“Yes master,” I said.
Chutsky was sitting on the sofa. He still didn’t look British Colonial-maybe it was the lack of eyebrows-but he did at least look like he had decided to live, so apparently Deborah’s rebuilding project was going well. There was a metal crutch leaning against the wall beside him, and he was sipping coffee. A platter of Danish sat on the end table next to him. “Hey, buddy,” he called out, waving his stump. “Grab a chair.”
I took a British Colonial chair and sat, after snagging a couple of Danish as well. Chutsky looked at me like he was going to object, but really, it was the very least they could do for me. After all, I had waded through flesh-eating alligators and an attack peacock to rescue him, and now here I was giving up my Saturday for who-knows-what kind of awful chore. I deserved an entire cake.
“All right,” Chutsky said. “We have to figure where Henker is hiding, and we have to do it fast.”
“Who?” I asked. “You mean Dr. Danco?”
“That’s his name, yeah. Henker,” he said. “Martin Henker.”
“And we have to find him?” I asked, filled with a sense of ominous foreboding. I mean, why were they looking at me and saying “we”?
Chutsky gave a small snort as if he thought I was joking and he got it. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “So where are you thinking he might be, buddy?”
“Actually, I’m not thinking about it at all,” I said.
“Dexter,” Deborah said with a warning tone in her voice.
Chutsky frowned. It was a very strange expression without eyebrows. “What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean, I don’t see why it’s my problem anymore. I don’t see why I or even we have to find him. He got what he wanted-won’t he just finish up and go home?”
“Is he kidding?” Chutsky asked Deborah, and if he’d only had eyebrows they would have been raised.
“He doesn’t like Doakes,” Deborah said.
“Yeah, but listen, Doakes is one of our guys,” Chutsky said to me.
“Not one of mine,” I said.
Chutsky shook his head. “All right, that’s your problem,” he said. “But we still have to find this guy. There’s a political side to this whole thing, and it’s deep doo-doo if we don’t collar him.”
“Okay,” I said. “But why is it my problem?” And it seemed like a very reasonable question to me, although to see his reaction you would have thought I wanted to fire bomb an elementary school.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and he shook his head in mock admiration. “You really are a piece of work, buddy.”
“Dexter,” Deborah said. “Look at us.” I did look, at Deb in her cast and Chutsky with his twin stumps. To be honest, they did not look terribly fierce. “We need your help,” she said.
“But Debs, really.”
“Please, Dexter,” she said, knowing full well that I found it very hard to refuse her when she used that word.
“Debs, come on,” I said. “You need an action hero, somebody who can kick down the door and storm in with guns blazing. I’m just a mild-mannered forensics geek.”
She crossed the room and stood in front of me, inches away. “I know what you are, Dexter,” she said softly. “Remember? And I know you can do this.” She put her hand on my shoulder and lowered her voice even farther, almost whispering. “Kyle needs this, Dex. Needs to catch Danco. Or he’ll never feel like a man again. That’s important to me. Please, Dexter?”
And after all, what can you do when the big guns come out? Except summon your reserves of goodwill and wave the white flag gracefully.
“All right, Debs,” I said.
Freedom is such a fragile, fleeting thing, isn’t it?
CHAPTER 28
HOWEVER RELUCTANT I HAD BEEN, I HAD GIVEN MY word to help, and so poor Dutiful Dexter instantly attacked the problem with all the resourceful cunning of his powerful brain. But the sad truth was that my brain seemed to be off-line; no matter how diligently I typed in clues, nothing dropped into the out-box.
Of course it was possible that I needed more fuel to function at the highest possible level, so I wheedled Deborah into sending down for more Danish. While she was on the phone with room service Chutsky focused a sweaty, slightly glazed smile on me and said, “Let’s get to it, okay, buddy?” Since he asked so nicely-and after all, I had to do something while I waited for the Danish-I agreed.
The loss of his two limbs had removed some kind of psychic lock from Chutsky. In spite of being just a little bit shaky, he was far more open and friendly, and actually seemed eager to share information in a way that would have been unthinkable to the Chutsky with four complete limbs and a pair of expensive sunglasses. And so out of what was really no more than an urge to be tidy and know as many details as possible, I took advantage of his new good cheer by getting the names of the El Salvador team from him.
He sat with a yellow legal pad balanced precariously on his knee, holding it still with his wrist while he scrawled the names with his right, and only, hand. “Manny Borges you know about,” he said.
“The first victim,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Chutsky said without looking up. He wrote the name and then drew a line through it. “And then there was Frank Aubrey?” He frowned and actually stuck the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he wrote and then crossed out. “He missed Oscar Acosta. God knows where he is now.” He wrote the name anyway and put a question mark beside it. “Wendell Ingraham. Lives on North Shore Drive, out on Miami Beach.” The pad slipped to the floor as he wrote the name, and he grabbed at it as it fell, missing badly. He stared at the pad where it lay for a moment, then leaned over and retrieved it. A drop of sweat rolled off his hairless head and onto the floor. “Fucking drugs,” he said. “Got me a little woozy.”
“Wendell Ingraham,” I said.
“Right. Right.” He scribbled the rest of the name and without pausing went on with, “Andy Lyle. Sells cars now, up in Davie.” And in a furious burst of energy he went right on and triumphantly scrawled the last name. “Two other guys dead, one guy still in the field, that’s it, the whole team.”
“Don’t any of these guys know Danco is in town?”
He shook his head. Another drop of sweat flew off and narrowly missed me. “We’re keeping a pretty tight lid on this thing. Need-to-know only.”
“They don’t need to know that somebody wants to convert them to squealing pillows?”
“No, they don’t,” he said, clamping his jaw and looking like he was going to say something tough again; perhaps he would offer to flush them. But he glanced up at me and thought better of it.
“Can we at least check and see which one is missing?” I asked, without any real hope.
Chutsky started shaking his head before I even finished speaking. Two more drops of sweat flew off, left, right. “No. Uh-uh, no way. These guys always have an ear to the ground. Somebody starts asking around about them, they’ll know. And I can’t risk having them run. Like Oscar did.”
“Then how do we find Dr. Danco?”
“That’s what you’re going to figure out,” he said.
“What about the house by Mount Trashmore?” I asked hopefully. “The one you checked out with the clipboard.”
“Debbie had a patrol car drive by. Family has moved in. No,” he said, “we’re putting all our chips on you, buddy. You’ll think of something.”
Debs rejoined us before I could think of anything meaningful to say to that, but in truth, I was too surprised at Chutsky’s official attitude toward his former comrades. Wouldn’t it have been the nice thing to do, to give his old friends a running start or at least a heads-up? I certainly don’t pretend to be a paragon of civilized virtue, but if a deranged surgeon was after Vince Masuoka, for instance, I like to think I might find a way to drop a hint into casual conversation by the coffee machine. Pass that sugar, please. By the way-there’s a medical maniac after you who wants to lop off all your limbs. Would you like the creamer?