“Might be a good idea if I don’t bother her anymore,”
Chutsky said suddenly, and it took me a moment to realize he was still talking about Deborah. “She’s not going to want anything to do with me the way I am now, and I don’t need anybody’s pity.”
“Nothing to worry about,” I said. “Deborah is completely without pity.”
“You tell her I’m fine, and I went back to Washington,” he said. “It’s better that way.”
“It might be better for you,” I said. “But she’ll kill me.”
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“No, you don’t understand. She told me to get you back.
She’s made up her mind and I don’t dare disobey. She hits very hard.”
He was silent for a while. Then I heard him sigh heavily. “I just don’t know if I can do this,” he said.
“I could take you back to the gator farm,” I said cheerfully.
He didn’t say anything after that, and I pulled onto Alligator Alley, made the first U-turn, and headed back toward the orange glow of light on the horizon that was Miami.
C H A P T E R 2 6
We rode in silence all the way back to the first real clump of civilization, a housing development and a row of strip malls on the right, a few miles past the toll booth. Then Chutsky sat up and stared out at the lights and the buildings. “I have to use a phone,” he said.
“You can use my phone, if you’ll pay the roaming charges,”
I said.
“I need a land line,” he said. “A pay phone.”
“You’re out of touch with the times,” I said. “A pay phone might be a little hard to find. Nobody uses them anymore.”
“Take this exit here,” he said, and although it was not getting me any closer to my well-earned good night’s sleep, I drove down the off-ramp. Within a mile we found a mini-mart that still had a pay phone stuck to the wall beside the front door. I helped Chutsky hop over to the phone and he leaned up against the shield around it and lifted the receiver.
He glanced at me and said, “Wait over there,” which seemed a little bit bossy for somebody who couldn’t even walk unas-
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sisted, but I went back to my car and sat on the hood while Chutsky chatted.
An ancient Buick chugged into the parking spot next to me.
A group of short, dark-skinned men in dirty clothes got out and walked toward the store. They stared at Chutsky standing there on one leg with his head so very shaved, but they were too polite to say anything. They went in and the glass door whooshed behind them and I felt the long day rolling over me; I was tired, my neck muscles felt stiff, and I hadn’t gotten to kill anything. I felt very cranky, and I wanted to go home and go to bed.
I wondered where Dr. Danco had taken Doakes. It didn’t really seem important, just idle curiosity. But as I thought about the fact that he had indeed taken him somewhere and would soon begin doing rather permanent things to the sergeant, I realized that this was the first good news I’d had in a long time, and I felt a warm glow spread through me. I was free. Doakes was gone. One small piece at a time he was leaving my life and releasing me from the involuntary servitude of Rita’s couch. I could live again.
“Hey, buddy,” Chutsky called. He waved the stump of his left arm at me and I stood up and walked over to him. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
“Of course,” I said. “Going where?”
He looked off in the distance and I could see the muscles along the side of his jaw tighten. The security lights of the mini-mart’s parking lot lit up his coveralls and gleamed off his head. It’s amazing how different a face looks if you shave off the eyebrows. There’s something freakish to it, like the makeup in a low-budget science-fiction movie, and so even though Chutsky should have looked tough and decisive as he 2 4 6
J E F F L I N D S A Y
stared at the horizon and clenched his jaw, he instead looked like he was waiting for a blood-curdling command from Ming the Merciless. But he just said, “Take