Fortune and Glory (Stephanie Plum 27)

Gabriela Rose was standing in a small clearing that led to a rope and board footbridge, which was swaying in the wind. The narrow bridge spanned a gorge that was a hundred feet deep and almost as wide. Rapids rushed over enormous boulders at the bottom of the gorge, but Gabriela couldn’t see the water, because it was raining buckets and she could barely make out the far side.

She was celebrating her thirtieth birthday deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest. The birthday wasn’t important to her. She was all about the job. Her long dark brown hair was hidden under her Australian safari hat, its brim shading her exotic almond-shaped brown eyes. She was 5'6" and slim. She kept in shape for the job but also because she liked pretty clothes. And pretty clothes didn’t always come in size fourteen.

She was with two local guides, Jorge and Cuckoo. She guessed they were somewhere between forty and sixty years old, and she was pretty sure that they thought she was an idiot.

“Is this bridge safe?” Gabriela asked.

“Yes, sometimes safe,” Jorge said.

“And it’s the only way?”

Jorge shrugged.

She looked at Cuckoo.

Cuckoo shrugged.

“You first,” she said to Jorge.

Jorge did another shrug and murmured something in Spanish that Gabriela was pretty sure translated to “chickenshit woman.” Let it slide, Gabriela thought. Sometimes it gave you an advantage to be underestimated. If things turned ugly, she was almost certain she could kick his ass. And if that didn’t work out, she could shoot him. Nothing fatal. Maybe take off a toe.

It had been raining when she landed in Quito two days ago. It was still raining when she took the twenty-five-minute flight to Caco and boarded a Napo River ferry to Nuevo Rocfuerte. And it was raining when she met her guides at daybreak and settled into their motorized canoe for the six-hour trip down a narrow, winding river with no name. Just before noon, they’d pulled up at a crude campground hacked out of the jungle. Four hours on foot after that, following a trail that barely existed. All in the pouring rain.

She’d been hired to find Henry Dodge and retrieve a ring he was carrying. Not a lot of information on the ring or Dodge. Just that he couldn’t leave his job site, and he’d requested that someone come to get the ring. Seemed reasonable, since Dodge was an archeologist doing research on a lost civilization in a previously unexplored part of the Amazon rainforest. The payoff for Gabriela was a big bag of money, but that wasn’t what convinced her to take the job. She was a treasure hunter. For profit and for pleasure. She was an amateur anthropologist, a descendent of Blackbeard, a history buff, and a collector of pirate plunder. The opportunity to visit a lost-cities site was irresistible.

“How much further?” she asked Jorge.

“Not far,” he said. “Just on the other side of the bridge.”

Ten minutes later, Gabriela set foot on the dig site. She’d been on other digs, and this wasn’t what she’d expected. There was some partially exposed rubble that might have been a wall at one time. A couple of tables with benches under a tarp. A kitchen area that was also under a tarp. A stack of wooden crates. A trampled area that suggested several tents had been recently used and recently abandoned. Only one small tent was left standing.

There were no people to see except for one waterlogged and slightly bloated dead man lying on the ground by the rubble, and a weary-looking man sitting nearby on a camp chair.

“This is not good,” Jorge said. “One of these men is very dead, and something has eaten his leg.”

“Panther,” the man in the chair said. “You can hear them prowling past your tent at night. This site is a hellhole. Were you folks just out for a stroll in the rain?”

“I was sent to get a ring from Henry Dodge,” Gabriela said. “I believe I was expected.”

The man nodded to the corpse. “That’s Henry. Had some bad luck.”

“What happened?”

“He was checking on an excavation in the rain first thing this morning, fell off the wall and smashed his head on the rocks. Then a panther came and ate his leg before we could scare it away. Everyone packed up and left after that. Too many bad things happening here.”

“But you stayed,” Gabriela said.

“They couldn’t carry everything out in one trip. I stayed with some of the remaining crates and the body. Cameron said he would be back with help before it got dark.”

“Do you know where Henry kept the ring?” Gabriela asked.

“It’s on his finger,” the man said. “He felt it was the safest place.”

Gabriela looked at the dead man’s hand. It was grotesquely swollen and clenched in a fist. The ring was barely visible.

“Someone needs to get the ring off his finger,” Gabriela said.

No one volunteered.