here are really very few better conversation stoppers than telling your brother you’re considering arresting him for murder, and even my legendary wit was not equal to the task of thinking of something to say that was worth the breath spent on it. So we rode in silence, down U.S. 1 to 95 North and then off the freeway and into the Design District, just past the turnoff for the Julia Tuttle Causeway.

The silence made the trip seem a lot longer than it really was. I glanced once or twice at Deborah, but she was apparently absorbed in thought—perhaps considering whether to use her good cuffs on me or just the cheap extra pair in the glove compartment. Whatever the case, she stared straight ahead, turning the wheel mechanically and moving in and out of traffic without any real thought, and without any attention wasted on me.

We found the address quickly enough, which was a relief, since the strain of not looking at each other and not talking was getting to be a bit much. Deborah pulled up in front of a sort of warehouse-looking thing on Northeast Fortieth Street, and pushed the gear lever into park. She turned off the engine and still did not look at me, but paused for a moment. Then she shook her head and climbed out of the car.

I guess I was supposed to just follow along like always, Little Deb’s hulking shadow. But I do have some small smidgen of pride, and really: If she was going to turn on me for a paltry few recreational killings, should I be expected to help her solve these? I mean, I don’t need to think that things are fair—they never are—but this seemed to be straining at the bounds of decency.

So I sat in the car and didn’t really watch as Debs stalked up to the door of the place and rang the buzzer. It was only out of the uninterested corner of my eye that I saw the door open, and I barely noticed the boring detail of Deborah showing her badge. And so I couldn’t really tell from where I sat unwatching in the car if the man hit her and she fell over, or whether he simply pushed her to the ground and then disappeared inside.

But I became mildly interested again when she struggled to one knee, then fell over and did not get up again.

I heard a distinct buzzing in Alarm Central: something was very wrong and all my huffishness with Deborah evaporated like gasoline on hot pavement. I was out of the car and running up the sidewalk as fast as I could manage it.

From ten feet away I could see the handle of a knife sticking out of her side and I slowed for a moment as a shock wave rolled through me. A pool of awful wet blood was already spreading across the sidewalk and I was back in the cold box with Biney, my brother, and seeing the terrible sticky red lying thick and nasty on the floor and I could not move or even breathe. But the door fluttered open and the man who had knifed Deborah stepped out, saw me, and went to his knees reaching for the knife handle, and the rising sound of wind that whooshed in my ears turned into the roar of the Dark Passenger spreading its wings and I stepped forward quickly and kicked him hard in the side of the head. He sprawled beside her, face in the blood, and he did not move.

I knelt beside Deborah and took her hand. Her pulse was strong, and her eyes flickered open. “Dex,” she whispered.

“Hang on, sis,” I said, and she closed her eyes again. I pulled her radio from its holster on her belt and called for help.

A small crowd had gathered in the few minutes it took for the ambulance to get there, but they parted willingly as the emergency medical techs jumped out and hurried to Deborah.

“Whoof,” the first one said. “Let’s stop the bleeding fast.” He was a stocky young guy with a Marine Corps haircut, and he knelt beside Debs and went to work. His partner, an even stockier woman of about forty, quickly got an IV bag into Deborah’s arm, sliding the needle in just as I felt a hand pulling my arm from behind.

I turned. A uniformed cop was there, a middle-aged black guy with a shaved head, and he nodded at me. “You her partner?” he asked.

I pulled out my ID. “Her brother,” I said. “Forensics.”

“Huh,” he said, taking my credentials and looking them over. “You guys don’t usually get to the scene this fast.” He handed back my ID. “What can you tell me about that guy?” He nodded to the man who had stabbed Deborah, who was sitting up now and holding his head as another cop squatted beside him.

“He opened the door and saw her,” I said. “And then he stuck a knife in her.”

“Uh-huh,” the cop said. He turned away to his partner. “Cuff him, Frankie.”

I did not watch and gloat as the two cops pulled the knife wielder’s arms behind him and slapped on cuffs, because they were loading Deborah into the ambulance. I stepped over to speak to the EMS guy with the short hair. “Will she be all right?” I asked.

He gave me a mechanical and unconvincing smile. “We’ll see what the doctors say, okay?” he said, which did not sound as encouraging as he might have intended.

“Are you taking her to Jackson?” I asked.

He nodded. “She’ll be in the ICU Trauma when you get there,” he said.

“Can I ride with you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. He slammed the door shut, ran to the front seat of the ambulance, and got in. I watched as they nosed out into traffic, turned on the siren, and drove away.

I suddenly felt very lonely. It seemed far too melodramatic to bear. The last words we had spoken were not pleasant, and now they might very well prove to be our Last Words. It was a sequence of events that belonged on television, preferably on an afternoon soap opera. It did not belong in the prime-time drama of Dexter’s Dim Days. But there it was. Deborah was on her way to intensive care and I did not know if she would come out of it. I did not even know if she would get there alive.

I looked back at the sidewalk. It seemed like an awful lot of blood. Deborah’s blood.

Happily for me, I did not have to brood too long. Detective Coulter had arrived, and he looked unhappy even for him. I watched him stand on the sidewalk for a minute and look around, before he trudged over to where I stood. He looked even more unhappy as he looked me over from head to toe with the same expression he had used on the crime scene.

“Dexter,” he said. He shook his head. “The fuck you do?”

For a very brief moment I actually started to deny that I’d stabbed my sister. Then I realized he couldn’t possibly be accusing me, and indeed, he was merely breaking the ice before taking my statement.

“She shoulda waited for me,” he said. “I’m her partner.”

“You were getting coffee,” I said. “She thought it shouldn’t wait.”

Coulter looked down at the blood on the pavement and shook his head. “Coulda waited twenty minutes,” he said. “For her partner.” He looked up at me. “It’s a sacred bond.”

I have no experience with the sacred, since I spend most of my time playing for the other team, so I simply said, “I guess you’re right,” and that seemed to satisfy him enough that he settled down and just took my statement with no more than a few sour glances at the blood stain left by his sacred partner. It took a very long ten minutes before I could finally excuse myself to drive to the hospital.

Jackson Memorial Hospital is well known to every cop, felon, and victim in the greater Miami area, because they have all been there, either as a patient or to pick up a coworker who was one. It is one of the busiest trauma centers in the country, and if practice truly makes perfect, the ICU at Jackson must be the very best at gunshot wounds, stab wounds, blunt-object wounds, beating injuries, and other maliciously inflicted medical conditions. The U.S. Army comes to Jackson to learn field surgery, because over five thousand times every year someone comes to the trauma center with the closest thing you can find to front-line combat wounds outside Baghdad.

So I knew Debs would be in good hands if she got there alive. And I found it very hard to imagine that she could possibly die. I mean, I was very well aware that she could die; it does happen to most of us, sooner or later. But I could not picture a world without a Deborah Morgan walking around and breathing in it. It would be like one of those thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles with a large center piece missing. It would just seem wrong.

I didn;t like thinking about it. It was a very strange sensation. I could not recall ever getting this maudlin before. It was not just realizing that she might die, since this was something that I did hace some small experience with. And it was not merely the fact that she was more or less family, since I had been through that before too. But when my foster parents died, I’d had a long illness and the certain knowledge that they were dying to prepare me. This was so sudden. Perhaps it was just the unexpected nature of the shock that made me feel so very nearly emotional.

Luckily for me, it was not a very long drive—the hospital was only a couple of miles away—and I pulled into the parking lot after only a few minutes of racing through traffic with one hand on the horn—which most Miami drivers usually ignore anyway.

All hospitals are the same on the inside, even down to the color the walls are painted, and on the whole they are not truly happy places. Of course, I was quite pleased to have one here at the moment, but I was not filled with a sense of pleasant expectation when I walked into the trauma unit. There was an air of animal resignation about the people waiting, and a sense of perpetual, bone-numbing crisis on the faces of all the doctors and nurses as they bustled back and forth, and this was only countered by the unhurried, bureaucratic, clipboard-wielding officiality of the woman who stopped me when I tried to push through and find Deborah.

“Sergeant Morgan, knife wound,” I said. “They just brought her in.”

“Who are you?” she said.

Stupidly thinking it might get me past her quickly, I said, “Next of kin,” and the woman actually smiled. “Good,” she said. “Just the man I need to talk to.”

“Can I see her?” I said.

“No,” she said. She grabbed me by the elbow and began to steer me firmly toward an office cubicle.

“Can you tell me how she’s doing?” I asked.

“Have a seat right here, please,” she said, propelling me toward a molded plastic chair that faced a small desk.

“But how is she?” I said, refusing to be bullied.

“We’ll find out in just a minute,” she said. “Just as soon as we get some of this paperwork done. Sit down, please, Mr—is it Mr. Morton?”

“Morgan,” I said.

She frowned. “I have Morton here.”

“It’s Morgan,” I said. “M-O-R-G-A-N.”

“Are you sure?” she asked me, and the surreal nature of the whole hospital experience swept over me and shoved me down into the chair, as if I had been smacked by a huge wet pillow.

“Quite sure,” I said faintly, slumping back as much as the wobbly little chair allowed.

“Now I’ll have to change it in the computer,” she said, frowning. “Doggone it.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, like a stranded fish, as the woman pecked at her keyboard. It was just too much; even her laconic “doggone it” was an offense to reason. It was Deborah’s life on the line—shouldn’t there be great fiery gouts of urgent profanity spewing from every single person physically able to stand and speak? Perhaps I could arrange for Hernando Meza to come in and teach a workshop on the correct linguistic approach to impending doom.

It took far longer than seemed either possible or human, but eventually I did manage to get all the proper forms filled out and persuade the woman that, as next of kin and a police employee I had every right in the world to see my sister. But of course, things being what they are in this vale of tears, I did not really get to see her. I simply stood in a hallway and peeked through a porthole-shaped window and watched as what seemed like a very large crowd of people in lime green scrubs gathered around the table and did terrible, unimaginable things to Deborah.

For several centuries I simply stood and stared and occasionally flinched as a bloody hand or instrument appeared in the air above my sister. The smell of chemicals, blood, sweat and fear was almost overwhelming. But finally, when I could feel the earth turning dead and airless and the sun growing old and cold, they all stepped back from the table and several of them began to push her toward the door. I stepped back and watched them roll her through the doors and down the hall, and then I grabbed at the arm of one of the senior-looking men who filed out after. It might have been a mistake: my hand touched something cold, wet and sticky, and I pulled it away to see it splotched with blood. For a moment I felt light-headed and unclean and even a little panicky, but as the surgeon turned to look at me I recovered just enough.

“How is she?” I asked him.

He looked down the hall toward where they were taking my sister, then back at me. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Her brother,” I said. “Is she going to be all right?”

He gave me half a not-funny smile. “It’s much too soon to tell,” he said. “She lost an awful lot of blood. She could be fine, or there could be complications. We just don’t know yet.”

“What kind of complications?” I asked. It seemed like a very reasonable question to me, but he blew out an irritated breath and shook his head.

“Everything from infection to brain damage,” he said. “We’re not going to know anything for a day or two, so you’re just going to have to wait until we do know something, okay?” He gave me the other half of the smile and walked away in the opposite direction from where they had taken Deborah.

I watched him go, thinking about brain damage. Then I turned and followed the gurney that had carried Deborah down the hall.