Page 73 of Girl in the Water

Ian reached for the gun tucked into his waistband.

The cab stopped.

Another white van stopped behind them, blocking them in.

The cabbie jumped out and ran from the short tunnel, scrambling up the embankment to their left, then disappearing over the rise.

Shit.

Ian dove for the front seat. Too late. Bullets were flying already.

“Throw your gun out,” somebody was shouting.

He had no other choice. He was hemmed in. Enemy before him, enemy behind him. He had no real cover. And if one of the idiots hit the fuel tank…

Ian tossed his weapon, an old Taurus .357 Magnum, through the open driver’s side door. Hadn’t had it long, dammit. He’d bought it off a kid on the edge of the favelas after he’d gotten into Rio this morning. He’d planned on stashing it someplace safe before he flew back to Manaus. Couldn’t take a gun on an airplane these days.

As soon as he tossed the revolver, the shooting stopped.

“Get out of the car. Hands in the air.”

He did as they told him. If they wanted him dead, they would have blown his head off already.

Right now, right here, he’d been outmaneuvered, plain and simple. He needed to gain time, and he needed to gain a sense of the enemy he was facing.

Marcos Morais, head of security at Lavras, got out of the van behind the taxi and strode forward, a Taurus PT92—Brazil’s response to the Beretta 92—in hand. Better by a long shot than Ian’s weapon had been. Next time, he’d buy a gun off someone like Morais instead of a street kid.

The man walked toward Ian. “I thought of a few more questions.”

He looked confident about getting answers. He had every reason to be. A four-man crew stood behind him, with weapons drawn.

* * *

Daniela

Ian hadn’t returned by midnight. He wasn’t answering his phone either.

Daniela called Iris after dinner to check in, but hadn’t told her about her missing son, just that Ian was out investigating. She didn’t want to worry Iris. Iris was having enough trouble with her bingo partner, who was lording five grandchildren—and a sixth on the way—over her.

Exhausted from scouring the worst slums of the city, Daniela finally went to bed, tohisbed—to make sure she couldn’t possibly miss Ian if he came back. But she couldn’t fall asleep.

By five in the morning, she was on a GOL Linhas Aéreas flight and reached Rio by noon since she only had one quick stop in the city of Brasília—the seat of the Brazilian government, the federal capital of Brazil. She made herself sleep on the flight so she wouldn’t be completely beat when they touched down. In Rio, she rented a car because she was pretty sure someone had taken Ian, and she was going to rescue him, so she’d need a getaway car, not a cab.

The thought that, like Finch, Ian was dead,killed, floated at the edges of her consciousness no matter how hard she fought to beat it back. The possibility of this worst-case scenario made her chest feel crushed, as if a water buffalo had sat on her.

Images of Finch lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor flashed into her mind, and she broke out in cold sweat. She refused to accept that she was too late to save Ian.

But she couldn’t believe the best-case scenario either, that Ian had simply lost his phone and missed his flight last night. She hadn’t had the kind of life that gave her that kind of optimism.

She settled on the most likely scenario: Ian had run into trouble.

She could track his cell phone with hers through GPS, same as he could track hers. He’d insisted on that years ago. At the time, she’d rolled her eyes and called him overprotective. Now she was glad she’d agreed.

As far as she could tell, he was in a large building at the edge of the industrial district. A sugar refinery, she realized when she finally reached it. Two men stood at the gate, two more security guards at the entrance of the main building.

If they thought they could keep her from Ian, they had another think coming.

* * *