Killmaster 56 - The Black Death by Nick Carter

Author:Nick Carter [Carter, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: papachanjo
Published: 2011-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The one thing I hadn’t counted on was that Hank Willard would know Sam Fletcher by sight. Maybe I should have thought of it, because the soldier of fortune types get together at times in bars and clubs all over the world, but I didn’t.

Willard, a skinny guy wearing ruined officer’s pinks and a tattered but clean OD shirt, was quick enough on the uptake. He didn’t give me away. What he did give me was one look from washed out gray eyes that said it all—I wasn’t Sam Fletcher and he knew it. And he wanted me to know that he knew it. I figured that his shut mouth was going to cost me something and I was right.

Lyda, Duppy and I had come down the side of the mountain into the valley as soon as it was dark enough. Duppy found a trail and led us up the next mountain for a way, then we turned into a narrow ravine that led into another ravine and then another. Beyond the last ravine there was a large clearing with one hut and a scattering of palm-thatched lean-tos. A small fire smoldered in a circle of stones. Around the fire were a dozen blacks and Hank Willard.

Duppy and the girl conversed in soft Creole with the blacks, in a dialect not familiar to me, though I caught a word now and then. The blacks were getting ready for a voodoo ceremony, or so I guessed, because there was a vever drawn in ashes and cornmeal near the fire. On each side of the vever a stake had been driven into the ground. On one stake was a skull, on the other was tied a silver crucifix. There is a lot of Christianity in voodoo, though not of the sort approved by the Church.

. I stayed in the background and watched. I thought it was all a lot of crap anyway, a waste of time, and said so, but Lyda agreed with Duppy that it was worthwhile. Later we might need help from these blacks.

There was one other woman, a slim black girl in a red calico dress and a blue bandanna on her oiled hair, and red handkerchiefs knotted about both her arms. The local houngan, an old man with hair like gray steel wool, made a mark on the girl’s forehead with oil and ashes and handed her something. The drummer, not far from me, began to tap his F goatskin stretched over a hollow stump. Not so much tapping at first as rubbing it. A muted, sullen, slithering sound that pricked at my nerves.

There was a goblin moon, round and yellow and showing a blue skull in it, shining directly into the clearing. The girl held up the thing the houngan had given her and I saw that it was a doll figure. Very crude. Just a swatch of rags on a stick, with a face drawn on an egg, and a few strands of hair stuck to the egg.

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