Deborah held up her shield. “This is a police emergency,”
she said. “If you impede me I am authorized to arrest you for obstruction of justice.”
The nurse thought she was going to say something very severe, but she opened her mouth, looked at the shield, looked at Deborah, and changed her mind. “I will have to tell doctor,” she said.
“Whatever,” Deborah said. “Dexter, help me close my pants.” The nurse watched disapprovingly for another few seconds, then turned and whisked away down the hall.
“Really, Debs,” I said. “Obstruction of justice?”
“Let’s go,” she said, and marched out the door. I trailed dutifully behind.
Deborah was alternately tense and angry on the drive
back over to the Mutiny. She would chew on her lower lip, and then snarl at me to hurry up, and then as we came close to the hotel, she got very quiet. She finally looked out her window and said, “What’s he like, Dex? How bad is it?”
“It’s a very bad haircut, Debs. It makes him look pretty weird. But the other stuff . . . He seems to be adjusting. He just doesn’t want you to feel sorry for him.” She looked at me, D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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again chewing her lip. “That’s what he said,” I told her. “He wanted to go back to Washington rather than put up with your pity.”
“He doesn’t want to be a burden,” she said. “I know him.
He has to pay his own way.” She looked back out the window again. “I can’t even imagine what it was like. For a man like Kyle to lie there so helpless as—” She shook her head slowly, and a single tear rolled down her cheek.
Truthfully, I could imagine very well what it had been like, and I had done so many times already. What I was having dif-ficulty with was this new side of Deborah. She had cried at her mother’s funeral, and at her father’s, but not since then, as far as I knew. And now here she was practically flooding the car over what I had come to regard as an infatuation with someone who was a little bit of an oaf. Even worse, he was now a disabled oaf, which should mean that a logical person would move on and find somebody else with all the proper pieces still attached. But Deborah seemed even more concerned with Chutsky now that he was permanently damaged.
Could this be love after all? Deborah in love? It didn’t seem possible. I knew that theoretically she was capable of it, of course, but—I mean, after all, she was my sister.
It was pointless to wonder. I knew nothing at all about love and I never would. It didn’t seem like such a terrible lack to me, although it does make it difficult to understand popular music.
Since there was nothing else I could possibly say about it, I changed the subject. “Should I call Captain Matthews and tell him that Doakes is gone?” I said.
Deborah wiped a tear off her cheek with one fingertip and shook her head. “That’s for Kyle to decide,” she said.
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J E F F L I N D S A Y
“Yes, of course, but Deborah, under the circumstances—”
She slammed a fist onto her leg, which seemed pointless as well as painful. “GodDAMN it, Dexter, I won’t lose him!”
Every now and then I feel like I am only receiving one track of a stereo recording, and this was one such time. I had no idea what—well, to be honest, I didn’t even have an idea what to have an idea about. What did she mean? What did it have to do with what I had said, and why had she reacted so violently? And how can so many fat women think they look good in a belly shirt?
I suppose some of my confusion must have showed on my face, because Deborah unclenched her fist and took a deep breath. “Kyle is going to need to stay focused, keep working.
He needs to be in charge, or this will finish him.”
“How can you know that?”
She shook her head. “He’s always been the best at what he does. That’s his whole—it’s who he is. If he gets to thinking about what Danco did to him—” She bit her lip and another tear rolled down her cheek. “He has to stay who he is, Dexter.
Or I’ll lose him.”
“All right,” I said.
“I can’t lose him, Dexter,” she said again.