Jeffry Lindsay - Dearly devoted Dexter

The nurse thought she was going to say something very severe, but she opened her mouth, looked at the shield, looked at Deborah, and changed her mind. “I will have to tell doctor,” she said.

“Whatever,” Deborah said. “Dexter, help me close my pants.” The nurse watched disapprovingly for another few seconds, then turned and whisked away down the hall.

“Really, Debs,” I said. “Obstruction of justice?”

“Let’s go,” she said, and marched out the door. I trailed dutifully behind.

Deborah was alternately tense and angry on the drive back over to the Mutiny. She would chew on her lower lip, and then snarl at me to hurry up, and then as we came close to the hotel, she got very quiet. She finally looked out her window and said, “What’s he like, Dex? How bad is it?”

“It’s a very bad haircut, Debs. It makes him look pretty weird. But the other stuff… He seems to be adjusting. He just doesn’t want you to feel sorry for him.” She looked at me, again chewing her lip. “That’s what he said,” I told her. “He wanted to go back to Washington rather than put up with your pity.”

“He doesn’t want to be a burden,” she said. “I know him. He has to pay his own way.” She looked back out the window again. “I can’t even imagine what it was like. For a man like Kyle to lie there so helpless as-” She shook her head slowly, and a single tear rolled down her cheek.

Truthfully, I could imagine very well what it had been like, and I had done so many times already. What I was having difficulty with was this new side of Deborah. She had cried at her mother’s funeral, and at her father’s, but not since then, as far as I knew. And now here she was practically flooding the car over what I had come to regard as an infatuation with someone who was a little bit of an oaf. Even worse, he was now a disabled oaf, which should mean that a logical person would move on and find somebody else with all the proper pieces still attached. But Deborah seemed even more concerned with Chutsky now that he was permanently damaged. Could this be love after all? Deborah in love? It didn’t seem possible. I knew that theoretically she was capable of it, of course, but-I mean, after all, she was my sister.

It was pointless to wonder. I knew nothing at all about love and I never would. It didn’t seem like such a terrible lack to me, although it does make it difficult to understand popular music.

Since there was nothing else I could possibly say about it, I changed the subject. “Should I call Captain Matthews and tell him that Doakes is gone?” I said.

Deborah wiped a tear off her cheek with one fingertip and shook her head. “That’s for Kyle to decide,” she said.

“Yes, of course, but Deborah, under the circumstances-”

She slammed a fist onto her leg, which seemed pointless as well as painful. “GodDAMN it, Dexter, I won’t lose him!”

Every now and then I feel like I am only receiving one track of a stereo recording, and this was one such time. I had no idea what-well, to be honest, I didn’t even have an idea what to have an idea about. What did she mean? What did it have to do with what I had said, and why had she reacted so violently? And how can so many fat women think they look good in a belly shirt?

I suppose some of my confusion must have showed on my face, because Deborah unclenched her fist and took a deep breath. “Kyle is going to need to stay focused, keep working. He needs to be in charge, or this will finish him.”

“How can you know that?”

She shook her head. “He’s always been the best at what he does. That’s his whole-it’s who he is. If he gets to thinking about what Danco did to him-” She bit her lip and another tear rolled down her cheek. “He has to stay who he is, Dexter. Or I’ll lose him.”

“All right,” I said.

“I can’t lose him, Dexter,” she said again.

There was a different doorman on duty at the Mutiny, but he seemed to recognize Deborah and simply nodded as he held the door open for us. We walked silently to the elevator and rode up to the twelfth floor.

I have lived in Coconut Grove my entire life, so I knew very well from gushing newspaper accounts that Chutsky’s room was done in British Colonial. I never understood why, but the hotel had decided that British Colonial was the perfect setting to convey the ambience of Coconut Grove, although as far as I knew there had never been a British colony here. So the entire hotel was done in British Colonial. But I find it hard to believe that either the interior decorator or any Colonial British had ever pictured something like Chutsky flopped onto the king size bed of the penthouse suite Deborah led me to.

His hair had not grown back in the last hour, but he had at least changed out of the orange coverall and into a white terry-cloth robe and he was lying there in the middle of the bed shaved, shaking, and sweating heavily with a half-empty bottle of Skyy Vodka lying beside him. Deborah didn’t even slow down at the door. She charged right over to the bed and sat beside him, taking his only hand in her only hand. Love among the ruins.

“Debbie?” he said in a quavery old-man voice.

“I’m here now,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

“I guess I’m not as good as I thought I was,” he said.

“Sleep,” she said, holding his hand and settling down next to him.

I left them like that.

I SLEPT LATE THE NEXT DAY. AFTER ALL, HADN’T I earned it? And although I arrived at work around ten o’clock, I was still there well before Vince, Camilla, or Angel-no-relation, who had apparently all called in deathly ill. One hour and forty-five minutes later Vince finally came in, looking green and very old. “Vince!” I said with great good cheer and he flinched and leaned against the wall with his eyes closed. “I want to thank you for an epic party.”

“Thank me quietly,” he croaked.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“You’re welcome,” he whispered back, and staggered softly away to his cubicle.

It was an unusually quiet day, by which I mean that, besides the lack of new cases, the forensics area was silent as a tomb, with the occasional pale-green ghost floating by suffering silently. Luckily there was also very little work to do. By five o’clock I had caught up on my paperwork and arranged all my pencils. Rita had called at lunchtime to ask me to come for dinner. I think she might have wanted to make sure I had not been kidnapped by a stripper, so I agreed to come after work. I did not hear from Debs, but I didn’t really need to. I was quite sure she was with Chutsky in his penthouse. But I was a little bit concerned, since Dr. Danco knew where to find them and might come looking for his missing project. On the other hand, he had Sergeant Doakes to play with, which should keep him busy and happy for several days.

Still, just to be safe, I called Deborah’s cell phone number. She answered on the fourth ring. “What,” she said.

“You do remember that Dr. Danco had no trouble getting in there the first time,” I said.

“ I wasn’t here the first time,” she said. And she sounded so very fierce that I had to hope she wouldn’t shoot someone from room service.

“All right,” I said. “Just keep your eyes open.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. I heard Chutsky muttering something cranky in the background, and Deborah said, “I have to go. I’ll call you later.” She hung up.

Evening rush hour was in full swing as I headed south to Rita’s house, and I found myself humming cheerfully as a red-faced man in a pickup truck cut me off and gave me the finger. It was not just the ordinary feeling of belonging I got from being surrounded by the homicidal Miami traffic, either; I felt like a great burden had been removed from my shoulders. And, of course, it had been. I could go to Rita’s and there would be no maroon Taurus parked across the street. I could go back to my apartment, free of my clinging shadow. And even more important, I could take the Dark Passenger out for a spin and we would be alone together for some badly needed quality time. Sergeant Doakes was gone, out of my life-and soon, presumably, out of his own life, too.