One Grave Less (26 page)

Maria snapped fully awake as if she had been Tasered. Ric—or rather, Kyle—was staring at her through the window, backlit by the early-morning sun, his rifle aimed at her head. Behind him she saw several members of the tribe standing back, talking among themselves and watching Kyle.

“Get down on the floor,” said Maria.

Rosetta slipped down and huddled under the dash with her backpack. Maria glanced at the passenger window to see if anyone was there. No one.

“Get out of the truck now, damn it!” he yelled.

Maria felt for her gun. She couldn’t find it. She made a quick survey of the truck. It was on the floor under the brake. The others were in the backpack.
Shit
.

“Now! You are going to do what I say. Why doesn’t anybody listen to me? Get out or I’m going to start shooting,” he said. The tendons in his neck stood out as he yelled. His face was red, but not with paint.

Maria had no choice. She wouldn’t be able to get the gun before he could shoot. Damn, she hadn’t meant to fall asleep. She’d stayed awake for most of the night mentally going over their route to Benjamin Constant in order to keep from nodding off. She had seen some of the tribe wandering around in the dark with only a small torch to light whatever route they were taking around the compound. That had surprised her. She had been under the impression that everyone pretty much stayed inside and under some kind of mosquito netting. She had wondered if they were waiting for her to fall asleep. Deeply asleep.

Maria opened her door, pushed the lock, and quickly closed the door, locking Rosetta inside the truck, wondering if that was a good idea. Rosetta might need to run to the forest.

“What is it you’re after?” she said when she faced him, hoping she looked a lot less afraid than she felt. A good thing about being almost six feet tall was that she could mimic being intimidating with a fair amount of accuracy.

“Peace,” he said. “I just want some peace. Get the kid out. I mean it, or I’ll shoot up the truck.”

“You would do that?” she said. “Kill a child?”

“Shut up and do what I say. Do you want to take that chance?”

“Rosetta, sweetheart, unlock the door and come stand by Mommy,” she yelled.

“I know who you are,” he said. “You’re name isn’t Maria. It’s Linda Chambers or something like that. I saw you at a meeting. Some big-time archaeologist everyone was afraid of.”

That surprised her. “You’re kidding. Afraid of me? What the hell for?”

“They said you pick at any little mistake in a paper and rip it to shreds in front of everybody.”

Absurdly, she felt like arguing with him. It wasn’t true, for heaven’s sake. He must have been with someone whose paper she had taken exception to. But no one was afraid of her. She wasn’t that intimidating in real life. Instead she said:

“The nice thing about being female is that you can change your name every time you get married. I use my maiden name professionally. When I was in graduate school, I danced competitively. I used a different name there too.”

She was surprised at how easily lies came out of her mouth. Ironically, she wanted to convince him she wasn’t lying to him. Confessing to a lie didn’t seem to be the way to do that.

“You know who I am, I’ll bet,” he said.

“I thought you looked familiar. It took a while, but I remembered seeing a story about you in the
Chronicle
. Does your family know you aren’t dead?”

“No, and I want it to stay that way for now,” he said.

Rosetta had scrambled out of the truck. Maria gently shoved Rosetta behind her.

“Why? I would imagine they would love to hear that you are alive.” Maria hoped she sounded sympathetic.

It was hot and sweat trickled down Kyle’s face to his chest, making trails through his body paint.

“Oh, they would at first. Then I’d have to explain that I was a failure. My family expected great things from me. My wife, my in-laws expected greatness. Sylvi was always telling everyone I was going to be a professor at Harvard when I graduated. At family reunions my in-laws and my parents would say the same things to people. I wasn’t going to be hired by Harvard or any of those Ivy League schools. Or they would say I would probably be a Rhodes Scholar. They just wouldn’t let up. Kept setting the bar higher and higher before I had even jumped the first one.”

Maria watched his rifle waver slightly. He wasn’t as tall as she and he was skinny. His ribs showed and he had little muscle. Though Maria was slim, she was muscular. She rode horses, ran, worked as an archaeologist. She was strong and she was desperate—she could take him. She needed an opportunity that would make sure Rosetta would be safe.

“You were at Chicago, weren’t you? That’s a good school. You must have been doing well. You’re here studying a rare indigenous tribe. That makes for good credentials. Not many opportunities to have a tribe like this to study.”

“I have no idea what to say about these people. They sleep, they eat, they reproduce, they move from place to place. Not much else.”

He doesn’t have any idea how to do anthropology
, she thought. She had had students like that—good in the classroom, bad in the field, no idea how to apply what they learned. She had whiners too. But Kyle was one of the biggest she had ever come across. Clearly he wanted to go home, but here he was sweating in the middle of the jungle with people he didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand, afraid to go home and face his family. She wanted to roll her eyes, tell him to grow up, or grow a pair. Instead she tried another tack.

“If you have a big find, you can go home a hero in the academic world. That’s what your family wants. One big find and you can write your own ticket.” Not true, but she could sell it.

“I told you, I don’t know anything about these people. There isn’t anything special about them,” he said. “They are like every other damn dirty tribe out here.”

“I’m not talking about anthropology. I’m talking about archaeology. On the way here I found an undiscovered Inca site. It’s probably the largest ever discovered, over eighty hectares.”

Kyle wrinkled his brow. But Maria was on a roll now.

“Over two hundred acres, maybe more. That’s bigger than any of the known sites.”

“You’re lying,” he said.

“No, I’m not. We camped there last night. I picked up a couple of potsherds to send to someone at the University of Brazil. They’re in my bag. The pottery is Incan, I’m sure, but I’m not familiar with ceramics well enough to know the chronology.”

“I’m not an archaeologist,” he said.

“You don’t have to be, you only have to be the discoverer. Everyone loves an explorer.”

“The Brazilian government would just take it over,” he said.

God, what a whiner
. She was giving him a huge gift on a silver platter and here he was figuring out ways it wouldn’t work.

“What do you intend to do? Kill me? Is that easier than taking credit for a huge discovery and going home?”

“I’m just going to hold you here, tie you up, and let them come get you.”

“Who?” Maria felt a sick knot forming in her stomach.

“Some men I know. They come through sometimes, looking for animals and things. I told them you had escaped from somewhere south of here. I thought they would know. They are plugged in to what goes on around here.”

The son of a bitch
.

“Your phone works, after all, I see,” she said.

Maria was going to have to take him now. There was no choice. She wasn’t going to allow them to recapture her and Rosetta. She reached behind her and pushed Rosetta down, hoping she would understand and hit the ground and roll under the truck and away. She felt the little girl slide quietly to the ground, holding on to her leg too tightly. At the same time, Kyle fell to the ground with a thump.

Maria stared at Kyle on the ground. His eyes were rolled back in his head, his rifle lay under him. She thought he’d had a seizure—a very fortuitous seizure—until she saw the young man in the tree with a blowgun. He climbed down with astonishing speed and agility and ran toward them.

Rosetta stood up and clung to Maria’s side. A woman, the mother of the child that looked like Kyle, also came toward them, her grassy skirt swaying with her quick steps. The others, including all the children, hurried toward their houses. The young man picked up the rifle and shook it in the air above his head.

The woman began yelling at Kyle. She kicked him a couple of times with her bare feet.

“No good. No good,” she said. “Stupid. Stupid.”

She looked up at Maria and continued her rant. What English she used gave way to her own language. Maria looked to Rosetta.

“She says he’s no good,” said Rosetta. Maria had gotten that part. “She says when he came they thought he would protect them from the bad men who came and hurt the forest and stole the birds out of the trees, beat the men and women of their village. They did this for fun. He didn’t protect them. He was afraid of the bad men.”

The woman looked down at Kyle again. His eyes were not rolled back in his head now, but he looked dazed and was unmoving.

The woman continued her tirade, half at Kyle, half at them. Her dark eyes sparkled with her anger. Rosetta translated. Maria thought she recognized some of the words as Portuguese.

“He knows how to do nothing—he can’t hunt, he can’t help us build our homes, he can’t even hunt for grubs. Useless. Useless.” She looked at Maria. “He is useless. We try to move away and leave him, but he follows us. We go with him to trade. We need tools, plates, big handle pots for carrying—we need metal things. He gets only things for himself, for his far-talk box, he forgets to trade for things we need. He asks stupid questions—why we decorate with feathers, why we paint our bodies, what our dances mean—stupid things even our children know.”

She stopped and took several breaths. Maria could see this had been building for a while.

“We hoped you came here to take him back. Then he calls the bad men—here to our homes. We have to move now. They come soon.”

“How soon?” asked Maria. Rosetta translated for her.

“He called yesterday, soon after we got here,” said Rosetta.

So they’d had all night to travel, thought Maria. She and Rosetta had to move fast.

“Ask her if we can have the far-talk box,” said Maria.

Rosetta asked and Maria didn’t need a translation to understand. The young woman used her hands as if holding the phone and beat it against the ground.

“She said it calls the bad men so they killed it,” said Rosetta. The little girl sounded as disappointed as Maria felt.

Maria wondered how much time they had. All the gains they had made were wiped out by the phone call of a wimpy self-centered little bastard. Maria felt like kicking him one time for good measure herself—and she had her boots on.

“Tell her we have to go,” said Maria. “Before the bad men get here.”

The Yawanawan woman had apparently gotten all her frustrations out—for herself and her tribe. She nodded at the two of them and turned and left in the company of the man with the blowgun and rifle, without a backward glance at Kyle. Maria would like to have had the rifle.

She checked the gas in the last of the spare containers. Not much, just a few gallons. They would be on foot before long, but she intended to take the truck as far as it would carry them. She siphoned the gas into the truck’s gas tank, got in the cab, and turned the key in the ignition. It took several scary moments for the engine to finally crank. She tried to think how far the men could have come if they had been traveling all night. She and Rosetta still had a significant head start, but whoever Kyle called may have an encampment closer than the one they escaped from. They may have better, faster vehicles. Hell, they may have a helicopter.

Maria put the truck in gear and headed out of the village. Glad to be going, hating that they hadn’t gotten away clean, hating they had run across Kyle, hating that they were almost out of gas.

Maria wondered if any of her friends were looking for her.The people at the site she was visiting just before she was kidnapped wouldn’t know she was even missing. The man driving her to Cuzco—the only witness to her abduction—turned out to be one of the kidnappers. He wouldn’t tell. But she hadn’t shown up for her lectures. The people there would be in touch with her department to find out why—wouldn’t they? Surely John, her boyfriend, would be on the phone to somebody by now, since he hadn’t heard from her in almost a week. Surely by now someone knew she was missing—didn’t they?

But if her friends were looking for her, where would they look? Not here. Brazil is not where she disappeared. She disappeared in Peru. On the other hand, perhaps, if nothing else, they could follow the trail of dead and dying bodies she had left behind her. Surely someone besides the bad guys had noticed.

One good thing, she thought, as she left the clearing and drove into the jungle, again looking for something she could pretend was a road, was that the closer they got to Benjamin Constant, the more villages they would run across where they could perhaps find help, perhaps get gas, maybe some good directions. Maybe they would stumble upon a tourist boat on one of the rivers. Something.

“You doing okay, Rosetta?” asked Maria.

Rosetta nodded. “That was close,” she said.

“Yes, it was, but we have been pretty lucky for most of our trip,” said Maria.

Rosetta looked over at her. “What would you call unlucky?”

Maria smiled. “How about we eat something? Do we have any bars left, or do we need to find a fruit tree?”

“We have some bars left,” said Rosetta. She dug down in her backpack and came up with a bar. “Maybe we should split what’s left,” she said. “Just eat a little. I have some fruit too. I took it at dinner last night.”