Get Charlie Noah

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Charlie sat beside her on the bed. Tara moved her head from side to side and attempted to raise her left arm. 'You're bandaged up babe,' said Charlie. 'You've had an injury to your left shoulder.'

Tara opened her eyes and looked at Charlie. 'You're supposed to be dead.'

'Am I?'

Tara's forehead wrinkled up with a look of confusion. 'I think so.'

'You are the one who almost ended up dead,' said Charlie. 'Ben saved you with some help from Peter.'

'Who's Peter?'

'He lives in the jungle and tends to the horses.'

'Ben saved me?'

'He sucked the poison from a dart out of your shoulder.'

'A dart?'

'Someone shot you with a poisoned dart,' said Charlie.

'But they told me to sit on the window sill and open the plantation shutters so I just did what they said. Their voices were so sweet.'

'Who told you to sit on the window sill?' asked Charlie.

'The girls. They woke me up.'

Charlie poured chilled water into a glass with a straw. 'Drink some of this.'

'Why?'

'You have to.'

'Who said?'

'Ben did.'

'Okay.' Tara drank the entire contents of the glass and then went back to sleep.

'We should never have put her in one of the downstairs bedrooms,' said Charlie.

'He wasn't looking for Tara,' said Ben as he peeled and sliced up a huge chunk of fresh ginger. 'He was looking for you. He thinks he shot you. He would have taken a shot at anyone with long black hair.'

'You need to talk with her when she wakes up. She said that the girls asked her to go and sit on the window sill, open the shutters and that is where she got shot.'

Ben chopped up sweet potato into small chunks.

'Are you listening to me?' asked Charlie.

'It's the other Mormon guy,' said Ben. 'I thought he would be long gone by now. Reginald hasn't called him off.'

'Perhaps he wasn't able to call him off,' said Charlie.

Ben chopped up fresh carrots without peeling them. Then he chopped fresh garlic.

'Tara woke for a while.'

'Yes, you told me,' said Ben. 'That's a great sign.'

'She told me that I should be dead by now,' said Charlie.

'You?'

'Yes...me.'

Ben put the knife down on the chopping board. 'Where's your rifle?'

'Where you left it beside my bed.'

Ben was familiar with the expression "icy fingers moved around the heart". He was familiar with numerous other expressions designed to force any person to feel deep fear. In real life, on numerous occasions, Ben had felt fear in its various and often unusual forms. He was feeling that now but grasping desperately onto the one thing that might just save him and Charlie...the poison which had entered Tara's system.

Ben moved quickly towards the stairs.

'This rifle?' asked Tara. She was three steps from the bottom of the stairway and the gun was aimed directly at Ben. 'You didn't even unload it this time.' Tara was wrapped in one of Charlie's white cotton robes. Her long black hair was pulled to the back of her head in a pony tail.