He rode slideways and escalators up through it all, still feeling vaguely numb from the codeine. On the far side of the terminal complex, he checked into the new MIA Marriott, took a room with a skyline view and ordered a medical check from the room service options. He charged it all on the Agency jack. As a contractor, he had fairly limited expense credit – working undercover in any case made for mostly wafer and cash transactions which he then had to claim back as part of his fee – but with a worst-case couple of days left ’til he could get back to London and officially close the file on Gray, there was still a lot of meat on the account.
Time to use it.
In the room, he stripped off jacket and weblar mail shirt, dumped his soiled clothing in a heap on the floor and soaked under a hot shower for fifteen minutes. The mesh was gone, back into its spinal lair, and he was a catalogue of bruises he could feel through the thinning veils of codeine. The glued wound in his side tugged at him every time he moved.
He dried himself on big fluffy Marriott towels and was putting on the cleanest of his worn canvas trousers when the door chimed. He grabbed a T-shirt, looked down at the wound and shrugged. Not much point in getting dressed. He dropped the shirt again and went to the door still stripped to the waist.
The in-house doctor was a personable young latina who’d maybe served her internship in some Republican inner city hospital, because she barely raised one groomed eyebrow when he showed her the knife wound.
‘Been in Miami long?’ she asked him.
He smiled, shook his head. ‘It didn’t happen here. I just got in.’
‘I see.’ But he didn’t get the smile back. She stood behind him and pressed long, cool fingers around the wound, testing the glue. She wasn’t particularly gentle about it. ‘So, are you one of our illustrious military advisers?’
He switched to English. ‘What, with this accent?’
A tiny bend to the lips now, as she moved round to face him again. ‘You’re British? I’m sorry, I thought—’
‘Forget it. I hate those motherfuckers too.’ That he’d killed one in a bar in Caracas last year, he didn’t mention. Not yet, anyway. He went back to Spanish. ‘You got family in Venezuela?’
‘Colombia. But it’s the same story down there, only for coca, not oil. And for longer. Been going on since my grandparents got out, and it’s never going to change.’ She went to her bag where it sat on the desk and fished out a hand-held echo imager. ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the things my cousins tell me about.’
Carl thought about the uniforms he’d seen on the streets of Bogota a few weeks ago. A summary beating he’d witnessed.
‘No, I would believe you,’ he said.
She knelt in front of him and touched the wound again, more gently now. Improbably, her fingers seemed warmer. She ran the imager back and forth a couple of times, then got to her feet again. He caught a gust of her scent as she came up. As it happened, their eyes met and she saw that he’d smelled her. There was a brief, flaring moment, and then she retreated to her bag. She dug out dressings and cleared her throat, raised brows and sideways slanted eyes at what had just happened.
‘There’s not much I can do for you that hasn’t already been done,’ she said, a little hurriedly. ‘Whoever glued you up knew what they were doing. It’s a good job, should heal quickly enough. Did they spray it?’
‘Yeah, they did.’
‘Do you want anything for the pain?’
‘The pain’s under control.’
‘Well, I’ll dress it again, if you like, unless you’re planning to shower now.’
‘I’ve just had a shower.’
‘Okay, well, in that case I can leave—’
‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’
She smiled then, properly.
‘I’m married,’ she said, holding up the hand and the plain gold ring on it. ‘I don’t do that.’
‘Oh, hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice,’ he lied.
‘No problem.’ She smiled again, but there was disbelief etched into it and the tone of her voice said she wasn’t fooled. ‘Are you sure you don’t want any painkillers? I’m going to charge you the rate minimum, they’d come as standard with that.’
‘No, you’re all right,’ he said.
So she packed up her bag, gave him one more smile, and left him to put his own dressings on.
He went out.
It probably wasn’t smart, but sense memory of the unattainable doctor drove him. Her fingers on him, her scent, her voice. The way she’d knelt in front of him.
An autocab took him east from the airport, cruising broad, multi-laned streets. Most places were still open – LCLS glow from the frontages beckoned, but still seemed oddly distant, like the lights of a seafront town seen from off-shore. He guessed it was the codeine, maybe playing off something in the mesh. For a while he was happy to watch it roll past. Then, as the traffic started to thicken, he got out at random where the lights seemed brightest. An avenue named after some Cuban Repossession hero, bronze beach-head-and-bayonet plaque fixed into the brickwork at the corner. Remixed Zequina and Reyes classics splashing out of propped-wide doorways, tanned flesh flexing within or strutting the street around him. It was warm and muggy, and dress ran to billowing scraps of silk over swimwear for the women, linen or tight leather jeans and bared chests for the men. On skin alone Carl would have blended in well enough – it was one of the few things he liked about Miami – but he’d blown it with his wardrobe. Canvas trousers, the lightest of his trail shoes and a Bradbury Bubble ’97 T-shirt. He looked like a fucking tourist.
In the end, tired of the flickering he don’t belong glances from the local streetlife, he ducked off the main drag and sank himself in the gloom of a club called Picante. It was seedy and half empty and no closer to his fantasies of how his evening would turn out than the screen ad he’d seen outside the bar in Garrod Horkan 9 was to Caribbean reality. In the back of his mind, there’d been this vague storyboard of images in which he met the latina doctor – well, a close substitute for, anyway – in some classy salsa bar full of dance-lights glittering off cocktail glasses and good teeth. Segue to the easy, low-light surroundings of some other more intimate place, equally upscale, and then the home straight to her place, wherever that might be. Fresh sheets on a big bed and the cries of an uninhibited woman in the throes of orgasm. Fading out, satiated, in the shadowed, temporary comfort of a strange woman’s night-time home.
Well, you got the shadows, he admitted to himself with a sour grin. Picante ran to a couple of LCLS dance panels not much bigger across than his hotel bathroom, a traditional straight-line bar, and wall lighting that seemed designed in kindness to the handful of fairly obvious prostitutes who hung around the tables, smoking and waiting to be asked to dance. Carl got himself a drink – they didn’t have Red Stripe, he settled for something called Torero, then wished he hadn’t – and installed himself at the bar near the door. It might have been professional caution, or just the odd comfort that being able to see the street outside gave him, the sense that he didn’t have to stay here if he didn’t want to.
But he was still there, nearly an hour later, when she came in and parked herself beside him at the bar. The barman drifted across, wiping a glass.