“Uh-huh,” Doakes said again.
Captain Matthews frowned, looking as much as he possibly could like a man of action making an important decision.
The rest of us managed to control our goose bumps.
“Morgan,” Captain Matthews finally said. He looked at Debs, and then he paused. A van that said Action News on the side pulled up in front of the little house and people began to get out. “Goddamn it,” Matthews said. He glanced at the body and then at Doakes. “Can you do it, Sergeant?”
“They’re not going to like it in Washington,” Doakes said.
“And I don’t much like it here.”
“I’m beginning to lose interest in what they like in Washington,” Matthews said. “We have our own problems. Can you handle this?”
Doakes looked at me. I tried to look serious and dedicated, but he just shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “I can do this.”
Matthews clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man,” he said, and he hurried away to talk to the news crew.
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Doakes was still looking at me. I looked back. “Think how much easier it’s going to be to keep track of me,” I said.
“When this is over,” he said. “Just you and me.”
“But not until it’s over,” I said, and he finally nodded, just once.
“Until then,” he said.
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Doakes took us to a coffee shop on calle ocho, just across the street from a car dealership. He led us to a small table in the back corner and sat down facing the door.
“We can talk here,” he said, and he made it sound so much like a spy movie that I wished I had brought sunglasses. Still, perhaps Chutsky’s would come in the mail. Hopefully without his nose attached.
Before we could actually talk, a man came from the back room and shook Doakes’s hand. “Alberto,” he said. “Como estas?” And Doakes answered him in very good Spanish—better than mine, to be honest, although I do like to think that my accent is better. “Luis,” he said. “Mas o menos.” They chattered away for a minute, and then Luis brought us all tiny cups of horribly sweet Cuban coffee and a plate of pastelitos.
He nodded once at Doakes and then disappeared into the back room.
Deborah watched the whole performance with growing impatience, and when Luis finally left us she opened up.
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“We need the names of everybody from El Salvador,” she blurted out.
Doakes just looked at her and sipped his coffee. “Be a big list,” he said.
Deborah frowned. “You know what I mean,” she said.
“Goddamn it, Doakes, he’s got Kyle.”
Doakes showed his teeth. “Yeah, Kyle getting old. Never would have got him in his prime.”
“What exactly were you doing down there?” I asked him. I know it was a bit off message, but my curiosity about how he would answer got the best of me.
Still smiling, if that’s what it was, Doakes looked at me and said, “What do you think?” And just underneath the thresh-old of hearing there came a quiet rumble of savage glee, answered right away from deep inside my dark backseat, one predator calling across a moonlit night to another. And really and truly, what else could he have been doing? Just as Doakes knew me, I knew Doakes for what he was: a cold killer. Even without what Chutsky had said, it was very clear what Doakes would have been doing in a homicidal carnival like El Salvador. He would have been one of the ringmasters.