“When we get farther in, I’m gonna have to put the lights back on or else we’ll crash before your friends ever get us. But for a little while, I can drive by the light from the town.”
Within minutes the air streaming through the windows became pungent with the smell of wet earth and alive with the sounds of peeper frogs and insects. Melanie smacked a mosquito on her arm, but not before it took a serious bite out of her.
They drove for a while longer. When the road became impossible to see, Raúl flipped on the headlights again. Melanie gasped at the wealth of insect life swarming their windows in the sudden illumination.
“If the bugs scare you from the car, what are you gonna do on that trail?” he said, glancing at her in the mirror.
“What trail? You said you’d drive me there!”
“I’ll take you as far as the road goes, but you can’t drive all the way to El Baño. Don’t worry. It’s not more than ten or fifteen minutes’ walk from where the road stops. The moon is strong tonight. You’ll be fine as long as you keep to the path.”
“What happens if I don’t?”
“Then…you’ll be in trouble. People get lost in here, and they find the bones picked clean.”
Melanie’s stomach lurched with fear, and her hands clenched together in her lap, but what was she going to do? Turn around and go back to the hotel? Dan was in there somewhere; she needed to warn him. And she needed to find her witness.
A while later Raúl shut off the headlights and braked.
“What-” Melanie began.
“Shhh!”
The route continued upward, but a short distance ahead she made out the shape of a structure by the roadside. In the moonlight she saw the Porsche in the small parking area.
“The information center,” Raúl whispered. “The trail leaves from here. Looks like your friends already started walking.”
“Looks that way,” she said, swallowing hard.
“You want, I just take you back to your hotel.”
“No. Thanks, but I have to do this.”
“Okay,” he said.
He sat there silently, and she realized he was waiting to be paid. Melanie gave him everything that was in her wallet, then wrote him a check for some more.
“I got a flashlight if you like,” he said as he counted the cash.
“How much do you want for it?”
“Twenty.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You see a hardware store around here?”
“I’ll have to write you a check.”
“Okay.”
“Where is it, though? I want to see it.”
He took the flashlight from the glove box and handed it across the seat. It was a grimy old plastic one. She turned it on, and the bulb glowed a dull yellow.
“No way. I’m not paying twenty bucks for this thing,” Melanie said.
“Ten then.”
“No. With what I just paid you, you can throw it in.”
Raúl frowned. “Okay. Normally I’m not such a pushover, but I’m worried about you, chica. Whatever you’re up to, it’s definitely not smart.”
“I’ll be fine. It’s nice of you to worry, though.”
“Hey, people saw me pick you up at the hotel. If you turn up dead, who do you think they’ll come looking for?”
Melanie tried laughing off his comment, but the sound emerged high-pitched, almost panicked. She got out of the car, closing the rear door as quietly as she could.
“So do me a favor, be careful,” Raúl said.
He backed up, waved jauntily, and headed down the road. As she watched the taxi disappear from view, the sounds of the night closed in around her, and Melanie felt as alone as she ever had in her life.
52
DAN’S CHEAP plastic watch had one thing going for it. The display lit up if you pressed a button, so he could see it was almost eleven, just about five minutes to showtime, and professional drug dealers tended to be prompt. He swatted another mosquito, looked up to see dozens of large bats swooping in and out of the tree he was crouching behind. The PR cops had a good laugh about that. He understood enough Spanish to hear them joking around before, when he took up position under the níspero tree, where the bats roosted at night. Like Dan could give a shit about a few bats. This was the best vantage point. From here he had a dead-on view of the eerie stone swimming hole and the patch of cleared path beyond that was the only possible place for a hand-to-hand. These Puerto Rican guys were just actors pretending to be cops, Dan thought, not the real deal, or they would’ve understood that he picked his spot for a reason. They should try working narcotics in New York, see the vermin you ran across there.
Dan was trying to figure out if this was a setup or not. It wasn’t like he was so high on himself, but he did trust his own gut. And something about this deal didn’t feel right. He hadn’t said anything to Melanie because he didn’t want to upset her, but Trevor’s voice in that message before did sound stressed, in a bad way. He wondered if the kid was okay. Shit, Trevor could be dead by now, and they would never know. How many times had a government witness just up and disappeared off the face of the earth? Guys like Jay Esposito always had a favorite dumping ground. The Flatlands. The Gotti Graveyard. The city was full of ’em. Dan hated to think how Melanie would react if something happened to that kid. That was what really got him about her-unbelievably smart and beautiful, yeah, but she had a heart.
A beam of white moonlight was shining straight down on the water in that big stone pool. It was so hot and misty out here that Dan drifted into a momentary fantasy about swimming naked with her, what they would do in the warm water. The sex was intense. If he thought he couldn’t stay away before, now he was really hooked. Everything in his life just felt like waiting to be with her again, to touch her, to taste her. When they were together again…
Who was he kidding? If. If, not when. Dan didn’t scare easily, but being under Melanie’s spell had him fucking petrified. She just might take it into her head to decide they weren’t right for each other or she was too busy or had too many responsibilities. Some fucked-up shit like that. And not because she didn’t care about him either-he knew she did-but because that’s just how she was. What would he do then? The thought of it made him want to punch the tree or pull out his nine-millimeter and shoot some bats. What could he do? He was sunk. Done.
He heard a rustling in the leaves and moved his hand to his gun.
“It’s me,” Bridget whispered. Her blond hair was hidden under a Mets cap.
“Jeez, you gotta be careful. I could shoot you in the dark like this.”
“Better than Pedro feeling me up.”
“Seemed to me you looked pretty happy over there,” he teased.
“No thanks. Those guys have been around the block too much for my taste.”
“Well, cops are dogs everywhere.”
“Not you,” Bridget said.
Her eyes in the dark stood out clear and blue, and she looked very young. Now why couldn’t he go for a nice average girl like this, who’d say yes in a New York minute to what he was asking of Melanie? Bridget would never hurt him. She wouldn’t want to, and he wouldn’t care enough to let her. But his emotions were beyond his control; his body, too. He was obsessed, nothing he could do about it. And if his relationship with Melanie felt like heartbreak waiting to happen…well, he had a sneaking suspicion that was part of its allure. It had a dark magic he couldn’t seem to fight. Plus, at some level he did set a high enough store by himself that he figured he’d win Melanie in the end. How sweet would that be?
“I’m trying to figure out if we’re being played,” Dan said to Bridget.