Read Online Tears of the Jaguar by A.J. Hartley - Free Book Online Page A

and because he thought she would be impressed by how casually he agreed to sit in a tomb in the jungle in the dark. Alice was sexy, in a grungy kind of way. She wore no makeup except black eyeliner and had a tough-looking tattoo on one shoulder. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent, like she’d been living underground for most of her life. She had strong, sinewy arms, and her legs were made for hiking boots, but her chest and belly were soft. She had great boobs. Not real big, but shapely. Sometimes she went without a bra and you could see her wide, pink nipples through her shirt. Nice.
    He walked around the rope that circled the
cenote
, looking at the sky. He’d never seen so many stars in his life. James, who had been raised in Hackensack, had barely spent a day in the country in his life. His folks had taken him camping in Pennsylvania once but they had come back early when he reacted badly toa bee sting. He’d been a city kid ever since, which was perfect really, since he was the kind of out-and-proud geek most at home in front of his MacBook or PlayStation, venturing out only to go to classes, the library, or the movies. Being here in the dark, with no one around, and just the chirping of crickets and frogs, was like being on another planet.
    Alice
.
    He hadn’t fancied her that much when he first met her. But he’d gotten used to her scowl and the way she looked you right in the eye when she talked. And she didn’t have the same smug look as a lot of cute girls he’d seen, the look that said,
Forget it, loser.
Sometimes the two of them sat up late and drank tequila together, talking about the clueless undergrads and Blowhard Bowerdale. Soon, he hoped, she might sleep with him. She wouldn’t think it was a big deal. It was to him, but she didn’t need to know that. His best chance with Alice was if she thought they were just fooling around, and that it didn’t mean anything. That was partly why he liked her. She was immune to other people. He envied her that, wished he cared less about things, including her.
    He checked his watch. He had already been there an hour, sitting under the deeper shade of the ancient acropolis. He spent ten minutes at the mouth of the tunnel flicking stones into the
cenote
, listening for their distant splash, and then decided to check out the tomb. He could sit down there in the dark and listen to Bauhaus on his iPod: crank the whole eleven minutes of “Bella Lugosi’s Dead” down there among the bones.
    Cool.
    He got a flashlight, stepped over the rope, and eased his way off the platform and onto the aluminum ladder. They had lashedit at the top with nylon rope and pinned it into the earth below with steel pegs, but the metal had a natural spring in it, and it felt precarious. He hadn’t admitted it to anyone, but he didn’t like heights, and the prospect of falling into the
cenote
with its underground river and who knew what swimming in it scared the crap out of him.
    The birds had discovered the new water source before the sun had gone down, and he’d watched what he thought were swallows diving down and skimming the surface with their beaks. He thought it was one of them that whistled past his head as he began his descent, but he realized as it whirred and fluttered away that it was actually a bat. He wasn’t crazy about bats either. They had vampire bats down here too, he thought.
    Just focus on the ladder
.
    With each footstep, the metal bounced and shifted under his weight, and he was glad to get a foot on the remains of the passage floor. He turned carefully, because the roof was low. Deborah had to virtually crawl just to get in. James wasn’t so sure about Deborah. He liked her OK, he guessed, but she seemed kind of hard, not with Alice’s
whatever
apathy, but with something else, something deep and focused. Determination, maybe. She was kind of cute, for an older chick, but she was a good four inches taller than him, and that wasn’t cool.
    Deborah had