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The second blow struck Coltrane harder. Ears ringing, his vision blurring, he landed hard, but his head seemed to be falling farther, and at once his consciousness cleared enough for him to realize that his head had indeed fallen farther. Half of him was hanging over the cliff.

“Or to
this
.” Nolan kicked him another few inches over the cliff. “I told you not to touch her again, but you went ahead and did it anyhow. You never take advice.”

This time, when Nolan kicked him, the force was so great that it shocked Coltrane over the edge. A groan escaping him, stomach rising, he clawed at the rock wall, scrabbling to find an outcrop. With a strain that threatened to dislocate his arms, he jerked to a halt, his body dangling, his fingers clinging to a two-inch ledge ten feet below the top. A hundred feet farther down, the hungry, pounding surf waited for him.

“Still hanging around?” Nolan frowned over the edge. “What do I have to do, drop a rock on your head?”

Staring up helplessly, his ribs aching from where he’d been kicked, Coltrane opened his mouth to say . . . he didn’t know what. Whatever it was came out as a hoarse inhuman croak.

Above him, Nolan looked around, presumably for the rock he meant to drop, then scowled at something behind him. “Hey, where the hell do you think you’re going?” He charged away from the cliff.

Tash, Coltrane thought. She must be running for help. He’s trying to stop her.

Despite the agony that racked his body, Coltrane scraped his shoes against the cliff. Unnerved by the thunder of the surf below him, he trembled, feeling a surge of hope when his right shoe found support in a crevice.

Do it! he mentally shouted. He lifted his left foot, taking three tries before he pressed his shoe onto a rock spur. His mind became gray. No! Clinging more fiercely, he inhaled deeply. His heart pounded faster. His consciousness focused, the gray dispersing. Move!

But his body didn’t want to obey.

Then his reflexes took control when he heard Tash shouting. He reached up his right hand, wedged his fingers into a crack in the stone, lifted his right foot, scraped it against the cliff, planted it on an outcrop, and pulled himself higher. The camera around his neck snagged on something. He squirmed, fearful that his movements would dislodge him, imagining his plunge to the rocks.

Again Tash shouted. He freed the camera and stretched higher, lifting, pawing, groping. Then he couldn’t find another handhold. His strength dwindling, he clawed at air, heard Tash shout a third time, and realized that the reason he couldn’t find another handhold was that there weren’t any to be found. His fingers were at the top. All he had to do was grip the edge, push himself up, and . . .

THE ROCK FORMATION CAME INTO VIEW. Squirming over the rim, he rolled onto his back, but he couldn’t allow himself to rest, and he rolled again, onto his hands and knees. The next shout from Tash made him waver to his feet and charge in her direction.

Her cry came from somewhere among the ruins. Adrenaline giving him strength, he didn’t waste time looking for a gate through the waist-high wall. He raced straight ahead, sending more lizards scurrying as he scrambled over the wall. Landing among a tangle of ferns and flowers, he heard Tash yell within the maze of buildings. His camera thumping against his chest, he charged past the shells of what might once have been guest houses and servants’ quarters. Vines tugged at his ankles, threatening to topple him as he veered around a corner and saw Nolan push Tash against a wall, trying to kiss her.

This time, it was Nolan who was caught by surprise. Before he could register the noise behind him, Coltrane slammed against his back, driving him hard past Tash, ramming him against the wall. With a groan, Nolan sagged, then spun, only to double over from Coltrane’s fist in his stomach.

But before Coltrane could strike again, Nolan rammed his head forward. Colliding with Coltrane’s chest, he propelled both of them across a flower-choked courtyard, walloping Coltrane against the opposite wall.

Coltrane wheezed, his breath knocked out of him. He did his best to punch Nolan, but his arms were weak from struggling up the cliff, and he had no effect on Nolan’s solid body. Nolan’s hands found his throat, gripped the camera strap around it, and twisted. Wheezing again, Coltrane fought to breathe, his face swelling as Nolan tightened the camera strap, cutting into Coltrane’s neck.

Coltrane’s strength failed. His vision dimming, he fumbled to try to peel Nolan’s hands away. He brushed against the shutter button on the camera, unintentionally tripping it, the camera’s whir barely audible, the last sound he might ever hear. No! Conscious of Tash’s frightened presence, he told himself he had to save her. He rammed his knee into Nolan’s groin. Again.
Again
. Nolan lurched back in pain.

It was the sweetest breath Coltrane had ever known. As he filled his lungs, Nolan kept stumbling away, needing to gain as much time as he could to recover from his pain. Then Nolan took one step back too far, tripped over vines, and toppled backward into the wreckage of a ruined building. Coltrane gaped. His eyes had to be playing tricks on him, he thought, for the decayed thatch of the collapsed roof suddenly came to life when Nolan landed, poles and twigs and strands of fiber thrashing into motion, snapping at Nolan, twisting, rippling over him, and — Oh, my God, Coltrane thought, those aren’t poles and twigs and strands of fibers. Those are snakes.

Nolan barely got a shriek out before his body tensed and trembled, dying. Snakes that had made their home in the ruin slithered out of the doorway.

“Tash!”

Momentarily paralyzed, she snapped into motion and rushed toward Coltrane. As the snakes hissed and coiled, Tash and Coltrane raced from the chaos of the ruins, staring frantically around to make sure they weren’t running into others. Every bush seemed a danger, every cluster of flowers a trap. They squirmed onto the wall, hesitating, afraid of what might be hiding beneath the shrubbery below them. The quick-legged scamper of a lizard made Tash cry out and jump down past ferns, racing toward the car.

Coltrane was only a few hurried strides behind. They scrambled into the car and yanked the door shut, breathing in a frenzy.

“Dear God,” he managed to say. His chest wouldn’t stop heaving. Sweat mixing with the blood from his swollen lips, he turned toward Tash, whose head was pressed exhaustedly against the back of the seat. Her eyes wide with panic, she stared at the ceiling.

“Are you . . .” Coltrane filled his oxygen-starved lungs.

“I think I’m . . .” Her chest rose and fell in alarming turmoil. “I think I’m all right. He had me trapped. If you hadn’t climbed to the top . . .”

“How the hell did he know where we’d be?”

“He shouldn’t have. We were careful.”

“I don’t understand. What did we do wrong?”

“Somehow he followed us.”

“I can’t believe I’m still alive.”

Trembling, Tash held him.

“I was sure I was going to fall,” Coltrane said.

“Alive.” Tash held him tighter. “My God, I was so scared. I
am
scared.” Her mouth was suddenly on his, and the pain of the pressure against his mangled lips was nothing compared to the life-affirming force of their embrace. Alive, Coltrane thought.

BUT HE COULDN’T STOP FEELING NUMB AND HOLLOW.

“Talk to me,” Tash said.

He kept shaking his head, staring out the window.

“What are you thinking?”

The car seemed filled with the smell of fear and death.

“Get it out of you,” Tash said.

“We can’t leave him like this.”

“We can’t take him
with
us.”

Coltrane frowned toward the ruins.

“All those snakes. You’re not suggesting we go back there and get his body.”

“Of course not,” Coltrane said. “But we can’t just drive away. Somebody has to be told.”

“The police? No way.”

“We don’t have a choice.”

“You bet we do,” Tash said. “We can get back to the States as fast as we can. The Mexican police scare me to death. They have a different kind of law down here. It’s based on the Napoleonic Code. You’re not innocent until proven guilty, the way we’re used to. The reverse. You’re guilty until you prove you’re innocent, and this might not look like self-defense to them. They might decide it’s manslaughter. What if someone thinks you pushed him onto those snakes? Down here, they don’t believe in the right to a speedy trial.”

“But the village knows we went up here,” Coltrane said. “It’s a safe bet they’re also aware of another stranger in the area, that Nolan went up here. So what are they going to think when you and I come down but Nolan doesn’t? Some of them are going to get curious enough to hike up and look around. As soon as they find Nolan’s body, the police will be looking for two outsiders in a car that fits this one’s description. They’ll be waiting for us at the airport. Because we tried to run, we really
will
look guilty. Don’t you see that we have to go to the police before the police come to
us
?”

A RED PONTIAC WITH A RENTAL-CAR STICKER ON IT WAS PARKED among ferns at the bottom of the overgrown lane. Nolan must have left it there and hiked up, Coltrane thought. That’s why we didn’t hear him. The rumble of the surf muffled his footsteps as he walked up behind me.

About to turn left onto the jungle-lined road that led into the village, he had to wait for an exhaust-spewing yellow bus to rattle past. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tash fidgeting. Sweat stuck his back to the seat.

“Pull ahead of that bus and make it stop,” Tash said.

“What for?”

“If the driver says it’s going farther north to Acapulco, I’m getting on it.”

“Getting on it?” Coltrane looked at her in astonishment.

“A woman with my features isn’t going to have a pleasant time in a Mexican jail.”

“There’s no guarantee you’ll spend
any
time in a Mexican jail.”

“I’m not going to take the chance.” Tash kept hugging herself. “I saw the way those soldiers looked at me when they were checking for drugs and guns.”

“Tash, nothing’s going to happen.”

“You bet it isn’t — because the Mexican and U.S. police are going to sort this out after I get home.”

“But the local police will find out we were together.”

“Not if you tell them you went up there alone, that I wasn’t feeling well and took the bus back to Acapulco.”

“Tash—”

“
Please
. I’m asking you. Pull ahead of that bus and make it stop.”

“THAT VINE IS WHERE HE TRIPPED,” Coltrane said. His mouth throbbed where he had been punched. “Be careful. There were snakes inside that building the last time I was here.”

“Yes, I see one in the corner.”

“What?”

“An especially nasty type.”

Coltrane’s skin turned cold. He had needed all of his willpower to guide the policeman through ferns and flowers toward this spot. Now he needed even stronger willpower not to bolt back to the car.

“A team of medical experts will have to drive here from Acapulco to examine the body before they move it.” The policeman, the only one in the village, was middle-aged and heavy, with a thick dark mustache and solemn eyes. “You say you had a fight.”

“Yes.”

Coltrane had considered inventing a story in which he had happened to find Nolan already dead, but he couldn’t think of a way to explain his mangled lips, not to mention the bruises that the medical examiner would find on Nolan’s groin.

“Over a woman,” the policeman said.

“Yes.”

“And this woman . . .”

“Isn’t here. As I explained, she wasn’t feeling well. She took a bus back to Acapulco while I came up here.”

“But meanwhile, this man . . .”

“Came up here also.”

“He followed you from Los Angeles.”

“Yes. He was very angry about the woman. He and I had a similar argument about her back in Los Angeles.”

“But this time, while you tried to defend yourself, he stumbled back and . . .” The policeman gestured toward motion inside the building.

“I never meant for that to happen.”

“Of course.”

“There’s something else I have to tell you.”

“Yes?”

“The dead man is a U.S. police officer.”

IT TOOK A WEEK TO STRAIGHTEN THINGS OUT. Coltrane endured most of that time in a crowded, noxious-smelling cell, not in the village, which was too small to have a jail, but in Acapulco, where his belongings were brought from the hotel, and where he learned that Tash had flown to the United States the day Nolan died. In Los Angeles, she had hired an attorney to fly to Acapulco and consult with a Mexican attorney about gaining Coltrane’s freedom. The Los Angeles Police Department was disturbed that another of its officers had died, and equally disturbed about Nolan’s behavior. For the sake of public relations and morale, it was decided to say only that Nolan had been on vacation and had died by misadventure: snakebite. Privately, the policeman whom Coltrane had first spoken to expressed severe reservations about Tash’s sudden departure from Mexico the day of the death — “She was extremely ill,” Coltrane emphasized — but the Mexican attorney earned his substantial fee, and Coltrane was eventually on a plane to Los Angeles. He had suffered doubts about how soon he would be released. He had definitely suffered from the privations of a Mexican jail. But throughout he had kept his emotional strength.

Because Tash had not gone to jail.

“THE NUMBER YOU HAVE CALLED IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE,” a computerized voice said.

In his kitchen, Coltrane set down the phone and frowned. His travel bag was at his feet. I must have rushed and pressed the wrong numbers, he thought. He picked up the phone and tried again.

“The number you have called is no longer in service.”

This time, he knew that he hadn’t made a mistake. What the . . . As soon as he had been released from jail in Acapulco, he had called Tash’s cellular phone but had failed to get an answer. At LAX, he had phoned her again and had still not gotten an answer. Now, in the forty minutes it had taken a taxi to drive him home in the congestion of evening traffic, her phone had been disconnected. What on earth was going on?