More from this Series
One For The Money
Book 1
Two For The Dough
Book 2
Three To Get Deadly
Book 3
More from the Author
The Bounty
Stephanie Plum One, Two,…
Gabriela Rose returns in Janet Evanovich’s next novel, coming in July 2021. Here’s a sneak peek.
Gabriela Rose was standing in a small clearing that led to a rope and board footbridge, which was swaying in the wind. The narrow bridge spanned a gorge that was a hundred feet deep and almost as wide. Rapids rushed over enormous boulders at the bottom of the gorge, but Gabriela couldn’t see the water, because it was raining buckets and she could barely make out the far side.
She was celebrating her thirtieth birthday deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest. The birthday wasn’t important to her. She was all about the job. Her long dark brown hair was hidden under her Australian safari hat, its brim shading her exotic almond-shaped brown eyes. She was 5'6" and slim. She kept in shape for the job but also because she liked pretty clothes. And pretty clothes didn’t always come in size fourteen.
She was with two local guides, Jorge and Cuckoo. She guessed they were somewhere between forty and sixty years old, and she was pretty sure that they thought she was an idiot.
“Is this bridge safe?” Gabriela asked.
“Yes, sometimes safe,” Jorge said.
“And it’s the only way?”
Jorge shrugged.
She looked at Cuckoo.
Cuckoo shrugged.
“You first,” she said to Jorge.
Jorge did another shrug and murmured something in Spanish that Gabriela was pretty sure translated to “chickenshit woman.” Let it slide, Gabriela thought. Sometimes it gave you an advantage to be underestimated. If things turned ugly, she was almost certain she could kick his ass. And if that didn’t work out, she could shoot him. Nothing fatal. Maybe take off a toe.
It had been raining when she landed in Quito two days ago. It was still raining when she took the twenty-five-minute flight to Caco and boarded a Napo River ferry to Nuevo Rocfuerte. And it was raining when she met her guides at daybreak and settled into their motorized canoe for the six-hour trip down a narrow, winding river with no name. Just before noon, they’d pulled up at a crude campground hacked out of the jungle. Four hours on foot after that, following a trail that barely existed. All in the pouring rain.
She’d been hired to find Henry Dodge and retrieve a ring he was carrying. Not a lot of information on the ring or Dodge. Just that he couldn’t leave his job site, and he’d requested that someone come to get the ring. Seemed reasonable, since Dodge was an archeologist doing research on a lost civilization in a previously unexplored part of the Amazon rainforest. The payoff for Gabriela was a big bag of money, but that wasn’t what convinced her to take the job. She was a treasure hunter. For profit and for pleasure. She was an amateur anthropologist, a descendent of Blackbeard, a history buff, and a collector of pirate plunder. The opportunity to visit a lost-cities site was irresistible.
“How much further?” she asked Jorge.
“Not far,” he said. “Just on the other side of the bridge.”
Ten minutes later, Gabriela set foot on the dig site. She’d been on other digs, and this wasn’t what she’d expected. There was some partially exposed rubble that might have been a wall at one time. A couple of tables with benches under a tarp. A kitchen area that was also under a tarp. A stack of wooden crates. A trampled area that suggested several tents had been recently used and recently abandoned. Only one small tent was left standing.
There were no people to see except for one waterlogged and slightly bloated dead man lying on the ground by the rubble, and a weary-looking man sitting nearby on a camp chair.
“This is not good,” Jorge said. “One of these men is very dead, and something has eaten his leg.”
“Panther,” the man in the chair said. “You can hear them prowling past your tent at night. This site is a hellhole. Were you folks just out for a stroll in the rain?”
“I was sent to get a ring from Henry Dodge,” Gabriela said. “I believe I was expected.”
The man nodded to the corpse. “That’s Henry. Had some bad luck.”
“What happened?”
“He was checking on an excavation in the rain first thing this morning, fell off the wall and smashed his head on the rocks. Then a panther came and ate his leg before we could scare it away. Everyone packed up and left after that. Too many bad things happening here.”
“But you stayed,” Gabriela said.
“They couldn’t carry everything out in one trip. I stayed with some of the remaining crates and the body. Cameron said he would be back with help before it got dark.”
“Do you know where Henry kept the ring?” Gabriela asked.
“It’s on his finger,” the man said. “He felt it was the safest place.”
Gabriela looked at the dead man’s hand. It was grotesquely swollen and clenched in a fist. The ring was barely visible.
“Someone needs to get the ring off his finger,” Gabriela said.
No one volunteered.
Gabriela flicked a centipede off her sleeve. Could the day get any worse? She was wet clear through to her La Perla panties, her boots and camo cargo pants were covered with mud, and she had bug bites everywhere. All part of the jungle experience, she told herself. The dead man with the swollen hand was not. The question now was, how bad did she want the ring? The lost-cities site had turned out to be a bust, but there was still a payday attached to the ring. So, the answer to the question was that she wanted the ring pretty damn bad. Without the ring, there would be no big bag of money. And she needed the money to finance her own treasure hunt. She’d recently found a three-hundred-year-old map that had been lost in her family for fifteen generations. It was a treasure map signed by Blackbeard, and she had it on good authority that it was real.
“I’ve come this far,” she said. “I’m not going back without the ring.” She looked at the man in the chair. “I need to pry Dodge’s hand open and work the ring off his finger. I need gloves and a baggie. I know all archeological sites have them.”
The man shrugged his shoulders as an apology. “They were all packed out. Truth is, we were shutting down before Henry happened. Henry was the holdout. He found the ring, and he thought there was more here. The rest of us didn’t care.”
“We need to leave now,” Jorge said. “It will be bad to be in this jungle after sunset. Hard to find the way, and panthers will be hunting at night. We have maybe five hours of daylight left.”
“I’m not leaving without the ring,” Gabriela said.
Cuckoo took his machete out of its sheath and whack! He chopped Henry Dodge’s hand off at the wrist.
“I suppose that’s one way to go,” Gabriela said. “I would have preferred to try my way first.”
“He’s dead,” Cuckoo said. “He doesn’t need the hand.”
He picked the hand up by the thumb, grabbed Gabriela’s daypack and dropped the hand in.
“Problem is solved,” Jorge said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Over the last twenty-five years, JANET EVANOVICH has written a staggering twenty-three #1 New York Times bestsellers in the Stephanie Plum series. In addition to the Plum novels, Janet has coauthored the New York Times bestselling Fox and O’Hare series (including The Big Kahuna and the forthcoming The Bounty with her son, Peter Evanovich), the Knight and Moon series, the Lizzy and Diesel series, the Alexandra Barnaby novels, and the graphic novel Troublemaker (with her daughter, Alex Evanovich).
EVANOVICH.COM
@JANETEVANOVICH @JANETEVANOVICH
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Janet-Evanovich
@AtriaBooks @AtriaBooks @AtriaBooks
BY JANET EVANOVICH
THE STEPHANIE PLUM NOVELS
One f
or the Money
Two for the Dough
Three to Get Deadly
Four to Score
High Five
Hot Six
Seven Up
Hard Eight
To the Nines
Ten Big Ones
Eleven on Top
Twelve Sharp
Lean Mean Thirteen
Fearless Fourteen
Finger Lickin’ Fifteen
Sizzling Sixteen
Smokin’ Seventeen
Explosive Eighteen
Notorious Nineteen
Takedown Twenty
Top Secret Twenty-One
Tricky Twenty-Two
Turbo Twenty-Three
Hardcore Twenty-Four
Look Alive Twenty-Five
Twisted Twenty-Six
Fortune and Glory (Tantalizing Twenty-Seven)
THE FOX AND O’HARE NOVELS
The Heist
The Chase
The Job
The Scam
The Pursuit
(with Lee Goldberg)
The Big Kahuna
(with Peter Evanovich)
KNIGHT AND MOON
Curious Minds
(with Phoef Sutton)
Dangerous Minds
THE LIZZY AND DIESEL NOVELS
Wicked Appetite
Wicked Business
Wicked Charms
(with Phoef Sutton)
THE BETWEEN THE NUMBERS STORIES
Plum Lovin’
Plum Lucky
Plum Spooky
THE ALEXANDRA BARNABY NOVELS
Metro Girl
Motor Mouth
Troublemaker
(graphic novel with Alex Evanovich)
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Interior design by Dana Sloan
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Author photograph © Roland Scarpa
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945056
ISBN 978-1-9821-5483-7
ISBN 978-1-9821-5486-8 (ebook)