Free Don't Look Back by Gregg Hurwitz Page A

chorus of rattles came to life, underlining his point.
    Jay said, “Those are…?”
    Lulu nodded.
    Sue, still on the prior point: “Didn’t Aztecs sacrifice humans like in that Mel Gibson movie?”
    “ The Passion of the Christ ?” Will whispered to Eve, and she stifled a laugh.
    “Mostly they made blood sacrifices without killing,” Lulu said. “Literally giving their blood. They used the sharp tips of agave plants to poke their lips, fingers, even their penises.”
    Jay signaled an invisible waiter. “Check, please?”
    “So they didn’t sacrifice people?” Sue asked.
    “I didn’t say that,” Lulu said. They approached an eroded stone sculpture that Eve mistook at first for a table. But no, it was an enormous jaguar, its features smoothed by time, a bowl hollowed in its spine. Lulu placed her palm in the contour and smiled darkly. “For hearts. ”
    A thin beam of sun filtered through a break in the canopy, catching the side of the temple. It refracted blindingly across the ball court, illuminating a wide passageway in the side of the far structure.
    “The Zapotecs stuccoed the sides of the temple with crushed oyster shells,” Lulu said. “To catch the light. The scientists re-created some there.”
    “What’s that passageway?” Will asked, already starting down into the courtyard toward it.
    “A burial chamber,” Lulu said. “These buildings became cemeteries for the invading cultures.”
    Keeping an awed silence, the group crossed the sunken court to the tunnel. It bored through the base of the crumbling structure, ending in a tiny square of light on the far side. They stood at the entrance for a moment, Eve wondering if they were actually going to go in.
    Neto turned on a flashlight, and they shuffled into the embrace of darkness. Spiderwebs brushed Eve’s cheeks. A musky scent filled her nostrils. She took short, careful steps, letting her night vision adjust.
    Neto’s beam picked across the moist stone walls, finally illuminating a femur resting on an inset ledge. A slow pan revealed a shattered hip bone, a nest of ribs, and a jawless skull. Rats scurried among the shards. Where the neck had eroded lay a spill of horseshoe-shaped necklace links.
    The air had grown cold here, locked in the chill of the stones.
    Neto switched the flashlight to the walls ahead, revealing set after set of burial ledges, stacked like bunk beds, running the length of the catacomb. Most were empty, but a few housed fragmentary skeletons, this one missing a rib cage, that a skull. Rising from one slab was what looked like a bulbous growth, the bones fossilizing into the rock over the centuries.
    Insect legs tapped across Eve’s neck, and she brushed them away. Her senses soaked in the damp air, all but vibrating with the Indiana Jones thrill. If Nicolas were here, he’d explode in delight.
    As they turned to reverse out, she rested a hand on Will’s shoulder ahead of her. Without looking back, he tapped her fingers once, a quick, flirtatious gesture that made her smile to herself in the darkness.
    Near the mouth of the passage, she slowed, seeing if there was enough ambient light for her crappy disposable camera to take a picture for Nicolas. The others kept on as she fumbled it out, turned it on.
    She held the camera to her eye. Nothing but blackness. She lowered it again. The fall of light from outside ended literally a hand span away from the first skeleton, a viable photo just out of reach. Picturing her son’s face, she exhaled with disappointment.
    Jay’s booming voice came audible, even from across the courtyard: “Let’s do that balloon thing again.”
    Eve turned the cardboard box of the camera in her hands, squinting to make out the button for the flash. That would probably yield no more than a starburst of bleached-out stone. She needed something fancier, with night vision.
    Of course.
    She slid her hand down her thigh, finding the hard edge of Theresa Hamilton’s camera, still zipped into her