Page 19 of Girl in the Water

Chapter Three

Ian

Ian hated Rio with a hot, burning passion. Cheerful little fuckers. All tourists and dancing and partying in skimpy clothes, sparkling skyscrapers, fancy cars, then the barely there bikinis on the beaches, Ipanema and Copacabana, the playgrounds of the rich and famous. He preferred the Zona Norte, so he rented a room on the edge, among normal, working people.

Finding the first trace of Finch ate up two whole weeks. He had a job in security for a while, it seemed, for some big international company, Lavras Sugar and Ethanol, according to the old man the kid had rented from, but then Finch had quit work and left the apartment. Nobody knew what for.

Another two weeks went by before Ian found a faint trail, indicating that Finch might have gone up to the Amazon.Fucking Amazon. What the hell?

Ian tracked him to Manaus, then up the Rio Negro, deeper and deeper into the jungle. The farther he got from the beaten path, the easier the tracking got—fewer foreigners. Blond as a love child of a Viking and a honeybee, Finch had stood out, had been noticed.

Ian tracked him all the way to Santana, a small municipality in the state of Amapá.

When he finally found the house Finch was supposedly living in, Ian settled in to watch the place. Small house, bamboo walls, steel roof, two bedrooms at the most, a decrepit piece of shit.

He cursed it, and the legion of bugs, as he waited. Before he barged in, he wanted to make sure he had the right place. He wanted to make sure nobody else was watching it. Finchhadsaid in that call that he was in trouble.

So Ian did a little general reconnaissance. A soldier who rushed into a situation was a dead soldier.

He arrived in the morning. Watched the house for two hours. No movement. Nobody went in or came out through the front.

Time to go a little closer, check out the back.

The back of the house stood maybe thirty feet from the river, but high up a tall bank that’d protect it from flooding. An empty dock reached into the water. No movement there either.

A couple of boats had been dragged up on the flat of the riverbank. Nobody around. Ian sat in the shade of the largest boat and pretended to be watching the barges and tugboats going past him.

He stole a glance at the house, hoping to spot Finch. Nothing there, but something rising out of the water maybe thirty feet from him caught his attention.

At first, he thought it might be a caiman. Caimans were native to the area, although he had no idea if they lived in this part of this particular river.

But instead, out of the river, rose a young woman.

She seemed to be struggling with…an anaconda?

When the shiny, black, long body wrapped around hers, Ian moved, ready to dive into the water to help her, but she had the upper hand and dragged the wriggling beast toward shore with a triumphant smile. He could see that she had a giant eel.

He couldn’t take his eyes off the thing. The eel stretched as long as the woman was tall, over five feet. They wrestled in the shallow water, the scene stunningly primal and elemental.

She had a piece of rag tied around her small breasts, and another around her slim waist, covering only the private parts of her body. She was the most stunning sight he’d ever seen, long dark hair streaming down in wet rivulets. A goddess risen.

A goddess in mortal struggle.

His Western sensibilities pushed him to run and help, but the woman and the eel and their battle seemed somehow the spirit of the Amazon itself, and he felt like an interloper. He felt that he couldn’t take the woman’s triumph away from her.

And she did win, dragging the eel to shore, grabbing a rock the next second and smashing the eel’s head. The eel was still squirming when, with the same, sharp-edged rock, she gutted the thing, dumping the insides back into the river. She was not a peaceful goddess.

She washed the eel efficiently, then picked up the carcass and carried it, staggering under the weight, up the tall, steep bank, and in through the back door of the house Ian had been watching.

Ian’s chin might have dropped a little. Or a lot. In fact, he felt as if his chin just hit his lap.

Who on earth wasshe?

Did he have the wrong house, after all that travel?

He stole back around, back across the street, and watched her leave the house a few minutes later with a beat-up canvas bag, wearing a simple green dress now, the heavy bag over her shoulder, hefting what looked like most of the damned eel.

She took her catch to the market and sold it to an old woman with a fish stand. She bought rice and fruit with some of the money, saved the rest, didn’t buy any sweets or trinkets.