Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [8]
Cristián’s hand lashes out and grabs the Time Lord’s wrist. His fingernails pierce the skin. The Doctor tries to pull away and cannot break his grip.
‘Otiquihiyohuih,’ Cristián snarls, with a smile.
* * *
Preston, thought Ace as she sliced into her steak, rated about a six. Two for looks, two for brains, two for having a good memory. He had bleach‐blond hair, and was wearing one of those red jackets with a big ‘P’ sewn onto the shoulder. He was from Houston, where he was busy failing college and chasing girls. But his family was rich, and he could afford to take English tourists to dinner in the hotel restaurant.
‘I used to see the guy every day – at breakfast, or going back into his room,’ he was saying. ‘He had these little dark eyes. A real psycho.’
‘What colour eyes?’
‘Brown,’ said Preston, hesitantly. He was obviously finding her curiosity very morbid indeed.
‘Were you here when the massacre happened?’
‘Yeah, I was stuck in the room with Montezuma’s revenge!’
‘Tell me about the massacre.’
‘It’s weird,’ said Preston. ‘Dallas is famous for being where JFK got shot. And we had that Waco thing last year. Everybody in the States has a gun. Everybody. In the glove box of their car, or on their bedside table. My dad has three – he keeps one of them with his golf clubs.’
‘Go on,’ she prompted.
‘We get a lot of psychos with guns,’ Preston said. ‘A lot. But it’s not supposed to happen in Mexico. One reason we came here was that there’s not much crime, well, not much violent crime, anyway. I have to watch the news for my media studies course. Do you know how depressing watching the news is? All the news?’
He looked older than he actually was, Ace thought. ‘I can imagine,’ she said.
‘In the twentieth century, the world has been at peace for eight per cent of the time. I read that somewhere. Can you believe that? There’s always a war on. Anyway. I was in my hotel room, watching TV. I could have been in the street market,’ he said. ‘But I was lucky. Damn lucky.’
‘Did you hear the first shot?’
‘There wasn’t really a first shot,’ said Preston. ‘It was a semi‐automatic. It went tick‐tick‐tick. Then the voices started.’
‘Voices,’ said Ace.
‘Screaming and shouting,’ said Preston. He was trying to sound cool, but his high cheekbones had gone quite white. ‘I was at the window by that stage. I saw them running, everybody running in different directions. I couldn’t see the Hallowe’en Man – he was somewhere in the crowd. People were running over the roofs of cars. I saw one old woman on her knees praying. Her groceries were spread out around her on the pavement.’
‘All right,’ said Ace. ‘Stop.’
Preston stopped. ‘You can’t imagine it,’ he said at length.
‘I don’t have to imagine it,’ said Ace.
She wanted to take his hand. But this was business.
* * *
‘He doesn’t remember any of it.’
Bernice gently closed the bedroom door. She squatted down next to the Doctor, who was sitting on the rug, scowling and nursing his wrist. Four deep scratches stood out against the pale flesh.
‘This whole situation,’ said Benny, ‘is extremely suspicious. It smacks of being some kind of trap.’
‘Trap? Trap? A cryptic message? A mysterious man from our past? Of course it’s a trap! But the question is, did Cristián set the trap, or is he the bait?’
The Doctor extracted a small plastic box from his pocket, with a red cross on it formed from two bits of electrical tape. He opened it and started bandaging his wrist with surprising ease.
Benny watched him. ‘Do you think it’s got anything to do with what happened to us in Oxford?’
‘Maybe. Too early to tell. It’s certainly not the Garvond.’
‘You know I didn’t mean that.’
‘Yes, I do. You mean whatever caused our brush with our skull‐faced friend, and the jaunt with the Silurians too. I’m not sure. So far nothing tastes of temporal interference, but all the same…’
Benny said, ‘You must have uncovered something pretty powerful in Cristián’s memory.’
‘Possibly,’ said the Doctor. ‘So much for New York. We still