Operation Tropical Affair: A Poppy McVie Adventure (Poppy McVie Series Book 1) (12 page)

“Now you’re talking,” he said. He shuffled around the room, looking for his phone. He called George and all I heard on this end was an occasional yeah or uh-huh. He hung up. “He wants me to play cards tonight. I’ll be late. Take the time to get your head together. Go to the beach, go to a spa. Whatever.”

Like hell. I had something else in mind.

I stopped by the butterfly gardens. He wasn’t there. I went straight to the tree house. Noah was stretched out in the hammock, playing his guitar, an old Johnny Cash tune. I called up. “May I come in?”
 

He glanced down at me and my insides went squishy. God, he was yummy. He flashed a grin and I steeled myself. No kissing this time. I took the stairs two at a time. He eyed me from the hammock, but didn’t get up. “Wasn’t sure if I’d see you again,” he said, matter-of-fact.

“Yeah, about that. Sorry?”

“I’m glad you’re here now,” he said and leaned forward and set down his guitar. “You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”

“Haven’t been able to get it off my mind actually. What you were saying, about the wildlife poachers.”

“Oh, you were listening. Your first mistake,” he said with a grin. He wiggled his empty beer bottle at me. “What can I get you?”

“Um, I’m not really a beer for breakfast kinda gal.”

“Wine then?”

“Ah, sure.” One glass wouldn’t hurt.

Noah slipped across the hanging bridge, which I now saw led to a kitchen. He came back with two stemmed glasses in one hand and a corkscrew and a bottle of red in the other. “I figure you for a red kinda gal. Am I right?”

I smiled. He was right. I did a quick double take. The bottle in his hand was a $150 vintage. “So what’s your story?” I asked. “All I know about you is that you volunteer at the butterfly gardens and in your spare time you like to dodge bullets.”

“Yeah, well, don’t let the Superman costume fool you. That was a pretty foolish thing to do.” He handed me a glass (poured one-third full, the way it should be done) and held his up to mine. By the stem. “Here’s to a little foolishness,” he said.
 

“Indeed,” I said, my eyes meeting his as we clinked our glasses together. Oh, what the hell. I leaned into him for a kiss.
 

“Mmmm,” he said. “I like this vintage.” He kissed me again until I was breathless, then pulled away. “You know what I think?” he said.
 

I held my breath.
 

“You’re trying to woo me with your sexy wiles.”

I grinned. “Woo you? Seriously? Who says that?”

“My grandma.” He shrugged. “Of course, she was bat shit crazy.”

“So you got it from her?”

He raised his glass as if to salute her in thanks. “You got it, babe,” he said and took a sip. “Every bat shit crazy chromosome.”

“How crazy are you?” I asked.

His gaze turned heavy. “What’d you have in mind?”

“I want to set those animals free. Every one of them.
I don’t care about video tapes and ticking off the guards. Supply and demand be damned. I don’t care about the law either. It’s all bullshit anyway. I want those animals out of that barn and back in the wild where they belong.”

“Okay,” he said. “I like a woman who knows what she wants.”

“I’m serious.”

“I am, too.” He poured more wine. “So what did you have in mind? I can call the gang, get them over here.”

“No,” I said. The more people involved, the more risky it would be. “Just me and you. Tonight.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I like the sound of that.”

“So no more wine.” I set my glass down.
 

His lips turned up into an exaggerated pout. “What about one more kiss?”

I drew in a breath. He had my kryptonite. He set down his glass and moved toward me, his eyes on my lips. My pulse leaped into overdrive. Why’d he have to be so hot? His kisses so, damn, wow—I tilted my head back and he nuzzled my neck. He looked up at me and my eyes flitted toward the bed. “We could always storm the shed tomorrow night,” he whispered, his hand moving from my waist to my backside and down.
 

“No,” I said, pulling away. “Tonight. They can’t be in those cages one more night.”

“All right, all right,” he said. He took a step back and held up his hands in surrender. “Tonight it is.”

Our plan was simple. Sneak in under the cover of darkness, deal with the guards, release the animals. We agreed—violence wasn’t acceptable. Taking out the guards needed some finesse. Distraction? Perhaps. Deal with them one at a time, tying them up? Could get dicey.
 

“I have an idea,” Noah said. He picked up his phone. “I need a favor,” he said when his call was answered. “Where are you?” A moment later he disconnected and said to me, “I’ll be back.” And he was gone.

I reclined in the rattan chair with my glass of wine. Why let it go to waste, right? Especially a Chateau Montelena. I stared at the label. What twenty-something year old guy, who lives in a tree house in Costa Rica and volunteers at the butterfly garden, can casually serve a $150 bottle of wine? He hadn’t given any other indication of trying to impress me with money. If anything, he’d been doing the opposite. His friends were all down to Earth, good-hearted folks. No one was knocking down six figures back in the States. They’d all freely talked about their jobs. Except Noah.
 

My heart was all in, but my head, or more specifically my training, urged me to find out more.

I wandered down the rope bridge to the kitchen. It was a wooden platform surrounded by a half wall about eight feet above the ground. A propane cooktop, oven, and chopping block lined one side, a sink built into the home-made counter top on the other. Nothing unique or extraordinary. I continued down the stairs to the shed below. An open padlock hung from the door latch. I eased the door open and stepped inside to find a state-of-the-art refrigerator, the kind that’s highly energy efficient, a critter-proof cabinet stocked with gourmet foods, and, built into the sandy ground like a bunker, a wine cellar that could grace the pages of
Wine Aficionado
. At least two-hundred bottles lined the walls.
 

I backed out of the shed and pushed the door back to the position in which I had found it. Back up the stairs, I poked around some more. Clothes, shoes, underwear. Boxer-briefs. I paused, imagining him in them. I shoved the drawer shut. Beside the bed, a tiny built-in door hung askew. It seemed out of place. I eased it open to find a solid door to a safe behind. I snapped the door back shut, making sure it hung in the same crooked angle and went back to my glass of wine.

He could be a trust-funder like Claudia had suggested. That would explain the modesty. But generally, in my experience, someone who spends that much on a bottle of wine does so because he feels he’s earned it. It didn’t fit.

Noah came bounding up the stairs with a tiny travel case in his hands. He popped it open to display the contents, a sneaky grin on his face. “What do you think?” Eight sedative injection darts were clipped into the case, each large enough for a big predator. “The dart gun’s in the van.”

“My god, that dose looks like enough to take down an elephant. That’s crazy.”

“Jaguars, actually. I like to think of it as poetic justice.” He flashed that grin again and my heart skipped a beat.

It wasn’t ideal, but it was a non-violent approach. “I guess we’re all set then,” I said. “Now we just have to wait for dark.”

He reached for his guitar. “I take requests.” A monkey zipped up the railing and into the hammock. “Hey Clyde,” said Noah. He turned to me. “Watch out. He likes the vino.”

I tipped my glass and downed the last sip. Clyde leaped to the railing, wrapped his tail around it, pulled the hammock up to him, then leaped on. As it swung back and forth, he chittered and peeped with glee. When the hammock slowed, he jumped up and got it swinging again.
 

“His favorite toy,” said Noah.
 

I looked down the stairs. “Where’s Isabella?”

“She lives in one of the houses here on the property. Clyde comes and goes.” He went to the bathroom and came back with something in his hand. He tossed it into the air and Clyde caught it with the skill of a miniature wide receiver. “It’s a monkey biscuit. They’re like Flintstones for monkeys. He loves ‘em. I have to keep them in there, though, because it’s the only place he can’t get. He can’t work the round door handle with only one good hand.”

“Sounds like he can be a little stinker.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

Clyde held the biscuit in a tight grip, his one nimble little hand against the tiny stump of his right, as he gnawed away, crumbs cascading to the floor. His eyes flitted about, looking for other monkeys I assumed. Crunch, crunch, crunch and it was gone. He bounced up and down, flailing his little arms and chittering.
 

“Clean up your crumbs,” Noah told him. “He wants another one.” He pointed at the pile of crumbs on the floor. “Clean ‘em up.”

Clyde chittered away, whining like a toddler.

“Not until you clean up that mess,” Noah said, shaking his head.

Clyde slunk to the floor, swept up the crumbs with his hand, licked them off his fingers, then sprang back up to the edge of the hammock and squealed for another biscuit.

“All right, one more,” Noah said and went to the bathroom. Clyde spun around, jumping up and down with excitement. Noah lobbed the biscuit into the air and Clyde scrambled up the hammock line, up the support post, grabbed a ceiling truss, and flung himself into the air, catching the biscuit in mid air before he landed on the coffee table.
 

“He’s too cute,” I said. After he finished his second biscuit, he crawled onto my lap and curled up into a ball. “Wow, I can’t get over how he’s a completely different monkey than the one I met at the bar.”

“Yeah, drunk people can be unpredictable and cruel. He knows he’s safe here.”

I gently petted him and he cooed.
 

“He’s been a good bar monkey, though. He’s never bit anyone.”

I held him in my arms, enjoying him cuddling with me, and thought of the newlyweds at the bar. How was I any different? It was a cruel catch twenty-two. People who love animals are the ones who drive the industry. They simply don’t understand that for their two minutes of enjoyment with the animal, that animal endures a lifetime of subjugation and, often, cruelty. The brutal truth is that breaking a wild animal’s spirit to a point that it will accept interaction with people usually means beating them, or worse. It’s not the natural way of things.

I rubbed Clyde under his muzzle. “I’m so sorry, little buddy,” I whispered. I thought of the monkeys I’d met last night and my pulse quickened. I shook my head. “I won’t let it happen to them,” I said to Clyde. “Your cousins are going to be free.”

I turned to Noah, my mind back on the plan and getting prepared. Yesterday, when I was at the shed, I’d been too focused on my purpose—to choose the monkey. But now, as I recalled the scene and the layout of the shed, I remembered that besides the stacks of cages, there were two large iron contraptions in the shed. They looked like rusty old exploding mines from World War One. “What can you tell me about the layout of the shed? Have you ever been inside?” I asked. “I’d like to know what’s there.”

“We’ve only made the attempt a few times. We have Claudia’s video. And Clyde’s. Both are not very good footage.”

“Can I see them anyway?”

“Sure,” he said. He opened the safe in the wall and pulled out a laptop. (So that’s what was in there.) He fired it up and found the videos right away. They were too dark, difficult to see the animals at all, but the contraptions were visible. “Pause right there,” I said. “What are those?”

“Old ball coffee roasters. The huge iron ball is filled with coffee beans and slowly turned over a hot fire, to roast them evenly, kinda like a rotisserie popcorn popper. See the crank and the turning wheel? Underneath here”—he pointed—“is where they’d build the fire.”

“Looks like a giant version of the little buddy burner I made with my dad when I was a girl.”

Noah got a silly grin on his face. “You were a Girl Scout?”

I ignored him. “Is this some kind of heat shield then?” The second one must have been the same roaster with the shield closed. It looked like a giant oil drum with the turning wheel sticking out the side.

“Yeah. The heat shield surrounds the whole thing like an exoskeleton.”

My turn to grin. “You’re really a bug guy at heart, aren’t you?”

He raised his hands in mock surrender. “Guilty.”

We left the van in the same pull off, which meant we had a two-hour hike up the side of the mountain. Noah carried a GPS unit but seemed to know exactly where he was going. I followed, carrying the dart gun. I wasn’t sure if he’d ever shot anything before, so I convinced him to let me do the shooting.
 

The jungle was alive with the incessant chitter of countless insects mixed with the occasional low-pitched thrum of nocturnal creatures bounding through the canopy. “Costa Rica is home to more than 500,000 species of critters, about 300,000 of which are insects,” said Noah. “894 birds, around 175 amphibians, approximately 225 reptiles, and nearly 250 mammals, including the elusive jaguar—a nocturnal hunter.”
 

“Yeah, I’d like to avoid each and every one of them,” I said. “Especially the snakes.” The key was watching our step and making our presence known. Unfortunately, this conflicted with our goal of a surprise attack.

As we approached the compound, we moved silently and cautiously. Then Noah motioned for me to halt. “There’s usually a guard at that corner,” he said. “Something’s up.”
 

An important rule of the tactical ambush is to know your enemy’s movement and positions. An unaccounted-for guard is a serious problem. He could be in the latrine, changing shifts, or standing behind you with a gun aimed at your head. “Let’s check the other positions, then circle back,” I said.

We moved single file through the jungle, avoiding the bell alarms. Of the usual five guards, we could see only two who paced at the entrance looking bored. “Maybe they’re taking the night off,” Noah said.