Hot Ice

swishing. Blood swirled around him.
    The shots hadn’t come from Remo. Even as Doug turned toward shore he knew it. They’d come from farther south. Either they had a fairy godmother or someone else was on their trail. He caught a movement and a glimpse of a white panama. When he saw Whitney just behind him, he didn’t stop to think about it.
    “Go, dammit.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the bank. Whitney didn’t look back but simply forced her legs to kick her through the water to shore.
    Doug half dragged her over the wet reeds on the edge of the canal and into the bush. Panting, aching, he propped himself on the trunk of a tree.
    “I’ve still got the papers, you sonofabitch!” he shouted across the canal. “I’ve still got them. Why don’t you take a little swim across the canal and try to take them from me?” For a moment, he closed his eyes and just worked on getting his breath back. He could hear Whitney heaving up canal water beside him. “You tell Dimitri I’ve got them and you tell him I owe him one.” He wiped the blood from his mouth, then spat. “You got that, Remo? You tell him I owe him. And by God, I’m not finished yet.” Wincing, he rubbed the shoulder he’d wrenched during the struggle with Weis. His clothes were plastered to him, wet, bloody, and stinking with mud. A few yards away in the canal, crocodiles were in a frenzy of feeding. The gun was still in his hand, empty. Deliberately, Doug took out the box of bullets and reloaded.
    “Okay, Whitney, let’s…”
    She was curled into a ball beside him, her head on her knees. Though she made absolutely no sound, he knew she was weeping. At a loss, he ran a hand through his dripping hair. “Hey, Whitney, don’t.”
    She didn’t move, she didn’t speak. Doug looked down at the gun in his hand. Violently, he shoved it back in his belt. “Come on, honey. We’ve got to move.” He started to put his arms around her, but she jerked back. Though tears ran freely down her face, her eyes burned when she looked at him.
    “Don’t touch me. You’ve got to move, Lord. That’s what you’re made for. Moving, running. Why don’t you just take that all-important envelope and get lost. Here.” Reaching in her pocket, she struggled to pull her wallet out of her clinging slacks. She threw it at him. “Take this too. It’s all you care about, all you think about. Money.” She didn’t bother to wipe at the tears, but watched him through them. “There’s not much cash in there, only a few hundred, but there’s plenty of plastic. Take it all.”
    It was what he’d wanted all along, wasn’t it? The money, the treasure, and no partner. He was closer than ever, and alone, he’d get there faster and have the whole pot to himself. It was what he’d wanted all along.
    Doug dropped the wallet back in her lap and took her hand. “Let’s move.”
    “I’m not going with you. You go after your pot of gold alone, Douglas.” Nausea heaved in her stomach, rising in her throat. She swallowed it down. “See if you can live with it now.”
    “I’m not leaving you here alone.”
    “Why not?” she tossed back. “You left Jacques back there.” She looked over toward the river and the shaking started. “You left him. Leave me. What’s the difference?”
    He grabbed her shoulders hard enough to make her wince. “He was dead. There was nothing we could do.”
    “We killed him.”
    That thought had already rammed into him. Perhaps because of it he gripped her harder. “No. I got enough baggage to carry around without that. Dimitri killed him the same way he’d swat a fly off the wall. Because it doesn’t mean any more to him than that. He killed him without even knowing his name, because killing doesn’t make him sweat, it doesn’t make him sick. It doesn’t even make him wonder when it’s going to be his turn.”
    “Do you?”
    He went very still a moment, while water dripped from his hair. “Yeah, dammit. I do.”
    “He was so young.” Her breath hitched as she grabbed his shirt. “All he wanted was to go to New York. He’ll never get there.” More tears spilled over, but this time she began to sob with them. “He’ll never get anywhere. And all because of that envelope. How many people have died for it now?” She felt the shell, Jacques’s ody —for safety, for luck, for tradition. Whitney wept until she ached from it, but the pain didn’t cleanse. “He died because of those papers, and he didn’t