Wild Orchids (26 page)

"What did you do with the drugs?" Her voice echoed her amazement. She had watched with her own eyes as he had carried crate after crate of bagged white powder inside.

Max shook his head. "We have an agreement, remember?"

Lora knew she was better off not knowing, so she didn't ask again. But she wondered madly.

"I'm going to go back and see what else I can rummage up—maybe there are some blankets or something in the plane's overhead compartments. I won't be long."

With that brief comment, and after wordlessly handing her back the pistol. Max disappeared back into the deepening gloom of the jungle. Lora looked after him with a frown. He was so distant with her—had been ever since she had made that instinctive protest against him shooting DiAngelo. Was he angry at her? She hated the idea of Max being angry with her. He was all she had, out here in this savage wilderness. She realized that she depended on him utterly, and didn't much like the realization. It wouldn't do to let herself come to need him… Was this a part of Stockholm Syndrome, too? Lora wished she could remember more of what she had read on the subject, but at the time she had never expected to find herself in this situation. But something was happening between her and Max, had been happening ever since she had first laid eyes on him, in fact, and she had to know what it was. She was too sensible, too sane and levelheaded to get involved with a man like him—so why was she so worried about his safety as she watched him disappear into the night? Why did she care that he might be angry with her?

"You like him, don't you?" This was Tunafish, speaking in a more serious voice than she had yet heard him use. Lora turned to look at him, having to strain to see him in the deepening shadows.

"Who?" The question was purely defensive, and at Tunafish's skeptical look she realized that she sounded like a coy teenager. She smiled wryly, and inclined her head. "Sometimes."

"He's a good man. One of the best."

"Have you known him long?" She shouldn't want to know about him, Lora thought. It was safer not to know too much. She didn't want this disconcerting physical attraction between them to go any further. It would be disastrous if she started to see him as a man she could learn to care for… But she couldn't stop the question. She wanted to know all she could about the enigma that was John Robert Maxwell, whether it was prudent or not.

"Since we were kids. We grew up together in Houston. We kind of lost track of each other after I dropped out of school and Max went on, but we met up again in 'Nam. He was my C.O. over there for almost three years. When Bravo Company got him, he was a lieutenant right out of college, green as grass, and if I hadn't stood up for him there were a few times that some of the guys might have blown his ass off—uh, sorry. But he learned fast, and when he did, there wasn't a better officer over there. Most of us got out alive because of him."

Lora moved closer without even realizing that she had done so. "He—you both—fought in Vietnam? In the army?"

Tunafish nodded. "We ended up in Army Intelligence. Recon work, mostly. Behind the enemy lines, real hush-hush stuff. But relatively safe. At least, if we did our job right. We were not supposed to let the gooks know we were there while we found out what they were up to, and if they didn't know we were there they couldn't shoot us. Elementary, huh? Only it didn't always work."

"Were you wounded?" She was standing right beside him now, and as she spoke she unconsciously dropped to her knees at his side. The fact that she was nominally supposed to be on watch had completely faded from her mind. The gun dangled unnoticed from her hand, its barrel resting on the cold stone floor.

Tunafish grinned at her, the whites of his eyes and the gleam of his teeth very bright in the darkness. "Everybody who served in 'Nam was wounded, I think. Don't ask me where I got hit, 'cause I ain't tellin'. It's downright undignified. Max got it in the knee. Shrapnel. That's why he limps. He's lucky he didn't lose that leg."

Lora was silent for a moment. "Tunafish—have you heard of Mei Veng?"

The grin disappeared from Tunafish's face as abruptly as if someone had wiped it away. "What do you know about Mei Veng?" The question was harsh; his eyes on her were wary.

"Max mentioned it in connection with killing people."

"Yeah." Tunafish's face was very bleak. Lora waited, but he said nothing else, just stared off into the distance as though he was seeing something in the darkness that she could not.

"Tunafish?" Her voice seemed to surprise him, because he almost started as his eyes turned back to her. "Tell me about it. Please."

Tunafish looked at her for a moment, unspeaking. Then he shook his head.

"I'm real surprised Max even said the name. As far as I know, he's never told anyone about it. We've never talked about it between us. It's not the kind of thing you talk about."

"Tunafish, please. I want to know. I—need to know."

Tunafish stared at her for a long time. Then his eyes moved again to look out at the infinite darkness beyond the mouth of the cave.                     

"Mei Veng was a village in 'Nam. Little village, you know, with old men and women and little kids. We were checking it for reds, it was supposed to be sympathetic toward the Vietcong, when this little kid in a diaper walks up to some of our guys. Well, we were ready to shoot anyone who made a move, but who wants to shoot a little kid? Only the kid had a grenade stuffed in his diaper. It blew him to hell along with three of our guys. That's where Max caught the shrapnel. Then all hell broke loose."

He stopped. His body was tense beside hers. Lora noticed that sweat had reappeared on his upper lip.

"Yes?" she said weakly. Did she really want to know anymore?

"We killed them all," he said simply, staring out into the night. "Every living soul in that village. We killed them all."

"Dear God," Lora breathed with instinctive horror. Her mind shied away from picturing the scene that he was obviously recalling so graphically, but she could not stop the images from forming. Blood and death—and children…

"Dear God," she said again. She had wanted to know about Max, and she was well served that what she had learned was ugly, ugly. But then, war was ugly, it was hell they said. How could she, who had never been in one, make judgments? She didn't want to. She didn't even want to think about it. Her eyes refocused on Tunafish, who was sweating profusely as he stared unseeing out into the night. He looked like a man who was picturing unthinkable horrors… Her conscience smote her. She had forced him to recall this. Her arms went instinctively around his shoulders. He patted her arm.

"It's all right," he said.

Lora slowly withdrew her arms and they sat without speaking for a long while. Then she asked slowly, "Is he married, Tunafish?" The question seemed to come out of nowhere, but as she said it she realized that the possibility had been troubling her for some time. And now she needed to know.

Tunafish's face recovered its customary good humor. "I ain't sure I should answer that. You better ask the boss."

"Please, Tunafish! Tell me. I—need to know."

"No, he ain't married. He was, a long time ago, but he got a divorce. He was kinda messed up for a while there after 'Nam, and I guess she couldn't take it. Anyway, somethin' went wrong, and she left."

"They didn't have any children?"

"No. No kids."

A ticklish feeling that Lora eventually identified as relief curled round and round in her stomach. She had been afraid, really afraid, to get an answer to her question. What would she have done if he had had a wife and half a dozen children tucked away back in the States? Nobly tried to forget this sexual attraction that pulled her to him despite the best efforts of her common sense? But she had tried that already, and it hadn't worked. Two dozen wives with six kids each probably wouldn't have made any difference to the way he affected her.

"So how did he—and you—get into this line of work?" Her tone was considerably lighter as she asked that, and Tunafish too seemed to relax, leaning back against the curving wall and reaching into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

"From very different roads," Tunafish said, chuckling as he lit the cigarette. "After 'Nam, after he'd recovered a little, Max went to work for the government. Undercover DEA. There came a time when he needed an expert to help him with a bust, so he came lookin' for me. See, I went into the family business when I got out of 'Nam. My granddaddy was a burglar, my daddy was a burglar, and I was makin' a pretty decent livin' at it myself. But then Max—uh, persuaded—me that crime doesn't pay, and I went to work for him. Doin' the same thing, burglin', only it was legal. Then this fool kid we were watchin', hopin' he would lead us to the big boys, got busted in Mexico for smugglin' in a trunkful of pot. He was only seventeen, and if you ain't never seen a Mexican prison you don't want to. Max felt bad about that—we could have busted the kid ourselves a month before and our court system wouldn't have done much to a kid his age. Max felt kind of responsible, so we went in and got him out. And word kinda got around, and people started offerin' Max money—big money—to get their kids out of jail. And here we are." Tunafish looked around, looked down at his leg, and then looked at Lora before grimacing comically. "I shoulda stuck with burglin'. At least then I ate good."

"Quit yer bitchin', Cascieroli."

The voice was Max's, and Lora looked up with surprise as he walked into the cave and dumped a pile of gear on the floor. She had been so absorbed in what Tunafish was telling her that she hadn't heard him approach. "I've got some good news; Ortega did put a homing device on that plane. I found it in the right engine. So we should be found before too long. And I got something for us to eat. There's a banana grove out there."

"Bananas!" Tunafish said, groaning, while Max grinned.

"Unless you'd rather eat a monkey. I've heard they're pretty tasty."

"You're joking." Lora was afraid he wasn't.

"I'm not. If we're here long, we may be eating monkeys. Tunafish here won't last long on a diet of bananas. Neither will I." To prove his point, Max reached down into the bundle at his feet and tossed a banana to Tunafish, who caught it, and another to Lora, who didn't.

"You'll just have to find something else. Than monkeys, I mean. They're almost human," Lora said firmly as she scrambled after her banana. It was small and green, but it was surprisingly good, she thought as she finished it in a few quick bites. She hadn't realized how hungry she was. Tunafish, too, for all his groaning, finished his quickly. So did Max. Then they all ate another. When the fruit was gone, and a comfortably full feeling had replaced the hollowness in her belly, Lora went to help Max sort out the gear he had brought back with him.

By the flickering firelight Lora was able to see that he had brought three blankets, two pillows, an unopened bottle of whiskey, a carton of cigarettes, the first aid kit, and a flashlight all wrapped up in a fourth blanket. Max stood as Lora sorted through his booty, running his hands over the stubble on his chin and looking around.

"We need more fuel for the fire," he said, and before either Lora or Tunafish could say anything he turned and left the cave again, returning moments later with an armful of brush and a few branches, which he proceeded to pile to one side of the cave's mouth.

"Any more matches?" he asked, displaying a nearly empty pack which he removed from his jeans pocket. Tunafish wordlessly displayed his lighter.

"Good. Here's water." He displayed an empty whiskey bottle filled with clear liquid, which he set beside the pile of brush.

"Looks like we're in business," Tunafish drawled.

"Not quite," Max replied, while out in the jungle a jaguar screamed. Lora shivered, and moved a little closer to Tunafish, who was closest. The dangers they faced were only just now beginning to come home to her.

Max went out again to gather more branches to make beds. He was gone more than half an hour, by Lora's calculation,and she was imagining all kinds of horrible fates that might have befallen him when he returned, the blanket on his back filled with cut tree limbs and leaves.

"Check those for ticks," he said to Lora, indicating the leaves as he dropped the bundle on the ground and proceeded to extract several of the cut branches. Lora stared at the jumble of leaves, horrified. The thought of ticks in her bed made her shiver. While Tunafish steadily sipped at Clemente's bottle of whiskey—Max had warned him to ration it, because the quarter that was left in there and the other bottle Max had found on the plane was all the alcohol they had—Lora shudderingly checked the bedding for invaders and Max made three pallets of branches, leaves, and blankets. When that was done he joined Lora and Tunafish, who were sitting against the wall near the fire.

"I'm going to bed for a while. Lora, you wake me in a couple of hours. I'll take the first watch. Tunafish, you can have the second."

"What about me?" Lora asked, indignant that she had been left out. It had never occurred to her that someone would have to stand guard all night, but now, with Max's words, she wondered that it had not. If all three of them slept at once, what was to stop Minelli and DiAngelo from creeping into the cave and blasting them as they slept—or that ravening jaguar she had heard from turning them into a midnight snack?

"I told you, you're on for the next two hours. But if you see or hear anything, you wake me up. Don't start shooting. From what I've seen so far, you shoot worse than you drive, if that's possible."

"Oh, shut up." She glared at him.

Tunafish grinned wanly. His leg in its makeshift splint stuck out stiffly before him; his face was drawn and gray.

Even his eyes were tinged with gray. He was suffering, and his face showed it even if he refused to say so.

"Come on, pal, let me help you to bed. You need to get some sleep, if you can." This was addressed to Tunafish, who slanted a look up at him.

"Yeah, all right," he grunted. Then he looked at Lora. "Got any more of that aspirin?" In answer, she scrambled to her feet and went to fetch the bottle of tablets from the first aid kit. Tunafish grimaced as she shook two tablets out onto his palm. Before he could swallow them. Max tossed one of the plastic bags of dope in his lap.