by Jeff Lindsay
“I’m not having hunches lately,” I admitted. “There’s just something that bothers me about this. It just—”
I opened my eyes and Deborah was staring at me. For the first time today there was something in her expression beyond bubbly happiness, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask me what that meant and was I all right. I had no idea what I would say if she did, since the Dark Passenger was not something I had ever talked about, and the idea of sharing something that intimate was very unsettling.
“I don’t know,” I said weakly. “It doesn’t seem right.”
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Deborah smiled gently. I would have felt more at ease if she had snarled and told me to fuck off, but she smiled and reached a hand across the desk to pat mine. “Dex,” she said softly, “the hard evidence is more than enough. The background fits. The motive is good. You admit you’re not having one of your . . . hunches.” She cocked her head to the side, still smiling, which made me even more uneasy. “This one is righteous, Bro. Whatever is bothering you, don’t pin it on this. He did it, we got him, that’s it.” She let go of my hand before either one of us could burst into tears. “But I’m a little worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and it sounded false even to me.
Deborah looked at me for a long moment, and then stood up.
“All right,” she said. “But I’m here for you if you need me.” And she turned and walked away.
Somehow I slogged through the gray soup of the rest of the day and made it all the way home to Rita’s at the end of the day, where the soup gelled into an aspic of sensory deprivation. I don’t know what we had for dinner, or what anyone might have said. The only thing I could bring myself to listen for was the sound of the Passenger rushing back in, and this sound did not come. And so I swam through the evening on automatic pilot and finally went to bed, still completely wrapped up in Dull Empty Dexter.
It surprised me a great deal to learn it, but sleep is not automatic for humans, not even for the semi-human I was becoming. The old me, Dexter of the Darkness, had slept perfectly, with great ease, simply lying down, closing his eyes, and thinking, “One two three GO.” Presto, sleep-o.
But the New Model Dexter had no such luck.
I tossed, I turned, I commanded my pitiful self to go immediately to sleep with no further dithering, and all to no avail. I could not sleep. I could only lie there wide-eyed and wonder why.
And as the night dragged on, so did the terrible, dreary introspection. Had I been misleading myself my entire life? What if I was not Dashing Slashing Dexter and his Canny Sidekick the Passenger? What if I was, in fact, actually only a Dark Chauffeur, allowed to live in a small room at the big house in exchange for driving the 108
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master on his appointed rounds? And if my services were no longer required, what could I possibly be now that the boss had moved away? Who was I if I was no longer me?
It was not a happy thought, and it did not make me happy. It also did not help me sleep. Since I had already tossed and turned exhaustively, without getting exhausted, I now concentrated on rolling and pitching, with much the same result. But finally, at around 3:30 a.m., I must have hit on the right combination of pointless movement and I dropped off at last into a shallow uncomfortable sleep.
The sound and smell of bacon cooking woke me up. I glanced at the clock—it was 8:32, later than I ever sleep. But of course it was Saturday morning. Rita had allowed me to doze on in my miserable unconsciousness. And now she would reward my return to the land of the waking with a bountiful breakfast. Yahoo.
Breakfast did, in fact, take some of the sourness out of me. It is very hard to maintain a really good feeling of utter depression and total personal worthlessness when you are full of food, and I gave up trying halfway through an excellent omelet.
Cody and Astor had naturally been awake for hours—Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD. They did not even notice me when I staggered past them on my way to the kitchen, and they stayed glued to the image of a talking kitchen utensil while I finished my breakfast, had a final cup of coffee, and decided to give life one more day to get its act together.
“All better?” Rita asked as I put down my coffee mug.
“It was a very nice omelet,” I said. “Thank you.”
She smiled and lunged up out of her chair to give me a peck on the cheek before flinging all the dishes in the sink and starting to wash them. “Remember you said you’d take Cody and Astor somewhere this morning,” she said over the sound of running water.
“I said that?”
“Dexter, you know I have a fitting this morning. For my wedding gown. I told you that weeks ago, and you said fine, you would DEXTER IN THE DARK
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take care of the kids while I went over to Susan’s for the fitting, and then I really need to go to the florist’s and see about some arrangements, even Vince offered to help me with that, he says he has a friend?”
“I doubt that,” I said, thinking of Manny Borque. “Not Vince.”
“But I said no thanks. I hope that was all right?”
“Fine,” I said. “We have only one house to sell to pay for things.”
“I don’t want to hurt Vince’s feelings and I’m sure his friend is wonderful, but I have been going to Hans for flowers since forever, and he would be brokenhearted if I went somewhere else for the wedding.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll take the kids.”
I had been hoping for a chance to devote some serious time to my own personal misery and find a way to start on the problem of the absent Passenger. Failing that, it would have been nice just to relax a little bit, perhaps even catch up on some of the precious sleep I had lost the night before, as was my sacred right.
It was, after all, a Saturday. Many well-regarded religions and labor unions have been known to recommend that Saturdays are for relaxation and personal growth; for spending time away from the hectic hurly-burly, in well-earned rest and recreation. But Dexter was more or less a family man nowadays, which changes everything, as I was learning. And with Rita spinning around making wedding preparations like a tornado with blond bangs, it was a clear imperative for me to scoop up Cody and Astor and take them away from the pandemonium to the shelter of some activity sanc-tioned by society as appropriate for adult-child bonding time.
After a careful study of my options, I chose the Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium. After all, it would be crowded with other family groups, which would maintain my disguise—and start them on theirs as well. Since they were planning to embark on the Dark Trail, they needed to begin right away to understand the notion that the more abnormal one is, the more important it is to appear normal.
And going to the museum with Doting Daddy Dexter was 110
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supremely normal-appearing for all three of us. It had the added ca-chet of being something that was officially Good for Them, a very big advantage, no matter how much that notion made them squirm.
So I loaded the three of us into my car and headed north on U.S. 1, promising the whirling Rita that we would return safely for dinner. I drove us through Coconut Grove and just before the Rick-enbacker Causeway turned into the parking lot of the museum in question. We did not go gentle into that good museum, however. In the parking lot, Cody got out of the car and simply stood there. Astor looked at him for a moment, and then turned to me. “Why do we have to go in there?” she said.
“It’s educational,” I told her.
“Ick,” she said, and Cody nodded.
“It’s important for us to spend time together,” I said.
“At a museum?” Astor demanded. “That’s pathetic.”
“That’s a lovely word,” I said. “Where did you get it?”
“We’r
e not going in there,” she said. “We want to do some -
thing.”
“Have you ever been to this museum?”
“No,” she said, drawing the word out into three contemptuous syllables as only a ten-year-old girl can.
“Well, it might surprise you,” I said. “You might actually learn something.”
“That’s not what we want to learn,” she said. “Not at a museum.”
“What is it you think you want to learn?” I said, and even I was impressed by how very much like a patient adult I sounded.
Astor made a face. “You know,” she said. “You said you’d show us stuff.”
“How do you know I’m not?” I said.
She looked at me uncertainly for a moment, then turned to Cody. Whatever it was they said to each other, it didn’t require words. When she turned back to me a moment later, she was all business, totally self-assured. “No way,” she said.
“What do you know about the stuff I’m going to show you?”
“Dex ter,” she said. “Why else did we ask you to show us?”
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“Because you don’t know anything about it and I do.”
“Duh-uh.”
“Your education begins in that building,” I said with my most serious face. “Follow me and learn.” I looked at them for a moment, watched their uncertainty grow, then I turned and headed for the museum. Maybe I was just cranky from a night of lost sleep, and I was not sure they would follow, but I had to set down the ground rules right away. They had to do it my way, just as I had come to understand so long ago that I had to listen to Harry and do it his way.
F I F T E E N
Being fourteen years old is never easy, even for artificial humans. It’s the age where biology takes over, and even when the fourteen-year-old in question is more interested in clinical biology than the sort more popular with his classmates at Ponce de Leon Junior High, it still rules with an iron hand.
One of the categorical imperatives of puberty that applies even to young monsters is that nobody over the age of twenty knows anything. And since Harry was well over twenty at this point, I had gone into a brief period of rebellion against his unreasonable re-straints on my perfectly natural and wholesome desires to hack my school chums into little bits.
Harry had laid out a wonderfully logical plan to get me squared away, which was his term for making things—or people—neat and orderly. But there is nothing logical about a fledgling Dark Passenger flexing its wings for the first time and beating them against the bars of the cage, yearning to fling itself into the free air and fall on its prey like a sharp steel thunderbolt.
Harry knew so many things I needed to learn to become safely and quietly me, to turn me from a wild, blossoming monster into DEXTER IN THE DARK
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the Dark Avenger: how to act human, how to be certain and careful, how to clean up afterward. He knew all these things as only an old cop could know them. I understood this, even then—but it all seemed so dull and unnecessary.
And Harry couldn’t really know everything, after all. He could not know, for example, about Steve Gonzalez, a particularly charming example of pubescent humanity who had earned my attention.
Steve was larger than me, and at a year or two older; he already had something on his upper lip that he referred to as a mustache.
He was in my PE class and felt it his God-given duty to make my life miserable whenever possible. If he was right, God must have been very pleased with the effort he put into it.
This was long before Dexter became the Living Ice Cube, and a certain amount of heated and very hard feeling built up inside. This seemed to please Steve and urge him on to greater heights of creativity in his persecution of the simmering young Dexter. We both knew this could end only one way, but alas for him, it was not the way Steve had in mind.
And so one afternoon an unfortunately industrious janitor stumbled into the biology lab at Ponce de Leon to find Dexter and Steve sorting out their personality conflict. It was not quite the classical middle-school face-off of filthy words and swinging fists, although I believe that might have been what Steve had in mind. But he had not reckoned with confronting the young Dark Passenger, and so the janitor found Steve securely taped to the table with a swatch of gray duct tape over his mouth, and Dexter standing above him with a scalpel, trying to remember what he had learned in biology class the day they dissected the frog.
Harry came to get me in his police cruiser, in uniform. He listened to the outraged assistant principal, who described the scene, quoted the student handbook, and demanded to know what Harry was going to do about it. Harry just looked at the assistant principal until the man’s words dribbled away into silence. He looked at him a moment longer, for effect, and then he turned his cold blue eyes on me.
“Did you do what he says you did, Dexter?” he asked me.
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There was no possibility of evasion or falsehood in the grip of that stare. “Yes,” I said, and Harry nodded.
“You see?” the assistant principal said. He thought he was going to say more, but Harry turned the look back on him and he fell silent again.
Harry looked back at me. “Why?” he said.
“He was picking on me.” That sounded somewhat feeble, even to me, so I added, “A lot. All the time.”
“And so you taped him to a table,” he said, with very little inflection.
“Uh-huh.”
“And you picked up a scalpel.”
“I wanted him to stop,” I said.
“Why didn’t you tell somebody?” Harry asked me.
I shrugged, which was a large portion of my working vocabu-lary in those days.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“I can take care of it,” I said.
“Looks like you didn’t take care of it so well,” he said.
There seemed to be very little I could do, so naturally enough I chose to look at my feet. They apparently had very little to add to the discussion, however, so I looked up again. Harry still watched me, and somehow he no longer needed to blink. He did not seem angry, and I was not really afraid of him, and that somehow made it even more uncomfortable.
“I’m sorry,” I said at last. I wasn’t sure if I meant it—for that matter, I’m still not sure I can really be sorry for anything I do. But it seemed like a very politic remark, and nothing else burbled up in my teenaged brain, simmering as it was with an oatmeal-thick sludge of hormones and uncertainty. And although I am sure Harry didn’t believe that I was sorry, he nodded again.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Just a minute,” the assistant principal said. “We still have things to discuss.”
“You mean the fact that you let a known bully push my boy to this kind of confrontation because of poor supervision? How many times has the other boy been disciplined?”
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“That’s not the point—” the assistant principal tried to say.
“Or are we talking about the fact that you left scalpels and other dangerous equipment unsecured and easily available to students in an unlocked and unsupervised classroom?”
“Really, Officer—”
“I tell you what,” Harry said. “I promise to overlook your extremely poor performance in this matter, if you agree to make a real effort to improve.”
“But this boy—” he tried to say.
“I will deal with this boy,” Harry said. “You deal with fixing things so I don’t have to call in the school board.”
And that, of course, was that. There was never any question of contradicting Harry, whether you were a murder suspect, the pres-ident of the Rotary Club, or a young errant monster. The assistant principal opened and closed his mouth a few more times, but no actual words came out, just a sort of sputtering sound combined with throat-clearing. Harry watched him for a moment, and then turne
d to me. “Let’s go,” he said again.
Harry was silent all the way out to the car, and it was not a chummy silence. He did not speak as we drove away from the school and turned north on Dixie Highway—instead of heading around the school in the other direction, Granada to Hardee and over to our little house in the Grove. I looked at him as he made his turn, but he still had nothing to say, and the expression on his face did not seem to encourage conversation. He looked straight ahead at the road, and drove—fast, but not so fast he had to turn on the siren.
Harry turned left on 17th Avenue, and for a few moments I had the irrational thought that he was taking me to the Orange Bowl.
But we passed the turnoff for the stadium and kept going, over the Miami River and then right on North River Drive, and now I knew where we were going but I didn’t know why. Harry still hadn’t said a word or looked in my direction, and I was beginning to feel a certain oppression creeping into the afternoon that had nothing to do with the storm clouds that were beginning to gather on the horizon.
Harry parked the cruiser and at last he spoke. “Come on,” he said. “Inside.” I looked at him, but he was already climbing out of 116
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the car, so I got out, too, and followed him meekly into the detention center.
Harry was well known here, as he was everywhere a good cop might be known. He was followed by calls of “Harry!” and “Hey, Sarge!” all the way through the receiving area and down the hall to the cell block. I simply trudged behind him as my sense of grim foreboding grew. Why had Harry brought me to the jail? Why wasn’t he scolding me, telling me how disappointed he was, devising harsh but fair punishment for me?
Nothing he did or refused to say offered me any clues. So I trailed along behind. We were stopped at last by one of the guards.
Harry took him to one side and spoke quietly; the guard looked over at me, nodded, and led us to the end of the cell block. “Here he is,” the guard said. “Enjoy yourself.” He nodded at the figure in the cell, glanced at me briefly, and walked away, leaving Harry and me to resume our uncomfortable silence.
