Double Dexter

ELEVEN

I was just sitting down to dinner that night when my cell phone began to chime. It was leftover night, which was not a bad thing at our house, since it allowed me to sample two or three of Rita s tasty concoctions at one sitting, and I stared at the phone for several seconds and thought very hard about the last piece of Rita s Tropical Chicken sitting there on the platter before I finally picked up my phone and answered.

It s me, Deborah said. I need a favor.

Of course you do, I said, looking at Cody as he pulled a large helping of Thai noodles out of the serving dish.

But does it have to be right now?

Debs made a sound somewhere between a hiss and a grunt. Ow. Yeah, it does. Can you pick up Nicholas from day care? she said. Her son, Nicholas, was enrolled at a Montessori day-care center in the Gables, although I was reasonably sure he was too young to count beads. I had wondered whether I should be doing the same for Lily Anne, but Rita had pooh-poohed the idea. She said it was a waste of money until a child was two or three years old.

For Deborah, though, nothing was too good for her little boy, so she cheerfully shelled out the hefty fee for the school. And she had never been late to pick him up, no matter how pressing her workload but here it was, almost seven o clock, and Nicholas was still waiting for Mommy. Clearly something unusual was afoot, and her voice sounded strained not angry and tense as it had been earlier, but not quite right, either.

Um, sure, I guess I can get him, I said. What s up with you?

She made the hiss-grunt sound again and said, Uhnk. Damn it, in a kind of hoarse mutter, before going on in a more normal voice, I m in the hospital.

What? I said. Why, what s wrong? I had an alarming vision of her as I had seen her in her last visit to the hospital, an ER trip that had lasted for several days as she lay near death from a knife wound.

It s no big deal, she said, and there was strain in her voice, as well as fatigue. It s just a broken arm. I just I m going to be here for a while and I can t get Nicholas in time.

How did you break your arm? I asked.

Hammer, she said. I gotta go can you pick him up, Dex? Please?

A hammer? For God s sake, Deborah, what

Dexter, I gotta go, she said. Can you get Nicholas?

I ll get him, I said. But what

Thanks. I really appreciate it. Bye, she said, and she hung up.

I put down my phone and saw that the whole family was staring at me. Set one more high chair for dinner, I said.

And save me that chicken breast.

They did save me the chicken, but it was very cold by the time I got back to the house with Nicholas, and all the Thai noodles were gone. Rita immediately grabbed Nicholas from me and took him away to the changing table, cooing at him, and Astor trailed along behind to watch. I d had no further calls from Deborah, and I still had no idea how she had managed to break her arm with a hammer. But I could only think of one hammer in the news this week, so I had a very strong suspicion that she had somehow caught our psychotic club-hammer killer.

It didn t really make sense. The ID on the fingerprint could not have come back yet there was no way it could have worked its way through all the layers of ossified bureaucracy in just a few hours but as far as I knew that was the only lead. Besides, she would never do something insanely risky without me along to take the hit for her, and cornering a homicidal psycho with a hammer certainly fit in the category of risky.

Of course, she d never had a partner she really trusted to back her up before, and she seemed to be bonding with Alex Duarte, probably in French. And she was certainly free to work with her new partner instead of with me. Nothing could be more natural it was even suggested by regulation, and it didn t bother me, not in the slightest. Let Duarte stick his neck in the noose instead of me. To be perfectly frank, I was a little bit tired of being her sidekick on every single perilous bust, and it was high time she stood up on her own two feet and stopped leaning on me.

After Rita put the children to bed, she sat beside me for a little while, until she began to yawn hugely. Very shortly afterward, she gave me a peck on the cheek and tottered off to bed herself. I stayed up with Nicholas, waiting for Deborah to come and claim him. He was not a bad baby, not at all, but he didn t seem nearly as clever as Lily Anne. His little blue eyes didn t have the same intelligent gleam in them, and it seemed to me that, from a purely objective point of view, his motor skills were not as advanced as hers had been at the same age. Maybe there was nothing to the Montessori thing after all. Or maybe he was just a slow learner and there was really nothing actually wrong with that. After all, perfection is far from universal, and there could be only one Lily Anne. Nicholas was still my nephew, and allowances must be made for children less gifted.

So I sat on the couch with Nicholas in chummy silence after everyone else went to bed. I fed him a bottle, and then shortly after that I changed his diaper. As soon as I took off the wet one, he began to pee straight up into the air, and it took all my considerable skill to dodge the stream. But I got him safely rediapered and, thinking that the soothing drone from the TV might encourage him to fall asleep, I turned on the set and sat back down on the couch with him.

And there was Deborah, all over the TV screen, accompanied by flashing lights and the urgent, ultraserious voice-over of the local news anchor. The picture showed my sister cradling her left arm as the emergency med techs helped her onto a stretcher and slapped an inflatable cast on her arm. She was talking the whole time to Duarte, clearly giving him orders on something or other, while he nodded and patted her on the uninjured shoulder.

And as the anchor finished a horrible, run-on sentence about Deborah s true grit and heroism, even pronouncing her name correctly, the picture made a jump cut to another gurney as two uniformed cops followed it into the ambulance. On this stretcher a large, square-faced man strained against his bonds. His shoulder and stomach were seeping blood, and he was shouting something that sounded obscene, even without sound. Then two studio portraits appeared on the screen, Klein and Gunther, side by side in their formal pictures. The anchor s voice got very somber, and he promised to keep me updated as the story developed. And in spite of the way I felt about TV newspeople, I had to admit that this was a lot more than my sister had done.

Of course, there was no reason she should update me. She was not her Dexter s keeper, and if she was finally beginning to realize that, so much the better. So I was completely content, not at all miffed with my sister, when she showed up at last to claim her child. It was almost midnight when she finally arrived, and Nicholas and I had watched several more news bulletins, and then the lead story on the late news itself, all pretty much repeating that first tiresome bulletin. Heroic officer injured while catching cop killer. Ho-hum. Nicholas showed no sign of recognizing his mother when she appeared on television. I was quite certain that Lily Anne would have known me, whether on TV or anywhere else, but that did not necessarily mean there was anything actually wrong with the boy.

In any case, Nicholas seemed glad enough to see Debs in person when I opened the front door and let her in. The poor child didn t know yet that he couldn t fly, and he tried to wing his way out of my arms and into hers. I fumbled and clutched and almost dropped him, and Deborah grabbed him awkwardly into a tight grip with her one good arm. The other, her left, was in a cast and hung from a sling.

Well, I said. I m surprised to see you in public without an agent.

Deborah was nose-to-nose with Nicholas and talking nonsense syllables to him in a soft voice while he chuckled and squeezed her nose. She looked up at me, still smiling. What the hell does that mean? she said.

You re all over the TV, I told her.

The network s biggest new star. Heroic detective sacrificing her limbs to catch psychotic cop killer.

She made a frustrated face. Shit, she said, apparently unconcerned about corrupting the morals of young Nicholas with potty talk. The goddamned reporters wanted interviews, and pictures, and a fucking bio they re everywhere, even in the ER.

It s pretty big news, I said. The guy was making everybody very jumpy. Are you sure you got the right psycho?

Yeah, it s him, she said happily.

Richard Kovasik. No question about it. She nuzzled Nicholas again.

How did you find him? I said.

Oh, she said without looking up. I got a match back from IAFIS. You know, on the fingerprint.

I blinked, and for a moment I couldn t think of a single thing to say. In fact, what she d said was so unlikely that I found it very hard to remember how to speak at all. That s not possible, I blurted out at last. You can t get a match on a partial in six hours.

Oh, well, she said. I pulled a few strings.

Deborah, it s a national database. There aren t any strings to pull.

She shrugged, still smiling at Nicholas. Yeah, well, I had one, she said. I called a friend of Chutsky s, inside the Beltway. He got them to hustle it through for me.

Oh, I said, which I admit was not terribly witty, but it was just about all I could come up with under the circumstances. And it added up; Chutsky, her departed boyfriend, had many connections in all the Washington organizations with three letters for their names. And, um, you re absolutely positive it s the right guy?

Oh, yeah, no question, she said. There were a couple of possible matches, you know it was just a partial print but Kovasik was the only one with a history of psychotic violence, so it was kind of a no-brainer. And he even works for a building demolition company up in Opa-locka, so the hammer s a match, too.

You took him down at his job? I said.

She smiled, half at the memory of the arrest and half at Nicholas, who was doing nothing more interesting than staring at her with adoration. Yeah, she said, touching the baby s nose with her finger. Right across the street from Benny s.

What were you doing at Benny s? I said.

Oh, she said without looking up. It s almost five o clock, and we got the match on the print, but he s listed as transient, and we got no place to look for the guy. Kovasik, she added, in case I had already forgotten the name.

Okay, I said, brilliantly concealing my impatience.

So Duarte is like, Five o clock, let s stop for a beer. She made a face. Which is a little hard-core for me, but he s the first partner I ve had that I can stand.

I noticed, I said. He seems very nice.

She snorted; Nicholas flinched a little at the sound, and she cooed at him for a second. He s not nice, she said. But I can work with him. So I say fine, and we stop for a beer at Benny s.

That explains it, I said. And it did; Benny s was one of those bars that was unofficially For Cops Only, the kind of place that would make you very uncomfortable if you wandered in without a badge. A lot of cops stopped there on their way home from work, and some of them had even been known to pop in for a quick unauthorized snort during working hours a stop that would never be logged in. If Klein and Gunther had gone to Benny s right before they were killed, it would explain why there was no record of where they had been when they were killed.

So we pull up in front, she said, and there s this taco wagon parked across the street. And I don t even think about it until I hear this kind of boom from the old office building over there. And then I look again and I see the sign, Tacos, and I think, No fucking way.

I was a little bit irritated. It was very late, and either I was too tired to follow her story, or it really wasn t making sense. Debs, is this going somewhere? I said, trying not to sound as peevish as I felt.

A boom, Dexter, she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Like from a hammer. Hitting a wall? She raised her eyebrows at me. Because they are tearing out the insides of the building across the street from Benny s, she said. With hammers and a taco wagon out front. And at last I began to understand.

No way, I said.

She nodded her head firmly. Way, she said.

Totally way. They got a couple of guys working in there, ripping out the walls, and they are using these big hammers.

Club hammers, I said, remembering what Vince had called them.

Whatever, Deborah said. So Duarte and I go over there, just thinking it s totally impossible but we gotta check it out? And I barely get my badge out when this guy just goes nuts and comes at me with his hammer. I shoot him twice and the son of a bitch still swings the goddamned thing and gets me on the arm. She closed her eyes and leaned against the doorframe.

Two slugs in him and he would have swung it again and crushed my head if Duarte hadn t Tasered him.

Nicholas said something that sounded like, Blub-blub, and Deborah straightened and shifted her baby s weight awkwardly in her arm.

I looked at my sister, so tired and yet so happy, and I admit I felt a little envious. And the whole thing still seemed unreal and incomplete to me, and I couldn t really believe it had happened without me. It was as if I had put only one word in a crossword puzzle and someone else finished it when I turned my back. Even more embarrassing, I actually felt a little bit guilty that I hadn t been there, even though I wasn t invited. Debs had been in danger without me, and that felt wrong. Completely stupid and irrational, not at all like me, but there it was.

So is the guy going to live? I said, thinking it would be a shame if he did.

Shit, yes, they even had to sedate him, Deborah said. Unbelievably strong, doesn t feel pain if Alex hadn t gotten the cuffs on him right away he would have hit me again. And he shook off the Taser in, like, three seconds. A total psycho. And with a smile of tired fulfillment, she hugged Nicholas tighter, pushing his little face into her neck.

But he s locked up safe and sound, and it s over. It s him. I got him, she said, and she rocked the baby back and forth gently. Mommy got the bad guy, she said again, more musically this time, like it was part of a lullaby for Nicholas.

Well, I said, and I realized that it was at least the third time I d said well since Deborah arrived. Was I really so flustered that I couldn t even manage basic conversation? You caught the Hammer Killer. Congratulations, sis.

Yeah, thanks, she said, and then she frowned and shook her head. Now if I can only make it through the next couple of days.

It might have been that the painkillers were making her incoherent, but I didn t know what she meant. Is your arm painful? I said.

This? she said, holding up the cast. I ve had worse. She shrugged and then made a terrible face. No. It s Matthews, she said. Fucking reporters are making a big deal of it, and Matthews is ordering me to play along because it s fucking great PR. She sighed heavily, and Nicholas said, Blat! quite distinctly and hit his mother s nose. She nuzzled him again and said, I fucking hate that shit.

Oh. Of course, I said, and now it made sense. Deborah was totally inept with public relations, departmental politics, routine ass kissing, and any aspect of police work that didn t involve finding or shooting bad guys. If she d been even half-good at dealing with people, she d probably already be Division Chief at the least. But she wasn t, and here she was again in the middle of a situation that called for fake smiles and bullshitting, two talents that were as alien to her as a Klingon mating dance. Clearly she needed a warning from someone who knew the steps. Since Nicholas couldn t even say his own name, that left me.

Well, I said cautiously, you re probably going to be in the spotlight for a couple of days.

Yeah, I know, she said. Lucky me.

It wouldn t hurt to play the game a little, Debs, I said, and I admit that I was getting a little cranky now, too. You know the right words: The entire Miami-Dade team did outstanding work in their tireless effort to apprehend this suspect

Fuck it, Dex, she snapped. You know I can t do that kind of crap. They want me to smile at the camera and tell the whole fucking world how great I am, and I never could do that shit and you know it.

I did know it, but I also knew that she would have to try again, which meant she was probably in for a couple of rough days. But before I could think of something really smart to say on the subject, Nicholas began to bounce again and say, Ba ba ba ba! Deborah looked at him with a tired smile and then back at me. Anyway, I d better get my little buddy to bed. Thanks for picking him up, Dex.

Dexter s Day Care, I said. We never close.

I ll see you at work, she said. Thanks again. And then she turned for the door. I had to open it for her, since she only had one good arm and that was full of Nicholas. Thanks, she said again a third time in less than a minute, which was certainly a record for her.

Deborah trudged to her car, looking as tired as I had ever seen her, and I watched as Duarte climbed out from behind the wheel and opened the back door for her. She fumbled Nicholas into a car seat, and Duarte held the passenger door as she got in. Then he closed it, nodded to me, and climbed in behind the wheel.

I watched as they drove away. The whole world thought Debs was wonderful right now because they believed she had caught a dangerous killer, and all she wanted was to get on with catching the next one. I wished she could learn to exploit a moment like this, but I knew she never would. She was tough and smart and efficient, but she would never learn to lie with a straight face, which was a real killer for any career.

I also had a niggling little feeling that at some point in the next few days she would need a little PR skill, and since she didn t have any, that would make it a case for the public relations firm of Dexter and Dexter, Spin Doctors to the Stars.

Naturally it always ended up being my problem, no matter how much it actually wasn t. I sighed, watched as Deborah s car disappeared around the corner, and then I locked the door and went to bed.