“what’s your guess?”
“Nahana! Nah!”
“I don’t think that’s right,” said the Doctor. “Although perhaps if you had a tongue, it might have been. Well, in any case,” he said, and he bent to the edge of the table and made a small mark on a piece of paper, almost like he was crossing something out. “It is rather a long word,” he said. “Nine letters. Still, you have to take the good with the bad, don’t you?”
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And he put down his pencil and picked up a saw, and as Doakes bucked wildly against his bonds the Doctor sawed off Doakes’s left foot, just above the ankle. He did it very quickly and neatly, placing the severed foot beside Doakes’s head as he reached over to his array of instruments and picked up what looked a large soldering iron. He applied this to the new wound and a wet hiss of steam billowed up as he cauterized the stump for minimal blood flow. “There now,” he said.
Doakes made a strangled noise and went limp as the smell of seared flesh drifted through the room. With any luck at all he would be unconscious for a while.
And I, happily, was a little more conscious all the time. As the chemicals from the Doctor’s dart gun seeped out of my brain, a sort of muddy light began to trickle in.
Ah, memory. Isn’t it a lovely thing? Even when we are in the middle of the worst of times, we have our memories to cheer us. I, for example, lay there helpless, able only to watch as dreadful things happened to Sergeant Doakes, knowing that soon it would be my turn. But even so, I had my memories.
And what I remembered now was something Chutsky had said when I rescued him. “When he got me up there,” he had said, “he said, ‘Seven,’ and ‘What’s your guess?’ ” At the time I had thought it a rather strange thing to say, and wondered if Chutsky had imagined it as a side effect of the drugs.
But I had just heard the Doctor say the same things to Doakes: “What’s your guess?” followed by, “Nine letters.”
And then he had made a mark on the piece of paper taped to the table.
Just as there had been a piece of paper taped near each victim we had found, each time with a single word on it, the let-
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ters crossed out one at a time. HONOR. LOYALTY. Irony, of course: Danco reminding his former comrades of the virtues they had forsaken by turning him over to the Cubans. And poor Burdett, the man from Washington whom we found in the shell of the house in Miami Shores. He had been worth no real mental effort. Just a quick five letters, POGUE. And his arms, legs, and head had been quickly cut off and separated from his body. P-O-G-U-E. Arm, leg, leg, arm, head.
Was it really possible? I knew that my Dark Passenger had a sense of humor, but it was quite a bit darker than this—this was playful, whimsical, and even silly.
Much like the Choose Life license plate had been. And like everything else I had observed about the Doctor’s behavior.
It seemed so completely unlikely, but—
Doctor Danco was playing a little game as he sliced and diced. Perhaps he had played it with others in those long years inside the Cuban prison at the Isle of Pines, and maybe it had come to seem like just the right thing to serve his whimsical revenge. Because it certainly seemed like he was playing it now—with Chutsky, and with Doakes and the others. It was quite absurd, but it was also the only thing that made sense.
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Doctor Danco was playing hangman.
“Well,” he said, squatting beside me again. “How do you think your friend is doing?”
“I think you have him stumped,” I said.
He cocked his head to one side and his small, dry tongue flicked out and over his lips as he stared at me, his eyes large and unblinking through his thick glasses. “Bravo,” he said, and he patted my arm again. “I don’t think you really believe this will happen to you,” he said. “Perhaps a ten will persuade you.”
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“Does it have an E in it?” I asked, and he rocked back slightly as if some offensive odor had drifted up to him from my socks.
“Well,” he said, still without blinking, and then something that may have been related to a smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “Yes, there are two E’s. But of course, you guessed out of turn, so . . .” He shrugged, a tiny gesture.
“You could count it as a wrong guess—for Sergeant Doakes,” I suggested, quite helpfully, I thought.