Wild Orchids (22 page)

"God!" The barely audible murmur made her lean over him again, a profound relief filling her as his eyes flickered open. Injured or not, at least he was alive.

Those obsidian eyes fixed on her for a moment, and she wondered if he remembered who she was. Then he said, "Lora?"

"Yes." His hands moved to the control panel as he spoke, and he used them to try to push himself upright. It must have hurt, because he winced and faltered.

"Don't try to move," she told him, but he persevered.

"Are you all right?" His question was thick, and Lora wondered again if he was seriously injured. He was sitting upright now, and she could see that the whole right side of his face was smeared with blood. Most of it seemed to come from a jagged cut high on the right side of his forehead. Atleast his right eye seemed to be all right. It was regarding her rather groggily, but no more so than its fellow.

"Yes. I think so. What about you? Your head is bleeding badly—do you hurt anywhere else?"

"My head—" He lifted a hand to his head and, on coming into contact with the still oozing blood, withdrew it, looking down at his smeared hand. "I remember hitting it on the windscreen. It hurts like hell, but the rest of me seems to be okay. God, look at Tunafish"

Max half rose out of his seat, but the still-fastened seat belt restrained him and he fell back. Lora's eyes went from him to Tunafish, for whom she had barely spared a thought until that moment.

"I'll see to him," she said, but before she could move in that direction, Tunafish stirred and sat up with a groan.

"Jesus, my leg!" He leaned his head back against the seat as his hand clutched his left leg. Lora saw that it had already swollen to perhaps three times its normal girth, and that, from halfway down the thigh, it jutted out at an odd angle. Stricken with concern and guilt, she moved to his side, looking down at the hulking figure slumped in the seat. Before she could say anything. Max was at her side, his face alarmingly pale and deep lines of what could have been pain bracketing that mustachioed mouth.

"You shouldn't move—"

"I'm okay." Max brushed her protest aside with an impatient shake of his head as he knelt to examine the swollen leg. Lora looked down at Max's bloodied face and knew that it was very far from being true, but she also saw that it would be useless to protest further. All his concern was centered on the sweating figure of his friend, who was looking at him with a twisted grimace as Max rendered his verdict.

"It's broken."

"Hell, I know that. Nothin' could hurt this bad if it weren't broke." Tunafish tried a grin, but it quickly turned into another grimace of pain. "If that's all that ails me, I'll live. At least the plane didn't blow up, not with no gas in it. What about the rest of them?"

Max looked at Lora, who shook her head.

"I'll check," he said, and turned toward the cabin. He looked back over his shoulder at Lora before he went. "You might look for the first aid kit while I'm gone. It should be under the jump seat. Maybe you can give Tunafish an aspirin or something for the pain.

"Thanks, buddy." Tunafish's mouth twisted. With a brief smile. Max disappeared through the curtain while Lora went to do his bidding. Sure enough, there was a small first aid kit where Max said it would be. The white box was marked with the universal symbol of the red cross. Lora opened it, rummaging around inside. Its supplies were pitifully meager: a roll of gauze, surgical tape, a small pair of scissors, a pair of tweezers, antiseptic, aspirin, and bandages of varying sizes. For serious injuries such as Tunafish's leg, there was nothing.

"Anything worth knowin' about?" Tunafish's voice sounded strained.

Her eyes darkening with compassion, Lora looked across at him. "What Max said. Aspirin."

"Shit!" Tunafish suddenly looked self-conscious. "Uh, sorry."

"Don't mind me." Lora carefully crossed the tilted cabin to kneel at his side. "I'd probably say the same thing myself. Or worse. You must be in dreadful pain."

"You're one nice lady, you know? No wonder the boss…"

Whatever he had been going to say was lost as Max appeared in the doorway. Lora and Tunafish both looked at him silently. His face was paler than before; his eyes were shadowed, and his mouth was grim.

"Well?" Tunafish asked the question for both of them.

"Clemente's dead." There was no emotion in his voice; the pain was all in his eyes. "The other two are all right. At least, as far as I can tell. DiAngelo's unconscious, but I think he's coming around."

"Lord Jesus! And Juanita just over havin' the baby. Clemente was so damned proud—a boy, after three girls."

"I know."

No one said anything for a long moment. Lora, looking at Max with concern, saw how dark and shadowed his eyes were.

Tunafish must have seen the same thing; his voice when he spoke was rough with sympathy. "Not your fault, boss."

Max looked across at him bleakly. "Isn't it? I talked him into coming. He wanted to quit after the last one—Juanita thought it was too dangerous. But I said just one more job. And with her pregnant, he needed the money, so he came."

"You're not God, man. What happened was none of your doing. The good Lord called him, and he went. Same thing with Lowenthal. Not your fault."

Max took a deep breath, and moved away from the door. "I know. It's just that Clemente was so damned proud of that boy."

"You'll see to it that he doesn't want—that none of them want. That's all you can do."

"Yes."

Both men were silent again. Max stood with his hand on the back of Tunafish's seat for a moment, staring out the shattered windshield at the tangle of branches pressing against it. Lora knew that he was seeing nothing of what was before him. She looked up at him from her crouched position, her heart aching for the pain obvious in the hard-bitten, masculine face. She had not realized that he was capable of such grief… There was nothing she could say, so she said nothing. After a moment. Max seemed to come to himself. He looked down at her.

"Is there a bandage in that thing?" He indicated the first aid kit, which she still held in her hands.

Lora nodded. "There are some sterile pads, and a few Band-Aids."

"Stick a Band-Aid on my head, will you? Then we'll get you out of here, buddy."

Max swiped the sleeve of his windbreaker over his bloody forehead as he addressed this last to Tunafish, who was gritting his teeth against a renewed surge of pain. Lora stood up, looking at Max with knit brows.

"That cut needs to be cleaned first. It could get infected."

Max shook his head. "Not now. Just put a bandage on it so that the blood doesn't keep running in my eye."

"But, Max, it's a serious cut! It's probably going to need stitches! At least let me—"

"Don't argue with me, please, Lora. This isn't the time for it."

He was right, of course. Tunafish's injury had to take precedence over his cut. The question was, what did he think they could do for Tunafish? Wouldn't it be wiser to wait for someone to rescue them, so he could be transported to a hospital? She said as much, and Max looked at her impatiently.

"Lora, it may be days—or longer!—until anyone finds us! Any search party will have hundreds of miles of mountainous jungle to cover and we must be practically invisible from the air. We'll have to take care of ourselves for a while—so quit arguing and do as I say, please!"

Lora didn't say another word. Instead, she extracted a sterile pad from the kit, adjuring him to crouch down and then hold the pad in place while she wrapped gauze around it to secure it. There was no way any kind of adhesive, such as Band-Aids or tape, would stick to his gore-smeared skin. It was only as she was tying a neat knot in the gauze to hold the pad in place that a horrible thought occurred to her.

"Max, you did radio for help, didn't you?" She asked the question in a very small voice. He looked at her impatiently.

"What do you take me for, a lunatic? Of course I sent a mayday."

"I only thought that, under the circumstances… Well, you might not have wanted to let the police know where we are."

"Under the circumstances," his voice mocked her, "I'd a hell of a lot rather be found by the police than not found at all. Believe me."

Lora did, and it afforded her considerable relief. The thought of being stranded in one of the remotest jungles on the continent of North America was terrifying. But surely it wouldn't be long before a search party located them. It couldn't be long…

As soon as the knot was tied and the dangling end of gauze cut, Max's attention was all on Tunafish, who was sweating profusely as he lay back in his seat with his eyes closed. Lora, looking up at her handiwork as Max frowned down at Tunafish, bit her lip as the white pad slowly began to stain with red.

"It's still bleeding, you know, and there could be glass in there."

"You can play ministering angel later. For now, go in the cabin and ask Minelli to come out here, would you? He's the big guy."

Lora did as he asked. Between them. Max and Minelli managed to get Tunafish out of the cockpit and into the cabin, not without considerable, heartfelt cursing on Tunafish's part. He kept apologizing to Lora for his language until at last Max told him not to be such an ass. Lora seconded the sentiments exactly, noun and all, and both Tunafish and Max stared at her. Tunafish grinned, relieved.

"That's one fine lady, boss," he said to Max as the two men wedged him against one rounded wall of the crazily leaning plane. They had moved him to the back, where the seats had been cleared out, to leave more room for cargo Lora presumed. The plane had landed so that the floor with its worn carpet formed part of one wall. The ceiling formed part of another, and it was against this that Tunafish sat.

"Ahhh!" Tunafish groaned as Minelli accidentally jostled his broken leg, and Lora looked down just in time to see Tunafish pass out in a dead faint at her feet.

"Just as well," Max said, looking at his friend's prone form. "I'll set the leg while he's out. Minelli, I'll need your help. Lora, see if there's anything you can do for DiAngelo, there."

Lora obediently made her way to DiAngelo, a tall, thin man with longish dark hair and a receding chin, who had not yet moved from his seat. He was still groggy, Lora supposed from a blow to the head, but other than a few scrapes and bruises he seemed to be unharmed. She was asking him in slow, distinct tones whether anything hurt, her attention focused on his pale face as she tried not to look at the blanket-shrouded figure of Clemente, still strapped in the seat, when Tunafish screamed with pain.

Looking around, she saw Max, grim-faced, pulling on his broken leg while Minelli held a struggling Tunafish still… Shuddering, she hastily shifted her attention back to DiAngelo as Tunafish sobbed and groaned. When she looked at Tunafish again, she was relieved to see that he had fainted once more.

Max had broken two reasonably straight branches from the myriad that invaded the cabin on its opposite side, and was binding them on either side of Tunafish's broken leg with strips torn from his windbreaker. It made a crude splint, but under the circumstances it was the best anyone could do.

When Tunafish was resting as comfortably as could be expected. Max hefted Clemente's blanket-wrapped body and carried it out of the plane. When he returned some twenty minutes later, his eyes were somber. Lora didn't like to ask what he had done with the body. In this climate, it would not last long in its present state. When rescue arrived, Lora supposed that the remains would be recovered and returned to Clemente's family. She shuddered. She did not like to think of that vital young man lying dead out there in the jungle—or of his family…

After that. Max could not seem to settle down. He paced, and finally stopped at the hole that had been left in one side of the cabin when one wing had sheared completely off. He stood for a while, staring out at the jungle, his arm resting on the jagged metal above his head.

Finally, he said over his shoulder, "I'm going to look around," and jumped.

Lora saw him disappear, and with a quick glance at the plane's remaining occupants decided to follow. She didn't want to remain essentially alone with Minelli—for that was what she would be, with Tunafish unconscious or asleep and DiAngelo not quite having regained his wits. She had not liked the way Minelli watched her while Max was gone before…

Careful not to cut herself on the ripped metal, she jumped lightly to the ground and found Max, standing, staring, among the dense jungle growth not ten feet away.

"What—" she started to say, when he moved forward, his eyes suddenly blazing, to lean inside a large hole torn in the plane's green-painted underbelly.

"What's wrong?" She followed him, nervously watching where she placed her sneakered feet. Beneath the thick carpet of vines and plants covering the jungle floor, anything could have lurked; snakes, or those dreadful tarantulas…

"That son of a bitch!"

"What?" She reached his side and stared up at him uncomprehendingly as he continued to glare furiously into the hole. Since it was obviously the source of his anger, Lora leaned around him to look into the hole, too. What she saw made her eyes widen. The plane's cargo bay was packed with wooden crates. The impact of the crash had broken open perhaps a dozen of them, and from the broken slats spilled dozens of small, clear plastic bags filled with a snowy white powder.

Chapter XIII