Well of course it was jammed. I mean, we already knew it was one of those days, didn’t we? It was one thing after another, and really, it would have been far too much to hope that even one small thing might go right. Just to underline the point, something went blurp in my ear, and I realized that Deborah had run out of time and was now trying her luck at breathing water. It was possible that she would be better at it than I was, but I didn’t think so.
I slid lower in the water and braced my knees against the roof of the car, wedging my shoulder against Deb’s midsection and pushing up to take her weight off the seat belt. Then I pulled as much slack as I could get down to the buckle and slid it through, making the belt very floppy and loose. I braced my feet and pulled Deborah through the belt and toward the door. She seemed a bit loose and floppy herself; perhaps after all my valiant effort I was too late. I squeezed through the door and pulled her after me. My shirt caught on something in the doorway and ripped, but I pulled myself through anyway, staggering upright once again into the night air.
Deborah was dead weight in my arms and a thin stream of D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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mucky water dribbled from the corner of her mouth. I hoisted her onto my shoulder and sloshed through the muck to the grass. The muck fought back every step of the way, and I lost my left shoe before I got more than three steps from the car.
But shoes are, after all, much easier to replace than sisters, so I soldiered on until I could climb up onto the grass and dump Deborah on her back on the solid earth.
In the near distance a siren wailed, and was almost immediately joined by another. Joy and bliss: help was on the way. Perhaps they would even have a towel. In the meantime, I was not certain it would arrive in time to do Deborah any good. So I dropped down beside her, slung her face-down over my knee, and forced out as much water as I could.
Then I rolled her onto her back, cleared a finger-load of mud from her mouth, and began to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
At first my only reward was another gout of mucky water, which did nothing to make the job more pleasant. But I kept at it, and soon Debs gave a convulsive shudder and vomited a great deal more water—most of it on me, unfortunately. She coughed horribly, took a breath that sounded like rusty door hinges swinging open, and said, “Fuck . . .”
For once, I truly appreciated her hard-boiled eloquence.
“Welcome back,” I said. Deborah rolled weakly onto her face and tried to push herself up onto her hands and knees. But she collapsed onto her face again, gasping with pain.
“Oh, God. Oh, shit, something’s broken,” she moaned. She turned her head to the side and threw up a little more, arching her back and sucking in great ratcheting breaths in between spasms of nausea. I watched her, and I admit I felt a little pleased with myself. Dexter the Diving Duck had come 1 8 8
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through and saved the day. “Isn’t throwing up great?” I asked her. “I mean, considering the alternative?” Of course a really biting reply was beyond the poor girl in her weakened condition, but I was pleased to see that she was strong enough to whisper, “Fuck you.”
“Where does it hurt?” I asked her.
“Goddamn it,” she said, sounding very weak, “I can’t move my left arm. The whole arm—” She broke off and tried to move the arm in question and succeeded only in causing herself what looked like a great deal of pain. She hissed in a breath, which set her coughing weakly again, and then just flopped over onto her back and gasped.
I knelt beside her and probed gently at the upper arm.
“Here?” I asked her. She shook her head. I moved my hand up, over the shoulder joint and to the collarbone, and I didn’t have to ask her if that was the place. She gasped, her eyes fluttered, and even through the mud on her face I could see her turn several shades paler. “Your collarbone is broken,” I said.
“It can’t be,” she said with a w
eak and raspy voice. “I have to find Kyle.”
“No,” I said. “You have to go to the emergency room. If you go stumbling around like this you’ll end up right next to him, all tied and taped, and that won’t do anyone any good.”
“I have to,” she said.
“Deborah, I just pulled you out of an underwater car, ruining a very nice bowling shirt. Do you want to waste my perfectly good heroic rescue?”
She coughed again, and grunted from the pain of her collarbone as it moved with her spasmodic breathing. I could tell that she wasn’t finished arguing yet, but it was starting to reg-
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ister with her that she was in a great deal of pain. And since our conversation was going nowhere, it was just as well that Doakes arrived, followed almost immediately by a pair of paramedics.
The good sergeant looked hard at me, as if I had personally shoved the car into the pond and flipped it on its back. “Lost
’em, huh,” he said, which seemed terribly unfair.
“Yes, it turned out to be much harder than I thought to follow him when we were upside down and under water,” I said. “Next time you try that part and we’ll stand here and complain.”