“¡Doctor, ven con nosotros ahora!” Doctor, come with us now.
I shot a glance at Carter, whose face had morphed from confused hostage to competent, controlled doctor as he hustled over with the backpack and asked for a sitrep. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“Es el hombre de la computadora. El esta herido.”
“The computer guy is hurt,” I said in case he didn’t catch it.
“Why? How? What happened? Was that him screaming?” Carter peppered the guards with questions, but they clearly didn’t understand a word he was asking. Instead of answering him, they grabbed him by the arms and carried him out. I tried to grab him back from their hold, but one of the guards shoved me back.
Carter let out a cry of distress and turned back to help me, but the guards pulled him down the hall. “Riggs!” he called.
“Coming,” I said, scrambling to catch up.
I raced along behind them, not daring to leave his side. There was no telling what someone like Gustavo would do when faced with a doctor who might or might not have the ability to save their important hostage.
And I needed to be prepared for anything.
12
Carter
Glasses and Skinny drag-carried me down the carpeted stairs, across a wood-paneled hallway, through an opulent dining room, and down yet another hallway to an enormous kitchen of the sort you’d expect to find in a fancy restaurant. The floor was covered in terra-cotta tiles, but all the countertops were stainless steel, and the appliances were high-end commercial-grade stuff. On the stove, steam puffed out from beneath the lid of a gigantic pot.
No one in the kitchen noticed, however, because all of them—two women, plus Beardy, Silent, and a couple of guys I didn’t recognize—were all clustered around a scarred wooden worktable in the center of the space where the blond, mulleted dude I’d seen the night before was laid out, bleeding profusely from a gash on his leg.
“Move back,” I commanded Beardy, who’d decided the best way to deal with a badly injured man was to wave his gun around.
Silent had been attempting to wrap a tourniquet around Mullet Guy’s upper leg while Mullet flailed against the two women restraining his shoulders and wailed in pain.
“Oh, sweet Jesus! Oh, grits ’n gravy! You best watch yourself, buddy, because without these ladies holding me down, I’d be on you like a duck on a June bug, and then you’d be sorry!”
I made a shooing motion and moved all of them away too. “Give the poor man room to breathe! Muévete away from the table.”
“Dude,” the injured man said, turning pleading eyes on me. “You’re a doctor? A real one?”
“Very real,” I assured him. “Riggs, ask the guys for some of the water boiling on the stove and to get me some very clean cloths.” I knew without looking that he was right behind me because I could sense him there, an oasis of calm in an ocean of chaos.
Sure enough, Riggs relayed my words in rapid, somewhat-halting Spanish.
“Rags and boilin’ water?” Mullet demanded. “I ain’t with child, son. You sure you’re a doctor?”
“Positive. How’d you hurt your leg?” I demanded. I whipped my own polo shirt over my head, thankful I still had a T-shirt underneath, so I could wipe away the blood and make sure there was no debris in the wound.
“Weeeeell, you might say this has been coming on for years. I always knew I was destined for greatness. You see, I was born—”
Dealing with the monologuing drug lord was bad enough. The last thing I needed was for all my patients to start monologuing.
“More recently,” I snapped.
“Well… One night a couple weeks ago, I stopped by the Dairy Queen, ’cause I love me a sundae—”
“More recently than that,” I demanded. “Within the last twenty minutes.”
“I fell out the upstairs window and cut my leg on a ding-dang metal spike embedded in the ground,” he admitted grudgingly.
“He was trying to escape,” Glasses said.
“Now I told you fellas, it was an accident!” Mullet insisted in a deep drawl. “I wasn’t escapin’! Heck, nah. I was just… just pacing near my open window upstairs when a breeze come along and carried me—”
“So you might have other injuries besides this one?” I interrupted.
“Well, no. Or maybe yes? The right side of my butt hurts awful bad, come to think. D’you s’pose I broke my ass?”
“Doubtful,” I informed him, especially given the way he was moving around. “But you might have bruised yourself pretty badly. I couldn’t say whether anything’s broken without an X-ray.”
I rummaged through the medical bag while one of the guards set down a large bowl of water and a stack of clean rags. “Riggs, could you—?”
“On it,” Riggs said, dipping a rag in the water.
“Okay, but first make sure you—”
“Test the temperature? It’s fine,” he assured me. “Not too hot.”