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“It means,” I said, “that they were assassins, drogas, that Kraunauer called in to kill us, but we killed them first.”
“Who’s we?” she snapped at me, and I realized that in my eagerness to be honest I had just made a very grave error. Whoever claimed honesty is the best policy, or even a good one, clearly had very limited experience with the real world.
I had always been very careful to keep all knowledge of Brian from Deborah. Quite natural, since the one time they’d met Brian had abducted her and taped her to a worktable for slow and careful dissection. And my brother, being no fool, had worked even harder to avoid running into Debs, since he reasoned, rather soundly, I think, that the kind of first encounter they’d had is usually quite memorable, and she was, after all, a cop. So Debs did not know Brian was even alive, let alone working with me. I was on the very edge of letting an extremely slippery cat out of the bag, and there was no way to predict which way the thing would run if I let it out the rest of the way. Deborah might fly into a violent and possibly justified rage, and decide to arrest Brian. And that, of course, might nudge Brian in the direction of even more serious action, something a little more permanent than anger. That would be very awkward for everyone involved, and especially me, since I would be jammed squarely in the middle, pushing the two of them apart and chanting, Why can’t we all just get along? I certainly didn’t want to be forced to choose between the two of them. And in all honesty, I had no idea which way that choice would go.
On top of everything else, I needed all the help I could get if I was to have any chance at all of retrieving my kids. The odds were already formidable, and one more steady hand with a motivated gun in it would make a very big difference. Somehow, some way, Debs had to accept Brian, and vice versa. They had to work together, with me, or there was simply no hope for any of us, especially the children.
And it had to be done quickly, too. I looked at my watch: a little after two a.m. If we started right now, we could hit Raul just before dawn, the ideal time for it. If we delayed, arguing about who did what to whom so many years ago, it would be daylight before we got there, and they would see us coming from three miles away.
“There’s no time for this, Debs,” I said firmly. “Stay put. We’re on our way to get you.”
“Goddamn it, who’s we?!” she was yelling when I hung up.
I put my phone away and turned back to the storage unit, and I paused as I realized the job I had in front of me now. It was a daunting task, right enough, and if I had thought Debs was going to be difficult to convince, Brian would be twice as hard. If I had any hope of persuading him to accept her I would need all the tongues of men and angels. At the moment I only had one.
I sighed heavily, and not merely because I realized I was wishing for more tongues. Somehow, a relatively simple and logical proposition—let’s do this together—had begun to seem like it would be harder and more dangerous than the real task at hand, rescuing the kids from a bevy of heavily armed drogas. Still, it is usually best to take care of the hard jobs first. So I strode manfully back into the storage unit to face my brother.
Brian was standing beside his work chair, looking fondly down at the ruin that was Ivan. The bomber was still alive, since we had to be sure he’d told us everything. Alive—but he didn’t look like he was completely sure that this was a good thing at this point. There were so many little parts of him that he would never see again—insignificant parts, perhaps, if taken one at a time. And actually, they had been taken one at a time, and very carefully, too. But there were a great many of them, and they were gone forever, and at some point the dear boy would have to add them up and ask himself if it was really worth going on without them.
It would have been very pleasant just to stand next to my brother and enjoy what we had done together—or perhaps undone is more accurate, considering the state of Ee-bahng as he lay in fragmented repose. But there was too much to do, and most of it was very time-sensitive, as well as unpleasant. So I girded my loins, stepped over to Brian with a firm stride, and said, “Brian. We have to go meet somebody. Now.”
“Really?” he said, in a voice so unhurried and even mellow that it was nearly indecent. “Who, pray tell?”
“Deborah,” I said.
Brian snapped to attention as if he was dangling from puppet strings and somebody had yanked them tight. All traces of mellow afterglow were gone as if they’d never been. “What? No, of course not,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “Completely out of the question.”
“We need her help,” I said.
He hadn’t stopped shaking his head. “No, ridiculous, she’d arrest me or something,” he said. “And we didn’t need her help with Ivan.”
“This is very different.”
“What is? What is different? I mean, different how?” he said, piling word on word with a brittle and worried energy I’d never seen from him before. “There is no reason to…to—She’s a cop, Dexter, and she has no reason to like me, you know. And she would completely…I mean, why on earth do we need her? She’s not actually one of us, you know.”
“Brian,” I said, cutting off his manic monologue. “You do remember why we’re here? With Ivan?”
“But that has nothing to—Oh, yes, I know, but…really, brother,” he said. “Even so, what can she possibly do? That you and I can’t do better without her?”
“We will need every gun we can get,” I said. “And we are not likely to pick up any other volunteers.”
“But she’s a cop,” he repeated, and in the interest of full disclosure I have to say he sounded just a little whiny. “And if we do this, we are breaking all kinds of laws.”
“She’s also a very good shot,” I said. “And these are her kids, too. She’ll do whatever it takes to get them back. Including shooting a couple of illegal immigrants who grabbed them.”
“But…but, Dexter,” he said, completely whiny now. “She’ll remember me.”
“Almost certainly,” I said.
“And when she finds out that this whole thing was because of me, I mean—”
“She doesn’t have to know that,” I said. And then I waved a fond farewell to my recent resolution to stick close to the truth with Debs. “We’ll tell her it was all Kraunauer.”
“She’ll believe that?” he asked dubiously.
“If I know Debs, she’ll be so anxious to get going and rescue the kids, she won’t question it until much later.” I shrugged reassuringly. “And by then you can be long gone, if you want.”
“Or dead,”
