by Jeff Lindsay
The phone on top of the clothing began to ring.
“Oh, well,” I said. I pushed disconnect and went to get Chutsky.
He was right where I had left him, although he looked like he would have run away if he could have. “Come on, for Christ’s sake, hurry up,” he said. “Jesus, I can almost feel his breath on my neck.” He twisted his head to the back door and then over to the kitchen and, as I reached to support him, he turned and his eyes snapped onto the mirror that hung on the wall.
For a long moment he stared at his reflection and then he slumped as if all the bones had been pulled out of him. “Jesus,” he said, and he started to weep again. “Oh, Jesus.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”
Chutsky shuddered and shook his head. “I couldn’t even move, just lying there listening to what he was doing to Frank. He sounded so happy—‘What’s your guess? No? All right, then—an arm.’ And then the sound of the saw, and—”
“Chutsky,” I said.
“And then when he got me up there and he said, ‘Seven,’
and ‘What’s your guess.’ And then—”
It’s always interesting to hear about someone else’s technique, of course, but Chutsky seemed like he was about to lose whatever control he had left, and I could not afford to let him snuffle all over the other side of my shirt. So I stepped close and grabbed him by the good arm. “Chutsky. Come on.
Let’s get out of here,” I said.
He looked at me like he didn’t know where he was, eyes as wide as they could go, and then turned back to the mirror.
“Oh Jesus,” he said. Then he took a deep and ragged breath 2 4 2
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and stood up as if he was responding to an imaginary bugle.
“Not so bad,” he said. “I’m alive.”
“Yes, you are,” I said. “And if we can get moving we might both stay that way.”
“Right,” he said. He turned his head away from the mirror decisively and put his good arm around my shoulder.
“Let’s go.”
Chutsky had obviously not had a great deal of experience at walking with only one leg, but he huffed and clumped along, leaning heavily on me between each hopping step.
Even with the missing parts, he was still a big man, and it was hard work for me. Just before the bridge he paused for a moment and looked through the chain-link fence. “He threw my leg in there,” he said, “to the alligators. He made sure I was watching. He held it up so I could see it and then he threw it in and the water started to boil like . . .” I could hear a rising note of hysteria in his voice, but he heard it, too, and stopped, inhaled shakily, and said, somewhat roughly, “All right. Let’s get out of here.”
We made it back to the gate with no more side trips down memory lane, and Chutsky leaned on a fence post while I got the gate open. Then I hopped him around to the passenger seat, climbed in behind the wheel, and started the car. As the headlights flicked on, Chutsky leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “Thanks, buddy,” he said. “I owe you big-time. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. I turned the car around and headed back toward Alligator Alley. I thought Chutsky had fallen asleep, but halfway along the little dirt road he began to talk.
“I’m glad your sister wasn’t here,” he said. “To see me like D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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this. It’s— Listen, I really have to pull myself together before—” He stopped abruptly and didn’t say anything for half a minute. We bumped along the dark road in silence. The quiet was a pleasant change. I wondered where Doakes was and what he was doing. Or perhaps, what was being done to him. For that matter, I wondered where Reiker was and how soon I could take him somewhere else. Someplace quiet, where I could contemplate and work in peace. I wondered what the rent might be on the Blalock Gator Farm.
“Might be a good idea if I don’t bother her anymore,”
Chutsky said suddenly, and it took me a moment to realize he was still talking about Deborah. “She’s not going to want anything to do with me the way I am now, and I don’t need anybody’s pity.”
“Nothing to worry about,” I said. “Deborah is completely without pity.”
“You tell her I’m fine, and I went back to Washington,” he said. “It’s better that way.”
“It might be better for you,” I said. “But she’ll kill me.”
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“No, you don’t understand. She told me to get you back.
She’s made up her mind and I don’t dare disobey. She hits very hard.”
He was silent for a while. Then I heard him sigh heavily. “I just don’t know if I can do this,” he said.
“I could take you back to the gator farm,” I said cheerfully.
He didn’t say anything after that, and I pulled onto Alligator Alley, made the first U-turn, and headed back toward the orange glow of light on the horizon that was Miami.
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We rode in silence all the way back to the first real clump of civilization, a housing development and a row of strip malls on the right, a few miles past the toll booth. Then Chutsky sat up and stared out at the lights and the buildings. “I have to use a phone,” he said.
“You can use my phone, if you’ll pay the roaming charges,”
I said.
“I need a land line,” he said. “A pay phone.”
“You’re out of touch with the times,” I said. “A pay phone might be a little hard to find. Nobody uses them anymore.”
“Take this exit here,” he said, and although it was not getting me any closer to my well-earned good night’s sleep, I drove down the off-ramp. Within a mile we found a mini-mart that still had a pay phone stuck to the wall beside the front door. I helped Chutsky hop over to the phone and he leaned up against the shield around it and lifted the receiver.
He glanced at me and said, “Wait over there,” which seemed a little bit bossy for somebody who couldn’t even walk unas-
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sisted, but I went back to my car and sat on the hood while Chutsky chatted.
An ancient Buick chugged into the parking spot next to me.
A group of short, dark-skinned men in dirty clothes got out and walked toward the store. They stared at Chutsky standing there on one leg with his head so very shaved, but they were too polite to say anything. They went in and the glass door whooshed behind them and I felt the long day rolling over me; I was tired, my neck muscles felt stiff, and I hadn’t gotten to kill anything. I felt very cranky, and I wanted to go home and go to bed.
I wondered where Dr. Danco had taken Doakes. It didn’t really seem important, just idle curiosity. But as I thought about the fact that he had indeed taken him somewhere and would soon begin doing rather permanent things to the sergeant, I realized that this was the first good news I’d had in a long time, and I felt a warm glow spread through me. I was free. Doakes was gone. One small piece at a time he was leaving my life and releasing me from the involuntary servitude of Rita’s couch. I could live again.
“Hey, buddy,” Chutsky called. He waved the stump of his left arm at me and I stood up and walked over to him. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
“Of course,” I said. “Going where?”
He looked off in the distance and I could see the muscles along the side of his jaw tighten. The security lights of the mini-mart’s parking lot lit up his coveralls and gleamed off his head. It’s amazing how different a face looks if you shave off the eyebrows. There’s something freakish to it, like the makeup in a low-budget science-fiction movie, and so even though Chutsky should have looked tough and decisive as he 2 4 6
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stared at the horizon and clenched his jaw, he instead looked like he was waiting for a blood-curdling command from Ming the Merciless. But he just said, “Take
me back to my hotel, buddy. I got work to do.”
“What about a hospital?” I asked, thinking that he couldn’t be expected to cut a walking stick from a sturdy yew tree and stump on down the trail. But he shook his head.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”
I looked pointedly at the two patches of white gauze where his arm and leg used to be and raised an eyebrow. After all, the wounds were still fresh enough to be bandaged, and at the very least Chutsky had to be feeling somewhat weak.
He looked down at his two stumps, and he did seem to slump just a little and become slightly smaller for a moment.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, and he straightened up a bit. “Let’s get going.” And he seemed so tired and sad that I didn’t have the heart to say anything except, “All right.”
He hopped back to the passenger door of my car, leaning on my shoulder, and as I helped ease him into the seat the passengers of the old Buick trooped out carrying beer and pork rinds. The driver smiled and nodded at me. I smiled back and closed the door. “Crocodilios,” I said, nodding at Chutsky.
“Ah,” the driver said back. “Lo siento.” He got behind the wheel of his car, and I walked around to get into mine.
Chutsky had nothing at all to say for most of the drive.
Right after the interchange onto I-95, however, he began to tremble badly. “Oh fuck,” he said. I looked over at him. “The drugs,” he said. “Wearing off.” His teeth began to chatter and he snapped them shut. His breath hissed out and I could see sweat begin to form on his bald face.
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“Would you like to reconsider the hospital?” I asked.
“Do you have anything to drink?” he asked, a rather abrupt change of subject, I thought.
“I think there’s a bottle of water in the backseat,” I said helpfully.
“Drink,” he repeated. “Some vodka, or whiskey.”
“I don’t generally keep any in the car,” I said.
“Fuck,” he said. “Just get me to my hotel.”
I did that. For reasons known only to Chutsky, he was staying at the Mutiny in Coconut Grove. It had been one of the first luxury high-rise hotels in the area and had once been frequented by models, directors, drug runners, and other celebrities. It was still very nice, but it had lost a little bit of its cachet as the once-rustic Grove became overrun with luxury high-rises. Perhaps Chutsky had known it in its heyday and stayed there now for sentimental reasons. You really had to be deeply suspicious of sentimentality in a man who had worn a pinkie ring.
We came down off 95 onto Dixie Highway, and I turned left on Unity and rolled on down to Bayshore. The Mutiny was a little ways ahead on the right, and I pulled up in front of the hotel. “Just drop me here,” Chutsky said.
I stared at him. Perhaps the drugs had affected his mind.
“Don’t you want me to help you up to your room?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. That may have been his new mantra, but he didn’t look fine. He was sweating heavily now and I could not imagine how he thought he would get up to his room. But I am not the kind of person who would ever in-trude with unwanted help, so I simply said, “All right,” and watched as he opened the door and got out. He held on to the roof of the car and stood unsteadily on his one leg for a 2 4 8
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minute before the bell captain saw him swaying there. The captain frowned at this apparition with the orange jumpsuit and the gleaming skull. “Hey, Benny,” Chutsky said. “Gimme a hand, buddy.”
“Mr. Chutsky?” he said dubiously, and then his jaw dropped as he noticed the missing parts. “Oh, Lord,” he said.
He clapped his hands three times and a bellboy ran out.
Chutsky looked back at me. “I’ll be fine,” he said.
And really, when you’re not wanted there’s not much you can do except leave, which is what I did. The last I saw of Chutsky he was leaning on the bell captain as the bellboy pushed a wheelchair toward them out the front door of the hotel.
It was still a little bit shy of midnight as I drove down Main Highway and headed for home, which was hard to believe considering all that had happened tonight. Vince’s party seemed like several weeks ago, and yet he probably hadn’t even unplugged his fruit-punch fountain yet. Between my Trial by Stripper and rescuing Chutsky from the gator farm, I had earned my rest tonight, and I admit that I was thinking of little else except crawling into my bed and pulling the covers over my head.
But of course, there’s no rest for the wicked, which I certainly am. My cell phone rang as I turned left on Douglas.
Very few people call me, especially this late at night. I glanced at the phone; it was Deborah.
“Greetings, sister dear,” I said.
“You asshole, you said you’d call!” she said.
“It seemed a little late,” I said.
“Did you really think I could fucking SLEEP? !” she yelled, D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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loud enough to cause pain to people in passing cars. “What happened?”
“I got Chutsky back,” I said. “But Dr. Danco got away. With Doakes.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know, Debs, he got away in an airboat and—”
“Kyle, you idiot. Where is Kyle? Is he all right?”
“I dropped him at the Mutiny. He’s, um . . . He’s almost all right,” I said.
“What the fuck does that mean?!?” she screamed at me, and I had to switch my phone to the other ear.
“Deborah, he’s going to be okay. He’s just—he lost half of his left arm and half the right leg. And all his hair,” I said. She was quiet for several seconds.
“Bring me some clothes,” she said at last.
“He’s feeling very uncertain, Debs. I don’t think he wants—”
“Clothes, Dexter. Now,” she said, and she hung up.
As I said, no rest for the wicked. I sighed heavily at the in-justice of it all, but I obeyed. I was almost back to my apartment, and Deborah had left some things there. So I ran in and, although I paused to look longingly at my bed, I gathered a change of clothing for her and headed for the hospital.
Deborah was sitting on the edge of her bed tapping her feet impatiently when I came in. She held her hospital gown closed with the hand that protruded from her cast, and clutched her gun and badge with the other. She looked like Avenging Fury after an accident.
“Jesus Christ,” she said, “where the hell have you been?
Help me get dressed.” She dropped her gown and stood up.
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I pulled a polo shirt over her head, working it awkwardly around the cast. We just barely had the shirt in place when a stout woman in a nurse’s uniform hurried into the room.
“What you think you’re doing?” she said in a thick Bahamian accent.
“Leaving,” Deborah said.
“Get back in that bed or I will call doctor,” the nurse said.
“Call him,” Deborah said, now hopping on one foot as she struggled into her pants.
“No you don’t,” the nurse said. “You get back in the bed.”
Deborah held up her shield. “This is a police emergency,”
she said. “If you impede me I am authorized to arrest you for obstruction of justice.”
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, D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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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 dif-ficulty 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.
