“How can you tell?” I asked. Because really, you would think that all former humans in this condition would be awfully hard to tell apart. The only distinguishing mark I could see was forehead wrinkles.
Doakes kept looking at it, but he grunted once and nodded at the side of the neck. “Tattoo. It’s Frank.” He grunted again, leaning forward and flicking a small piece of notepaper taped to the bench. I leaned in for a look: in the same spidery hand I had seen before Dr. Danco had written HONOR.
“Get the paramedics,” Doakes said.
I hurried over to where they were just closing the back doors of the ambulance. “Do you have room for one more?” I asked. “He won’t take up a lot of space, but he’ll need heavy sedation.”
“What kind of condition is he in?” the spike-haired one asked me.
It was a very good question for someone in his profession to ask, but the only answers that occurred to me seemed a lit-
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tle flippant, so I just said, “I think you may want heavy sedation, too.”
They looked at me like they thought I was kidding and didn’t really appreciate the seriousness of the situation. Then they looked at each other and shrugged. “Okay, pal,” the older one said. “We’ll squeeze him in.” The spike-haired paramedic shook his head, but he turned and opened the back door of the ambulance again and began pulling out the gurney.
As they wheeled down the block to Danco’s crashed van I climbed in the back of the ambulance to see how Debs was doing. Her eyes were closed and she was very pale, but she seemed to be breathing easier. She opened one eye and looked up at me. “We’re not moving,” she said.
“Dr. Danco crashed his van.”
She tensed and tried to sit up, both eyes wide open. “You got him?”
“No, Debs. Just his passenger. I think he was about to deliver it, because it’s all done.”
I had thought she was pale before, but she almost vanished now. “Kyle,” she said.
“No,” I told her. “Doakes says it’s someone named Frank.”
“Are you sure?”
“Apparently positive. There’s a tattoo on his neck. It’s not Kyle, Sis.”
Deborah closed her eyes and drifted back down onto the cot as if she was a deflating balloon. “Thank God,” she said.
“I hope you don’t mind sharing your cab with Frank,” I said.
She shook her head. “I don’t mind,” she said, and then her D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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eyes opened again. “Dexter. No fucking around with Doakes.
Help him find Kyle. Please?”
It must have been the drugs working on her, because I could count on one finger the number of times I had heard her ask anything so plaintively. “All right, Debs. I’ll do my best,”
I said, and her eyes fluttered closed again.
“Thanks,” she said.
I got back to Danco’s van just in time to see the older paramedic straighten up from where he had obviously been vomiting, and turn to talk to his partner, who was sitting on the curb mumbling to himself over the sounds that Frank was still making inside. “Come on, Michael,” the older guy said.
“Come on, buddy.”
Michael didn’t seem interested in moving, except for rocking back and forth as he repeated, “Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh God.” I decided he probably didn’t need my encouragement, and went around to the driver’s door of the van. It was sprung open and I peeked in.