Dearly Devoted Dexter

CHAPTER 21

SERGEANT DOAKES APPARENTLY FORGOT HE WAS SUPPOSED to be following me, because he beat me to the van by a good twenty yards. Of course he had the very large advantage of having both shoes, but still, he moved quite well. The van was run up on the sidewalk in front of a pale orange house surrounded by a coral-rock wall. The front bumper had thumped a rock corner post and toppled it, and the rear of the vehicle was skewed around to face the street so we could see the bright yellow of the Choose Life license plate.

By the time I caught up with Doakes he already had the rear door open and I heard the mewling noise coming from inside. It really didn’t sound quite so much like a dog this time, or maybe I was just getting used to it. It was a slightly higher pitch than before, and a little bit choppier, more of a shrill gurgle than a yodel, but still recognizable as the call of one of the living dead.

It was strapped to a backless car seat that had been turned sideways, so it ran the length of the interior. The eyes in their lidless sockets were rolling wildly back and forth, up and down, and the lipless, toothless mouth was frozen into a round O and it was squirming the way a baby squirms, but without arms and legs it couldn’t manage any significant movement.

Doakes was crouched over it, looking down at the remainder of its face with an intense lack of expression. “Frank,” he said, and the thing rolled its eyes to him. The yowling paused for just a moment, and then resumed on a higher note, keening with a new agony that seemed to be begging for something.

“You recognize this one?” I asked.

Doakes nodded. “Frank Aubrey,” he said.

“How can you tell?” I asked. Because really, you would think that all former humans in this condition would be awfully hard to tell apart. The only distinguishing mark I could see was forehead wrinkles.

Doakes kept looking at it, but he grunted once and nodded at the side of the neck. “Tattoo. It’s Frank.” He grunted again, leaning forward and flicking a small piece of notepaper taped to the bench. I leaned in for a look: in the same spidery hand I had seen before Dr. Danco had written HONOR.

“Get the paramedics,” Doakes said.

I hurried over to where they were just closing the back doors of the ambulance. “Do you have room for one more?” I asked. “He won’t take up a lot of space, but he’ll need heavy sedation.”

“What kind of condition is he in?” the spike-haired one asked me.

It was a very good question for someone in his profession to ask, but the only answers that occurred to me seemed a little flippant, so I just said, “I think you may want heavy sedation, too.”

They looked at me like they thought I was kidding and didn’t really appreciate the seriousness of the situation. Then they looked at each other and shrugged. “Okay, pal,” the older one said. “We’ll squeeze him in.” The spike-haired paramedic shook his head, but he turned and opened the back door of the ambulance again and began pulling out the gurney.

As they wheeled down the block to Danco’s crashed van I climbed in the back of the ambulance to see how Debs was doing. Her eyes were closed and she was very pale, but she seemed to be breathing easier. She opened one eye and looked up at me. “We’re not moving,” she said.

“Dr. Danco crashed his van.”

She tensed and tried to sit up, both eyes wide open. “You got him?”

“No, Debs. Just his passenger. I think he was about to deliver it, because it’s all done.”

I had thought she was pale before, but she almost vanished now. “Kyle,” she said.

“No,” I told her. “Doakes says it’s someone named Frank.”

“Are you sure?”

“Apparently positive. There’s a tattoo on his neck. It’s not Kyle, Sis.”

Deborah closed her eyes and drifted back down onto the cot as if she was a deflating balloon. “Thank God,” she said.

“I hope you don’t mind sharing your cab with Frank,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t mind,” she said, and then her eyes opened again. “Dexter. No fucking around with Doakes. Help him find Kyle. Please?”

It must have been the drugs working on her, because I could count on one finger the number of times I had heard her ask anything so plaintively. “All right, Debs. I’ll do my best,” I said, and her eyes fluttered closed again.

“Thanks,” she said.

I got back to Danco’s van just in time to see the older paramedic straighten up from where he had obviously been vomiting, and turn to talk to his partner, who was sitting on the curb mumbling to himself over the sounds that Frank was still making inside. “Come on, Michael,” the older guy said. “Come on, buddy.”

Michael didn’t seem interested in moving, except for rocking back and forth as he repeated, “Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh God.” I decided he probably didn’t need my encouragement, and went around to the driver’s door of the van. It was sprung open and I peeked in.

Dr. Danco must have been in a hurry, because he had left behind a very pricey-looking scanner, the kind that police groupies and newshounds use to monitor emergency radio traffic. It was very comforting to know that Danco had been tracking us with this and not some kind of magic powers.

Other than that, the van was clean. There was no telltale matchbook, no slip of paper with an address or a cryptic word in Latin scribbled on the back. Nothing at all that could give us any kind of clue. There might turn out to be fingerprints, but since we already knew who had been driving that didn’t seem very helpful.

I picked up the scanner and walked around to the rear of the van. Doakes was standing beside the open back door as the older paramedic finally got his partner onto his feet. I handed Doakes the scanner. “It was in the front seat,” I said. “He’s been listening.”

Doakes just glanced at it and put it down inside the back door of the van. Since he didn’t seem terribly chatty I asked, “Do you have any ideas about what we should do next?”

He looked at me and didn’t say anything and I looked back expectantly, and I suppose we could have stood like that until the pigeons began to nest on our heads, if it hadn’t been for the paramedics. “Okay, guys,” the senior one said, and we moved aside to let them get to Frank. The stocky paramedic seemed to be perfectly all right now, as if he was here to put a splint on a boy with a twisted ankle. His partner still looked quite unhappy, however, and even from six feet away I could hear his breathing.

I stood beside Doakes and watched them slide Frank onto the gurney and then wheel him away. When I looked back at Doakes he was staring at me again. Once more he gave me his very unpleasant smile. “Down to you and me,” he said. “And I don’t know about you.” He leaned against the battered white van and crossed his arms. I heard the paramedics slam the ambulance door, and a moment later the siren started up. “Just you and me,” Doakes said again, “and no more referee.”

“Is this more of your simple country wisdom?” I said, because here I was, having sacrificed an entire left shoe and a very nice bowling shirt, to say nothing of my hobby, Deborah’s collarbone, and a perfectly good motor-pool car-and there he stood without so much as a wrinkle in his shirt, making cryptically hostile remarks. Really, the man was too much.

“Don’t trust you,” he said.

I thought it was a very good sign that Sergeant Doakes was opening up to me by sharing his doubts and feelings. Still, I felt like I should try to keep him focused. “That doesn’t matter. We’re running out of time,” I said. “With Frank finished and delivered, Danco will start on Kyle now.”

He cocked his head to one side and then shook it slowly. “Don’t matter about Kyle,” he said. “Kyle knew what he was getting into. What matters is catching the Doctor.”

“Kyle matters to my sister,” I said. “That’s the only reason I’m here.”

Doakes nodded again. “Pretty good,” he said. “Could almost believe that.”

For some reason, it was then that I had an idea. I admit that Doakes was monumentally irritating-and it wasn’t just because he had kept me from my important personal research, although that was clearly bad enough. But now he was even critiquing my acting, which was beyond the boundaries of all civilized behavior. So perhaps irritation was the mother of invention; it doesn’t seem all that poetic, but there it is. In any case, a little door opened up in Dexter’s dusty cranium and a small light came shining out; a genuine piece of mental activity. Of course, Doakes might not think much of it, unless I could help him to see what a good idea it actually was, so I gave it a shot. I felt a little bit like Bugs Bunny trying to talk Elmer Fudd into something lethal, but the man had it coming. “Sergeant Doakes,” I said, “Deborah is my only family, and it is not right for you to question my commitment. Particularly,” I said, and I had to fight the urge to buff my fingernails, Bugs-style, “since so far you have not done doodley-squat.”

Whatever else he was, cold killer and all, Sergeant Doakes was apparently still capable of feeling emotion. Perhaps that was the big difference between us, the reason he tried to keep his white hat so firmly cemented to his head and fight against what should have been his own side. In any case, I could see a surge of anger flicker across his face, and deep down inside there was an almost audible growl from his interior shadow. “Doodley-squat,” he said. “That’s good, too.”

“Doodley-squat,” I said firmly. “Deborah and I have done all the legwork and taken all the risks, and you know it.”

For just a moment his jaw muscles popped straight out as if they were going to leap out of his face and strangle me, and the muted interior growl surged into a roar that echoed down to my Dark Passenger, which sat up and answered back, and we stood like that, our two giant shadows flexing and facing off invisibly in front of us.

Quite possibly, there might have been ripped flesh and pools of blood in the street if a squad car hadn’t chosen that moment to screech to a halt beside us and interrupt. A young cop jumped out and Doakes reflexively took out his badge and held it toward them without looking away from me. He made a shooing motion with his other hand, and the cop backed off and stuck his head into the car to consult with his partner.

“All right,” Sergeant Doakes said to me, “you got something in mind?”

It wasn’t really perfect. Bugs Bunny would have made him think of it himself, but it was good enough. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I do have an idea. But it’s a little risky.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Thought it might be.”

“If it’s too much for you, come up with something else,” I said. “But I think it’s all we can do.”

I could see him thinking it over. He knew I was baiting him, but there was just enough truth to what I had said, and enough pride or anger in him that he didn’t care.

“Let’s have it,” he said at last.

“Oscar got away,” I said.

“Looks like it.”

“That only leaves one person we can be sure Dr. Danco might be interested in,” I said, and I pointed right at his chest. “You.”

He didn’t actually flinch, but something twitched on his forehead and he forgot to breathe for a few seconds. Then he nodded slowly and took a deep breath. “Slick motherfucker,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” I admitted. “But I’m right, too.”

Doakes picked up the scanner radio and moved it to one side so he could sit on the open back gate of the van. “All right,” he said. “Keep talking.”

“First, I’m betting he’ll get another scanner,” I said, nodding at the one beside Doakes.

“Uh-huh.”

“So if we know he’s listening, we can let him hear what we want him to hear. Which is,” I said with my very best smile, “who you are, and where you are.”

“And who am I?” he said, and he didn’t seem impressed by my smile.

“You are the guy who set him up to get taken by the Cubans,” I said.

He studied me for a moment, then shook his head. “You really putting my pecker on the chopping block, huh?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “But you’re not worried, are you?”

“He got Kyle, no trouble.”

“You’ll know he’s coming,” I said. “Kyle didn’t. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be just a little bit better than Kyle at this kind of thing?”

It was shameless, totally transparent, but he went for it. “Yes, I am,” he said. “You’re a good ass-kisser, too.”

“No ass-kissing at all,” I said. “Just the plain, simple truth.”

Doakes looked at the scanner beside him. Then he looked up and away over the freeway. The streetlights made an orange flare off a drop of sweat that rolled across his forehead and down into one eye. He wiped at it unconsciously, still staring away over I-95. He had been staring at me without blinking for so long that it was a little bit unsettling to be in his presence and have him look somewhere else. It was almost like being invisible.

“All right,” he said as he looked back at me at last, and now the orange light was in his eyes. “Let’s do it.”