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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 catalog 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 with 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 around 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 handheld echo imager. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things my cousins tell me.”
    Carl thought about the uniforms he’d seen on the streets of Bogotá 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, I’m 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