DAPI ISLAND
“How are you feeling?” Amaury said in Portuguese.
Bakari’s voice was a barely audible croak. “Sick.”
Bakari had got the worst of it. Amaury and Razi had a drop here and there on their pant legs, but Bakari had caught a big splash from just below his left knee down to his boot.
And now he lay on a blanket, curled into a fetal ball, shaking uncontrollably, his pocked face glistening with sweat. Amaury had seen people in a malaria crisis shake like this.
“Are you cold?”
Bakari only shook his head and continued shaking.
“Your friend tried to kill my brother!” Razi said, his hands opening and closing as if yearning to fasten around someone’s throat.
“He’s not my friend!” Amaury shouted. “He was never my friend!” He lowered his voice. “But I never thought he was my enemy. I never thought he’d … try to kill me.”
Amaury found it unfathomable. What did Jeukens have to gain by killing him and the brothers? If he had wanted to keep the secret of the island to himself—to guarantee that only he knew it existed—the time for murder would have been on the way back during the first trip. He could have killed Amaury, brought the Sorcière close to some deserted stretch of Mozambique’s coast—no shortage of those—then pointed the boat south and swum ashore. It would have wound up adrift in the uncharted stretches of the Indian Ocean and might never have been found.
He’d always thought the Afrikaner a strange one, but not a murderer.
Amaury realized he felt hurt. Betrayed. And a little sickened.
Why not simply bring a gun along and shoot them? So clean and easy. And manly. Poison was for women. A Borgia game. A slow, painful death.
Did Jeukens hate Amaury so much?
And what had he used for poison?
Taking Bakari’s gloves from atop the cage, Amaury pulled them on and lit a second battery lantern. He approached the Coleman, careful to avoid the splattered matata. The burner was still lit. He turned it off. He remembered Jeukens pouring clear fluid from a plastic bottle into the stew. He’d put it down when Amaury confronted him and—
There! The bottle, on its side, close beside the stove. He held it up to the light. A few drops remained in the bottom. He took a quick, cautious sniff but smelled nothing.
He guessed it killed if you ingested it—why else would Jeukens add it to the matata?—but, considering Bakari’s reaction, it seemed to work through the skin as well.
Movement next to the Coleman caught his eye. A six-inch, blood-red millipede was undulating across the ground toward the spilled matata.
“You might not want to go there,” Amaury muttered.
He watched it wriggle to within an inch or so of a splatter and stop. It raised its head, swayed back and forth, then turned and retreated.
Amaury couldn’t smell anything, but this thing apparently could.
Which gave him an idea.
Squatting, he upended the bottle over the millipede and let the last three drops within fall onto its undulating back. It crawled on, but only for a few seconds. Then it stopped, shuddered, and began a frantic writhing. Within fifteen seconds it was curled into a twitching ball. Very soon after that the twitching stopped.
Amaury dropped the bottle and backed away. So quick. So awful. It looked like every nerve in the millipede’s body had gone wild.
Some sort of neurotoxin.
He clenched his teeth. That was what Jeukens had planned for them? No question about it: They had to find him and kill him on sight. Amaury had never killed a man but he could not allow Jeukens another chance at murder.
Then again …
If Jeukens was truly going to identify these dapis as the missing link, the payoff would be enormous. That made him worth keeping alive.
Why was nothing ever simple?
And why hadn’t he done a background check on Jeukens? Not that he had the resources for a deep backgrounding, but he hadn’t even Googled the man. No reason to. He paid in cash, and cash was king in Amaury’s business. But now that he was thinking of it, how did he know this man had any scientific credentials at all? He could be a psychopath who simply believed he was a scientist.
A psychopath who had decided to murder his fellow travelers.
A nightmare! This simple trip—return to the island, bag some pets, and then go home—had turned into some sort of horror film.
Amaury returned to Bakari, who seemed to be shaking less.
“Feeling any better?”
He nodded weakly. “A little.”
Maybe they’d be lucky. Maybe they’d dodged the Afrikaner’s poison bullet.
As he set the second lantern down on top of the holding cage, he noticed the blanket had been disturbed. Had the dapis been at it? He lifted it and saw the injured dapi still inside. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. He didn’t know what to do with it.
“I’m sorry you are hurt,” he said in a soothing voice. “It was an accident. We wish to harm no one.” He thought of Jeukens. “Well, almost no one.”
Then he noticed that the cage latch was partially undone. His fellow dapis must have come down and tried to open the cage while he and the brothers were off chasing Jeukens. He’d have to arrange a better lock.
He glanced up into the trees and gasped as he saw the eyes … just the eyes … countless big blue eyes reflecting the light from the lanterns.
A galaxy of eyes, watching …