Never Too Late (20 page)

"Go ahead
then," Jerry said. "Be my guest."

For a few
moments Carter said nothing, his eyes looking off as if into the past, then he
took a long steadying breath, and started talking...

"Before
leaving home we saw movies of what was going on over there and it seemed more
like war games than the real thing. But my first day in Nam I knew it was no
game. A truck with recruits pulled into the compound and the guys piled out in
their new jungle fatigues and stood in formation waiting for orders. A few
minutes later, choppers started coming in and the men were told to unload them.
But what they were unloading were the bodies of the men they'd be replacing,
most of them blown to shit by who knows what. By the time those recruits
finished unloading bodies, their new fatigues were stained with blood, and the
men would never be the same. And that was only the beginning. The stress wears
you down. You have an engagement, get into a firefight,
have
close calls with traps or bombs, all in a single day. With that kind of stress
soldiers turn to alcohol or drugs. It builds, and by the time you get out, you
have stress disorder."

Jerry looked at
Carter. "Are you telling me you have stress disorder?" he asked.

"Hell, I
don't know what I have," Carter replied. "Lapse of memory maybe
because I don't talk about it. At least not until now."

"Yeah,
some things are best left buried," Jerry said, understanding all too well
the need to stay silent about things that are too painful to face,
like seeing the burnt out frame of a car and
the charred remains of a kid dead at sixteen
...

Carter started
in again. "In the jungle you shed the rules of society to learn the rules
of survival and be more animalistic. You don't wash, you smell like dirt and
BO. And when you finally go home, you have to toss out everything you learned
about survival and learn and rules of society again. It's not easy going from
jungle base camps with hand-dug latrines to a twenty-two-room mansion with
marble bathrooms and a staff of servants." He let out a short laugh.
"Man do I sound pathetic. You probably grew up living like I did in the
bush."

"Close,
but not quite," Jerry said, offering a little smile of understanding.

"You have
siblings?" Carter asked, turning to look at Jerry.

"Yeah, two
half-brothers somewhere," Jerry replied. "We took different paths and
that's fine with me."

"And your
mother?"

"Who
knows? After beating the crap out of me a few times, I didn't really care what
happened to her. It's fine though. I've got my girls and—" he stopped
short of saying,
my girls and Andrea
,
adding instead, "I've got my girls and my grandkids."

Carter eyed him
for a few moments, and said, "Most of the regular soldiers came from
backgrounds like yours and were a hell of a lot better qualified for Special
Forces than I was. But instead of getting one of them, Special Forces got a
privileged shithead like me who grew up needing a battalion of nannies to wipe
his butt."

Jerry looked at
Carter and smiled. "I'm not sure, Ellison, but I think you just paid me a
compliment."

Carter
shrugged. "I did... long overdue."

"Well, if
it turns out we're about to become friends, it's twenty-five years too
late," Jerry said. "Andrea and I are about to become history."

"Is that
what you want?" Carter asked, looking at Jerry.

"Hell, Carter,
I don't know what I want with that woman any more. She drives me crazy. I spent
twenty-five years trying to one-up you by giving her everything I thought I'd
taken away from her when she married me. And just for the record, I never asked
Andrea to drop out of college and marry me. We'd planned on marrying after she
graduated, but when I got the chance to start my own business in Myrtle Beach
and told her I was moving, she quit school and came with me. She thought I'd
find someone else if I went without her, and I was sure she'd find someone else
if I left her behind, so when she insisted on going with me I didn't try to
stop her. But we had some good years before... Yeah. There were some good
years."

"Don't
write her off too quickly," Carter said. "Andrea's stubborn, but
she's not stupid."

"Is that
another compliment?" Jerry asked, looking at Carter.

He smiled.
"Could be."

For a few
minutes they sat together saying nothing, but during the silence, Jerry could
feel a rapport he would never have expected an hour before. It made him sad to
think it took twenty-five years to get to know the man.

Carter was the
first to speak. Glancing back at the trail where they'd been, then ahead where
they were going, he said, "Something's not right. I can feel it."

"Feel
what?" Jerry asked.

"The
silence. When the birds are quiet there's something wrong. Don't ask me why
because I don't know. It's just how it is... like the forest is waiting for
something to happen. The same gut feeling I got in the jungles in Nam when I
knew we were being watched."

Jerry felt it
too, an eerie, unnatural silence. The question now was whether to go forward
and confront whatever was out there, or go back and warn the others...

Andrea glanced
back and was relieved to see Bud Howell behind her again. He'd left the trail
for a few minutes to relieve himself, and during that time she began to have
the feeling they were being followed. She assumed it was nerves brought on by
having seen the spike pit Jerry and her father had uncovered. The idea that a
human set such a brutal thing to maim another human was inconceivable,
especially since the man in charge of the whole operation was a man she'd not
only trusted, but had been alone with in his stateroom on several occasions.

Odd though, her
first thought when she looked into the pit was if she'd stepped into it, the
spikes would have messed up her legs, and Jerry liked her legs. In fact, he
seemed to like her
again,
at least he liked the way
she looked. How ludicrous, worrying about avoiding a pit that could send spikes
through her legs because her legs wouldn't look good for Jerry any more...

Thinking she
heard something beyond the squawks of parrots, and the rat-a-tat-tat- of a
woodpecker, she stopped abruptly, raised her machete in readiness, and said to
Bud, "Did you hear that crackling noise behind us? Sounded low... on the
trail."

Bud's hand
automatically came up to rest on the butt of the pistol on his hip. "Yeah.
Could have been an iguana," he replied. "Schribe said some get to be
six feet long. There are also wild boar. I'll hang back for a few minutes and
listen. You go on ahead and catch up with Schribe." His hand resting on
the butt of the gun, he waited and watched.

Andrea
quickened her pace and caught up with Inspector Schribe. After explaining why
Bud was hanging back, she said, while eyeing the pistols in twin holsters on
his hips, "If you let me have one of those guns I'd feel a whole lot
better."

"You don't
have a permit," Schribe said.

"You're
not serious," Andrea replied. "You'd hold me to that, out here among
drug kingpins and wild boars and assassins?"

Schribe laughed
quietly. "Yeah, holding you to having a permit does seem a little absurd
at this point." He slipped one of the pistols from its holster and handed
the butt end to her, saying, "Keep the safety on and tuck it in your
belt."

"Where's
the safety?" Andrea asked, looking up at him.

Schribe eyed
her with misgiving. "You've never shot a pistol." It was a statement.

"No,"
Andrea admitted, "but I can point and fire. You just need to show me where
the safety is and how to take it off. I know where the trigger is."

Schribe sucked
in a long breath.

"I can do
this, inspector," Andrea said. "I just need to know where the safety
is."

The muscles in
Schribe's jaws bunched, as if he were reconsidering, then he said, while
pointing, "The safety's here. Push it this way and it's off. Push it this
way and it's on. If someone approaches, slip it off, curve your finger around
the trigger, and keep the gun pointed down unless you want to wipe him out.
That thing has a hair trigger and it can blow a hole in a man."

Andrea slipped
the safety off, then shoved it on again and tucked the gun into her belt. The
feel of a steel muzzle rubbing against her hip bone was a constant reminder
that this was not a game, that they were moving deeper and deeper into a forest
where snipers could be hiding, and that this whole episode in her life had to
be a bad dream.

But when she
drew in a long, nerve-settling breath, taking with it the scent of fungus and
mold and tropical flowers, mingled with salt air from the ocean, she knew it
wasn't a dream, but the culmination of a very bad decision to spend time with a
man who might add a little spice to her life, when she already had a husband
who was the sexiest, spiciest man she knew. Impossible to get along with, but
every bit as sexy as Alessandro Cavallaro, thong and all. But she didn't
visualize Alessandro in a thong, but Jerry, beefy chest, firm abs, that little
line of hair leading down his belly to a tantalizing package in a fishnet
thong...

A very bad time
to be thinking about Jerry that way, Andrea decided. She looked around again
and Bud was nowhere in sight, which alarmed her. She'd expected him to wait a
few moments then catch up. "Inspector," she called ahead to Schribe.
He turned and waited for her to catch up. "Something isn't right, I can
feel it."

"I know
what you mean," Schribe replied. He looked beyond Andrea to where they'd
been, and said, "Howell should have caught up with us by now. I'll go back
and see if there's something wrong. You wait here. And keep your hand on the
butt of that pistol." He stepped around her and started back down the
trail.

Andrea looked
ahead to where the path meandered deeper into the forest then glanced behind,
where Schribe was retracing their tracks, all the while feeling eyes on her,
eyes that weren't those of forest creatures, but eyes with evil intent.

She waited for
what seemed like the better part of a half hour, and still, neither of the men
returned. Feeling a rush of adrenaline, along with the first muscle-weakening
signs of panic, she slipped the gun from her belt and curved a nervous finger
around the trigger and continued up the trail. She considered taking off the
safety, then decided against it, afraid if she heard movement ahead she'd shoot
then ask questions, and it could be Jerry or her father.

Wanting to
catch up with them, she quickened her pace, trusting there were no booby traps
ahead since they'd already passed the section of trail she was traveling. A few
hundred feet ahead she came upon another exposed pit with spikes released.
There was still no sign of Bud or the inspector behind her, and no indication
that Jerry and her father were ahead.

And still, she
felt watched...

Deciding to
hide in the brush and wait for Bud and the inspector to rejoin her, instead of
trying to catch up with Jerry and her father, she glanced around and found a
small path that looked recently traveled, and wondered if Jerry and her father
had left the main trail to see where it went, or maybe even went that way.
Glancing ahead, and seeing no one, she started up the narrow path. A short
distance ahead, the path came to an end at a thicket of brush. The brush looked
disturbed, as if it had been pushed aside for someone to pass through.

Parting it, she
looked into a natural grotto. Down a slope from it was a perfectly round hole,
obviously one of the blue holes the inspector mentioned. The grotto was also a
place where she could hide, and wait. She parted the brush further, but when
she stepped through the opening, a large hand clamped over her mouth, and a
deep male voice said, in a soft Italian accent, "So,
querida
, you have come looking for me..."

***

Jerry quickened
his pace as they headed back down the trail from where they'd come, in an
effort to find the others. "There's no sign of any of them," he said,
while glancing over his shoulder at Carter. "They should have gotten at
least this far by now. Something's wrong."

"Hell, I
should have had Schribe hold Andrea as a material witness just to keep her from
coming," Carter said. "I knew there'd be trouble. My only daughter
and I might as well have sent her in front of a firing squad."

"Kicking
yourself now isn't helpful," Jerry said.

"And going
after men with guns, with only machetes to defend ourselves, doesn't make a
hell of a lot of sense either," Carter replied. "But we have no
choice."

Jerry stopped
and raised his hand for silence. "I heard something," he said in a
hushed voice. "Isn't it around here where the path splits off to the blue
hole?"

Carter nodded.
"Right over there. Let's check it out. The path looks more trampled than
before."

They made their
way up the path, now easily discernible from having recently been trod, but
when Jerry parted the brush, a low commanding voice said, "I've been
waiting for you men." Alessandro Cavallaro stepped from behind an old
growth pine, one arm around Andrea's ribs, a gun pressed to her head.
Impulsively, Jerry started for Cavallaro.
"Hold
it there!"
Cavallaro yelled, pressing the muzzle tight against
Andrea's temple. "Don't come any closer."

Jerry froze.
"What do you want with her?" he asked, his heart pounding so hard it
felt as if it might burst through his chest. He shifted his gaze from the
steely glint of the barrel, and looked into Andrea's eyes, enormously wide in
their shadowed sockets.

"I want
the stamp, and I want a way out of here," Cavallaro said. He looked at
Carter, who'd stepped into the grotto and was standing behind Jerry. "You
have a Learjet sitting at the airport, Ellison. You'll be taking me out of
here."