Ricci shook his head. “You might need it later on,” he said, and then turned toward Marissa Vasquez.
Ricci stepped to the back of the hut, saw Marissa’s expression, paused before he quite reached her. Her captors had used battery lanterns for lighting as dusk closed in around them, and their stark radiance had washed any hint of color from her face. She looked afraid, but mostly she looked to be in shock, her wide, glassy eyes seeming to stare at everything and nothing.
He crouched in front of her and glanced over at Lathrop, nodding toward the bodies of the men they’d killed. Lathrop began searching them for the keys to her restraints.
Ricci looked at her again.
“Marissa,” he said. “We’re taking you out of here.”
Her gaze went to him. At first its remoteness, coupled with the strange, flat look on her face, made him feel only half in her attention. Then she appeared to draw it upon him with an effort.
“My boyfriend needs help,” she said, her voice thin. “They’re keeping Felipe here somewhere.”
Ricci looked at her a moment, then shook his head.
“His name is Manuel Aguilera,” he said slowly. “He was with them from the start.”
She took a while to react. Ricci wasn’t sure she’d grasped the meaning of what he had told her and gave it a while to sink in. But there was Lathrop behind him in the hut, and the possibility of stragglers outside from among the group who’d abducted her, and he could afford only so much time.
“No,” she said at last.
Ricci kept looking at her.
“It’s the truth,” he said.
“No.”
Ricci started to reach out a hand, saw her flinch back, and held it still.
“It hurts,” he said. “But it’s the truth.”
Marissa Vasquez moved her head slightly from side to side.
“No.”
Ricci hesitated.
“I’m not saying I know how he felt about you,” he said. “He might’ve gotten to care, but maybe cared more about things you weren’t part of. It isn’t always one way or the other with people.”
Though Marissa was shaking her head more vehemently now, Ricci saw tears gathering on the rims of her lower eyelids. She seemed to be trying to hold them back.
“His name is Felipe Escalona,” she said.
Ricci looked at her.
“His name isn’t what matters,” he said. “What does is that he helped those men bring you here. And that I’m bringing you out.”
She stared at him. Then her eyes sharpened on his face and she made a choking sound and began to sob, the tears running down her cheeks.
“I love him,” she said, a desperate, pleading quality in her voice.
Ricci extended his hand a little further.
“There’s a plane waiting for us,” he said. “We’re taking you home.”
“I love him.”
Ricci hesitated again, reaching his hand out until it was within an inch of hers.
“I know,” he said. “But you need to trust me.”
A moment passed, and then several more. Marissa Vasquez bent her head, crying hard, her entire body shaking with the release of emotion.
Ricci crouched in front of her without saying anything else, waiting, leaving his offered hand out there between them.
And then, finally, her chained hand came up and took it.
EIGHT
Nimec brought the pontooner in toward the mangroves that hemmed the island’s wild northwestern shore, getting it as far under the trees as he could, sliding through their pale web of roots to finally pull beneath their arched, outspread limbs.
He throttled to a complete halt and turned toward Annie. She was knelt over Blake, who had for the past few minutes shown signs of awareness, if not quite consciousness, squeezing his big hand weakly around hers as she held it, once even half opening his eyes to look at her face with seeming recognition.
“You holding up okay?” Nimec said.
“So far,” she said. “There’s nothing to do but try, I suppose.”
He ran a hand across his chin in thought, still looking at her. Unable to guess the severity of Blake’s injury, they had been careful not to move him from where he’d fallen, and done little in the way of treating him other than to pat some of the blood off his head with gauze from the boat’s first-aid kit, then gently ease it from the hard deck onto her folded windbreaker, providing whatever minimal comfort they could.
“Been about fifteen minutes since we radioed base on the mainland,” Nimec said. “The Skyhawks are taking off out of San Fernando, and fast as those birds travel, it’ll be another ten or fifteen before they show.” He paused. “I’m guessing we can buy enough time right here… or at least that right here’s our best chance.”
Annie nodded her understanding. Overhead the sky was almost unseen through the roof of branches, cut into thin slivers of blue that scarcely showed between their interstices. In the Stingrays that patrolled the island, men they could no longer trust — and had every reason to want to elude — might very well be out searching for them. And what blocked their view of the sky would also block any view the chopper crews might have of the pontoon boat from above. That gave Annie some measure of hope. But she had been a pilot most of her life, had flown above the atmosphere in a space shuttle and trained others to do the same, and it had occurred to her there was more to be concerned about than visual observation.
“Pete,” she said, her expression troubled. “If our people can fix on your GPS signal…”
He looked at her, and she let the sentence trail.
“Yeah, Annie,” he said. “We’d have to figure theirs can, too.”
Jarvis Lenard crouched in the shadows of the mangroves and wondered what was going on.
Drawn to the sound of the marine engine, he had picked his way through the undergrowth to investigate, gotten as close as he dared to peer at the approaching vessel from the gloom at the forest’s edge. It was, he saw from his concealed position, a pontoon boat. A pleasure boat. To his knowledge, the Sunglasses would not come out looking for him in such a craft. Not unless they were trying some deception, no… but what would be its logic? The wilderness area was large, and he reasoned that it was unlikely they would stop the boat expecting he would be close enough to hear it, never mind be moved to risk being exposed to those aboard.
Which, Jarvis thought, was of course the very thing he had done. And perhaps that proved the Sunglasses were a step ahead of him, counting on his desperation to do him in, knowing the boat could tempt him to reveal himself this time when caution would have prevailed at another. Perhaps there were ten such boats, a dozen, set out into the marshes as lures.
Perhaps, yes…
And then again, perhaps not.
Jarvis flattened himself almost onto his belly and crawled further toward the shore, slipping among the low foliage and riblike air roots, his already soiled and tattered clothes muddying to stick clammily to his body. Then, a few yards from the boat, he paused again. A man in swim trunks and a jacket was moving from its pilot’s station toward the middle part of the deck and Jarvis realized now that there was a woman with him, kneeling down over something—
His eyes widened.
No, he thought.
Not something.
Someone.
Jarvis inched still closer until he was chin-deep in the mire, hoping the insects and leeches in his company would not make a total feast of him. But on he went anyway — he had to get a better look at the person on that deck. It was a man, he saw now. A large man lying on his back, his head on what might have been a towel or jacket…