So I took my cell phone from its holster and called him. He answered almost immediately.

“Hello?”

“Kyle, this is Dexter” I said.

“Hey, buddy” he said in his artificially cheerful voice. “What's up?”

“I'm with Deborah” I said. “In the ICU at Jackson.”

“What happened?” he asked after a slight pause.

“She's been stabbed” I replied. “She lost a lot of blood.”

“I'm on my way” he announced, and hung up.

It was nice that Chutsky cared enough to come right away.

Maybe he would help me with Deborah's pablum, take turns pushing the wheelchair. It's good to have someone.

That reminded me that I had someone —or perhaps I was had.

In any case, Rita would want to know I would be late, before she cooked a pheasant souffle for me. I called her at work, told her quickly what was up, and hung up again as she was just getting started on a chorus of Oh-My-Gods.

Chutsky came into the room about fifteen minutes later, trailed by a nurse who was apparently trying to make sure he was perfectly happy with everything from the location of the room to the arrangement of IVs. “This is her,” the nurse said.

“Thanks, Gloria” Chutsky said without looking at anything but Deborah. The nurse hovered anxiously for a few more moments, and then vanished uncertainly.

Meanwhile, Chutsky moved over to the bed and took Deborah's hand —good to know I had been right about that; holding her hand was, indeed, the correct thing to do.

“What happened, buddy?” he said, staring down at Deborah.

I gave him a brief rundown, and he listened without looking at me, pausing in his hand-holding briefly to wipe a lock of hair away from Deborah's forehead. When I had finished talking he nodded absently and said, “What did the doctors say?”

“It's too soon to tell” I said.

He waved that away impatiently, using the gleaming silver hook that had replaced his left hand. “They always say that” he said. “What else?”

“There's a chance of permanent damage” I said. “Even brain damage.”

He nodded. “She lost a lot of blood” he said, not a question, but I answered anyway. “That's right,” I said.

I have a guy coming down from Bethesda” Chutsky said. “He'll be here in a couple of hours.” I couldn't think of very much to say to that. A guy? From Bethesda? Was this good news of some kind, and if so, why?

I could not come up with a single thing to distinguish Bethesda from Cleveland, except that it was in Maryland instead of Ohio.

What kind of guy would come down from there? And to what end? But I also couldn't think of any way to frame a question on the subject. For some reason, my brain was not running with its usual icy efficiency. So I just watched as Chutsky pulled another chair around to the far side of the bed, where he could sit and hold Deborah's hand. And after he got settled, he finally looked directly at me. “Dexter” he said.