They would achieve the impossible and be remembered in their culture until the end of time. Stories would be told around fires, and the name of their city would be known far and wide as the crowning jewel in the Inca crown — the great promise of its future, the legendary new center of the noble and ancient civilization’s universe: Paititi, the City of Gold.
Chapter Two
Patricia hurried from her flower shop to the car. Night had fallen hours ago and traffic had dwindled to nothing, leaving the downtown deserted. She normally didn’t stay at the store after dark, but it was the end of the month and there were accounts to be balanced. Times were hard now, and she’d been handling the bookkeeping herself. She considered herself lucky that she still had a business.
Her sensible heels clicked on the sidewalk, her breath steaming in the frigid night air, and then she heard the sound again — something or someone was gaining on her. She struggled to stay calm as she reached into her purse for the can of pepper spray she’d hidden there years ago, praying that it still worked.
Patricia’s hand fumbled in the bag, a knock-off Coach she’d gotten on a Mexican cruise in better days, and her trembling fingers felt the distinctive cylinder. She tried to remember the effective range, but all she could think of was that she should run. Run as fast as her feet would carry her, run to safety, to her waiting car.
She hesitated at the junction of two gloomy streets, ears straining for any hint of a pursuer. A scrape from behind her, no more than twenty yards, reaffirmed her worst fears before she forced them away and slowed her breathing. That could have been anything. A cat. One of the heaping garbage bags she’d passed rustling in the breeze. Something shifting inside them, or a rat burrowing for buried treasure. Anything at all.
When she rounded the corner, she sprinted for the parking lot, all pretense of calm gone as she ran on tiptoes to avoid the sound of her heels alerting whoever was behind her that she was in full flight. Because now, in spite of her inner dialogue, she was sure someone was tailing her.
Visions of serial killers played through her imagination as she reached the waist-high concrete wall that encircled the lot. She pushed through the gate, wincing at the groan of its corroded hinges, and made her way to her car as she fished in her overcoat for her key ring. God, she hoped it would start on the first try. She cursed silently at how she’d been putting off taking the old Buick to the dealership for months.
A decision she prayed wouldn’t prove her undoing.
Patricia fumbled with her keys and got the door open. She wasted no time sliding behind the wheel and throwing her purse on the seat beside her before twisting the ignition. The doors locked automatically as the starter ground.
“No. Oh, God, no. Come on. Come on!” she murmured.
Two black-gloved hands slammed against the driver’s side window. Patricia screamed and wrenched the ignition again. With a phlegmy roar, the engine coughed a cloud of black exhaust. She shifted into gear and floored the accelerator just as she registered the unmistakable shape of a pistol in her side mirror. Patricia swerved toward the street, ducking in panic as she saw the orange blossom of a muzzle flash and her rear window blew out in a shower of safety-glass fragments.
The old vehicle bounced over the curb with a jolt as she cut the driveway too tight, and then she was speeding down the empty street. Behind her, a pair of headlights blazed to life and grew frighteningly large. She gazed in spellbound horror in her rearview mirror as the shooter’s vehicle pulled after her, and she spun the wheel, hurtling toward the highway that led to the safety of her modest home ten minutes outside town.
Patricia blew through the red light at the base of the onramp. Panic replaced her momentary relief when the glare of headlights reappeared behind her, gaining on her even as she strained to drive the gas pedal through the floorboard, pulse pounding in her ears, a band of pressure tightening around her chest.
“Come on. Come on…” she hissed, willing the aging Buick to greater speed as she raced by the old gas station that marked the town periphery, the arched windows of its fifties-era building as dark as the night sky.
A cold wind tore at the trees along the highway as the speedometer needle inched past eighty, faster than she’d ever forced it, but insufficient to pull away from the vehicle closing on her. Her gaze darted to the mirror again, where she could see the other car a hundred yards behind.
Patricia was doing ninety-six miles per hour when she missed the curve just before the river bridge. Her tires screeched like a wounded animal, and then she was sailing through space in a graceless arc.
The sedan chasing her slowed until it rolled to a stop halfway across the bridge’s span. The passenger reached up with a gloved hand and flipped the interior light off, and then opened his door and stepped out into the freezing gloom. His head swiveled right, then left, verifying that he was alone. He approached the edge of the bridge and stared into the darkness at the inky rushing water of the river hundreds of feet below. There, at the base of the gorge, was the Buick, partially submerged, mangled beyond recognition.
He shook his head and pulled his overcoat around him, slim protection against the chill wind as he returned to the waiting car.
“Nobody could have survived that,” he said, swinging the door open.
“Now what?” the driver asked, hands loose on the wheel.
The passenger glanced at the moon grinning crookedly from between the clouds.
“Now it gets hard.”
Chapter Three
Drake Simmons peered over the dashboard of his Honda Accord at the row of clapboard homes across the street and took another sip from his lukewarm can of cola.
He hated stakeouts. Endless hours watching and waiting for the perp to appear, which often never happened, rendering for naught his patient vigil living off caffeine and peeing into a Gatorade bottle. He ran a hand over the dusting of dark beard on his lean face and wondered again how he’d wound up in this business rather than using his journalism degree.
The job market had gone from bad to worse since he’d graduated five years ago. Finding criminals who’d skipped out on their bond wasn’t quite in the same league as being an investigative reporter, but it required many of the same attributes: patience, dogged determination, research skills, and a certain crazy recklessness that had defined his character since childhood. It was just a lower-rent version of how he’d imagined himself, playing out his Woodward and Bernstein fantasies as the star of a major newspaper.
The door to one of the squalid houses opened and a tall man with the jaundiced pallor of an addict sauntered down the stairs, eyes scanning the street. Drake slumped down behind the steering wheel and pushed a long lock of dark brown hair off his forehead, and then adjusted his Oakley sunglasses before sliding up just enough to see.
No question that was his boy. Alan Cranford, two-time B&E loser up for his third count, a junkie, a thief, a cheat, and now a fugitive after he failed to appear at his arraignment last week. But most importantly, Cranford meant five thousand dollars in Drake’s pocket as his fee — ten percent of the bond’s value, which the scumbag had allowed his aging mother to post before kicking her, and the bail bondsman, to the curb.
Cranford had a rep for being violent, Drake knew from Harry Rivera, his sometimes employer and longtime friend.
“Be careful, kid. He’s mean as a reservoir dog and twice as dangerous,” Harry had warned in his distinctive gravelly voice tempered by two packs a day of unfiltered Pall Malls and an affinity for Jack Daniels. “Last time he was in the joint he almost killed his cell mate. You don’t wanna play him wrong.”