Heart of Fire by Linda Howard Page B

hundred pounds. His left ear was missing.
    Ben's butt had scarcely settled on the chair when a sullen-faced boy appeared beside him. "Drink?"
    "Beer." He didn't want to give the kid anything to remember about him, so Ben limited his response to that one word and didn't even glance up. He also resisted the urge to look around. He just sat slouched in the chair, doing his best to look sleepy or drugged.
    The kid brought the beer. Ben laid the money on the table, the kid's nimble fingers made it disappear, and then he was left alone to nurse the drink.
    The glass probably hadn't been washed in a week. Mentally Ben shrugged and took a sip, figuring the alcohol would kill any germs. He shifted his position until he was hunched over, elbows resting on the table, his head dropped forward. The hat shielded his face. Ever so slowly he moved his eyes, trying to penetrate the shadows of the room.
    There were fifteen, maybe twenty men there, half of them standing at the bar. No one was paying any attention to him. The conversation was the usual bullshit; the country and language changed, but the bullshit never did. A radio on the shelf behind the bartender blared out some Brazilian rock song. The singer wasn't any good. No one cared.
    Kates was sitting at the very last table, his back to the door. Stupid move. But then Ben recognized the other man at the table and realized that Kates wouldn't have had any choice about where he sat. Ramon Dutra would automatically put his back to the wall, with good reason.
    Dutra was a murderous thug. He was known to kill for hire, and took pleasure in being as brutal about it as he could. If Dutra was the one man Kates personally wanted to hire, then this was rapidly getting much rougher than Ben had originally thought. What was Kates planning? To leave everyone else dead in the jungle and keep all of the—what? —gold, maybe, for himself. But gold was heavy. One man couldn't carry out enough to make the trip worthwhile, and not only that, Kates wouldn't be able to make it out by himself. The man knew nothing about the jungle.
    Dutra did, however. He regularly vanished upriver, probably to evade either some other thug or the law. Maybe Kates was fool enough to think he could hire Dutra to do his dirty work, then guide him out of the jungle with the loot before he himself killed Dutra. Probably Dutra was planning on roughly the same scenario, but with a different dead person at the end of it.
    This made the situation a lot more serious than Ben had anticipated, and the prim, serious Ms. Sherwood was in over her head. Damn it, how had she gotten involved with a slime ball like Kates, anyway? Her brother, of course. Didn't the man care that he was putting his sister in so much danger? Obviously not, because he didn't seem to have an inkling that Kates was double-dealing all the way. Sherwood thought of himself as a full partner, when he was nothing but a patsy.
    Once again Ben thought about bailing out, knowing all along that he wouldn't. Then he thought about dumping Kates and Sherwood while he and the sister did the trek on their own, but he discarded that idea because, for one, he didn't want to throw that much money into a project that might not pay off as big as he hoped, and for another, she probably wouldn't go along with it. She hadn't seemed overcome by his charm.
    Not that he'd made any effort to be charming. He'd been deliberately crude and insulting. Well, she was just going to have to get over her distaste for him, because they were going to have to work together to get back from this trip alive and in one piece.
    Having seen what he'd come in there to see, he slugged back the beer, wiped his mouth, and slid the sunglasses back into place as he stood. No one paid any attention to him as he walked out as unobtrusively as he'd entered.
    Dutra's presence didn't simply mean that he would have to be more alert and take more notice of Jillian's safety; the men he had been planning on hiring would