"Absolutely," I said, and believe it or not I had to fight down a very real urge to give him a hug. "Thank you, Brian," I said instead. "Thank you very much."

"You're very welcome," he said. He smiled again, and then he turned away and walked off into darkness.

"She's gonna be okay, buddy," Chutsky said, and I looked back to where he still squatted beside the open back door of the car. He held her hand, and he looked overwhelmingly weary. "She's gonna be all right."

"Are you sure?" I said, and he nodded.

"Yeah, I'm sure," he said. "You should still take her to the ER, get her checked out, but she's okay, no thanks to me and-" He looked away from me and for a very long moment he didn't say anything, long enough that I began to feel uncomfortable; after all, we were agreed that we needed to get out of here. Was this really the time and place for quiet contemplation?

"Aren't you coming along to the hospital?" I said, more to move things along than because I wanted his company.

Chutsky didn't move or speak. He just kept looking away, off into the park, where there were still scattered sounds of revelry and the mindless thump of the music wafting toward us on the night breeze.

"Chutsky," I said, and I felt real anxiety growing.

"I fucked up," he said at last, and to my very great horror, a tear rolled down his cheek. "I fucked up big-time. I let her down when she needed me the most. She could have been killed, and I couldn't stop them, and…"

He took a deep and very ragged breath. He still didn't look at me. "I've been kidding myself, buddy. I'm too old for her, and I'm no fucking good to her or anybody else. Not with…" He held up his hook, and thumped his forehead against it, resting his head there and looking down at his fake foot. "She wants a family, which is stupid for a guy like me. Old. A mess, and a cripple-and I can't protect her, or even-It's not me she needs. I'm just a useless, old fuckup-"

There was a shriek of female laughter from inside the park, and the sound brought Chutsky back to the here and now. He snapped his head around to the front, took another deep breath, a little steadier, and looked down at Deborah's face. Then he kissed her hand, a long kiss with his eyes closed, and stood up. "Get her to the ER, Dexter," he said. "And tell her I love her." And then he marched to his car.

"Hey," I said. "Aren't you going to…"

Apparently, he wasn't going to. He ignored me, got into his car, and drove away.

I did not linger to watch his taillights flicker off into the night. I secured Debs in the backseat the best I could with a seat belt around her middle, and got in. I drove two miles or so, far enough to be safe, and then pulled over. I reached for my phone, then thought better of it and instead picked up Chutsky's phone from the seat where Debs had thrown it. His phone would be shielded from little things like caller ID. I dialed.

"Nine-one-one," the operator said.

"You all better get a whole lotta boys over to that ol' Buccaneer Land right fast," I said in my best Bubba voice.

"Sir, what is the nature of this emergency?" the operator asked.

"I'm a veteran," I said. "I done two tours in Eye-rack and I know gunfire when I hear it and that's sure as shit gunfire in Buccaneer Land."

"Sir, are you saying you heard gunshots?"

"More than jes' heard it. Went and took a look in there, and they's dead bodies everywhere," I said. "Ten, twenty dead bodies, and folks dancin' 'round 'em like a party," I said.

"You saw ten dead bodies, sir? You're sure?"

"And then somebody took a bite outta one and started to eat it an' Ah run. Never seen nothin' so groo-sum in mah life, an' Ah wuz in Baghdad."

"They-ate the body, sir?"

"You all best get all them SWAT boys over there pronto," I said, and I hung up and put the car in gear. They might not round up everybody in the park, but they would get most of them, enough to get a picture of what had happened, and that would be enough to get Bobby Acosta, one way or another. I hoped that it would make Deborah feel a little better about Samantha.

I nosed the car up onto I-95 and began the drive to Jackson. There were several closer hospitals, but if you are a Miami cop, you tend to home in on Jackson, which has one of the best trauma units in the country. And since Chutsky had assured me that the visit was precautionary only, I thought it best to go with the experts.

So I drove south as fast as I dared, quietly for the first ten minutes, and then just before the turnoff for the Dolphin Expressway, I heard sirens, and then more sirens, and a column of emergency vehicles long enough to deal with a major invasion went by in the opposite direction. They were followed closely by a matching column of satellite trucks from the local news departments-all headed north, presumably to Buccaneer Land. Moments after the noise had faded, I heard movement in the backseat and a few seconds later Deborah spoke. "Fuck," she said, not really a surprising first word, considering the source. "Oh, fuck."

"You're all right, Deborah," I said, craning my neck to see her in the mirror. She lay there with her hands clasped over her middle and a look of numb panic on her face. "We're on our way to Jackson, but just to check. Nothing to worry about; you're okay."

"Samantha Aldovar?" she said.

"Um," I said. "She didn't make it." I glanced again in the mirror; Debs closed her eyes and rubbed her stomach.

"Where's Chutsky?" she said.

"Well, ah, I don't really know," I said. "I mean, he's okay, you know, not hurt. He said, 'Tell Deborah I love her,' and then he drove away, but…" A large truck jerked in front of me, even though I was in the HOV lane, and I had to swerve and brake. When I looked back in the mirror again, her eyes were still closed.

"He's gone," she said. "He thinks he let me down, and so he got all noble and left me. Just when I need him most."

The idea of needing Chutsky at all, letting alone "most," seemed like stretching credibility to me, but I played along.

"Sis, you're going to be all right," I said, searching for the right reassuring words. "We'll get you checked out at Jackson, but I'm sure you're fine, and you'll be back at work tomorrow and everything will seem all right, and-"

"I'm pregnant," she said, which really left me nothing at all to say.

EPILOGUE

Chutsky really was gone-Deborah was right about that. After a few weeks it became clear that he wasn't coming back, and there was nothing she could do to find him. She tried, of course, with all the single-minded skill of a very stubborn woman who was also a very good cop. But Chutsky had spent a career in black operations, and he swam at a deeper level. We didn't really even know if Chutsky was his real name. After a lifetime of espionage, he probably didn't know either, and he vanished as completely as if he had never existed.

Deborah was right about the other thing, too. It soon became very obvious to everyone that all of her pants were suddenly too tight, and her usually bland shirts had changed into loose-fitting, Hawaiian-patterned things, the kind that she would normally never willingly accompany even to the drunk tank. Deborah was pregnant, and she was determined to have the baby, with Chutsky or without him.

I worried at first that her new status as an unmarried mother would hurt her standing at work; cops are generally very conservative people. But I had apparently not kept up with the New Conservatism. Nowadays, Family Values meant that getting pregnant when you were single was fine, as long as you stayed that way, and Deborah's prestige at work actually went up as her belly got bigger.

You would have thought that a pregnant detective would have been sympathetic enough to convince anyone of a person's wickedness, but at the bail hearing for Bobby Acosta, the lawyers played up the fact that Joe had just lost his wife-Bobby's stepmother, who had raised him and meant so much to him, now tragically departed, and they somehow forgot to mention that she had died in the act of torturing and murdering a few sundry people, like wonderful precious me. The judge set bail at five hundred thousand dollars, which was chump change for the Acosta family, and Bobby skipped happily out of the courtroom and into the arms of his ever-loving father, as we had known all along he would do.