Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

I turned. A uniformed cop was there, a middle-aged black guy with a shaved head, and he nodded at me. “You her partner?” he asked.

I pulled out my ID. “Her brother,” I said. “Forensics.”

“Huh,” he said, taking my credentials and looking them over. “You guys don’t usually get to the scene this fast.” He handed back my ID. “What can you tell me about that guy?” He nodded to the man who had stabbed Deborah, who was sitting up now and holding his head as another cop squatted beside him.

“He opened the door and saw her,” I said. “And then he stuck a knife in her.”

“Uh-huh,” the cop said. He turned away to his partner and said, “Cuff him, Frankie.”

I did not watch and gloat as the two cops pulled the knife wielder’s arms behind him and slapped on cuffs, because they were loading Deborah into the ambulance. I stepped over to speak to the EMS guy with the short hair. “Will she be all right?” I asked.

He gave me a mechanical and unconvincing smile. “We’ll see what the doctors say, okay?” he said, which did not sound as encouraging as he might have intended.

“Are you taking her to Jackson?” I asked.

He nodded. “She’ll be in the ICU trauma when you get there,” he said.

“Can I ride with you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. He slammed the door shut, ran to the front seat of the ambulance, and got in. I watched as they nosed out into traffic, turned on the siren, and drove away.

I suddenly felt very lonely. It seemed far too melodramatic to bear. The last words we had spoken were not pleasant, and now they might very well prove to be our Last Words. It was a sequence of events that belonged on television, preferably on an afternoon soap opera. It did not belong in the prime-time drama of Dexter’s Dim Days. But there it was. Deborah was on her way to intensive care and I did not know if she would come out of it. I did not even know if she would get there alive.

I looked back at the sidewalk. It seemed like an awful lot of blood. Deborah’s blood.

Happily for me, I did not have to brood too long. Detective Coulter had arrived, and he looked unhappy even for him. I watched him stand on the sidewalk for a minute and look around, before he trudged over to where I stood. He seemed even more unhappy as he looked me over from head to toe with the same expression he had used on the crime scene.

“Dexter,” he said. He shook his head. “The fuck you do?”

For a very brief moment I actually started to deny that I’d stabbed my sister. Then I realized he couldn’t possibly be accusing me, and indeed, he was merely breaking the ice before taking my statement.

“She shoulda waited for me,” he said. “I’m her partner.”

“You were getting coffee,” I said. “She thought it shouldn’t wait.”

Coulter looked down at the blood on the pavement and shook his head. “Coulda waited twenty minutes,” he said. “For her partner.” He looked up at me. “It’s a sacred bond.”

I have no experience with the sacred, since I spend most of my time playing for the other team, so I simply said, “I guess you’re right,” and that seemed to satisfy him enough that he settled down and just took my statement with no more than a few sour glances at the bloodstain left by his sacred partner. It took a very long ten minutes before I could finally excuse myself to drive to the hospital.

Jackson Memorial Hospital is well known to every cop, felon, and victim in the greater Miami area, because they have all been there, either as a patient or to pick up a coworker who was one. It is one of the busiest trauma centers in the country, and if practice truly makes perfect, the ICU at Jackson must be the very best at gunshot wounds, stab wounds, blunt-object wounds, beating injuries, and other maliciously inflicted medical conditions. The U.S. Army comes to Jackson to learn field surgery, because over five thousand times every year someone comes to the trauma center with the closest thing you can find to front-line combat wounds outside of Baghdad.

So I knew Debs would be in good hands if she got there alive. And I found it very hard to imagine that she could possibly die. I mean, I was very well aware that she could die; it does happen to most of us, sooner or later. But I could not picture a world without a Deborah Morgan walking around and breathing in it. It would be like one of those thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles with a large center piece missing. It would just seem wrong.

It was unsettling to realize just how used to her I was. We certainly never exchanged tender feelings or gazed dewy-eyed at each other, but she had always been there, my whole life, and as I drove to Jackson it occurred to me that things would be very different if she died, and not quite as comfortable.

I didn’t like thinking about it. It was a very strange sensation. I could not recall ever getting this maudlin before. It was not just realizing that she might die, since this was something that I did have some small experience with. And it was not merely the fact that she was more or less family, since I had been through that before, too. But when my foster parents died, I’d had a long illness and the certain knowledge that they were dying to prepare me. This was so sudden. Perhaps it was just the unexpected nature of the shock that made me feel so very nearly emotional.

Luckily for me, it was not a very long drive—the hospital was only a couple of miles away—and I pulled into the parking lot after only a few minutes of racing through traffic with one hand on the horn—which most Miami drivers usually ignore anyway.

All hospitals are the same on the inside, even down to the color the walls are painted, and on the whole they are not truly happy places. Of course, I was quite pleased to have one here at the moment, but I was not filled with a sense of pleasant expectation when I walked into the trauma unit. There was an air of animal resignation to the people waiting, and a sense of perpetual, bone-numbing crisis on the faces of all the doctors and nurses as they bustled back and forth, and this was only countered by the unhurried, bureaucratic, clipboard-wielding officiality of the woman who stopped me when I tried to push through and find Deborah.

“Sergeant Morgan, knife wound,” I said. “They just brought her in.”

“Who are you?” she said.

Stupidly thinking it might get me past her quickly, I said, “Next of kin,” and the woman actually smiled. “Good,” she said. “Just the man I need to talk to.”

“Can I see her?” I said.