“Doakes just called,” Deborah said to me without even saying hello. “The guy he went to talk to is running. Doakes is following to see where he goes, but he needs us for backup.”
“Quickly, Watson, the game’s afoot,” I said, but Deborah was not in a literary mood.
“I’ll pick you up in five minutes,” she said.
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Ileft rita with a hurried explanation and went outside to wait. Deborah was as good as her word, and in five and a half minutes we were heading north on Dixie Highway.
“They’re out on Miami Beach,” she told me. “Doakes said he approached the guy, Oscar, and told him what’s up. Oscar says, let me think about it, Doakes says okay, I’ll call you.
But he watches the house from up the street, and ten minutes later the guy is out the door and into his car with an over-night bag.”
“Why would he run now?”
“Wouldn’t you run if you knew Danco was after you?”
“No,” I said, thinking happily of what I might actually do if I came face-to-face with the Doctor. “I would set some kind of trap for him, and let him come.” And then, I thought, but did not say aloud to Deborah.
“Well, Oscar isn’t you,” she said.
“So few of us are,” I said. “Where is he headed?”
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She frowned and shook her head. “Right now he’s just cruising around, and Doakes is tailing him.”
“Where do we think he’s going to lead us?” I asked.
Deborah shook her head and cut around an old ragtop Cadillac loaded with yelling teenagers. “It doesn’t matter,”
she said, and headed up the on-ramp onto the Palmetto Expressway with the pedal to the floor. “Oscar is still our best chance. If he tries to leave the area we’ll pick him up, but until then we need to stick with him to see what happens.”
“Very good, a really terrific idea—but what exactly do we think might happen?”
“I don’t know, Dexter!” she snapped at me. “But we know this guy is a target sooner or later, all right? And now he knows it, too. So maybe he’s just trying to see if he’s being followed before he runs. Shit,” she said, and swerved around an old flatbed truck loaded with crates of chickens. The truck was going possibly thirty-five miles per hour, had no tail-lights, and three men sat on top of the load, hanging on to battered hats with one hand and the load with the other. Deborah gave them a quick blast of the siren as she pulled around them. It didn’t seem to have any effect. The men on top of the load didn’t even blink.
“Anyway,” she said as she straightened out the wheel and accelerated again, “Doakes wants us on the Miami side for backup. So Oscar can’t get too fancy. We’ll run parallel along Biscayne.”
It made sense; as long as Oscar was on Miami Beach, he couldn’t escape in any other direction. If he tried to dash across a causeway or head north to the far side of Haulover Park and cross, we were there to pick him up. Unless he had a helicopter stashed, we had him cornered. I let Deborah 1 7 0
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drive, and she headed north rapidly without actually killing anyone.
At the airport we swung east on the 836. The traffic picked up a little here, and Deborah wove in and out, concentrating fiercely. I kept my thoughts to myself and she displayed her years of training with Miami traffic by winning what amounted to a nonstop free-for-all high-speed game of chicken. We made it safely through the interchange with I-95
and slid down onto Biscayne Boulevard. I took a deep breath and let it out carefully as Deborah eased back into street traffic and down to normal speed.
The radio crackled once and Doakes’s voice came over the speaker. “Morgan, what’s your twenty?”
Deborah lifted the microphone and told him. “Biscayne at the MacArthur Causeway.”
There was a short pause, and then Doakes said, “He’s pulled over by the drawbridge at the Venetian Causeway.
Cover it on your side.”