Find him, she said again. Doakes just nodded, but it was enough for her. Deborah let go of his arm and he stood up to give the paramedics room. They swooped in and gave Debs a once-over, and they moved her onto their gurney, raised it up, and began to wheel her toward the waiting ambulance. I watched her go, wondering what had happened to our dear friend in the white van. He had a flat tire—how far could he get? It seemed likely that he would try to switch to a different vehicle, rather than stop and call AAA to help him change the tire. So somewhere nearby, we would be very likely to find the abandoned van and a missing car.

Out of an impulse that seemed extremely generous, considering his attitude toward me, I moved over to tell Doakes my thoughts. But I only made it a step and a half in his direction when I heard a commotion coming our way. I turned to look.

Running at us up the middle of the street was a chunky middle-aged guy in a pair of boxer shorts and nothing else. His belly hung over the band of his shorts and wobbled wildly as he came and it was clear that he had not had much practice at running, and he made it harder on himself by waving his arms around over his head and shouting, Hey! Hey! Hey! as he ran. By the time he crossed the ramp from I-95 and got to us he was breathless, gasping too hard to say anything coherent, but I had a pretty good idea what he wanted to say.

De bang, he gasped out, and I realized that his breathlessness and his Cuban accent had combined, and he was trying to say, The van.

A white van? With a flat tire? And your car is gone, I said, and Doakes looked at me.

But the gasping man was shaking his head. White van, sure. I hear I thought it’s a dog inside, maybe hurt, he said, and paused to breath deeply so he could properly convey the full horror of what he had seen. And then—

But he was wasting his precious breath. Doakes and I were already sprinting up the street in the direction he had come from.

Dexter 2 – Dearly Devoted Dexter

CHAPTER 21

S ERGEANT DOAKES APPARENTLY FORGOT HE WAS SUPPOSED to be following me, because he beat me to the van by a good twenty yards. Of course he had the very large advantage of having both shoes, but still, he moved quite well. The van was run up on the sidewalk in front of a pale orange house surrounded by a coral-rock wall. The front bumper had thumped a rock corner post and toppled it, and the rear of the vehicle was skewed around to face the street so we could see the bright yellow of the Choose Life license plate.