Morgan's Mercenaries: Heart of the Jaguar

“They won’t,” he said, gesturing toward a redbrick church ahead, its gleaming white spire thrusting above the mire of human habitations. “Peruvians in Lima don’t view Indians as human. We’re animals to them. Big, dumb brutes to be used as pack animals, is all.”

Frowning, Ann said, “You said you were Yaqui?”

“My mother’s part Yaqui, from Central America, and part Quechua Indian. She was born in Peru, but her family moved north to Mexico when she was six years old.”

“How did your mother meet your father?”

“When you get me good and drunk sometime, I’ll tell you,” Mike told her with a grin.

He braked the van and turned at the redbrick church, which was surrounded by a white picket fence. Despite the mud, filth and poverty of the neighborhood, the Catholic church was spotlessly clean, with no trash littering the well-kept green lawn. The church stood out like a sore thumb in the dirty barrio, but Ann supposed it was a symbol of hope. A beacon of sorts. When he drove the van to the rear of the church, she saw a one-story brick addition to the building.

“That’s the clinic,” Mike told her proudly, slowing down. Putting the van into Reverse, he backed up to the open gate of the picket fence. “Sisters Dominique and Gabriella live here. They’re the ones who are in the trenches every day, keeping the clinic doors open for the people.”

Ann saw at least fifteen mothers with children standing patiently in line outside the doors. Her heart broke as she noticed their lined, worried faces. Some carried babies in thin blankets, pressed tightly to them; others had crying children who clung to their colorful skirts. They were all Indians, Ann observed.

Houston turned off the van and set the brake. He glanced over at Ann. The devastation in her exhausted eyes spoke eloquently of how deeply moved she was by the horrible conditions the Indians lived in. She was easily touched, he was discovering, and it said something about her he’d already known intuitively. Still, he wondered how she would fit in with the nuns here, and he worried that the cool demeanor Ann had displayed toward him when they’d worked together on the ranch might put the nuns off. “The two little old nuns are French. They’re from Marseilles, and they’re saints, as far as I’m concerned. They’ve been ministering to the poor since they came here in their twenties. They’re in their seventies now and should’ve retired a long time ago, but they’re like horses in a harness—it’s all they know and they have hearts as big as Lima. They speak French and Spanish and some English.”

He wrapped his hands around the steering wheel and gave Ann a measuring look. “I know how you reacted to me off and on for eight weeks up in Arizona. They don’t need a norteamericana coming in here and telling them what to do. They’re homeopaths, not medical doctors. If you don’t know anything about homeopathy, try to suspend your disbelief about it, watch them work and watch what happens to the patients they serve before you make any judgment about it, okay?”

Ann met and held his searching gaze. Because she’d kept him at a distance until now, he probably thought she would carry on that way here. “You’re remembering my attitude toward you in Arizona and predicting that I’ll treat everyone at this clinic the same way?”

Mike castigated himself. “There are times when I wish I had more diplomacy, but lack of sleep is making me a little more blunt than usual.” He opened his hands over the wheel in a helpless gesture. “I owe you an apology.”

Ann accepted his apology—the second one to come from him since they’d traded parries on the plane. “Look,” she said, sighing wearily, “I understand your being wary. I know I haven’t been easy to get along with. But let’s just forget our personal feelings about one another, shall we? I have a commitment to honor in Morgan’s name for the next six weeks. In a clinic situation or a hospital environment, I’m not the ice queen you think I am. So don’t be concerned that I’ll ride roughshod over two old nuns. I’ve got better things to do with my time than pick at them or complain about what type of medicine they practice. No, I don’t know a lot about homeopathy. But it obviously works or they wouldn’t have been using it here for fifty years, would they?” But despite her assurances to Mike, Ann knew she would have to make an effort to suspend some of her rational approaches and training. Her medical background was different from a homeopathic practitioner’s. This was another situation in which she would have to yield her scientific bent to a more mysterious, even mystical kind of medicine. If she was going to survive these six weeks, she understood that she had to adjust to Mike’s world, and that included the nuns’ medical procedures.

Mike saw Ann struggling to not be hurt by his request. That said a lot about her. She was confident and didn’t let her ego get in the way of better judgment. “I didn’t mean to accuse you of being close-minded. It’s just that I know a lot of conventional medicine types in the medical field who look down their nose at homeopathy. Hell, the clinic was so poor financially that we couldn’t afford to buy the prescription drugs we needed, so homeopathic meds took up the slack instead.”