AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Okay,” I said. “But why is it my problem?” And it seemed like a very reasonable question to me, although to see his reaction you would have thought I wanted to fire bomb an elementary school.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and he shook his head in mock admiration. “You really are a piece of work, buddy.”
“Dexter,” Deborah said. “Look at us.” I did look, at Deb in her cast and Chutsky with his twin stumps. To be honest, they did not look terribly fierce. “We need your help,” she said.
“But Debs, really.”
“Please, Dexter,” she said, knowing full well that I found it very hard to refuse her when she used that word.
“Debs, come on,” I said. “You need an action hero, somebody who can kick down the door and storm in with guns blazing. I’m just a mild-mannered forensics geek.”
2 6 6
J E F F L I N D S A Y
She crossed the room and stood in front of me, inches away.
“I know what you are, Dexter,” she said softly. “Remember?
And I know you can do this.” She put her hand on my shoulder and lowered her voice even farther, almost whispering.
“Kyle needs this, Dex. Needs to catch Danco. Or he’ll never feel like a man again. That’s important to me. Please, Dexter?”
And after all, what can you do when the big guns come out? Except summon your reserves of goodwill and wave the white flag gracefully.
“All right, Debs,” I said.
Freedom is such a fragile, fleeting thing, isn’t it?
C H A P T E R 2 8
However reluctant i had been, i had given my word to help, and so poor Dutiful Dexter instantly attacked the problem with all the resourceful cunning of his powerful brain. But the sad truth was that my brain seemed to be off-line; no matter how diligently I typed in clues, nothing dropped into the out-box.
Of course it was possible that I needed more fuel to function at the highest possible level, so I wheedled Deborah into sending down for more Danish. While she was on the phone with room service Chutsky focused a sweaty, slightly glazed smile on me and said, “Let’s get to it, okay, buddy?” Since he asked so nicely—and after all, I had to do something while I waited for the Danish—I agreed.
The loss of his two limbs had removed some kind of psy-chic lock from Chutsky. In spite of being just a little bit shaky, he was far more open and friendly, and actually seemed eager to share information in a way that would have been unthinkable to the Chutsky with four complete limbs and a pair of ex-
2 6 8
J E F F L I N D S A Y
pensive sunglasses. And so out of what was really no more than an urge to be tidy and know as many details as possible, I took advantage of his new good cheer by getting the names of the El Salvador team from him.
He sat with a yellow legal pad balanced precariously on his knee, holding it still with his wrist while he scrawled the names with his right, and only, hand. “Manny Borges you know about,” he said.
“The first victim,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Chutsky said without looking up. He wrote the name and then drew a line through it. “And then there was Frank Aubrey?” He frowned and actually stuck the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he wrote and then crossed out. “He missed Oscar Acosta. God knows where he is now.” He wrote the name anyway and put a question mark beside it. “Wendell Ingraham. Lives on North Shore Drive, out on Miami Beach.” The pad slipped to the floor as he wrote the name, and he grabbed at it as it fell, missing badly. He stared at the pad where it lay for a moment, then leaned over and retrieved it. A drop of sweat rolled off his hairless head and onto the floor. “Fucking drugs,” he said. “Got me a little woozy.”
“Wendell Ingraham,” I said.
“Right. Right.” He scribbled the rest of the name and without pausing went on with, “Andy Lyle. Sells cars now, up in Davie.” And in a furious burst of energy he went right on and triumphantly scrawled the last name. “Two other guys dead, one guy still in the field, that’s it, the whole team.”
“Don’t any of these guys know Danco is in town?”
He shook his head. Another drop of sweat flew o
ff and nar-
