“She woke up,” Chutsky said. “And she spoke.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said.
NINETEEN
I DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT I WAS EXPECTING WHEN I GOT to the hospital, but I didn’t get it. Nothing seemed to have changed. Deborah was not sitting up in bed and doing the crossword puzzle while listening to her iPod. She still lay motionless, surrounded by the clutter of machinery and Chutsky. And he sat in the same position of supplication in the same chair, although he had managed to shave and change his shirt somewhere along the way.
“Hey, man!” he called out cheerfully as I pushed in to Deborah’s bedside. “We’re on the mend,” he said. “She looked right at me, and she said my name. She’s gonna be totally fine.”
“Great,” I said, although it didn’t seem clear to me that saying a one-syllable name meant that my sister was rocketing back to full, unimpaired normality. “What did the doctors say?”
Chutsky shrugged. “Same old shit. Not to get my hopes up too high, too soon to be sure, autonomic nervous blah blah blah.” He held up his hand in a what-the-hell gesture. “But they didn’t see it when she woke up and I did. She looked into my eyes, and I could tell. She’s still in there, buddy. She’s gonna be fine.”
There seemed to
be very little to say to that, so I muttered a few well-meaning and empty syllables and sat down. And although I waited very patiently for two and a half hours, Debs did not leap out of bed and begin to do calisthenics; she did not even repeat her parlor trick of opening her eyes and saying Chutsky’s name, and so I finally tottered home to bed without feeling any of Chutsky’s magical certainty.
The next morning when I arrived at my job, I was determined to get to work right away and find out all I could about Doncevic and his mysterious associate. But I barely had time to put my coffee cup down on my desk when I received a visitation from the Ghost of Christmas Gone Terribly Wrong, in the person of Israel Salguero, from Internal Affairs. He came wafting silently in and sat in the folding chair across from me without a sound. There was a sense of velvet menace to his movement that I would have admired, if it had not been aimed at me. I watched him, and he watched me for a moment, before he finally nodded and said, “I knew your father.”
I nodded and took the very great risk of sipping my coffee—but without taking my eyes off Salguero.
“He was a good cop, and a good man,” Salguero said. He spoke softly, fitting his way of moving so silently, and he had the slight trace of an accent that many Cuban Americans of his generation had. He had, in fact, known Harry very well, and Harry had thought highly of him. But that was in the past, and Salguero was now a very respected and very feared IA lieutenant, and no good could come of having him investigating either me or Deborah.
And so, thinking that it was probably best just to wait him out and let him get to the point, if there was one, I took another sip of my coffee. It did not taste nearly as good as it had before Salguero’s arrival.
“I would like to be able to get this thing cleared up as quickly as possible,” he said. “I’m sure that neither you or your sister have anything to worry about.”
“No, of course not,” I said, wondering why I didn’t feel reassured—unless of course it was because my entire life was built around the idea of escaping notice, and having a trained investigator peering in under the edges was not terribly comforting.
“If there is anything you care to tell me at any time,” he said, “my office door is always open to you.”
“Thank you very much,” I said, and since there didn’t seem to be anything else to say, I didn’t say it. Salguero watched me for a moment, then nodded and slid up from his chair and out the door, leaving me wondering just how much trouble the Morgans were in. It took me several minutes and a full cup of coffee to clear his visit from my head and concentrate on the computer.
And when I did, what a wonderful surprise I got.
Just as a matter of reflex, I glanced at my e-mail in-box as I went to work. There were two departmental memos that demanded my immediate inattention, an ad promising me several inches of unspecified additional length, and a note with no title that I almost deleted, until I saw who it was from: [email protected]
It really shouldn’t have, but it took a moment for the name to register, and my finger was literally poised on the mouse to delete the message when something clicked in my head and I paused.
Bweiss. The name seemed familiar somehow. Perhaps it was “Weiss, first initial B,” like most e-mail addresses. That would make sense. And if the B stood for Brandon, that would make even more sense. Because it was the name of the person I had just sat down to investigate.
How thoughtful of him to get in touch.
I opened Weiss’s e-mail with more than usual interest, very eager to find out what he might have to say to me. But to my great disappointment, he apparently had nothing at all to say. There was merely an Internet link, underlined and in blue letters, stuck in the middle of the page with no comment at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99lrj?42n
How very interesting. Brandon wanted to share his videos with me. But what kind of video could it possibly be? Perhaps his favorite rock band? Or an edited montage of clips from his favorite TV show? Or even more of the kind of footage he had sent to the Tourist Board? That would be very thoughtful.
And so with a warm and fuzzy glow growing in the spot where my heart should have been, I clicked on the link and waited impatiently for the screen to open. Finally, the small box showed up and I clicked on the play button.
For a moment there was just darkness. Then once again a grainy picture blossomed and I was looking down at white porcelain from a fixed camera perched somewhere near the ceiling—the same shot featured in the video sent to the Tourist Board. I felt mildly disappointed—he had just sent me a link to a copy of something I had already seen. But then there was a sound of soft slithering, and movement started in the corner of the screen. A dark figure lurched into the frame and dumped something onto the white porcelain.
Doncevic.
And the dark figure? Dashing Dimpled Dexter, of course.
My face was not visible, but there was no doubt. That was Dexter’s back, his seventeen-dollar haircut, the collar of Dexter’s lovely dark shirt curled around Dexter’s wonderful precious neck—