Stranded (30 page)

Chapter 52

Eduardon sailed the yacht south onto the open sea, just out of sight of land. Blood pulsated in his temples, and his hands shook. Jojo had duped him! They had agreed no one would be hurt, that the watchman and Camerons would be abandoned on some deserted island. Yet, clearly, Philippe had been instructed to throw his knife to kill. As an expert knife thrower himself, Eduardon recognized the precision with which the knife had landed in the watchman’s throat.

Now if they got caught, he was a conspirator. No one would believe his innocence. He never should have joined up with the big ape. He’d expected Jojo to try to cheat him of money, but murder—

He gripped the wheel until his knuckles turned white, forcing the trembling inside him to harden into a dead calm. He must outsmart the Ape. Gain the upper hand before they reached the island hideout tomorrow.

“Boss wants you.” Philippe padded barefoot and shirtless to the wheel.

Eduardon’s nostrils flared. Jojo was
not
his boss. But the two low-life crewmen thought so. Right there was Eduardon’s first task: befriend Philippe and Miguel, win them to his side.

He released the wheel. “Perfect throw this morning.”

Philippe grinned, revealing crooked, yellow teeth. “We have contest?” He nodded at Eduardon’s slender knife, sheathed in leather on the left side of the navigator’s belt.

Eduardon forced his mouth to smile. “Tonight?” To get things off to a good start, he’d let Philippe win.

He found Jojo and Miguel on the main deck. Miguel was tying weights onto the watchman’s corpse. Eduardon swallowed at the rust-colored smears trailing from the watchman’s body back up the stairs Eduardon had just descended. 

More weights lay nearby. Next to them sat the yacht’s owner, completely naked, his hands tied behind his back. Blood dripped from fresh cuts on his brow and the sides of his face. His teeth were clenched, but the tremors shaking his body screamed his pain.

Jojo stood over the man, head bent, eyes narrowed in an unblinking stare. He held a knife in his right hand. The blade was clean except for the tip. With a start, Eduardon realized Jojo had carved the man’s face with the same cuts that scarred Jojo’s.

The bones in Eduardon’s legs turned to jelly. He stumbled, barely catching himself from dropping to his knees. Jojo’s eyes snapped onto him, but Eduardon knew better than to look at him. He must not, must not show his fear.

“Ah, Eduardon.” Jojo smiled. “Remember when you took that last job, against my wishes?”

Eduardon’s mouth went dry.

“Mr. Cameron here is going to help me demonstrate what happens to people who cross me.” Jojo’s smile stretched wider. Keeping his gaze on Eduardon, he leaned over and slowly pulled Cameron’s head back until recognition of what was about to happen registered on Eduardon’s face. Then, swiftly, he slit Cameron’s throat.

Eduardon recoiled. His back rammed into the railing. He grabbed onto it to keep from falling. Jojo’s laughter, and then Miguel’s, pierced his back like knives as he fled to the bridge.

Jake pulled the raft up next to the bobbing canoe below their cave and moored it to the same boulder. Building the raft had proved easier than sailing it up the coast today against the current. Eve collapsed the raft’s sail and passed the two bamboo oars to him. He laid them in the canoe. “How about if you get tonight’s fruit while I attach the canoe to the raft? It’s late enough, we’ll do the trial run with Betty and Crystal tomorrow.”

To his surprise, Eve held out her hand. “Help me off, will you?”

Her slender fingers curled around his palm, and warmth shot up his arm to his chest. She stepped ashore but didn’t let go. 

“Jake . . .”

Holding her hand zapped an ache to his throat. He had to swallow to answer. “Yes.”

She cast her eyes down, then raised them resolute to his. “You know I love you.”

He blinked. She took his other hand, and the air in his lungs dragged out in a ragged breath. It took every bit of strength he could summon to not say he loved her too. He shook his head. “Eve, I—”

“If I became a Christian, I wouldn’t know if I did it because I really meant it, or if I did it just to please you.”

His arms trembled, wanting to pull her to him. “Eve—” He shook his head harder.

“Please, I want you to love me for who I am. Then we can deal with God. I’m ready to tell you everything you want to know.”

The words whirled in his head. It was all there, wasn’t it? Her promise to open up, her readiness to include God. Everything required to free him to love her.

He clasped her to him. Fire, fierce and sweet, swept through him. They would work through this. One step at a time. He slipped his hands to her face and allowed himself a kiss on the side of her mouth. His heartbeat accelerated. Two kisses. One on each side.

She closed her eyes and parted her lips. A moan,
soft and shivery, rose from her throat. Her body melted into his.

No. He should stop. Let go of her. Talk.

Instead, he closed his mouth over hers. Tenderly at first, then, as she responded, with the hunger of having resisted so long. So many months. The air in his lungs
shuddered and expanded hotly in his chest. He pulled her tighter against him,

“Jake.” She pulled away, her hands shaking on his shoulders. “I want to be with you. Always.”

Always
. The word dropped like a hand and
drew a line between them in the sand.

There was a cost. A price for stepping over the line. The heat in his chest flickered. He let go of her.

Her fingers dug into his shoulders. “I know you love me. Please, give me a chance. You might not want me after you hear me out anyway.”

Dread clogged his throat so that he couldn’t speak. He didn’t want to lose her. Didn’t want a reason not to love her.

But she was going to tell him about Ginny, wasn’t she?

He closed his eyes and nodded. He had to know.

Her hands slipped to her side, leaving his shoulders cold and abandoned. “I’ll get the fruit and meet you in the garden at dusk.”

He longed to reach out. To stop her. Everything in him shouted to go with her. Grab her hand and say it didn’t matter. They’d gather the fruit together. Face the future together. Face the past together.

But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t step over the line.

He watched her disappear around the corner of the sandbar.

What sounded like the scream of a leopard pierced the jungle. Or was it a bird? A shiver prickled down Eve’s spine and down her legs to the ends of her toes. She shouldn’t have come without Jake. They were fools to treat the island like it was some kind of safe haven. Leopards, crocs, land mines, booby traps—the island was full of dangers that could have taken all four of their lives. It wasn’t good to be alone.

She hastened to gather fruit from a spot high above the waterfall pool, keeping tuned into the monkeys. As long as they were screaming at her, she had some measure of assurance that no danger lurked nearby.

Her heartbeat settled, and she filled the pouch in her shirt with fruit. She loved that the canopy around the waterfall turned up its nose at the summer heat and filled the trees with never-ending bouquets of flowers. At the last minute, she selected a deep-purple orchid for her rendezvous with Jake.

Dusk tinted the slice of sky above the pool. She set the fruit and flower in the shallow corral Jake had made, and stripped and washed the sweat and grime from her clothes, her hair, her body.

She could hardly believe she’d declared herself to Jake. She’d always kept her emotions safely caged, stuffed away where no one could touch them. Their sudden freedom made her head reel.

Fear and exhilaration jockeyed in her stomach. Fear that Jake would reject her; exhilaration that he’d kissed her. Exhilaration that passion, for the moment at least, had won out. Fear that loyalty to God would in the end overrule.

Tomorrow they would leave the island. They would make a trial run of the raft and attached canoe with all four of them aboard, then move the provisions from the cave to the raft. One last hash mark scratched onto the cave wall, and they’d lower the door, kiss Lone Soldier good-bye, and sail away.

Tomorrow Jake would hold one of them uppermost in his heart. Her . . . or God.

Tonight she would find out which.

The yacht carried more wine than hard liquor, but Eduardon managed to find a bottle of whiskey. He bolted half of it down to blot out the image of the knife slicing a red line across Cameron’s throat. And before that, of Jojo’s trance as he swayed above his victim, glutting on Cameron’s pain. The man was as close to pure evil as Eduardon had ever come. Should the Ape ever discover Eduardon’s jellied knees, he would feed upon Eduardon’s terror and end his life in the same kind of bloody climax.

Winning the two crewmen to his side wasn’t enough. He needed to get rid of Jojo.

At dusk, when Jojo disappeared below deck to the Camerons’ stateroom, Eduardon left Miguel to man the bridge and met Philippe on the main deck for their contest. No longer could he allow Phillipe to win. It was imperative that Eduardon demonstrate his superiority and the right to command the ship after they disposed of Jojo.

They selected a target and began. The bottle of whiskey warmed their bellies and stirred a semblance of camaraderie. Philippe’s tongue loosened. He told Eduardon about his acquaintanceship with Jojo. How he’d worked with him a year ago aboard a transport ship. How a crewmember disappeared at sea after an argument with Jojo. How—long story, short—no one dared defy Jojo.

“But we can—we should—when the man is a murderer,” Eduardon almost blurted. Then he remembered the knife sticking out of the watchman’s neck. Philippe’s knife. Is that what it would take—stooping to their level, becoming a murderer himself—to be rid of the Ape?

He found a second bottle of whiskey and obliterated everything but the game from his thoughts. The contest was close. It wasn’t hard to lose himself in the competition, to find it not at all unlike his beloved cockfights. Two scrappy cocks—that’s what he and Philippe were—facing each other off, fighting to a clear decision point. And Eduardon, without question, was pulling ahead to the win.

A woman’s screams shattered the night air. Both he and Philippe jumped. Miguel leaned over the rail and laughed. “The boss, he likes his women . . . chopped meat.”

The screams didn’t stop for ten minutes. In the meantime, Philippe won.

Eve entered the Japanese garden and emptied the fruit from her shirt into a small pool. Jake wasn’t there yet. Good. Her insides shook, and her stomach was in knots. She needed to sit down, close her eyes, relax. Think positive thoughts.

She wove the orchid into her hair and pictured the garden behind her closed eyelids. In spite of the June heat, the garde
n―
nourished by the trickling stream and numerous pool
s―
was flourishing. The Japanese soldiers had planted their selections with care, with knowledge of each flower’s need for sun or shade. She inhaled their faint perfume, trailed her mind in the stream’s whispered serenade. Her fingers stopped shaking.

She had a plan. One that that would make everyone happy. Jake. Crystal. Betty. Even God.

If Jake chose her first—for who she was, and not because of what she believed or didn’t believe about God—then she, in turn, would choose God. She would give Him a try.

A try because Jake said God was sovereign. That people were like grasshoppers. Not in
her
book. Some things belonged in
her
hands. Had to. The rest, God could rule. Then they had a deal.

Something
brushed against her foot and she opened her eyes. A diamond-shaped head with slit eyes stared straight at her. The head hovered an arm’s length away, topping the end of a pile of brown-and-green patterned coils.

She screamed and jumped up. The snake attacked faster than she could scramble away. It lashed around her legs like gigantic whipcords. She fell backwards, landing on its coils. With lightning speed, the snake looped itself around her. She couldn’t get up, couldn’t get away. The snake was all over her.

A spiral of bone and muscle squeezed her rib cage. She panicked. She needed to breathe. She exhaled, ready to gulp the precious air into her lungs. As if waiting, the snake tightened its crush. She couldn’t . . . fill . . . her . . . lungs.

For an eternity of seconds, she lay paralyzed, embraced in the snake’s death grip. Terror seeped into her soul. Her last thought was of God.
Please, no! I—

And everything went black.

Jake sped into the garden at Eve’s scream. The sight of the giant python doubled him over like a sledgehammer to the stomach.

“Eve!” He caught his breath and bared the katana sword. The snake seized Eve so quickly that his dash to intercept it seemed in slow motion. His heart thundered in jolts as Eve disappeared into the huge, camouflage-colored cords.

He raised the sword above his head with both hands and brought the blade down hard. A V-shaped furrow opened across the coils, revealing red meat. The snake loosened its hold and thrashed about madly. Eve’s limp body fell to the ground.

Before Jake could get to Eve, the undulating mass turned on him. Coils looped around his feet, rendering him immobile. An ugly, triangular snout rose up and struck at his face. He ducked, but the snake’s lunge knocked him to the ground. The katana sword flew out of his hand.

He
struggled to pull his feet loose. His left foot slipped free just in time to kick out and block the snake’s next lunge. He screamed as the serpent’s sharp teeth sank into his heel and its mouth engulfed his entire foot. The writhing snake slammed him on the ground and shook him from side to side. His head and arms flailed about like a puppet with loose strings.

The bayonet. On his second attempt, he managed to grab it from its sheath on his other leg and hack a slice out of the snake. The cut did nothing. He tried aiming a puncture blow, but the battering prevented him. Twice, the deadly coils looped around him. Each time, he slashed at them with the bayonet and opened up more snake meat. Each time, the snake let go. He worried the coils might pin his arms. If he couldn’t wield the bayonet, he wouldn’t come out the victor.

He had to change his tactics. He pulled himself into a tight curl and anchored his left arm around his left knee and calf, just above the snake’s head. Then, again and again, like a mad man, he bashed the butt of the bayonet against the snake’s skull. Again and again and again, until his arm ached and his breath came in gasps. Until his fist and the bayonet handle and the slit eyes became one in a sludge of gore and blood.

The ground vibrated as the writhing body of the python went into convulsions. For a terrified moment, he wondered if the snake was dead after all. Finally, the coils lay still. With a cry of revulsion, he tore the snake from his foot. Its teeth left a bloodbath from his ankle below.

He ran, limping, to Eve. She was on her back, her hair matted over her face and neck. There was no rise and fall of her chest. Her face, when he brushed her hair away, was flaccid. No pulse fluttered in her neck.

“No, no, no!” He didn’t dare try chest compressions in case her ribs were broken. He opened her mouth, pinched her nostrils shut, and applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Pythons killed their prey by suffocating them. If her heart hadn’t stopped, if he could get her lungs going, get oxygen into her blood, she might live.

How could God do this to him—a second time! Was it because he didn’t want to lose Eve, so God was taking the choice away,
mandating
His will?

Anger choked his throat. He jerked his mouth away from Eve’s.

“Jake.”

Eve’s whispered rasp jolted tears to his eyes. He cried out and grabbed her into his arms. She grunted at the tightness of his grip and her eyeballs rolled back in their sockets. Her head lolled onto his chest.

He’d forgotten about her ribs. He stood, held her steady against the beat of his heart, and carried her down the mountainside to the cave.

Away from the snake. From the garden.

Away, if only he could, from God’s callous control.