Fortune and Glory (Stephanie Plum 27)

Gabriela flicked a centipede off her sleeve. Could the day get any worse? She was wet clear through to her La Perla panties, her boots and camo cargo pants were covered with mud, and she had bug bites everywhere. All part of the jungle experience, she told herself. The dead man with the swollen hand was not. The question now was, how bad did she want the ring? The lost-cities site had turned out to be a bust, but there was still a payday attached to the ring. So, the answer to the question was that she wanted the ring pretty damn bad. Without the ring, there would be no big bag of money. And she needed the money to finance her own treasure hunt. She’d recently found a three-hundred-year-old map that had been lost in her family for fifteen generations. It was a treasure map signed by Blackbeard, and she had it on good authority that it was real.

“I’ve come this far,” she said. “I’m not going back without the ring.” She looked at the man in the chair. “I need to pry Dodge’s hand open and work the ring off his finger. I need gloves and a baggie. I know all archeological sites have them.”

The man shrugged his shoulders as an apology. “They were all packed out. Truth is, we were shutting down before Henry happened. Henry was the holdout. He found the ring, and he thought there was more here. The rest of us didn’t care.”

“We need to leave now,” Jorge said. “It will be bad to be in this jungle after sunset. Hard to find the way, and panthers will be hunting at night. We have maybe five hours of daylight left.”

“I’m not leaving without the ring,” Gabriela said.

Cuckoo took his machete out of its sheath and whack! He chopped Henry Dodge’s hand off at the wrist.

“I suppose that’s one way to go,” Gabriela said. “I would have preferred to try my way first.”

“He’s dead,” Cuckoo said. “He doesn’t need the hand.”

He picked the hand up by the thumb, grabbed Gabriela’s daypack and dropped the hand in.

“Problem is solved,” Jorge said.