“Mañana,” Carter had said with a patient smile. “Regresa mañana, por favor.”
I’d gotten excited at the airport in Caracas for a minute thinking Carter was fluent in Spanish, but when he’d wanted the bus driver to help us undo the ropes so we could get our luggage off the roof and had instead asked the guy for help removing his ropas—which meant clothing—I’d realized while Carter might be able to find us a baño, he was never going to get us through a small-town Venezuelan police corruption scheme if we ran into one.
I’d immediately downloaded an extra translation app on my phone just in case. I spoke passable Spanish—maybe slightly better than passable—but I preferred to keep all language fluency quiet until and unless I desperately needed it. The practice had come in handy more times than I’d expected while stationed in Afghanistan.
“And the bedroom is just here,” Eriko said, gesturing to the other door at the back of the building. I glanced over at the small room, replaying his sentence in my mind until the word “bedroom” turned plural from wishful thinking. “There is a pallet on the floor for your helper.”
I tilted my head at him. Was he trolling me?
Carter’s sparkling eyes suggested Eriko was being sincere. “Excellent! I’m sure Mr. Riggs will appreciate your kindness.”
Eriko looked very pleased. He informed Carter that someone from the community would be stopping by with our dinner and we were welcome to spend the rest of the evening setting up for tomorrow’s clinic.
“We are very grateful you are here. The people of Gelada have to travel very far to see a doctor. Many of them do not have money for the bus. When you come with your supplies and medicines… well, we are truly blessed.”
Carter’s face softened. Suddenly, I could see the doctor behind the snarky duchess. “It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having us.”
As soon as the local man was gone, closing the outer door and making sure Carter locked it from the inside, Carter’s smile disappeared.
“You’re in charge of making sure the med cabinet stays secure. It’s one of the biggest security challenges on a project like—”
I cut him off. “I know. Next.” This wasn’t my first professional mission. I knew better than to show up in a remote town in any foreign country without doing my research and determining the risk factors involved in operation security.
Carter tightened his jaw and nodded. “I need to show you how to give a shot. We need to get as many vaccines in arms as we can, especially for yellow fever. The program sent us with mosquito nets too. Give one out to every person who gets a vaccine and anyone else who wants one. It helps prevent malaria.”
“I know how to give a shot, and I served in Afghanistan which has the third-largest malaria burden in the world,” I told him. “What else?”
Carter moved over to a stack of folding chairs and began unfolding them. “Let’s set these up as a kind of waiting area, then we’ll see what we can do for an exam table and some patient privacy.”
We worked for the next hour and a half cleaning the dirty tables and chairs with a generic Pine-Sol solution and rags made from old clothes. Eriko had left a few boxes of donated supplies from the village, but it looked like we would be on our own for anything even remotely sterile.
There was no way to create a private exam area in the main room, so I suggested moving our supply boxes into the bedroom and converting the storage closet into a makeshift exam room.
Carter pursed his lips in thought. “Okay, but someone needs to be in there with me if I’m with a patient.”
I stared at him. “I don’t think they’re going to sue you for inappropriate touching, Duchess.”
“It’s not about a lawsuit, Mr. Riggs. It’s about making patients, especially female patients, feel comfortable when they’re at their most vulnerable. Maybe we can get a female volunteer to help. Eriko said he’s sending someone.”
I schlepped all the boxes back out of the storage room and into the bedroom, leaving only enough room on the floor for the “pallet,” which turned out to be literally two wooden pallets covered by the kind of long cushion my grandma used to put on her screened-in porch chaise lounge. I eyed it with distaste.
“Aw. Someone looks like he’s having a grumpy day,” Carter remarked with fake sympathy as he passed me. “What’s wrong, Mr. Riggs? Not enough box carrying for you?”
“Just thinking that this pallet looks like it’s going to hurt your back.” I folded my arms over my chest. “Might consider hitting up the med cabinet before hitting the hay, Duchess.”
Carter didn’t even turn around and look at me. He simply said, “Duchesses don’t sleep on pallets, Mr. Riggs. This is well-known. In fact, I’m pretty sure there would be something in my grandfather’s contract about that. If he knew you were implying otherwise, that is.”
I glanced at the double bed in the room. Honestly, it didn’t look much better. It had a very obvious crater in the middle of it, which was going to wreak havoc on the doctor’s spine tonight. The bottom line was both of us were going to be in hell.
You’ve slept in worse conditions.
I tried not remembering some of the worst. Instead, I buckled down and finished organizing supplies so we were ready for tomorrow.
“You have an awful lot of bandages here,” I noticed. It reminded me of the med kit I’d had as a medic in the Marines.
He looked at me like I’d said something odd. “What do you think people come to medical clinics for?”
“Sickness. Pills,” I said. Shrapnel wounds.
“Sprains, strains, cuts, scrapes, rashes. Sometimes broken bones. Sometimes upper-respiratory infections or gastro complaints. Definitely the mosquito-borne illnesses. Dengue, malaria, chikungunya. And the vaccine-preventable ones like measles, yellow fever, and even diphtheria. Hopefully we can make a dent in the local population’s risk with some of the vaccine supply we brought, but we’ll really have to work hard to convince them to let us vaccinate as many people as we can.”
For some reason, hearing him speak like a doctor settled the agitation in my gut. He sounded intelligent and capable.
However, I really didn’t want to like Dr. Carter Rogers, so I quickly changed the subject. “I didn’t figure you for a gamer,” I said, after noticing him playing a handheld game on the flight to Caracas.
He glanced up from the stack of papers he was organizing at the old metal desk that would double as the reception desk and the “office.” When Eriko had apologized for the inconsistent Wi-Fi and the spotty cell reception, Carter had assured him we’d brought everything in paper anyway. “I learned that lesson the hard way in Eritrea,” he’d said with a wide smile as if anything was easy in a place like Eritrea. Just picturing the clean-cut doctor there made me low-key nervous. He was lucky to have gotten out of there safely, especially if he’d been in the more dangerous areas where programs like this operated.
“I wouldn’t call myself a gamer,” Carter said. “Why do you ask?”
I picked up the bucket of cleaning solution and began wiping down a folding table. “I saw your sparkly purple game thing on the plane. Looked like you were into it.”