Riggs nodded once, and we kept walking.
Then a voice said, “Ah, goldurnit! Now you’ve gone and made this whole thing higgledy-piggledy! I told you fools, the magic ain’t in the seed, it’s in the Nutter!”
“Oh my God. Do you hear that?” I breathed. If not, the universe was talking to me about Gustavo’s miracle child, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“Holy shit,” Riggs whispered. He squeezed his eyes shut. “It can’t be. It was supposed to be Mexico.”
But whatever was supposed to be in Mexico, the look on his face suggested, was right here.
“What’s in Mexico?” I demanded. “Do you know who that is? Do you think he can get us out of here?”
“What? No. Nothing.” Riggs shook his head slowly. “Not a clue. But you’re right. He definitely sounds American.”
“¡Mueve!” Beardy shouted. “¡Callate!”
I frowned. “But—”
“You heard the man,” Riggs said, pushing me forward gently. “Move it along and keep quiet.”
11
Riggs
When the guards led us to some kind of small employee break room with a muttered comment about using it as a lab space for the doctor, my mind was reeling with what I’d just found.
Buck Nutter was here. Here in Venezuela. Here at Gustavo Santiago’s hidden compound.
Well, I’ll be damned. Kandi was right.
A drug lord really had stolen her brother. But what would a guy like Santiago want with a video game access code? Was he hoping to hold the game hostage? Make HOG Corporate pay?
And what were the chances we’d stumbled onto the same drug lord? Especially considering the idiot in the bed did not have the intelligence to be a major player in the cartel. Was Gustavo playing us? Or was someone else pretending to be him? The way he kept referring to himself in the third person sure made it seem like that. Did it matter?
If I could find a way to get both Buck and Carter out of here, I might be able to redeem myself in Champ’s eyes, earn back the right to take my place in the auricle implant program, and maybe even smooth things over with Jacob Horn and the Horn of Glory folks.
But that meant I had to think. I opened my mouth to explain before shutting it again with a snap. Champ had warned me time and time again not to talk about clients to others. Did this count?
In the end, I decided it didn’t really matter. Carter was a nervous babbler. I couldn’t risk telling him about Buck in case he said something in front of the guards. Besides, it appeared one of the guards had made himself at home on a chair in the corner of the room. He glared at me like he expected me to eat his lunch out of the employee fridge.
I looked around at the small break room. It was half-kitchenette, half-lounge space, with old, battered sofas, a hand-me-down table and chairs, and three different coffee makers on the counter. Santiago clearly didn’t lavish his guards in luxury the way he did his guests, even the prisoner guests.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Carter whispered. “They took the blood samples from me last night to store them. I don’t have them.”
I glanced at the guard again. “¿Donde estan las muestras de sangre?” Where are the blood samples?
He nodded in the direction of the fridge. Great. They’d been stored next to someone’s ham sandwich.
I stepped toward the fridge and opened the door. Thankfully, the only thing in there was the plastic baggie with two vials of blood in it. I pulled it out and set it on the counter. “Now what?”
Carter shot me a nervous look. “The simple stuff takes ten seconds which is too… ah… quick. As for a more complex assay, I don’t usually do those myself.” He dropped the medical backpack on the table and began to sort through it. “Even in Gelada, we sent them out to a lab in Socopó, remember?”
I did. Carter had a handheld bloodwork analyzer to do some simple tests, but the more complex bloodwork orders had been sent to a lab.
“Do the best you can,” I said softly. “It doesn’t really, uh…” I glanced at the guard again and was surprised to find him holding a Horn of Glory console. His attention was clearly on the game. “It doesn’t really matter,” I continued, “if he has what you think he has, right?”
“True.”
“Just make it look good,” I said in an even softer tone.
He busied himself pulling out vials and pipettes, a little stand to hold the vials, bandages and alcohol wipes, blood-draw kits, and anything else that could make his little lab operation look legit. He finally grabbed his handheld analyzer and began working. I stepped up close to him at the counter and tried to look like I was assisting him so I could talk to him without the guard overhearing.