Within fifteen minutes of his arrival at the hospital, he was in a clean consultation room, stretched out on a table as a registered nurse, a stately dark Belizian, removed the old bandage and began to ask Carter questions about allergies to various antiseptic and antibiotic substances. Her plastic name badge said she was Rose Cole.
"Fortunately for me, no allergies," Carter said.
"If I be any judge, you be very fortunate because it sure looks like you get shot at a lot." Rose Cole began to swab on an antiseptic cream, her strong fingers tracing the extent of Dr. Hakluyt's suturing. "It also look like you heal pretty good too. This one not going to leave a big scar."
Carter laughed. Scars were the least of his problems. They were his campaign badges. "Do you treat many gunshot wounds here?"
Rose Cole reflected for a moment. "We see more than we ought. What peoples about here got to shoot at each other for?"
"Is there some local feud?"
She chuckled. "Only feuds we be having is when some man don't marry that gal he be sleeping with for two, three years, and they have a few kids. Then her family be offended and there be threats back and forth about what happen if there be no ceremony and all. Stuff like that. But they too smart to go round settling things with guns. They use a witch."
"Do you believe in witches, Rose?"
"Well, we got two, maybe three gifted witches in the area, maybe one or two men who know their way around. So what happen, the offended gal's family, they pay a witch to make a spell that work so good, the man" — she gave a healthy chuckle — "the man can't have no truck with no other woman. He might just as well give up all thought of a sex life unless he marry that gal he start out with."
"So your feuds are fought with witches and spells?"
"That's the way with us," Rose Cole said. "We may not be high-tech, but a lot of us be happy."
At her direction, Carter sat. "I be removing these sutures now. They done their work and now you ready to mend on your own." She was an attractive woman, perhaps in her early thirties. Beginning to work on Carter, she watched him with an interest that went beyond the merely professional.
As she bandaged and taped, Carter pursued his line of questioning. "If the people around here are so peaceful, what accounts for the bullet wounds you've been seeing?"
"What I think, Mr. Carter, is dat they be lots of men like you hereabouts. They be playing soldier, and some of them just be plain silly or can't hit nothing."
"Where is all this taking place? Do you know?"
The nurse applied a final strip of adhesive. "I do it nice and tight, just like you say, so you can shower and bathe to suit you."
"You're not answering my question," Carter persisted.
She sighed and faced him, vexed. "You be a fine man, Mr. Carter. I can see how the ladies would be taken with you. But you sure do push." She handed him his shirt. "I see so many men with guns in the last ten years, how the hell do I know where they come or go? Some of them sweet-looking boys, trying to make a name for themselves. Some of them as mean and macho as you could want, and a lot of 'em like you, they seem easygoing enough if you don't push em, but plenty professional on the inside."
"Just one more thing," Carter said.
She smiled directly at him. "They be only one more thing you could give me any interest in."
The Killmaster met her gaze and smiled. "What can you tell me about that Center for the Arts?"
She humphed. "I should know you come here to get fixed up and go play soldier yourself instead of being interested in playing a more fun game, the basic boy-girl stuff," she said dryly. "That arts center, they be there five or six years. Before that, the buildings they be empty for maybe three or four years. Long enough for the jungle to start growing back in on it. Some peoples from the Bahamas and Mexico, they run a kind of resort where people come, eat silly little diet meals, and gamble. When that arts center start up, you hear all kinds of stones. I myself was called out there to help in some surgery. Surprising what an operating room they had."
Carter started to feel the excitement of a possible connection. "What kind of surgery?"
"I think they be calling it blunt trauma. That the way it seem to me. Some man, his face be moved around quite a bit, they want to make sure he look all right, I guess. We work and work on him."
"Do you happen to recall the name of the doctor who did the surgery?"
Rose Cole smiled. "He be a strange man they all call Dr. Smith. Now, I may be a small-town gal, Mr. Carter, what you might call a hick. But I seen enough movies, read enough things. When a man from America call himself Smith, that mean his real name ain't none of your business."
Carter thanked Rose Cole. She'd had more information for him than he'd really expected. It had been a good break that she'd been on duty, and the results were beginning to make him eager to get moving. At the desk he was given a hefty but fair bill, which he paid, then he drove back to the inn. He was given a small, clean room next to Zachary. It seemed to him like a monk's cell in a monastery. The walls had been freshly whitewashed. The bed was a cot made of reject mahogany saplings and substantially laced with tanned leather strips.
As he ran a security check, Carter discovered that someone had been in the room during his absence. His bag wasn't squared with the edge of the bed as he'd left it. The drawer to the small writing desk had been closed flush against the frame, and Carter had deliberately left it ajar about a quarter of an inch. The pile of towels in the closet had been searched — and replaced with the manufacturer's label showing as opposed to the way Carter had left things.
He spent the next half hour checking for booby traps — innocent things that might be fatal for the unwary. At length he discovered that nothing had been rigged. Someone had merely wanted to check on him. Or perhaps someone had wanted Carter to know he was under surveillance.
Sinking into a soft but lumpy mattress, Carter felt frustrated, impatient. This entire business with LT reminded him of blood spreading in shark-filled waters. The renegade Prentiss starts the whole thing by a big discovery. Maybe he'd tumbled onto some of the Lex Talionis planning meetings. Then Cardenas, the Grinning Gaucho, gets into the picture. Possibly out of boredom with his laundered life in Phoenix. Possibly he sees a way to get back into a life-style that was more exciting. And now this business with Piet Bezeidenhout. A man who has power, prestige, and enough security to satisfy the ordinary wealthy individual. But Bezeidenhout maybe has a bigger dream, one that takes him into power and influence on a global scale, and so what if he has to burn his former employers?
The difficult thing to piece into the puzzle now was Samadhi and his place in things.
Well, the hell with it. Carter was on the trail and he promised himself that tomorrow he'd be closer.
Nick Carter awakened to the sound of a distant rumble. He listened. Wilhelmina in his hand. He got up and moved out to the front porch. In the distance he saw headlights. A lot of headlights, moving in the night. A moment later Zachary appeared, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "I figure they truck in a lot of supplies around here, but that's more than a lot of supplies. That sounds like troop transports," he said. "A big convoy."
"Sure sounds like it," Carter agreed.
The rumbling continued, and in a few moments Carter returned to his room and began dressing. He fit Pierre into place carefully, strapped on the chamois sheath for Hugo, and holstered Wilhelmina under his left armpit. He took an extra clip and shoved it in his jacket.
Minutes later the two were in Carter's rental car, heading out toward the main highway, following the distant convoy on the road heading south.
They'd driven less than two miles when another vehicle, a restored World War II Jeep painted in jungle camouflage, loomed before them, its parking lights suddenly coming on. The Jeep was parked squarely in the middle of the road.