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“Well,” I told him with my customary lighthearted touch, “perhaps I’ll think of a way to merge them.” And I thought happily of sending a troop of drogas after Anderson. A happy ending for all—he would even get a hero’s funeral, which was certainly a great deal more than he deserved. “But, Brian—I don’t know how much good I am out of jail. I mean—I can’t risk carrying a weapon of any kind. And that’s…Seriously, what’s the plan?”
Brian said nothing, just finished off his coffee, and to my mind he looked a little bit shifty, as if he hoped his ostentatious coffee swallowing would distract me and I wouldn’t remember what I’d asked him.
It didn’t work. He put down the cup, looked vaguely out the window.
“Brian,” I said, a little testy, “you do have some kind of plan, don’t you?”
He looked back at me, hesitated, and then shrugged. “To be perfectly honest,” he said, “I was hoping something might occur to us.”
I noticed that he said us, and that was almost as irritating as his notion of winging it when pursued by a horde of assassins. “All this time, nothing has occurred to you?” I said.
“One thing did,” he said, trying hard for a tone of injured righteousness. “I got you out.”
I felt myself grinding my teeth together at the realization that, just like Deborah, Brian had decided that when the going gets tough, the tough get Dexter—and then they make him do all the work. “This is my problem?” I said with some heat. “I’m supposed to figure out how to keep us both alive?”
“Well,” he said. “I mean, you had a much better education.”
“Yes, but he’s your drug lord,” I said, and I realized that he’d succeeded in knocking away my cool control and I was speaking much too loudly. I lowered my voice. “I don’t know the first thing about these people, Brian,” I said. “Not what they’re likely to do, or how they’ll do it, or—Nothing at all. How am I even supposed to
find them?”
“Oh, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Brian said soothingly. “I’m quite sure they’ll find us.”
For some reason, I could not find any comfort in that. “Wonderful,” I said. “And I can assume they know what they’re doing, of course.”
“Of course,” he said happily. “Some of them are very good, too.” He smiled, and even though it was the closest to a real smile I’d ever seen from Brian, the effect was spoiled somewhat by the bright pink, blue, and green sprinkles stuck to his teeth. “Let’s just hope we’re a little better,” he said.
I ground my teeth some more. It didn’t actually do any good, but it was probably better than leaping across the tabletop and sinking my canines into Brian’s neck. “All right,” I said. “So your wonderful plan is to wait until they come after us, and then be better than them.”
“A little oversimplified,” he said. “But accurate.”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. When I opened my eyes again, Brian was looking at me with a happy little smirk on his face. “How will they do it?” I asked him. “I mean, if it won’t spoil your plan to tell me.”
“Oh, not at all,” he said. “I know how Raul thinks—I mean, I ran so many of these little errands for him, and he got very specific most of the time.” He nodded, and at least he lost the smirk. “He hasn’t found me yet, and he is not a patient man. So his first move will be to try to frighten me so I’ll do something silly and become visible.”
“Frighten you with something like killing Octavio, and dumping him in a room you got with that credit card?” I asked.
“Mmmm, maybe,” Brian said thoughtfully. “Of course, he wanted to kill Octavio anyway, and…You know, I was really looking for something a little splashier.”
“And if we survive the splash?” I asked.
“Then we watch for his men,” he said. “Whatever they do, they’ll be very close, watching for us. We find them first.”
I sighed again, wondering whether Brian really believed it would be that simple. “All right, fine, we wait,” I said. At least I could do that without too much effort. And in the meantime…“I can use the time to try to stay out of jail.”
“Oh, certainly,” he said. “You do what you must. When something happens, I’ll call you.” He hesitated slightly, and then, looking a little uneasy, he added, “But do watch your back, brother.”
“I plan to,” I said.
He nodded. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
“The whole case against me is pure fiction, made up by Anderson,” I said. “If I can find something to show he tampered with evidence—”
“He did tamper, didn’t he?” Brian asked.
“Only when he didn’t just invent it,” I said. “So I thought I would have a quiet chat with Vince Masuoka.”
Brian nodded. “That would certainly be a good place to start,” he said. “He seemed very…indignant?”
