Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (26 page)

 
          
Valerie
stuck her head out the hut door and watched the nasty little plane buzz away at
last. “Him again!” she said.

 
          
The
tribespeople were coming back into the village, all laughing and talking and
slapping one another’s shoulders. They’d
loved
being endangered by that airplane, Valerie could tell. Only Rosita looked less
than delighted by it all. Could it be . . .

 
          
Valerie
went over to Rosita, and pointed toward the now^gone plane. “Him?” she asked.
“Is
he
the man you told me about?”
“You bet,” Rosita said grimly. “And I just give it to him straight, what you
said to me, and he got
pretty
shifty.
I bet you right all along.” “I
know
I’m right!
That
man?”

 
          
Rosita
looked alert. “You know Kirby?”

 
          
“Kirby
Galway, that’s right, that’s his name!”

 
          
“You
know
him, Sheena?”

 
          
Valerie
had long since given up trying to get the tribespeople to quit calling her
Sheena and call her Valerie. Even though her hair wasn’t blonde, and even
though her remaining rags of clothing bore no resemblance at all to a tiger
skin, and even though she had never swung from vines in her entire life,
nevertheless when she had stumbled into this village a week ago the man called
Tommy Watson had at once dubbed her Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. And so had
everyone else, deeply amused, once he’d explained that comic book character to
them. In fact, it was during his description of the comic book Sheena, in
Valerie’s presence, with some of the comparative details becoming rather
personal, that Valerie had let them all know she understood Kekchi and wished
they wouldn’t talk about her in quite that manner.

 
          
“She
speaks our language!” Tommy had cried, in delight and wonder. “She
is
Sheena!”

 
          
In
fact, the variant of Kekchi spoken in this village was not at all the same as
the pure language she had so doggedly learned, but at least it was similar
enough so she could understand most of what was said to her, unless the person
spoke very fast.

 
          
And
as to their calling her Sheena, after three days and nights of wandering
through forest and jungle and swamp and desert Valerie would have agreed to any
condition in return for a full meal and a safe bed. That the only condition
imposed was that she answer to the name of Sheena was odd, but not difficult.
Sheena she became, Sheena she had been for a week, and Sheena she would go on
being for . . .

 
          
.
. . who knew how long?

 
          
She
didn’t dare go back to civilization, at least not yet. Who knew how many more
of them were in that rotten racket together? Kirby Galway; the driver who had
locked Valerie in that filthy hut; the man Vernon who had come to give the
driver his orders. And of course Innocent St. Michael must be the ringleader,
the brains behind the whole scheme.

 
          
She
had been foolish to let Vernon know she recognized him, because that was what
had tipped the balance at last and made them decide they had to commit murder.
Even though that nasty dark room had been very hot and humid, a chill had gone
through her when she’d heard the driver say, “Say it out, Vernon. Say what you
want,” and Vernon answer, “She has to die.”

           
After Vernon left, Valerie stood
quaking in the darkness of the inner room, wondering if she had the strength to
fight off the driver, knowing she did not. It was so dark in here she couldn’t
see if there might be a stick or something lying around that might help.

 
          
Was
there anything in the structure itself that might become a weapon? Valerie made
her way to the rear wall and, partly by sight, partly by touch, made out that
the slabs were nailed to vertical two- by Tours, a foot and a half apart, with
here and there a horizontal two- by-four for extra support. Perhaps one of
those horizontal pieces could be worked loose? She tried one, just at eye
level, pried it a bit, pushed on it, and the two-by-four with the whole slab
behind it, six feet long, simply fell off the building, with a clatter that
made Valerie go rigid. Her head turned to stare at the closed door, but nothing
happened, so the driver hadn’t heard or was possibly out somewhere.

 
          
Digging
a grave.

 
          
It
was then just a matter of moments for Valerie to force an opening large enough
to eel through, ripping her left sleeve on a nail stuck out of the boards. The sky
ahead was completely black, with visible stars. Above, it modulated through
bruised-looking blues and sullen reds to become orange on the far side of the
shack. So east must be straight ahead, which meant that north—and Belize
City—-were to her left. Miles and miles and miles away to her left.

 
          
Valerie
struck off northward, moving as quickly as possible in the uncertain light over
the uncertain ground. A half moon shone with increasing brilliance off to her
right—giving her a guide to move north by—but its light wasn’t really much use.

 
          
Half
an hour from the shack, Valerie all at once came upon the Land Rover. Her feet,
seeking out the path of least resistance, had all unknowing found and stuck
with the trail she and the driver had taken up from where the little dirt road
had ended. And here she was back again, the Land Rover looking more nautical
than ever in the watery moonlight.

 
          
Had
he left the keys? Certainly not.
Frustrated, unhappy, wishing she hadn’t had a useless brother like Robert
Edward Greene V but a
real
brother
who would have taught her how to jump ignitions, Valerie sat in the driver’s
seat, resting from her exertions and trying to think what she could possibly do
next. All at once she heard a racket headed this way, a crashing and muttering
as of some ogre in a fairy tale, lumbering through the woods and telling
himself about the children he would eat.

 
          
The
driver!

 
          
Valerie
hopped out and hurried away into the darkness, tripping over roots and rocks,
falling once, skinning her knee, and deciding at last to wait right
here
and not injure herself any more out
of panic.

 
          
She
lay in deep darkness, amid shrubbery and low twisted trees. The Land Rover sat
in a moonlit open space. Valerie was close enough to hear what the driver said
as he too entered that moonlit space and paused to search himself with quick
anger for the keys, and what he said was:

 
          
“Oh,
no, not me, not Fred C! You don’t put Fred C. in one of those jails, oh, no, no
you don’t. She’s gone, she’s gone, she gonna raise the alarm, everybody can go
to jail but not Fred C., no, sir. Fred C. is
gone
! Down to Punta Gorda, sell this damn vehicle, go on down to
Colombia, down where they got no law at all. Fred C. is
out
of this story! Where’s the damn
keys
? Here they are.”

 
          
With
that, he hopped into the Land Rover, a second later the starter made its
grinding noise, the engine caught, and headlights cut the night into the quick
and the dead. The Land Rover jolted backward in a halTtum, those bright beams
swinging this way, then it roared off, bouncing like a toy down the road, soon
out of sight, then out of hearing.

 
          
Valerie
stood. She had the night to herself. But at least she had that road. By
morning, she would be back in her room at the Fort George, enjoying a wonderful
shower, and Kirby Galway and Innocent St. Michael and Vernon Vernon would all
be in jail, right where they belonged.

 
          
If
it hadn’t been for the headlights, everything would have been all right.
Valerie had been walking almost two hours when she saw them slowly advancing,
jouncing along, the beams first looking up at the sky then ducking down to
stare at the road immediately ahead then snapping up to gaze at the sky again,
and her first thought was:
Rescue
!

 
          
But
her second thought was: Maybe not.

 
          
She
was alone in a strange land. So far, the people she had trusted—Innocent and
Vernon
and to a lesser extent the driver—had
proved false. So she should think very carefully before attracting the
attention of whoever was coming this way.

 
          
Could
this be the driver, panic over, realizing Valerie wouldn’t get far at night on
foot, coming back to do the job after all? It could.

 
          
Could
this be Vernon, returning to make sure his orders had been carried out? It very
well could.

 
          
Could
this be some other friend or ally of those people, who would smile at her and
promise to take her straight to the police, but who would take her to her death
instead? It most definitely could.

 
          
The
headlights jerked closer. Valerie
wanted
to believe she could just stand here, wave her hand, and be rescued, saved,
returned to Belize City. She wanted to believe it, but she turned and hurried
away from the road instead, up a rocky slope where she kept feeling too
exposed, because of those headlights flashing around all over the place. So she
kept going, up over the top, and down into a shallow basin, and waited.

 
          
Some
sort of truck engine. She couldn’t see the lights any more, but she could hear
the straining engine, hear it approach, become briefly very loud, then recede,
then fade away.

 
          
She
waited a while longer, mostly because she was very tired, her muscles very
sore. Then she made her way back up the slope, and it took much longer than
she’d expected to reach the top. When she finally did, there were no headlights
to be seen anywhere, so she made her way down the other side and found nothing
but a narrow ravine with a little quick stream running through it.

 
          
Where
was the road? She kept looking around, but in the moonlight every hill and
boulder and shrub looked the same. Still, the road had to be very close by.

 
          
She
never found it again. The moon had risen higher in the sky, giving marginally
more light but no longer marking the east. The road was gone. It occurred to
her to worry about wild animals.

 
          
She
remembered from something she had read that the best way to be safe from wild
animals in the wilderness was to sleep in a tree, so she chose a rough'barked
thick-trunked tree near the crest of a hill and with some difficulty climbed up
to a crotch about seven feet from the ground, where she did her best to become
reasonably comfortable, and to sleep.

           
No wild animals found her in the
tree, but many mosquitoes did. They kept her awake a long while, until at last
nothing in the world could keep her awake any longer, and she slept, crumpled
up in the tree crotch, being fed on all night by nasty little flying things.

 
          
In
the morning she was so stiff, and so hot, and so itchy, and so dry, and so
hungry, and so uncomfortable, she thought she would die. She thought it would
be more comfortable to die. Twisting around in the tree crotch, every movement
an agony, she searched from her vantage point for the road—for
any
road or any other sign of human
existence—and saw nothing but woods, forests, jungle growth, high mountains to
the west and south, a broken tumbled landscape untouched by man. Sighing, she
made her creaky painful way down from the tree and plodded off northward,
guided now by the sun.

 
          
At
first her spirits weren’t really low, because she was distracted by her
training. Her studies in archaeology and her interest in the ancient Mayans had
led her to Belize in the first place, and now here she really was, in
conditions as primitive as anything the Mayans ever faced, crossing broken
barren ground they had crossed a thousand years ago.