Hush (27 page)

“
Un momento, señora
,” the police chief said, silky except for the underlying threat in every syllable. “I think you are mistaken.”

“No,” she began slowly, eyes darting to the three other men at the table, who stood with deliberate intent. Oh, crap. Did she really think it would be that easy? Her lashes flared, wide as she could, as she asked uncertainly, “I won, right? That's how people win.”
Assholes
. “Right? And I paid you back, so now you don't even have to withdraw the money from my bank account,” she added brightly, to remind him he had plenty to gain by letting her go.

The fingers on her arm were brutally tight, but the expression on his face changed. He had forgotten the bigger prize. He held on as he decided if he wanted both the cash
and
the lotto fortune, which didn't take long.
But before José Fejos could say or do anything more, the doors behind Acadia slammed open.

“¡Señora!”
The shrill old voice sliced through the cantina like a rusty saw blade. Acadia watched the chief's eyelids flinch. “
Durante una hora, su esposo ha estado buscando a usted, y ahora ¿le encuentro aquí, en la cantina?
” Sister Clemencia strode across the uneven cantina floor like a miniature soldier in Hawaiian blue. Her beady little eyes were pinned on Acadia as she pointed at her, her tirade reaching a crescendo. “¡
Bebiendo como una borrachera! ¿Jugando las cartas?
” she spat.
A drunk, playing cards. “¡Usted es una mujer ingrata!
”

Acadia winced. She was
not
an alcoholic, ungrateful wife. She was getting them money to get her impatient
husband
the hell out of here! Still, she gritted her teeth, bowing her head. “I'm sorry,” she said plaintively, and slid José a sideways glare. “I was just going back to the mission, if Police Officer Fejos is done.”

Sister Clemencia fired off a rapid spurt of Spanish that had José's lips tightening to a thin, pale line. “Sí,” he all but growled, letting her go. Perhaps he'd settle for the lotto fortune after all. He gave the other men a quelling look and, turning his face away from the fierce little nun, a knowing smirk.

Acadia, shoulders hunched, dutifully moved to the old woman's side as Clemencia shook a gnarled finger at all of them. She didn't catch all of it, but she got enough to know that the diminutive nun didn't think highly of men who encouraged a young wife to sin.

She flinched as the nun rounded on her. “Your husband,” she said flatly. “He is awake and seeking his wife.
You go. Be a good wife.”
Or else
hung in the air just long enough for Acadia to march beside the nun across the bar and toward the door.

The men watched her all the way out into the evening light.

As the door swung closed behind Sister Clemencia, Acadia sucked in a breath, whispered, “
Muchas gracias
,” and ran like hell across the street back to Zak.

Happy birthday to her. She'd just won safe passage out of there.

55836232859675625355565583623285967562535556558362328596756 …

Zak saw the same unending sequence of numbers moving continuously in his mind's eye with crystal clarity, streaming left to right like some goddamned securities exchange ticker.

They weren't going away. In fact, they seemed to be permanently lodged in his head. Day or night. Lights on, lights off. No matter where he looked, the numbers were superimposed over the bottom edge of whatever he was looking at. If he closed his eyes, he saw them just as clearly. The only time he
didn't
see the damn things was if he was asleep.

Morse code? Some sort of algorithm? An encryption?

Fuckit. He had to stop trying to make sense of something that was a figment of his imagination.

He never got sick. Hell, he rarely went to doctors for anything short of the required travel vaccinations or getting a broken bone set, but he'd get on this shit quick.
It was both distracting and cause for real concern. He didn't like it, even though he imagined—hoped like hell—it was some sort of temporary hallucination. It
looked
damn real to him. Maybe it was a lingering sign of fever? Or the knock on the head back at the hotel where this had all begun must've knocked a screw loose.

Wouldn't Gideon find
that
amusing?

He and Acadia sat in a long
curiara
—a wooden dugout canoe; an elderly Pemon man and his grandson were taking them down the Orinoco River as far as Ciudad Bolívar.

The sky was a deep blue. Not fully dark yet, but several stars were popping up in the vast overhead canopy. The trees lining the riverbank were filled with flocks of red, yellow, and blue squawking parrots, and hundreds of large black-and-orange troupials, with their long tails and bulky bills, swooped and dived, feeding on the insects swarming the water. A heron stood on one leg and watched them skim by. A log or alligator lurked between the tall grasses on the bank. Zak kept an eye out for any quick movements.

“I'll miss him,” Acadia said as the kid stood on the riverbank waving madly, the skinny dog at his side.

“He probably gave us fleas.”

“Nah.” She waved back just as enthusiastically, causing the canoe to list. “Not Dogburt.”

“Sit still before you tip us over. Pace your excitement, it'll be a while.”

Even in the wilds of the rainforest, anything was possible when one threw money at it. Acadia and the
kid had shown up at the mission clinic within minutes of one another. The kid was there to retrieve his dog. Acadia, flushed and heart-stoppingly beautiful as she'd bounded in, had surprised the hell out of Zak by emptying pockets full of cash.

It was like providence. The kid's uncle's brother's second cousin—he was sure he'd missed something in the colloquial translation—had a boat. He was also unafraid of the police chief whom Acadia had relieved of his cash.

Something Zak didn't share, not with her cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling and hands full of money, was that he was scared shitless that Piñero would finally track them down. He wanted them out of there, immediately. Zak had ignored Sister Clemencia's admonishment that he wasn't well enough to leave. He'd
died
, she reminded him. Several times. God had a plan for him.

Yeah. Meet with his brother. Uncover who the fuck the kidnappers worked for, get back to his life. It was a fine plan. But he couldn't hold a candle to Acadia—the woman planned everything down to the last peso. He wished he'd seen her playing poker against the crooked police chief and his cronies.

She was an intriguing female.

“What do you think happened to Piñero and her men?” Acadia stared at him like she wanted to see inside of his head. No, thank you. Too damned cluttered as it was.

The old man and his son paddled them into the center of the river, where the water was clear and deep, and
the current helped move them along briskly. “Maybe she just gave up.”

She huffed out a breath, shifting to get comfortable on the hard bench seat across from him. “With sixty million U.S. dollars up for grabs? No, she didn't.”

Loida Piñero
hadn't
given up. And if she hadn't given up, where
was
she? Zak scanned the lush vegetation on either side of the riverbank, as if Guerrilla Bitch might suddenly appear like a jack-in-the-box from among the trees.

While he didn't have the itch on the back of his neck he usually got when shit was about to hit the fan, he had a distinct waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling lying like a stone in his stomach. Sixty million American was a shitload of ransom to give up on. And Piñero hadn't looked to Zak like a woman who gave up easily, if at all. No, she was after their asses.

She just hadn't sprung out at them. Yet.

Another possibility—one he didn't even want to consider—was that they'd caught Gideon, and would use his brother as bait to get to him. But Gideon was smart and resourceful, so that scenario was as unlikely as it was unwelcome.

“What are you going to do?” Acadia asked. “You and Gideon.”

“Turn the tables, and hunt her down like the bitch she is. She has answers we want, and I sure as hell don't like having to look over my shoulder. Something tells me she didn't instigate the kidnappings. But dollars to doughnuts she knows who did. Gideon and I are professionals at shaking bushes and rattling cages.”

“You could just go home to …?” She left it hanging, waiting for him.

The muscles along his jaw flexed. “Seattle,” he supplied, “and not just no.
Hell
, no. Not until this is over.”

“Okay, then.” She trailed a finger in the water. “Are you going to recover physically before you hare off on this wild scheme? Or are you hoping to push yourself until you're really sick, and you—” He noticed she caught herself before she asked him if Gideon was right, if he really did want to die.
Again.

“Until you can't do anything but lie in bed flopping like a—like a beached tuna?”

God, she was funny. A beached tuna? Where the hell did she come up with this shit? His lips twitched. “I'm plenty recovered.” Except for the annoying numerical crawler in his brain, he actually felt surprisingly
great
for a guy who'd died recently. “Get your hand out of the water,” he added. “Things bite down there.”

Her eyes widened and she snatched her fingers back into the boat so quickly, he had to double-check that something hadn't taken them already. “Then why are you scowling?” she demanded, with a scowl of her own.

He rubbed his eyes with one hand. “I'm not.”

“You have a headache, don't you?”

He watched an anaconda swish through the water a few feet from the
curiara
. Thing was as thick as his thigh, and six feet long if it was an inch. “Even my mother never gave a rat's ass if I had a headache.” His tone lashed. “Don't mother me, Acadia; I don't need it.”

“
Everyone
needs mothering once in a while.” Her gray eyes were calm, mouth set in the lush line he was coming to recognize as Acadia Gray at her most determined. “What happened to yours?”

“Twenty questions?” His shoulder ached, and he shifted to ease the dull pain, annoyed and out of sorts that he couldn't help with the rowing. He tried to figure out what the numbers could be. A bank account number? Safety deposit? Hell, random numbers with no rhyme or reason? There were a lot of fives …

She did some ultra-feminine thing with the high ponytail and twisted it into an untidy nest on top of her head. Her nape was going to be feasted on by mosquitoes. Zak reminded himself he wasn't
her
mother either.

She dropped her hands to hold on to the sides of the canoe. “Got anything better to do?”

He could think of a few—
Whoa
. “Has anyone told you that you talk too much?”

“Strangely, no.” She cocked her head, and the muted light streaming across her clear skin made her eyes look almost transparent. They got dark and smoky while she was being fucked. And hazy and foggy when she was limp and replete in his arms afterward.

“Okay, yes,” she admitted with a rueful smile that pleasantly kick-started his heart. “Once in a while. And do you know why?”

“I probably don't, but tell me anyway.” He liked listening to her talk. Liked hearing how her agile, funny mind
worked, how her brain ticked through problems, and how she came up with solutions in her own convoluted way.

“It's a nerves thing, I mentioned that once.” He remembered. “But it was also to get a little attention. My parents loved each other to distraction, usually to the exclusion of anyone else around. They waited ten years to have me—went through in vitro, and so on. When I finally arrived, they loved me to distraction as well, but they were pretty set in their ways, and sometimes they didn't notice me waiting to be noticed.”

Her gaze drifted past him, out to the lush jungle bracketing the river around them. The noise was different out here; muted, somehow, but no less full. The sudden slap of things skating under the surface, the rustle of animals—even the birds harangued them from all sides.

And yet, aside from the blaring trail of numbers in his brain, Zak was momentarily at peace, and fascinated by all things Acadia Gray.

Her fingers trailed over the boat's edge again before she caught herself and tucked her hand around the curve of her thigh. He wondered what she'd do if he asked her to tuck it into his. “I'd talk a lot,” she continued quietly, matter-of-factly, “and really fast, so I could tell them about my day or whatever before they lost interest.”

He forced his mind to get into gear. “And they live in Kansas City?”

“My mom died—” She paused, and Zak frowned as something soft and squishy welled up in his chest. Sympathy?

Hell …

“A pretty routine surgery, but she never woke up.” Her mouth twisted. “Breast reduction, actually. So you can imagine—or maybe you can't,” she added wryly, “but I was terrified my breasts would get so large that I'd have to deal with the same issues she had. I'd just turned thirteen.”

Tough for a teenage girl. Zak felt compelled to say something, anything, and settled for the first thing that popped into his brain. “Your breasts are perfect in every way.” He loved it when her eyes crinkled up in amusement. “And your father?”

The amusement faded. “Died a month before I won the lottery, as a matter of fact.”

Jesus Christ. “I'm sorry.”

“Thank you.” Acadia drew her knees up, resting her chin on them. The canoe wobbled and splashed water around their feet. She shot the father-grandson team an apologetic look over her shoulder. “
Lo sentimos!”
Then she said to Zak, “Me, too. He was a wonderful man, and I adored him. I guess you could say I had about thirteen awesome years with both of them. Then my mom died, and my father started getting … strange. I thought he was absentminded with grief. They'd been so close—It was years later that he was diagnosed as early-onset Alzheimer's. It was a slow, scary road. But those first years were … magical.” She smiled. Not sad, not
woe is me
. A quiet smile filled with love.