>>I think it's a bad idea. If somebody changes where condition of the query or makes query not fully optimizable some other way, you'll get wrong result.
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>Fortunately (or not, depending on your pov), the SQL statement is hard coded and not subject to user interference. It is used for a very specific purpose which would become worthless anyway if somebody changed it. It's a real simple statement, but even though there is an index exactly matching the where clause, and an index on DELETED(), when it runs on a table of about 100,000 records, it takes about 10 seconds to run. Doing what I'm doing brings it down to sub 1 second. I'm going to continue trying to find a better option, but I think for now, I may just have to treat this as a temporary fix.

Why not explain what you're really trying to accomplish? If you're looking for deleted records using a seek on that deleted tag will get you the deleted records faster than any other process.