The Finishing School (37 page)

“Ray, it’s Melanie. I’m so glad I got you! Did you land yet?”

“Did I
what
?”

“Are you in San Juan? I couldn’t reach you before, so I figured you guys and Trevor were already on the plane. I have some important new information.”

“Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait. We got a serious problem up here.”

Melanie felt suddenly cold and light-headed, like she was sick with something. She knew what was coming. The thing she’d tried so hard to avoid. She closed her eyes and saw Trevor’s face.

“Tell me,” she demanded with quiet urgency.

“It’s Trevor. He never arrived at the airport. The Escalade they had him in hasn’t been seen in hours. We’ve lost them somehow.”

MELANIE WAS BUSY negotiating with a cabdriver named Raúl in the hotel driveway when Lamar Gates and Pavel LNU walked right by her and got into a waiting convertible. What the hell were they doing in San Juan? Did they have Trevor stashed around here somewhere? She didn’t have a clue what was going on, but one thing she
did
know: She couldn’t afford to waste time. She quit arguing over a few bucks and jumped in the back of the taxi.

“Follow that car!”

“Lady, are you crazy? That’s a Porsche,” Raúl said, looking at her in the rearview mirror. He was middle-aged, with a bristly mustache.

“Do it! Hurry up! We’re gonna lose them.”

“You pay twice the meter and cover any damage to my cab.”

“Deal.”

Once his foot touched the pedal, Raúl did not disappoint. He ran red lights all the way to the highway. They got on, heading for El Yunque, and Raúl wove in and out of traffic, doing a minimum of eighty, keeping the Porsche in his sights yet somehow remaining far enough back so as not to blow their cover.

Another benefit of doing eighty was that it made El Yunque that much closer. Twenty minutes later they turned off the highway onto a smaller road that ran beside a diminutive river, more like a stream. In the distance black mountains massed, shrouded in mist.

“That’s it,” Raúl said, pointing out the front window.

Melanie shivered. “Are there snakes?” she asked.

“Probably, but I’m no expert. I don’t like nature. Too dirty for me.”

They’d seen the Porsche cross through El Yunque’s gates some distance ahead of them and disappear into the blackness. Now Raúl drove up to the portal, marked by a National Park Service sign, and stopped the cab.

“Here you go,” he said.

“This isn’t my final destination. I’m going to El Baño Grande.”

“Lady, the park is closed.”

“I’ll pay extra.”

“I’m not going in
there
after hours.”

“Raúl, this is important. Like I said, I’ll pay.”

“Twice the meter
y cincuenta pesos más
.”

“Fifty bucks extra? You’re crazy.”

“Fine,
chica
, there’s the door.”

“I don’t even
have
that much. I’ll pay you twice the meter plus twenty-five.”

He shrugged. “Okay.” He put the car in gear, then stopped, looking at her over his shoulder. “Your friends in the Porsche, they got guns?”

She hesitated, not wanting him to change his mind. But she wasn’t the type to lie, not when another person’s safety was at stake.

“I’m not sure, but probably,” she said, expecting him to turn the cab around. Instead he turned off the headlights, and they entered the park in complete darkness.

“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.

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.

“Really? That never occurred to me. What should we do?” Bridget asked.

“Wait and see. If this is for real, it won’t be long now.”

She moved in closer to him, whipped out a pair of binoculars, and trained them on the swimming hole. Bridget was very petite. Dan wondered how a little girl like her would measure up as a partner. She’d probably be pretty fast, maybe even quick on the draw, but how would she ever manage to pull some two-hundred-pound animal off him in a dark alley? Not like a partner had never been called on to perform that service. It’d happened, all right, about five years back. Randall Walker had proved he was still one tough son of a bitch that night, with some spark left in him, and because of that, Dan was still walking around. Okay, Bridget smelled a damn sight better than Randall, but realizing that only made Dan long for Melanie, so it wasn’t much reason to join forces.

“Hey,” Bridget whispered.

“You got something?”

“Yeah, two guys about ten o’clock. Could be the Colombians.”

“Lemme see,” Dan said, holding out his hand for the binoculars, but Bridget wouldn’t give them up.

“Definitely the Colombians. One has a duffel bag. Must be the product. And—Jeez.
Shit
.”

“What?”

“They got AK-47s. And dogs.”

MELANIE TOLD HERSELF this was just like any old nature trail. She was in a national park. There was a path. It led from Point A to Point B, it was slippery but only moderately steep, and it was marked. All she had to do was stay on it. Maybe it was dark, but she had a flashlight. Maybe a lot of
things
were flying through the air and crawling underfoot, but—

“Aaghh,” she cried involuntarily, swatting at something that knocked into her face. Jesus, it was crunchy and sinewy. Some sort of whirring insect, but the size of a small bird.

She broke out in a cold sweat and thought about turning back. The problem was, where would she go? The park gates were so far away that she wouldn’t make them by sunup. And she’d have to walk through a dark ocean of creepy-crawlies to get to them. Melanie was a city girl. A lot of things
didn’t
scare her: police sirens, gunshots outside her window, the ominous beating of military helicopters during orange alert. But the forest at night—forget about it! Her legs were quivering like jelly.

She forced herself to continue on, shielding the flashlight beam with her hand and keeping it pointed at the ground. Her goal was to use the weak light to avoid stumbling off the path without alerting Expo’s bodyguards to her presence. When she got closer to El Baño Grande, she’d do some reconnaissance and try to locate her team members.
How
, she wasn’t exactly sure, but something would come to her. It’d better.

She walked on resolutely for about five minutes more, the path sloping steadily upward, challenging her thigh muscles. She’d feel this tomorrow. If Raúl had been correct that El Baño Grande was only ten or fifteen minutes’ walk from the information center, she should be coming up to it soon. Her heart had stopped pounding; her breathing was steadier. Hell, this wasn’t so bad.