sweet—to cut through all the nonsense and right down to the heart of things. But I could not. Harry made it complicated.

“I don’t know what I’ll do when you’re dead,” I said.

“You’ll do fine,” he said.

“There’s so much to remember.”

Harry reached a hand out and pushed the button that hung on a cord beside his bed. “You’ll remember it,” he said. He dropped the cord and it was almost as though it pulled the last of the strength from him as it flopped back down by the bedside. “You’ll remember.” He closed his eyes and for a moment I was all alone in the room. Then the nurse bustled in with a syringe and Harry opened one eye. “We can’t always do what we think we have to do. So when there’s nothing else you can do, you wait,” he said, and held out his arm for his shot. “No matter what . . . pressure . . . you might feel.”

I watched him as he lay there, taking the needle without flinching and knowing that even the relief it brought was temporary, that his end was coming and he could not stop it—and knowing, too, that he was not afraid, and that he would do this the right way, as he had done everything else in his life the right way. And I knew this, too: Harry understood me. No one else ever had, and no one else ever would, through all time in all the world. Only Harry.

The only reason I ever thought about being human was to be more like him.

C H A P T E R 1 1

And so i was patient. it was not an easy thing, but it was the Harry thing. Let the bright steely spring inside stay coiled and quiet and wait, watch, hold the hot sweet release locked tight in its cold box until it was Harry-right to let it skitter out and cartwheel through the night.

Sooner or later some small opening would show and we could vault through it. Sooner or later I would find a way to make Doakes blink.

I waited.

Some of us, of course, find that harder to do than others, and it was several days later, a Saturday morning, that my telephone rang.

“Goddamn it,” said Deborah without any preamble. It was almost a relief to hear that she was her recognizable cranky self again.

“Fine, thanks, and you?” I said.

“Kyle is making me nuts,” she said. “He says there’s nothing we can do but wait, but he won’t tell me what we’re wait-

D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R

9 7

ing for. He disappears for ten or twelve hours and won?

?t tell me where he was. And then we just wait some more. I am so fucking tired of waiting my teeth hurt.”

“Patience is a virtue,” I said.

“I’m tired of being virtuous, too,” she said. “And I am sick to death of Kyle’s patronizing smile when I ask him what we can do to find this guy.”

“Well, Debs, I don’t know what I can do except offer my sympathy,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I think you can do a whole hell of a lot more than that, Bro,” she said.

I sighed heavily, mostly for her benefit. Sighs register so nicely on the telephone. “This is the trouble with having a reputation as a gunslinger, Debs,” I said. “Everybody thinks I can shoot the eye out of a jack at thirty paces, every single time.”

“I still think it,” she said.

“Your confidence warms my heart, but I don’t understand a thing about this kind of adventure, Deborah. It leaves me completely cold.”

“I have to find this guy, Dexter. And I want to rub Kyle’s nose in it,” she said.

“I thought you liked him.”

She snorted. “Jesus, Dexter. You don’t know anything about women, do you? Of course I like him. That’s why I want to rub his nose in it.”

“Oh, good, now it makes sense,” I said.

Tags: Jeff Lindsay Dexter Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net