Dearly Devoted Dexter (Dexter 2)

He shook his head. “Back to plan A,” he said.

“And what the hell is plan A?” Deborah asked him.

“Patience,” he said.

And so in spite of a delightful lunch and a truly original little shopping trip afterward, we were back to waiting. A week passed in the now typically boring way. It didn’t seem lik

e Sergeant Doakes would give up before my conversion to a beer-bellied sofa ornament was complete, and I could see nothing else to do except play kick the can and hangman with Cody and Astor, performing outrageously theatrical good-bye kisses with Rita afterward for the benefit of my stalker.

Then came the telephone ringing in the middle of the night.

It was Sunday night, and I had to leave for work early the next day; Vince Masuoka and I had an arrangement, and it was my turn to pick up doughnuts. And now here was the telephone, brazenly ringing as if I had no cares in the world and the doughnuts would deliver themselves. I glanced at the clock on my bedside table: 2:38. I admit I was somewhat cranky as I lifted the receiver and said, “Leave me alone.”

“Dexter. Kyle is gone,” Deborah said. She sounded far be-

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yond tired, totally tense, and unsure whether she wanted to shoot someone or cry.

It took me just a moment to get my powerful intellect up to speed. “Uh, well Deb,” I said, “a guy like that, maybe you’re better off—”

“He’s gone, Dexter. Taken. The, the guy has him. The guy who did that thing to the guy,” she said, and although I felt like I was suddenly thrust into an episode of The Sopranos, I knew what she meant. Whoever had turned the thing on the table into a yodeling potato had taken Kyle, presumably to do something similar to him.

“Dr. Danco,” I said.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?” I asked her.

“He said it could happen. Kyle is the only one who knows what the guy looks like. He said when Danco found out Kyle was here, he’d make a try. We had a—a signal set up, and—

Shit Dexter, just get over here. We have to find him,” she said, and hung up.

It’s always me, isn’t it? I’m not really a very nice person, but for some reason it’s always me that they come to with their problems. Oh, Dexter, a savage inhuman monster has taken my boyfriend! Well damn it, I’m a savage inhuman monster, too—didn’t that entitle me to some rest?

I sighed. Apparently not.

I hoped Vince would understand about the doughnuts.

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It was a fifteen-minute drive to deborah’s house from where I lived in the Grove. For once, I did not see Sergeant Doakes following me, but perhaps he was using a Klingon cloaking device. In any case, the traffic was very sparse and I even made the light at U.S. 1. Deborah lived in a small house on Medina in Coral Gables, overgrown with some neglected fruit trees and a crumbling coral-rock wall. I nosed my car in next to hers in the short driveway and was only two steps away when Deborah opened her front door.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“I went to yoga class, and then out to the mall to buy shoes,” I said. In truth, I had actually hurried over, getting there less than twenty minutes after her call, and I was a little miffed at the tone she was taking.

“Get in here,” she said, peering around into the darkness and holding on to the door as if she thought it might fly away.

“Yes, O Mighty One,” I said, and I got in.

Deborah’s little house was lavishly decorated in I-have-no-

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