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Doakes just glared at me and grunted. Then he knelt beside Deborah and said, “You hurt?”
“Collarbone,” she said. “It’s broken.” The shock was wearing off rapidly and she was fighting the pain by biting her lip and taking ragged breaths. I hoped the paramedics had something a little more effective for her.
Doakes said nothing; he just lifted his glare up to me. Deborah reached out with her good arm and grabbed his arm.
“Doakes,” she said, and he looked back at her. “Find him,”
she said. He just watched her as she gritted her teeth and gasped through another wave of pain.
“Coming through here,” one of the paramedics said. He was a wiry young guy with a spiky haircut, and he and his older, thicker partner had maneuvered their gurney through the chain-link fence where Deb’s car had torn a gap. Doakes tried to stand to let them get to Deborah, but she pulled on his arm with surprising strength.
“Find him,” she said again. Doakes just nodded, but it was enough for her. Deborah let go of his arm and he stood up to 1 9 0
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give the paramedics room. They swooped in and gave Debs a once-over, and they moved her onto their gurney, raised it up, and began to wheel her toward the waiting ambulance. I watched her go, wondering what had happened to our dear friend in the white van. He had a flat tire—how far could he get? It seemed likely that he would try to switch to a different vehicle, rather than stop and call AAA to help him change the tire. So somewhere nearby, we would be very likely to find the abandoned van and a missing car.
Out of an impulse that seemed extremely generous, considering his attitude toward me, I moved over to tell Doakes my thoughts. But I only made it a step and a half in his direction when I heard a commotion coming our way. I turned to look.
Running at us up the middle of the street was a chunky middle-aged guy in a pair of boxer shorts and nothing else.
His belly hung over the band of his shorts and wobbled wildly as he came and it was clear that he had not had much practice at running, and he made it harder on himself by waving his arms around over his head and shouting, “Hey! Hey!
Hey!” as he ran. By the time he crossed the ramp from I-95
and got to us he was breathless, gasping too hard to say anything coherent, but I had a pretty good idea what he wanted to say.
“De bang,” he gasped out, and I realized that his breathlessness and his Cuban accent had combined, and he was trying to say, “The van.”
“A white van? With a flat tire? And your car is gone,” I said, and Doakes looked at me.
But the gasping man was shaking his head. “White van, sure. I hear I thought it’s a dog inside, maybe hurt,” he said, D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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and paused to breath deeply so he could properly convey the full horror of what he had seen. “And then—”
But he was wasting his precious breath. Doakes and I were already sprinting up the street in the direction he had come from.
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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 D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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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 remain-der 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.
