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he muttered.
“I will prepare her first,” I said. “You can wait in the car, and if it goes against me, you don’t even have to come in.”
He shook his head again, but slower this time. “It can’t possibly work, Dexter,” he said.
“It can,” I said. “It has to.”
Twenty minutes later Brian parked his Jeep facing out on the street in front of Deborah’s house. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and made no move to turn off the engine. I reached for the door handle, and he said, “Dexter,” and looked at me quite nervously.
“Please, Brian,” I said. “This gives us our best chance.”
He licked his lips. “I suppose so,” he said, very unconvincingly. “If she doesn’t just shoot me.”
“She carries an old Thirty-eight Special,” I said. “You won’t even notice it.”
He didn’t appear to appreciate my light wit. He just looked straight ahead through the windshield and shook his head. “I’ll wait here,” he said. “But I don’t see how—”
“I’ll call you either way,” I said, and I got out of the car and walked to Deborah’s front door.
Once again Deborah opened the door when I was only halfway up the walkway. But this time she just flung it open and spun away, and I closed it behind me as I came in and followed her back to the kitchen.
She had apparently been there for several hours, because she had shredded the old wicker place mat in front of her and started on the one to her right. Three cups stood beside her on the table, one of them still half-full of coffee, one of them empty, with the handle snapped off, and one of them lying on its side, half-shattered.
“Where are they,” she snapped at me before I could even settle into the chair opposite. “Goddamn it, what the fuck is Kraunauer—and who is we, for fuck’s sake?!”
“Please, Deborah,” I said, as soothing as I could be. “One question at a time.”
Deborah lifted her hands off the table and flexed them as if she was thinking she might strangle me. She bared her teeth and locked them together, hissing out a long breath between them. “Dexter, so fucking help me—” she said. Then she dropped her hands to the tabletop and made a visibly huge effort to control what seemed like an urgent need to kill. “All right,” she said. She picked up the battered stainless-steel spoon beside her tattered place mat and began to tap it rapidly on the table. “Where are the kids?”
“It isn’t wonderful,” I said.
“Where, goddamn it!”
“They’re on a drug lord’s yacht.”
Some people might have turned pale and faint at the news that their children were in the murderous clutches of a true archfiend. And others might have pounded the table and roared with impotent rage. Deborah simply narrowed her eyes, and you would have thought she was completely calm—except for the fact that the spoon she held in her hand was now bent neatly in half. “Where,” she said softly.
“It’s anchored off Toro Key.”
Deborah dropped the ruined spoon onto the table and flexed her fingers. “How many men will he have?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But he has three less now.”
“Three?” she snapped. “They only found two with Kraunauer.”
“We took one alive, for questioning,” I said.
Deborah was completely still for a moment, her eyes locked on mine. “Who is we?” she said, back to her dangerously soft voice. “And why did a drug lord take the children?” she said, still quiet, but obviously it was the very dangerous kind of quiet.
It really is stunning how a simple question like that can knock you right over. I had been trundling along, convinced that my brain was operating at a truly high level, prepared for all the bizarre and unlikely possibilities. And I was sure I had all of them covered, too—but then one completely obvious question—“why?”—comes along, and I realized I hadn’t even thought about it. Why did a drug lord have our kids? Why, because my brother pissed him off, of course!
…And if I said that to Deborah, the operation was over before it even began. I had to tell her something, and it had to be convincing, but all I could think of was how totally stupid I had been not to be ready for that most obvious question.
“Why, Dexter?” Debs repeated, and there was a dangerous edge to her voice that went far behind frustrated anger.
“It’s kind of complicated,” I said, stalling in the hope that either a brilliant idea would occur to me or, if not, the house might be hit by lightning.
“Make it simple,” she snapped.
