Out of Control (26 page)
“I’ll make you carry me piggyback.”
He’d actually managed to make a joke, but Savannah was the one now who couldn’t laugh. She just grimly kept wrapping her right foot. “I got you into this mess. No way am I taking your sandals, too.”
Ken crouched down in front of her, gently lifting her other foot. It was bruised, battered and bleeding from a cut on her heel. “I’m sorry about this.”
She pulled her foot free, wrapped that one, too. “Yeah, well, like you said, I should’ve had sneakers on. And it’s better than being dead. Just think—every step I take, I’ll be reminded just how very alive I am.”
Ken picked up one of his sandals. “Maybe I can somehow adjust these—”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t. Let’s just get out of here.”
He put his sandals back on. “Maybe what we should do is get you hidden someplace. Let me go after the money by myself. We’re going to want to head back this way—to stick relatively close to the river. Chances are it’ll lead us directly to that little town on the coast.”
Panic made her heart pound. She’d as much as told him to ditch her while they were on the helicopter. But now, faced with the very real possibility, she was terrified by the idea. And even if he didn’t mean to ditch her, how on earth would he ever find her again if he left her here?
“Okay,” she said as evenly as she could manage—which wasn’t very evenly at all. “If that’s what you want to do.”
“On the other hand,” he said, “maybe it’s better to stick together until we know what’s up. I mean, if they send in four different helos to search for us, I’m going to want you near me.”
Savannah took a deep breath. “Kenny, maybe you should just forget about the money, forget about me, and get out of here. They may not even know about you—I’m the one they’ll be looking for.”
He laughed, but it wasn’t because he thought she was funny. It was with contempt. “Jesus. You must really think I’m an asshole. That I’d just walk away from you? Leave you out in the middle of the freaking jungle?”
“You don’t even like me.” She tried to make him understand. “And you almost died. Those people did die because of me today, and you very well could have been one of them.”
Savannah caught herself trying to tuck her silk blouse neatly back into her skirt, then realized how ridiculous that was, considering she was sweaty and smeared with jungle mud. Her footwear was designer, but she was pretty sure Donna Karan hadn’t meant for her jacket to be worn quite that way.
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
She clung to her handbag as she turned away, afraid if she so much as looked at Kenny, the floodgates would open. She’d been holding so much in for so long, if she started to cry, she might never stop. “I will not put you in danger again. And if being with me means that you’re in danger—”
“I don’t know what Adele told you about me.” Annoyance rang in his voice. “But here’s the deal, babe. I’m not going to freaking ditch you in the freaking jungle. That’s number one. Number two. We should go collect that money. As cavalier as you are about leaving it for the locals like one big-ass tip, the fact is, we might be able to use it to buy our way out of here.”
“I’m not cavalier about losing a quarter of a million dollars,” she protested. “I just don’t think it’s worth dying—”
“Number three,” he interrupted. “If the people who are looking for you are anything like the men in the helo, they’re amateurs. You stay close to me, you do what I tell you to without question, and evading them will be a breeze. I’m a SEAL, Savannah. You and I can live off the land and hide from these guys forever if we have to. This isn’t going to be any more dangerous than any other camping trip you’ve ever been on.
“Number four,” he continued. “Those assholes didn’t die because of you. They died because they were greedy. Because taking your money wasn’t enough—they had to prove to the world how bad they were by trying to take your life, too. They got what they deserved, do you understand?”
She nodded, wanting to believe him.
“Good. Let’s move. Let me know if I’m going too fast, okay?”
She nodded again, and he headed confidently away from the river. How did he know which way to go?
Savannah followed. “I’ve never been camping,” she told him.
Ken turned back to look at her, his expression incredulous. “Never? Not even when you were a kid?”
“If we live through this,” she told him, “I’ll introduce you to my mother and you’ll realize what a completely absurd question that is.”
“You don’t need to,” he said. “I see more than enough of her in you.”
Savannah stopped following him. There wasn’t a young woman alive who didn’t dread the idea of turning into her mother. “I think that might be the rudest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
He didn’t stop walking. “If the truth is rude, that’s not my fault, it’s yours, don’t you think?”
“I’m nothing like my mother.”
“Yeah? Then why are you wearing her clothes?”
She hurried to catch up to him, ignoring the pain in her feet. “These are not my mother’s clothes, thank you very much. There are my clothes—clothes I wear to work. To court.”
“They suck,” Ken said. “They make you look ugly and they suck. I bet you don’t even own a pair of jeans.”
“I do so,” she retorted, stung. He thought she was ugly? What happened to you are so fucking beautiful? Or was that just something he’d said to get her naked? “I bet you don’t own a pair of pants that doesn’t have fifty different pockets. I bet you don’t even know what size jacket you wear. I bet you can’t even tie your own tie.”
“Guilty, guilty, and guilty.” He moved through the jungle without hesitation, as if he knew exactly where the money was, and was intending to lead her directly to it. “Ask me if I give a damn.”
Savannah closed her mouth, unwilling to give him the satisfaction.
“I bet I spend way more time comfortable and far happier than you,” Ken told her.
She didn’t say a word. She just grimly marched on, on her painful feet. But she would probably bet that, too.
“Whoa,” Ken said as he found the broken crate not far from where the briefcase was half buried in the soft dirt.
“What is it?” Savannah asked, shuffling closer to look over his shoulder.
“Dynamite,” he told her. There were fuses here, too. It was a regular little do-it-yerself demolition kit.
“That’s why the helicopter blew up,” she said. Smart woman.
“Yeah.” It was, indeed why the helo had fireballed. His bullets hadn’t miraculously hit some vital part of the engine to make that puppy blow. No, they’d merely hit the cargo, created the right amount of friction to cause a spark and . . . Blam.
This had been one crate of maybe three dozen on board that helo. Whoever had ordered this from Death and Destruction-R-Us wasn’t looking to do some little home project, like blasting a new hole for the family latrine. No, there had been enough explosives on the helo to clear a big enough patch of the jungle to build Disney-Indonesia. Or, far more likely, to grow acres and acres of cannabis or poppies.
“Whoever was waiting for this delivery isn’t going to be happy,” Ken said.
That would make a crapload of unhappy people wandering around this part of the jungle—including him. The good news was that the money had survived its plunge to the ground thanks to the quality of the metal attaché case. The bad news was that he now had a battered metal attaché case filled with money to drag around with them as they traipsed through the brush trying to stay hidden.
Not only would it be a bitch and a half to carry, but it was made of shiny metal. Ready to reflect the sun and act as a signal beacon to the rest of the world. Here we are! Come and blow our heads off!
Yeah, perfect.
Ken dragged the broken crate and the dynamite back toward Savannah, who was now sitting on the money. Savannah, who was camping challenged, who was the second part of this perfect equation, dressed in just about the most inappropriate clothes anyone could wear in the jungle.
Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration. A nun’s habit, an evening gown, a stripper’s tassels and g-string all would have been worse.
No, strike that last bit. The tassels and g-string would have at least given him inspiration.
She’d taken off one of the pieces of jacket she’d wrapped around her foot and was examining a nasty looking cut on her big toe when she heard him coming and quickly covered her foot back up again.
He’d been able to tell from her breathing that every single step she’d taken had been painful. But she hadn’t said a word. Not one single complaint.
He’d been about to offer to carry her more than once, but each time, she’d given him such a venomous look—as if she could read his mind—that he hadn’t dared.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a duffle bag or a backpack in your handbag would you?” he asked her now. “Large enough to hold both the money and all this dynamite?”
He was only half kidding. Adele had managed to carry some pretty amazing stuff in her purse. Of course, Adele had carried a bag that was twice the size of Savannah’s. Come to think of it, it made sense because Adele was twice the size of Savannah.
Savannah shook her head, no.
“What have you got in there?” he asked. “Maybe we should take a minute and do a quick inventory, see what we’ve got, see if we can somehow lighten our load.” He went through his pockets, pulling everything out and dumping it in a relatively dry spot in front of her. “Knife, keys, wallet, passport, a coupla squished power bars—that’s good, we’re bound to get hungry—and . . . oops.”
Condoms.
He was carrying around a half a dozen. He stuffed them back into his pocket, but not before she saw them.
He gave her a weak smile. “I just, you know, always carry ’em.”
That was a lie and she knew it.
“If we get bored, we can use them to make balloon animals,” he added.
She was not at all amused.
“All right,” he said. “So I’m not here purely because I’m a nice guy. You’re a lawyer—sue me. What have you got in your bag?”
Still silent, she handed it to him.
He unzipped it. It was neat and clean—no two-year-old receipts or stale, loose M&M’s to be found. In fact, the contents read like an anal retentive neat-freak’s checklist. Leather wallet with credit cards carefully arranged and, Jesus, more cash than he made in a month—half in American dollars, half in Indonesian currency.
The money was neatly arranged, too, every bill facing up, ones to one hundreds in crisp, perfect order, like she was ready to play real-life Monopoly.
Ken had been one of those kids who’d kept his Monopoly money in one huge chaotic pile. Orange five hundreds mixed in with the yellow tens and the pink fives. No doubt about it. Their relationship had been doomed from the start.
Savannah von Hopf wasn’t really the hot chick with the messy hair dressed in his clothes on his patio and naked in his bed. She was the designer attired, perfectly put together, absolutely in control young woman who’d scared him to death back at the Hotel Del Coronado. The woman he’d spent the night with hadn’t really existed.
And that was a goddamn shame.
He kept unloading her purse.
Cell phone. Cell phone! Please God, let there be some wealthy drug lord set up nearby with a satellite dish . . .
He flipped it open. He’d call Sam Starrett. Or Johnny Nilsson if Sam wasn’t around. Or the senior chief. Yeah, he’d call the senior first. He’d have a helo from the nearest U.S. military installation out here in a matter of hours. There would be one hell of a roaming charge for the call but who the hell cared.
Except nothing happened. No “searching for service” message. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
“I didn’t get a chance to recharge it,” Savannah informed him. “I do it at night, every night, but . . .”
But last night she’d been otherwise occupied. Yeah, he remembered. A little too well.
He snapped it shut. “Yeah,” he said. “Right. Well, that would’ve been too easy, huh?”
She looked so miserable, he added, “It probably would’ve been out of range anyway. It’s not worth getting your panties in a knot.”
“I’ve charged my phone battery every night for the past nearly ten years,” she told him. “I swear to you, I haven’t missed a night. Except for last night and the night before.”
She was serious. She probably went to bed at the same time every night, too. 2330 on the dot. Time to charge the cell phone and then climb into bed.
Scary.
He dug deeper into her purse.
Keys, passport, mini tin of Altoids, nice pen, change purse containing some coins—heaven forbid they float around loose and create unnecessary chaos, a small pack of tissues, a little bottle of hand sanitizer in a ziplock baggie—to prevent leakage no doubt.
He tossed that to her. “Put this on your feet. And anywhere else you’ve got broken skin. Try to use as little as possible.”
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