Stranded (16 page)

“What do you want to do, Eve?” Jake’s question startled her. Shame welled up that she’d been thinking of only herself again.

Suddenly the answer to her dilemma popped into her mind. Danny Romero’s drug trade enslaved untold numbers of addicts and prostitutes. Her purpose to bring him to justice was no fool’s mission. But it didn’t require her to sacrifice the welfare of others. She could hold the two in balance. Jake would never know about Danny Romero, but he’d never have cause to call her a fool again.

“Find the cave.” Her words came out strong and clear. “I don’t want Betty and Crystal to sit through another torrent like this.” Warmth surged from her resolve and spread throughout her body.

Across the fire, Jake’s expression was stern. It said that until she proved herself, her words were hollow. But he’d see. She’d be right by his side tomorrow, searching for that cave. And she’d look out for everyone from now on, not just herself.

“Crystal, let’s show Jake and Eve how you did with Psalm Twenty-three.”

Eve grimaced as Betty nudged Crystal forward. Okay, she’d have to work on the religion thing—bite her lips to keep her mouth shut. It galled her in particular that adults would impose their beliefs on vulnerable children.

Crystal crawled around Eve and Jake to stand under the highest point of the tent. Behind her, the rain had settled into a steady patter, reflecting the firelight in its drops. The child smiled, obviously self-conscious, just as obviously pleased with their attention. She opened her mouth and sang.

The melody rose clear and sweet from the depths of Eve’s memory. Tears blurred her vision. The words were familiar. She knew them, every one of them. Her lips trembled, aching to sing them.

She was five years old, sitting on her mother’s lap. Her mom’s arms were wrapped around her, loosely, so that together they could sing the Twenty-third Psalm. She sang the melody while her mother sang the descant. Every night at bedtime they practiced until she knew every word. Then a car accident took her mother away. All by herself, Eve sang the psalm, huddled under the covers at night, wanting her mommy. Then came the day she understood her mommy would never come back. She never sang it again.

The sharp crack of clapping hands echoed against the raindrops. Eve joined the applause, her teary eyes matched by Betty’s and Jake’s. She held back the sobs wrenching her chest, stuffed away the memory into the deep crevices of her heart.

What she couldn’t do anything about mustn’t be allowed to create cracks in her armor.

Eve’s scream woke Jake. He sat up, confused by the shriek, the shadow hovering over his head, the dark lumps stirring close by. Of course . . . he was in the tent. Eve squealed again, identifying herself as the lump two arm-lengths away. Farther back, next to the kindling, lay Betty and Crystal. His heart jumped at the level of fear in Eve’s next yell. He scrambled to his knees. A bad dream? Or snake?

He scurried to her side, eyed one of the bayonets that stuck upright in the sand a foot away. He grabbed it and crouched next to her, ready to jump back if he found the coils of a giant python looped over her. She broke into a pant, the contortions of her face highlighted in the glow of the fire’s coals.

No snake. No critter of any kind that he could see. She whipped her arm up and thrashed at the air. A dream. She was having a nightmare. He grabbed her hand to bring her terror to a halt. “Eve, wake up! You’re—”

Her foot crashed into his face. Pain stabbed lightning hot under his eyes. He let go of her hand and fell backwards, dropping the bayonet to grab his nose with both hands.

“Wolves!”

The hair on the back of his neck pricked. “Eve, you’re dreaming. Wake up!”

She scrabbled to her knees, her eyes so wide the whites around her irises gleamed in the firelight. He sat up, still cupping his nose. The iron taste of blood seeped into his mouth. Dark spots dropped to the ground from between his fingers.

“Wolves—I thought they . . .” Eve gazed at his fingers. “Oh, Jake, I’m sorry! I kicked you, didn’t I?”

“Jake?” Betty rose onto one elbow. “What’s going on?”

“Eve had a nightmare and kicked me in the face.” He got to his feet and stepped outside the tent, pinching the bridge of his nose to stop the bleeding. When, oh when, would he learn to stop rescuing this fool of a woman?

A full moon had replaced the storm clouds, illuminating the campsite in stark grays and whites. His feet were bare, but he had no problem picking his way over the rocky soil to the stream. He lay down at the edge and buried his face in the water.

“Jake.” Eve touched his back. “Jake, let me see.”

Her voice was unsteady. She hadn’t recovered from her nightmare, yet she had chased after him to make sure he was all right. The hardness in his heart softened at her concern. He pushed back from the stream and sat up.

She squatted next to him. “It doesn’t look broken, but I can’t tell for sure.”

“I’ll be okay. Won’t be the first time if it’s broken. Is it still bleeding?”

“No.” She sank into a sitting position, criss-crossing her legs. “Jake, I’m sorry. I . . .” She stared down at her hands. They were trembling.

“Sounded like a bad nightmare. Wolves, you say?”

“They’re chasing me.” She inhaled a shaky breath. “I’m running through a forest, shouting for help, but my father . . . he’s not there.” Tears brimmed in her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. “They always catch me. Always. I try to fight them off, but their teeth rip into me—”

Terror, sharp and piercing, sliced across Jake’s chest. The memory slashed at his throat so that he couldn’t breathe. He gasped.

“Jake?”

“The dog.” He shot his hand to the scars on his right cheek.

“The pit bull?”

“It just kept tearing me up. That’s all I remember. Ripping me up . . .” He stopped.

“I’m sorry. It must have been awful. My nightmare is nothing. I feel stupid.”

“No, please. I don’t even know where that came from.” He shook his head to dispel the specter. His heartbeat leveled.“Does your dream happen a lot?”

“I don’t know what triggers it. I go months, then I have it.”

Guilt stung him. Had he caused her nightmare by chewing her out at the volcano?

“What about you?” she asked.

He shrugged, feeling stupid himself now. “Like I said, I don’t know where that came from. I never dream about the attack. I was two years old and foolishly walked up to a chained dog with pups. We’d always had dogs, so I wasn’t scared of its bark. My dad got me away before the dog did any real damage.”

“Those scars looked pretty serious to me.”

“They only became a problem when I got older and the kids teased me. So I coped by beating them up.” He touched his nose, recalling the first punch he had taken. “That’s when my father started me in a wrestling program. Instead of hitting my critics, I tossed them to the ground and pinned them till they squealed ‘uncle.’”

“Maybe I need to learn how to pin wolves.”

“What about your father? You said he wasn’t there.”

She stiffened and looked away. “It’s only a dream, Jake.” She tossed a pebble into the stream and rose to her feet. “Thanks for rescuing me once again. I hope it didn’t cost you your nose.”

“It‘ll be fine.” Other than hurting like crazy.

They walked back to the tent in silence. He wanted to ask more questions about her dream, but she’d slammed that door shut. Dream? That was like calling a five-alarm fire a weenie roast.

One thing for sure—he’d misjudged Eve. She wasn’t simply a hardheaded woman. Something had happened to make her tough. He rubbed the scars on his cheek. And she hadn’t had a dad there to help her like he’d had.

They reached the tent and returned to their sleeping spots. The campfire had snuffed out, but the moonlight was as bright as a streetlamp. At the back of the tent, soft snores puffed from the Betty-lump.

“Eve?” he whispered.

“Yes?”

“You know there’s a heavenly Father.”

“That doesn’t help, Jake. Good-night.”

He could take her hostility now. Tonight, Eve’s dream had unlocked a secret. No man was trustworthy, and no man was going to boss her around. No doubt there would be more revelations trickling down from this one. He cushioned the back of his head against his arms and suppressed a groan.
Please, may my nose be the only casualty.

Jojo slapped the wad of pesos onto the table. The uneven legs rocked under his hand, rattling the chairs shoved against the table legs. The noise got him the attention he wanted.

“Go away, we’re closed.” From the back of the restaurant, his mother’s voice echoed against the hard surfaces of pots and pans hanging on hooks above metal appliances. She stuck her head out the doorway. A sharp inhale followed by the snapping on of lights told him she’d spied his hulk at the table. “What do you want? I told you not to come here.”

She plodded into the room as if she weighed two hundred pounds instead of eighty. A broom with a handle longer than she was tall trailed her like a tail. He smirked as her eyes sought out the pile on the table before turning to him. “What do you want?” she repeated, emphasizing the
want
with sullen petulance, as if he were the beggar.

“Are you behind on the rent?”

“I owe a little. I’ll catch up.”

“You get kicked out of that rat’s hole, you won’t find another.”

“I’ve got friends.”

“Your boyfriends?” He sneered. “All they give you is disease.”

“One gave me worse.” She glared at him as she did every time she threw the word at him. “A monster.”

He grinned. The one good thing his American father had given him was his size.

“And a murderer. You killed that sailor that disappeared off the ship, didn’t you? Everyone is talking about it. Said you loosed some crated zoo animal to make it look like they fought and fell overboard.”

He sniggered at his cleverness. Thanks to the leopard, no one had been able to fix the blame on him.

“They’ll drag you off to prison, and this time you’ll stay.”

“And then what will you do for money? Make your home with the street children and become their mother?”

“Monster! Because of you, I have no babies!”

He grinned a second time. Best thing his size had ever done was shred his mother’s womb at birth. He put his hand on the pile of money. “Maybe you don’t want this, then.”

The flare of her nostrils was barely perceptible before she lifted her chin and stalked toward the kitchen. He laughed so that his voice bounced off every hard surface in the room as he left. When he peeked back in a minute later, the pile on the table was gone.

Jake set the bunch of green bananas on the tent floor. These would have to do for this morning. His nose throbbed as if Eve had plunged a bayonet into his face instead of her foot. The only motivation he felt to move a single muscle today was to find that second cave.

A tarantula crawled out of the fruit, a big, hairy brute. The opening scene from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
leaped to mind. His spine tingled at the thought of tarantulas parked on his back from hauling the bananas. He brushed the spider into the fire pit before it could crawl away. It burst into flames and popped. He’d read they were good to eat roasted, but he suspected he’d already pushed the women’s threshold with the snake meat.

“Whoa, that’s what Eve did to your face last night?” Betty rolled herself into a sitting position.

Crystal opened her eyes and blinked. “Wow, you look like a raccoon.”

“Good morning to you too. Watch out for tarantulas in the bananas. I already killed one.” He was disappointed when they barely responded to his poke at them. No eeks or scuttling away. They were adapting to life on a wild island better than he had expected.

“Sorry, Jake.” Eve sat up and yawned. She didn’t have black eyes like he did, but last night’s stress tinted the areas under her eyes a faint gray.

“Are you up to exploring today? You could stay here and rest.” Good grief, he was back to feeling sorry for her. Her nightmare had tossed the hammer right out of his hand.

“I wouldn’t miss it. All I need are a couple of bananas and I’m ready.”

And a dip in the stream, a drink of water, and a trip to the designated toilet area. He huffed at the delays.

When she was finally ready, he snatched up Crystal’s torch and the lens to light it. They walked down the stream to the cove so he could observe the location of the trench from a distance. The stream emptied into the left side of the cove; to the right, rocky ground rose to the cliff he and Eve had fallen over. Between the two areas lay the cove’s beach, the minefield in back of it that hid the trench, and above it the abrupt rise of rock stretching far away to the volcano. A second cave had to be somewhere in that rock.

They returned to the spot where the log had pushed them over the edge of the cliff. Their first task was to look for more booby traps. When they found none, they tramped the length of the trench and back, then the rocky section between the trench and the cliff.

“Logically, the cave should be here, near the cliff’s edge,” Jake grumbled, “but I don’t see any more openings. Nothing but rock. I wonder if I can see anything by looking down on this area from above.”

He climbed to the height of a two-story house above the trench. The area proved to be a mini-plateau, about thirty feet in diameter. Closest to the side above where Eve stood, tall grasses and shrubs grew, while the rest of the plateau was bare rock. Peculiar that one section had life, while the rest was barren.

Using a stick, he parted the foliage and found several bamboo
pongee sticks stuck in the ground. His mouth went dry. He was familiar with them from Nam. The hidden, razor-sharp spikes had injured a number of his buddies. The tips of these were dull, battered by decades of sun and rain, but the memory of the deadly spikes still sent a shiver up his spine.

The trap’s presence was further evidence that he was close to something. His heart beat faster. Was something buried among the pongee sticks? Another swipe, deeper this time, disclosed what the foliage had been meant to hide: a rusted pulley. Running over the top of it and back down into the rock was a cable. Excitement pulsated through his nerves. The Japanese soldiers had rigged a counterweight.

Shoving aside the decayed pongee sticks, he reached down and grabbed hold of the pulley. Clockwise, it wouldn’t budge. He pushed hard in the opposite direction. This time it turned.

“Eve!”

“What?”

“I found a pulley. See if it makes any of the rocks move.” Straining against the resistance of rust, he rotated the mechanism a full circle.

“Yes, a stone moved,” she hollered.

He climbed down to her side, his heart hammering. This was beyond anything he’d imagined. He and Eve put their hands flat against the rock she designated and pushed up. Grating in protest, showering a powder of gray cinder, the rock slid to the height of their kneecaps and stopped.

He got on his hands and knees and peered into the darkness. “We found it.”