Page 67 of Final Approach

I’d spent six days in the hospital, and only because I’d checked myself in. How long would it take Danny to recover? If rescue didn’t come tomorrow, he wouldn’t know.

“Madman?” I called again. “Do you know where he is?” I asked Nikki, who’d finished dabbing the gel and was carefully removing the tainted glove.

Irritation flashed through the light hue of his eyes. “How should I know?” he snapped, throwing the glove on the ground as if it had personally offended him. “I’ve been a bit busy.” He waved his hands around the camp for emphasis.

Immediately, his eyes flashed with panic. “I’m so sorry, Marl, I’m a bit—I’m not myself today.” He ran his hands through his frizzy curls in obvious distress. “Please forget I’m an intolerable asshole.”

His snap had pierced through my heart, but the immediate apology soothed the scratch. He was on edge, of course. We all were. The man in front of me had only ever shown kindness and courtesy—he got a pass for being human.

“I don’t think any of us are ourselves, Nik.” I offered a weak smile as the symbol of my forgiveness. “It’s okay. But I need to find Madman.”

“He was here,” Brooks piped up in stilted English. They sat beyond the fire with Ambrose crafting more mats out of the long fronds. For what purpose, I couldn’t yet tell, but Ambrose was weaving with impressive dexterity, his tongue stuck out in focused concentration.

He was cute, this insufferable meathead, when he wasn’t making my life harder.

“I think”—Brooks pointed toward the direction of the plane—“he went there.”

“He’s probably just taking a piss,” the meathead called after me when I headed in that direction.

Well, it wouldn’t be something I hadn’t seen already. My cheeks flushed again, and I had to erase the thought from my mind entirely.

Foreboding grew in my gut when I recognized Diaz was also nowhere to be found. Thank God, I had taken the gun from Maddox last night.

Voices carried through the jungle as I rounded the bend.

“Why are you out here, cabrón?” The familiar, husky masculine tenor hissed between the rustle of leaves. “Why did you drug me and bring me to this hell?” A grunt, then a pained, choked sound. “Who paid you to do it?”

Halting in my tracks, I waited. It was my duty to protect my passengers—all of my passengers—but I wanted to know Diaz’s game, too. My cellphone, likely long dead in Ambrose’s electronics bag we’d stowed away, would have been so useful right now to record the evidence.

The voices turned to hushed whispers, giving me nothing. Creeping forward to get a better view with hopefully more audio, I barely caught myself from stumbling over an errant vine. Shit.

Closing my eyes, I counted to ten, then crept forward again. Within a few more steps, the vague whispers turned into a real sound stream.

“Do you know what I do to men like you, cabrón? I remove your eyes so you can no longer see me coming. Then, I shatter your eardrums, so you can’t hear me coming.”

Madman’s tone chilled my blood to ice, even in the incessant heat. “Then I beat you so badly, your bones become dust.”

I shivered as the chill became a chatter knowing he meant every word. This protective man who decided to bestow favor on me had been incarcerated for a reason. He was dangerous.

A gurgle surfaced over the sound of his threats, followed by a scuffle. A pained cry whistled through the trees.

“Then I remove each limb, until all you are is a carcass for the birds.”

Gravel filled his voice, each word as sharp as a stone. It was time for me to stop this before Diaz became our next victim.

I’d crashed a plane with no memories, and my copilot’s body was still missing. I could still be deemed at fault and given my own prison sentence. I was terrified when rescue came, they’d find some drugs we’d missed—I had no idea what the fuck I was doing in that department—which could result in another prison sentence.

To have a law enforcement officer’s death on my conscience would be just too much.

I rushed through the trees, snakes be damned, and stopped short at a tiny clearing. Madman sat on Diaz’s back, grinding his face into the earth. He’d wrapped his corded biceps around the grunting detective’s neck. Two bricks of cocaine lay on the ground in front of them. One had a half-torn plastic edge tied into a slim knot.

“Hello, Captain,” Madman greeted casually, his smile so cavalier despite Diaz’s lips and eye sockets turning a sickly shade of eggplant in his hold. “I found the missing cocaine from yesterday.”

Missing cocaine. I racked my brain for the answer and realized far too late. The drugs Nikki had dropped to the ground when we were attacked—the partially open one from the sprinkle we’d spread onto Ambrose’s wounds. I hadn’t even noticed they weren’t there yesterday.

Walking closer, I sized up the quivering Diaz mere moments from slipping unconscious. It was dark in here. The thick canopy filtered out all evidence of daylight.

“Release him, please.” I commanded, lowering to the balls of my feet, wary of any creepy crawlers slithering through the vines. “Just enough so he can talk.”