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“Then we should each get half our money back.” It was miserly of me—half would be all of eight dollars—but it was the principle of the thing. I didn’t appreciate being taken advantage of.
“He’s agreed to have dinner sent up.” He steered me back toward the stairs.
“Sent up? We’re not honeymooning.” I mentally cursed as slightly pornographic images starring my handsome roommate naturally coursed through my head.
His deep laugh sent a thrill down my spine. “Perhaps not, but I believe we may be together for some time.”
“What do you mean?” I stopped on the landing, leaving him a couple of steps behind and still at eye level. Nice and tall.
“Our generous landlord told me your name. Dr. Robards?”
“Yes,” I admitted warily, reluctant to give up even my stage name to this guy.
“I am Carlos Gutierrez, your pilot. Chico hired me to take you into the jungle.” He smiled, and his black eyes glinted many, many promises at me.
Thank you, Chico.
I slid out of bed well before dawn and silently dressed. Force of habit. I always check all my gear before heading out. At first light Carlos and I would be at the airstrip, taking off for the deep interior. I twisted the bare bulb in its socket to turn it on, then pulled out the number-coded paper I’d lifted from the Brain in San Antonio, memorized it and burned it in a metal ashtray. When the ashes cooled, I broke them up with a ballpoint pen.
Despite the crackling and the smoke, Carlos still slept soundly, as well he should after the heroically athletic sex he’d treated me to. He lay with one strong arm thrown over his bare stomach and the other tucked under my pillow.
I tipped the ashes into the waste can on top of the used condoms. Story of my sex life, I thought, looking into the can. I always get hot for somebody and go into it thinking, The sex is going to be great so maybe this guy is The Guy, and the next day have a helluva casual sex hangover. Maybe it was time to stop making this mistake. The ashes cast up a question mark of smoke. I went to check my gear.
All the essentials went into my day pack, and everything else would go into the canvas duffel bag, leaving me plenty of room for the orchids. Ordinarily I’d bring a newspaper with me for drying and pressing specimens. But von Brutten needed the Death Orchid alive, so I’d brought several cardboard tubes for storing and shipping. He’d also given me a handful of forged CITES certificates to help me get the orchid back into the States. I’d have to pass off the Death Orchid, if I found it, as a different orchid altogether.
That’s another irony of CITES. You can’t transport a specimen across international boundaries unless it can be identified as a known species. So if you’re like me, hunting down brand-new species, you’re outta luck. Or else you become a criminal, as I have. What a woman will do in the name of botany.
I settled in the chair and by the dim light took another look at Harrison’s notebook page Photostat. Marcus would probably figure out pretty fast what the blood on the original page really was, but my guess was I’d be in the jungle by then, out of reach of anything remotely resembling phone service. I’d just have to check messages next time I hit a city. Most of Harrison’s handwriting, shorthand and abbreviations I could decipher from three years’ practice working as his graduate lab assistant. The page took issue with Rudall’s suggestion of a close morphological relationship between Hypoxidaceae and Orchidaceae. Hypoxidaceae are bulb plants, like lilies and amaryllis. Put simply, in order for a plant to be chemically active, it needed, among other things, to have alkaloids, and Hypoxidaceae don’t. If orchids were like lilies, in other words, they’d be useless for any pharmaceutical company to pursue.
Harrison’s notes, calculations and research were all designed to determine whether his Death Orchid specimen could indeed be used by a pharmaceutical company. In layman’s terms, the answer was a whopping great yes.
A scribble near the margin, barely readable and in shorthand, caught my eye. Something about the orchid’s distinctively long column. That probably meant its pollinator, whatever it was, had a distinctively long proboscis. Rain forest relationships are ancient. Sometimes, more often than you might think, a single insect and a single plant have coevolved so that one can’t exist without the other. The bug drinks only the nectar provided by the plant and the plant can accept as pollinator only that bug. Or, like Scooter’s Phalaenopsis, the flower disguises itself as the bug’s mate so the males will be attracted to it. Darwin himself, after finding an orchid with a twelve-inch column, had hypothesized the existence of an insect with a twelve-inch proboscis. Turns out, years after Darwin’s death, someone found that very insect.
But the idea of saying “Open wide” and shoving a microscopic tongue depressor down a bug’s throat didn’t appeal to me.
Then another scribble: the Death Moth.
“Up already?” Carlos’s carelessly deep voice should have raised a shiver, but it merely annoyed me. I liked to work alone, in silence.
“Getting ready to go,” I replied, shoving the Photostat into my day pack.
“Where are we going today?” he asked.
I dug the medicine bowl out of my day pack and handed it to him. “I need to go where this was found.”
“Yanomamo,” he murmured. His forefinger traced the jaguar pawprint idly.
“And that narrows down my search to what? A million square kilometers of rain forest?”
Carlos grinned. “No, gatinha. I can take you to someone who can tell you exactly where this came from. A scientist.”
“Chico said you knew the area.”
“I do,” he said, flashing a charming smile that fell strangely flat. “I know every airstrip in the northern Amazon.”
Great. Now I’d have to risk exposing my mission to someone who just might deduce what I was after. Someone who might give Lawrence Daley the same information. This trip was getting more difficult all the time.
An hour later we piled out of a battered taxi and strode through a scattering mist toward the airstrip. A beat-up Cessna Caravan 675 squatted behind a sheet metal shed. At least the plane looked relatively new. Riding in it couldn’t be any worse than riding ten miles in a shockless Chevy over the pocked and jutted road to the airstrip. The runway, predictably, was a ribbon shaved out of the jungle, bounded by ever-encroaching forest currently being beaten back by a small army of machete-wielding Indians.
When we approached the shed, its crooked wooden door shoved open and a smallish Brazilian stepped out to yell at Carlos. Carlos started shouting back with equal verve in what I gathered was some kind of bargaining behavior.
Then a fresh-faced, good-looking young white guy bounded out of the shed, carrying a backpack, a tripod and a camera case.
“Oh no,” I said to Carlos, interrupting his shouting match and thumbing at the college boy as he joined us. “He’s not sharing my plane.”
College Boy pushed his wire frames higher on his nose and held his hand out to Carlos. After a shake, he launched into a spate of excellent Portuguese that, judging from Carlos’s raised eyebrows, surprised the pilot as much as it did me. The Brazilian stood back and grinned. Then College Boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills that could choke a horse.
“We had a deal,” I reminded Carlos. “You. Me. The plane. No one else.”
“Excuse me,” College Boy said in English, turning to me.
“What.”
His smile didn’t falter. “I’m Dr. Richard Kinkaid. I’m headed out to Ixpachia Research Station.” He shoved his glasses further onto his nose. “I’m an entomologist,” he added, as though that would somehow make a difference.
I looked him up and down. Right. A bug nerd. A Milquetoast bug hunter with an oversize camera and no idea how to take care of himself outside a graduate school laboratory. I read the tea leaves and didn’t like what I saw.
“No,” I said to him. “You may not share my plane.”
“If the pilot’s willing to take me, it’s not your concern.”
“And I won’t take you to your research station, even if I knew where it was.”
“I have a map—”
“And I won’t pull your ass out of the jungle when you get burned by fire liana.”
“Fire liana?”
“Or stung by Dresk’s beetles.”
“I have an antidote for that—”
“Or get a limb chewed off by a hungry jaguar.”
“Jaguars don’t—”
“Or get shot with a poisoned arrow by one of the several hostile indigenous peoples.”
At that his strong face solidified to stone. Arrogant jungle newbie on his first field trip. His presence was an unacceptable risk. We glared at each other.
“Not interested,” I clarified.
“But I am,” Carlos cut in. “Ixpachia Research Station is where we are going. However, my rates are rather steep.”
The bug nerd turned his back on me to juggle his tripod under one arm as he counted out bills. Carlos’s eyes widened.
“Hey,” I said to Carlos, grabbing his sleeve to take his attention off the cash. “I paid for your exclusive services.”
“You got those last night,” he said with an intimate leer.
My face heated up. “I paid you good money for a solitary trip. A flight in, five days working in the jungle, a flight out. I’m not sharing my plane.”
“But his money’s as good as yours.” Carlos’s perfect white smile would have dazzled me yesterday. Today it just made me mad. “And the flight is dangerous, is it not? Should I not be paid for the work as much as I can get?”
“We had a deal.”
He chuckled. “Gatinha, my word is true, but money is life.” He waved at the bug nerd. “Bring your gear, amigo!”
The Brazilian cackled as I stumped along behind Carlos and the bug nerd, fuming. I’d have a word with Chico next time I saw him. For now, I’d deal with it. But I didn’t have time to baby-sit anybody. Scooter was my priority. Everybody else would just have to get by.
Carlos jerked the Cessna’s cargo door open for us. A whoosh of stifling hot air fell out. The plane was just this side of a stripped-down drug runner: a pilot’s seat, electronics and little else. Even the passenger seats were gone. Good old Carlos must have a day job flying snow. Maybe dodging the joint Brazilian-American drug-enforcement guys had made him arrogant with the average sightseer. He was used to flying much richer cargo than what I’d bring back.
“Let me get that for you.” The bug nerd reached for my duffel bag.
Hell, why not let him play gentleman and throw out his back? Maybe I’d make this trip alone after all. But he easily swung the heavy duffel bag into the cargo bay with one arm. Then he hopped into the plane after it, holding out his broad hand for my day pack and smiling at me like this was a Boy Scout jaunt to Camp Okefenokee.
“I got it.” I kept my day pack and climbed into the plane. I settled down across from the open cargo door and hoped he wouldn’t start talking.
Up front, Carlos flicked switches and turned dials. A few minutes later, the Cessna’s single engine fired up. The bare metal wall I leaned against vibrated from my neck all the way to my butt. Even my ankles tingled from the jarring.
The bug nerd shoved his gear against one of the plane’s exposed steel ribs and scrambled up to the cockpit.
“The engine doesn’t sound right to me,” he shouted over the guttering noise.
Carlos shook his head. “This plane is safe, my friend. Go take a nap.”
“But the mechanical clatter—”
“It’s nothing!”
The nerd’s firm jaw tightened, then he yelled, “So where are the parachutes?”
Carlos flashed the nerd a dark look and jerked his head toward the cargo bay. Get out of my face. I could read the message from halfway down the plane. Carlos might be a good guy as far as illicit dealings in the jungle go—meaning he wouldn’t kill anyone without a good reason—but, like me, he was a mercenary who needed to eat. Mouthy pip-squeak “experts” got tossed out the cargo door at seven thousand feet.
Besides, the bug nerd had given him the full payment up front. Dumbass.
The nerd flopped down again across from me, mindless of the open cargo door to his left. He closed his eyes, apparently taking Carlos’s nap suggestion seriously. He wore pristine trekking gear that looked like it’d been ordered out of a Whole Earth Catalog: heavy canvas pants, a shirt a size too big for him, what had to be day-hiking boots made by Birkenstock. His dark brown hair lay longish on his collar, highlighting prominent cheekbones, a strong jaw and chiseled lips. I wondered briefly what he’d look like with a ponytail but decided “tasty” wasn’t a word a woman like me should use. The wire frames slipped a half inch down his nose. He didn’t move.
I turned my attention to the shed. The Brazilian who apparently acted as the local air-traffic controller was nowhere to be seen. Nothing out there but trees and bugs and already-intense heat.
The plane lurched forward. The Cessna stuttered and jerked toward the dirt runway. Deep jungle green rolled by. Workers’ arms rose and fell, blades slashing and hacking. Carlos turned the plane’s nose due west and the shed came into view again. A very dark man, maybe half Negro, half Indian, stood beside the shed, staring at us. Carlos stopped the plane to check something.
The staring man strode toward us purposefully, his gaze unwavering. A chill shot through my veins. Carlos fidgeted with controls, and still the man walked, unhurried and deliberate. How could someone stare so long without blinking?
Then the man grasped the open cargo doorway and leaned in. Twin puckered scars etched his face, neck, and the part of his collarbone I could see beneath his ragged shirt. Around his neck, a leather cord held a single jaguar tooth—a canine. His huge hands gripped the doorway with such strength I had no doubt he could bend the metal if he chose. Black eyes stared at me.
Directly at me.
The chill in my veins dropped to a freeze. He didn’t glare; his eyes were as emotionless as those of the jaguar he’d killed for its tooth.
Endless darkness welled up in my periphery. The plane’s metallic clatter heightened into deafening howls and screams and roars. The world dropped away from my feet, leaving me standing in utter blackness, alone. I no longer hunkered down in a Cessna waiting to go into the jungle. The jungle had come for me, and what hunted me breathed hot and heavy on my neck. I spun. Nothing. I spun again. Nothing. Panicked, I struck out with both arms, swinging wild. If I could just see.
As if in answer to a prayer, a dim yellow light grew near my feet, filling the darkness with itself, illuminating nothing. A single sound cut through the cacophony: a slithering hiss that singed my spine with fear and brought bile into my throat. I knew what it was. The yellow light sharpened into two flat, slitted, alien eyes. Pit viper. The kind of venomous snake whose head would chase you after you’d severed it from the body. Low words, words I didn’t understand but whose meaning I knew instantly, told me to leave this place. What waited for me in the trees was hissing death.
Abruptly, the vision disappeared.
The empty cargo-bay door yawned. Outside, trees and undergrowth lurked behind the sagging shed. The shaman—if that’s what he was—had disappeared.
Once the Evil Eye has its grip, you’re lost. The open cargo door tempted me to leave. I could jump out now before my curse found me. Jump out, go home, save myself. My fingers itched for my day pack.
I shook my head to clear it. Medicine man tales, I said to myself. Shaman lies. I’d had a hallucination due to fatigue and stress. I lived in a world of science and technology. The Evil Eye was like the boogeyman, meant to scare and intimidate you into doing what someone else wanted. It couldn’t catch me or keep me. It couldn’t prevent me from going deep into the jungle.
“Let’s get this show on the road!” I called up to Carlos.
He gave me a thumbs-up. The plane jerked twice, then bumped down the strip, gaining speed. Straight brown tree trunks and masses of green leaves flitted by. Carlos pulled back on the stick and abruptly we were up, over the treetops, heading northwest.
Heading to a place where I wasn’t welcome.
But I’d survive.
Scooter’s life depended on it.
Chapter 4
Stuttering. It’s not a good sign at five thousand feet, whether it’s the pilot or the plane. In this case, it was the plane.
The bug nerd’s eyes opened, glared briefly toward Carlos’s broad back, and closed. I knew that look: You’re the tough man, you handle it.
Brilliant emerald treetops fluffed the ground. From above, the canopy shows you a solid-looking mass with an occasional peep-show peek at the really good stuff underneath. To see the real wealth of species—the dozens of monkeys, thousands of birds, bazillions of insects—you have to go in from the bottom.
North-north-west, where we were headed, the canopy abruptly rose and fell with the stubby Guiana Highlands. The high point, Serra do Apiau, was only around 3,300 feet, not even as high as most of the hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And nothing like the Rockies.
But the terrain wouldn’t make a nice landing pad. By the increased clattering of the engine and the intensity of the frown the bug nerd cast in Carlos’s direction, maybe we were going to need one.
On cue, the Cessna fell several feet, tossing my stomach up around my ears. Carlos’s right hand felt around over his head for some controls. The bug nerd got up, grabbed a steel rib and leaned out the cargo door. His hair whipped his left ear. He held his glasses in place with his free hand. Not a good place to be sick, I thought, but he levered himself back into the plane and headed to the cockpit.
I didn’t catch his first shouted words, but there was no mistaking the pale grimace of fear Carlos shot him in response. Time to be worried, I gathered. I got up and joined them, hanging on to a steel handhold over my head like a professional New York commuter.
