“Nope. Put it on the ground and run it over. And the first road we come to heading south? Take it. They’re tracking us, so they know we’re on this road. Probably thinking we’re headed to San Antonio. So now we’re not going to do that. We’ll head to Corpus. If necessary, we’ll hotwire a car to get there if the truck gives out.”
Drake could see the conflict in her eyes as she placed the phone on the asphalt and returned to her position behind the wheel. She pulled forward and heard a sickening crack as it shattered, and then the rear tire rolled over it. She braked and put the truck in neutral, and got out again to inspect her handiwork.
She was back in ten seconds. “It’s history.”
“Good girl. Now let’s make ourselves history as well.”
Back on the dark two-lane road, they came to an intersection and took a right, and found themselves driving through more farmland, the engine in the danger zone as they drove south. Drake looked through his window at the landscape moving by and considered that they’d crossed an important point of no return. There was no way to pretend that this was all a big mistake or that Jack had been unduly paranoid. The Russians were on their tail and wouldn’t stop until Drake had found the treasure, or died trying.
Which it would be was anyone’s guess. But he didn’t intend to go down without a fight.
They’d find he was tougher to take out than they’d assumed. He might not know everything there was about guns, but he’d dropped enough felons to feel confident in his abilities, and he could always learn to shoot better.
Now he just needed to figure out how to survive in a hostile jungle while looking for an impossible-to-find lost city, and he’d be golden.
He took another look at Jack and was glad the man was on his side.
Maybe they actually had a chance. Between the three of them, maybe it could be done.
He sighed, tired, the adrenaline burnt out of his system, nothing left but fatigue. He rubbed his eyes, and when he looked up again, he was no longer hesitant about what he was going to do.
If there actually was a Paititi, he’d figure out how to locate it, Russians or no Russians. He had the journal, so he had an edge, even if it was a slim one.
The question was whether it would be enough.
Chapter Fifteen
Vadim and Sasha trudged down the road, their rented sedan dead a mile behind them, the windshield shattered from a shotgun blast, the driver-side front tire flattened. Vadim’s face was bleeding from safety glass that had sprayed across his cheek, and Sasha had his tie wrapped around his left arm where he’d been nicked by a few shotgun pellets that had winged their way through the car.
“What now?” Sasha asked in gruff Russian, his breath steaming before him.
“We find a vehicle. We take it. Then we continue until successful,” Vadim said angrily. “What do you think we do?”
“I was thinking about how the girl’s phone stopped transmitting. Looks like they worked that one out.”
“Only a matter of time.”
“Yes, well…which brings us back to question of what we do now.”
Vadim’s eyes narrowed to slits, rage building in him, driving him forward as his blood dried on his face. “I don’t know. But we will think of something — just as we always do.”
“I wish we had accessed some heavier artillery,” Sasha complained, patting the Ruger 9mm in his jacket pocket. “I, for one, did not expect the boy to travel with an arsenal. The only things missing were grenades and a bazooka.”
“A mistake we will certainly not make again.”
A frigid gust blew across the adjacent field, carrying with it the scent of freshly plowed soil. Tendrils of ground fog seeped over the furrows, the land stretching as far as they could see in the gloom, the only sound in the quiet night their footsteps crunching on the gravel underfoot and the hiss of their labored breathing.
“The larger oversight was underestimating their resourcefulness…that they were onto us. That changes the situation. But it also tells us something — they either have the journal, or they know where it is.”
“The lawyer already told us the boy has it.”
“But the boy probably does not understand its significance. Now that his father’s associate is involved, we have to assume he does. And that he also realizes that no place is safe for him. For any of them.” He paused, thinking. “What would you do if you knew that the devil was coming for you and you couldn’t go home?” Vadim asked rhetorically.
“I would go after whoever was hunting me.”
“Ah, but that is impossible for them. We don’t exist. The old man isn’t stupid. He knows the stakes. The only thing we can assume is that they’ll try to find the Inca city themselves.”
“But can we be sure of that?”
“It is the most probable outcome.”
Sasha spit. “I hate that jungle. Hated it then, and I hate it even more now.”
“As do I. But it holds our future. And this time we will prevail.”
Allie emerged from the twenty-four-hour drugstore on the outskirts of Corpus Christi with a roll of gauze, a bottle of iodine, tape and pads, two liters of orange juice, and a container of Pedialyte. Jack gulped the juice greedily, his body depleted by blood loss, and downed the Pedialyte by the time they’d rolled out of the lot.
The engine was still holding out, although strained to its limits. Drake was relieved when they eased to a stop in front of a fleabag motel that wouldn’t care much about formalities like identification as long as their cash was green. He went in with Allie and got two rooms from a sleepy East Indian clerk listening to a radio broadcast that sounded like cats rolling down a slope in a barrel.
Drake helped Jack to the first room as Allie backed the truck into a dark recess by a dumpster so that the bullet holes in the tailgate wouldn’t be obvious. Upon her return, she stripped the clotted T-shirt from Jack’s side and examined the damage before twisting the cap off the iodine.
“This is going to hurt. It’s a flesh wound, but deep. Looks like it cut through one of your love handles,” she warned, and Jack nodded.
“I’m not using them for anything. Do your worst.”
His sharp intake of breath hissed as the liquid bubbled into the wound, and Drake could see moisture well in his eyes, an involuntary physical response to the pain. Allie fished a small first aid kit out of Jack’s bag and poured another dollop of iodine onto the bullet hole — thankfully a clean entry and exit that had missed any organs. After blotting it, she squeezed two drops of Dermabond adhesive into the entry wound, and Jack reached down and held it closed with his fingers. She went to work on the exit hole and repeated the procedure, pressing the flesh together until it had sealed.
“That’s pretty amazing stuff,” Drake said as she returned the tube to the kit.
“A friend of mine who works in the ER got me some. It’s prescription, but it’s basically superglue without the compound that generates heat. I use it for mountain biking spills. It can be a lifesaver out in the boonies,” Allie explained.
“Only a graze, it was the blood loss that was worrying me,” Jack said, and looked up at Drake. “I suppose we should add some basic first aid to the bag of tricks I teach you. If we hadn’t had the Dermabond and we’d been in the jungle, you might have had to heat your dad’s sword up and cauterize it. Trust me. I’ve had to do that, and you never forget the smell.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Drake looked around the shabby room, whose sickly cream-colored walls reminded him of pus. The carpet was stained and threadbare in places, and the bathroom door hadn’t been properly repaired where a prior guest had punched a hole in it. The impressionist print of a woman staring off over a field of wildflowers made him unaccountably sad, and he realized that it was lack of sleep more than anything that was wearing at him. He checked the time and saw that it was 4:20 a.m., and couldn’t help but yawn. “Sorry. I’m beat.”