by Jeff Lindsay
“Almost anything,” I said. “Professional football is probably out.”
“Do you shoot people?” Astor asked Deborah.
“For Christ’s sake, Dexter,” Deborah said.
“She shoots people sometimes,” I told Astor, “but she doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“Shooting somebody is a very private thing,” I said, “and I think she feels that it isn’t anybody else’s business.”
“Stop talking about me like I’m a lamp, for Christ’s sake,” Deborah snapped. “I’m sitting right here.”
“I know that,” Astor said. “Will you tell us about who you shot?”
For an answer, Deborah squealed the car through a sharp turn, DEXTER IN THE DARK
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into the parking lot, and rocked to a stop in front of the center.
“We’re here,” she said, and jumped out as if she was escaping a nest of fire ants. She hurried into the building and as soon as I got Cody and Astor unbuckled, we followed at a more leisurely pace.
Deborah was still speaking with the sergeant on duty at the desk, and I steered Cody and Astor to a pair of battered chairs.
“Wait here,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Just wait?” Astor said, with outrage quivering in her voice.
“Yes,” I said. “I have to go talk to a bad guy.”
“Why can’t we go?” she demanded.
“It’s against the law,” I said. “Now wait here like I said. Please.”
They didn’t look terribly enthusiastic, but at least they didn’t leap off the chairs and charge down the hallway screaming. I took advantage of their cooperation and joined Deborah.
“Come on,” she said, and we headed to one of the interview rooms down the hall. In a few minutes a guard brought Halpern in.
He was handcuffed, and he looked even worse than he had when we brought him in. He hadn’t shaved and his hair was a rat’s nest, and there was a look in his eyes that I can only describe as haunted, no matter how clichéd that sounds. He sat in the chair where the guard nudged him, perching on the edge of the seat and staring at his hands as they lay before him on the table.
Deborah nodded to the guard, who left the room and stood in the hall outside. She waited for the door to swing closed and then turned her attention to Halpern. “Well, Jerry,” she said, “I hope you had a good night’s rest.”
His head jerked as if it had been yanked upward by a rope, and he goggled at her. “What—what do you mean?” he said.
Debs raised her eyebrows. “I don’t mean anything, Jerry,” she said mildly. “Just being polite.”
He stared at her for a moment and then dropped his head again.
“I want to go home,” he said in a small, shaky voice.
“I’m sure you do, Jerry,” Deborah said. “But I can’t let you go right now.”
He just shook his head, and muttered something inaudible.
“What’s that, Jerry?” she asked in the same kind, patient voice.
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“I said, I don’t think I did anything,” he said, still without looking up.
“You don’t think so?” she asked him. “Shouldn’t we be kind of sure about that before we let you go?”
He raised his head to look at her, very slowly this time. “Last night . . .” he said. “Something about being in this place . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said.
“You’ve been in a place like this before, haven’t you, Jerry?
When you were young,” Deborah said, and he nodded. “And this place made you remember something?”
He jerked as if she’d spit in his face. “I don’t—it isn’t a memory,” he said. “It was a dream. It had to be a dream.”
Deborah nodded very understandingly. “What was the dream about, Jerry?”
He shook his head and stared at her with his jaw hanging open.
“It might help you to talk about it,” she said. “If it’s just a dream, what can it hurt?” He kept shaking his head. “What was the dream about, Jerry?” she said again, a little more insistently, but still very gently.
“There’s a big statue,” he said, and he stopped shaking his head and looked surprised that words had come out.
“All right,” Deborah said.
“It—it’s really big,” he said. “And there’s a . . . a . . . it has a fire burning in its belly.”
“It has a belly?” Deborah said. “What kind of statue is it?”
“It’s so big,” he said. “Bronze body, with two arms held out, and the arms are moving down, to . . .” He trailed off, and then mumbled something.
“What did you say, Jerry?”
“He said it has a bull’s head,” I said, and I could feel all the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight out.
“The arms come down,” he said. “And I feel . . . really happy. I don’t know why. Singing. And I put the two girls into the arms. I cut them with a knife, and they go up to the mouth, and the arms dump them in. Into the fire . . .”
“Jerry,” Debs said, even more gently, “your clothes had blood DEXTER IN THE DARK
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on them, and they’d been singed.” He didn’t say anything, and she went on. “We know you have blackouts when you’re feeling too much stress,” she said. He stayed quiet. “Isn’t it just possible, Jerry, that you had one of these blackouts, killed the girls, and came home? Without knowing it?”
He began shaking his head again, slowly and mechanically.
“Can you give me a better suggestion?” she said.
“Where would I find a statue like that?” he said. “That’s—how could I, what, find the statue, and build the fire inside it, and get the girls there, and—how could that be possible? How could I do all that and not know it?”
Deborah looked at me, and I shrugged. It was a fair point. After all, there must surely be some practical limit to what you can do while sleepwalking, and this did seem to go a little beyond that.
“Then where did the dream come from, Jerry?” she said.
“Everybody has dreams,” he said.
“And how did the blood get on your clothes?”
“Wilkins did it,” he said. “He had to, there’s no other answer.”
There was a knock on the door and the sergeant came in. He bent over and spoke softly into Deborah’s ear, and I leaned closer to hear. “This guy’s lawyer is making trouble,” he said. “He says now that the heads turned up while his client is in here, he has to be innocent.” The sergeant shrugged. “I can’t keep him outta here,” he said.
“All right,” Debs said. “Thanks, Dave.” He shrugged again, straightened, and left the room.
Deborah looked at me. “Well,” I said, “at least it doesn’t seem too easy anymore.”
She turned back to Halpern. “All right, Jerry,” she said. “We’ll talk some more later.” She stood up and walked out of the room and I followed.
“What do we think about that?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Jesus, Dex, I don’t know. I need a major break here.” She stopped walking and turned to face me. “Either the guy really did this in one of his blackouts, which means he set the whole thing up without really knowing, which is impossible.”
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“Probably,” I said.
“Or else somebody else went to a shitload of trouble to set it up and frame him, and timed it just right to match one of his blackouts.”
“Which is also impossible,” I said helpfully.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
“And the statue with the bull’s head and the fire in its belly?”
“Fuck,” she said. “It’s just a dream. Has to be.”
“So where were the girls burned?”
“You want to show me a giant statue with a bull’s head and a built-in barbecue? Where do you hid
e that? You find it and I’ll believe it’s real,” she said.
“Do we have to release Halpern now?” I asked.
“No, goddamn it,” she snarled. “I still got him on resisting arrest.” And she turned away and walked back toward the receiving area.
Cody and Astor were sitting with the sergeant when we got back out to the entryway, and even though they had not remained where I told them to, I was so grateful that they had not set anything on fire that I let it go. Deborah watched impatiently while I collected them, and we all headed out the door together. “Now what?” I said.
“We have to talk to Wilkins, of course,” Deborah said.
“And do we ask him if he has a statue with a bull’s head in his backyard?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “That’s bullshit.”
“That’s a bad word,” said Astor. “You owe me fifty cents.”
“It’s getting late,” I said. “I have to get the kids home before their mother barbecues me.”
Deborah looked at Cody and Astor for a long moment, then up at me. “All right,” she said.
N I N E T E E N
Idid manage to get the kids home before Rita went over the edge, but it was a very close call that was not made any easier when she found out that they had been to see severed heads. Still, they were obviously unbothered and even excited about their day, and Astor’s new determination to be a Mini-Me to my sister Deborah seemed to distract Rita from anything approaching actual wrath. After all, an early career choice could save a lot of time and bother later.
It was clear that Rita had a full head of steam and we were in for Babblefest. Normally I would simply smile and nod and let her run on. But I was in no mood for anything that smacked of normal.
For the last two days I had wanted nothing but a quiet place and time to try to figure out where my Passenger had gone, and I had instead been pulled in every other direction possible by Deborah, Rita, the kids, even my job, of all things. My disguise had taken over from the thing it was supposed to be hiding, and I did not like it.
But if I could make it past Rita and out the door, I would finally have some time to myself.
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Monday morning, I slid out the door and drove in to the office, enjoying the relative peace and calm of Miami traffic on a Saturday night.
For the first fifteen minutes of the drive I could not lose the feeling that I was being followed. Ridiculous, I know, but I had no experience with being alone in the night and it made me feel very vulnerable. Without the Passenger I was a tiger with a dull nose and no fangs. I felt slow and stupid, and the skin on my back would not stop crawling. It was an overall feeling of impending creepiness, the sense that I needed to circle around and sniff the back trail, because something was lurking there hungrily. And tickling at the edges of all that was an echo of that strange dream music, making my feet twitch in an involuntary way, as if they had someplace to go without me.
It was a terrible feeling, and if only I had been capable of empa-thy, I’m sure I might have had a moment of awful revelation, wherein I flung a hand to my forehead and sank to the ground, murmuring anguished regrets over all the times I had done the stalking and caused this dreadful feeling in others. But I am not built for anguish—at least, not my own—and so all I could think about was my very large problem. My Passenger was gone, and I was empty and defenseless if somebody really was tailing me.
It had to be mere imagination. Who would stalk Dutiful Dexter, plodding through his completely normal artificial existence with a happy smile, two children, and a new mortgage to a caterer? Just to be sure, I glanced into the rearview mirror.
No one of course; no one lurking with an ax and a piece of pottery with Dexter’s name on it. I was turning stupid in my lonely dotage.
A car was on fire on the shoulder of the Palmetto Expressway, and most of the traffic was dealing with the congestion by either roaring around it on the left shoulder or leaning on the horn and shouting. I got off and drove past the warehouses near the airport.
At a storage place just off 69th Avenue a burglar alarm was clattering endlessly, and three men were loading boxes into a truck without any appearance of haste. I smiled and waved; they ignored me.
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It was a feeling I was getting used to—everyone was ignoring poor empty Dexter lately, except, of course, whoever it was that had either been following me or not really following me at all.
But speaking of empty, the way I had weaseled out of a confrontation with Rita, smooth as it had been, had left me without dinner, and this is not something I willingly tolerate. Right now I wanted to eat almost as much as I wanted to breathe.
I stopped at a Pollo Tropical and picked up half a chicken to take with me. The smell instantly filled the car, and the last couple of miles it was all I could do to keep the car on the road instead of screeching to a halt and ripping at the chicken with my teeth.
It finally overwhelmed me in the parking lot, and as I walked in the door I had to fumble out my credentials with greasy fingers, nearly dropping the beans in the process. But by the time I settled in at my computer, I was a much happier boy and the chicken was no more than a bag of bones and a pleasant memory.
As always, with a full stomach and a clean conscience I found it much easier to shift my powerful brain into high gear and think about the problem. The Dark Passenger was missing; that seemed to imply that it had some kind of independent existence without me. That meant it must have come from somewhere and, quite possibly, gone back there. So my first problem was to learn what I could about where it came from.
I knew very well that mine was not the only Passenger in the world. Over the course of my long and rewarding career I had encountered several other predators wrapped in the invisible black cloud that indicated a hitchhiker like mine. And it stood to reason that they had originated somewhere and sometime, and not just with me and in my own time. Shamefully enough, I had never wondered why, or where these inner voices came from. Now, with the whole night stretching ahead of me in the peace and quiet of the forensics lab, I could rectify this tragic oversight.
And so without any thought of my own personal safety, I dashed fearlessly onto the Internet. Of course, there was nothing helpful when I searched “Dark Passenger.” That was, after all, my private term. I tried it anyway, just to be safe, and found nothing 144
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more than a few online games and a couple of blogs that someone really should report to the proper authorities, whoever was in charge of policing teenage angst.
I searched for “interior companion,” “inside friend,” and even
“spirit guide.” Once again there were some very interesting results that made one wonder what this tired old world was coming to, but nothing that illuminated my problem. But as far as I know there has never been only one of anything, and the odds were that I was simply failing to come up with the correct search terms to find what I needed.
Very well: “Inner guide.” “Internal adviser.” “Hidden helper.” I went through as many combinations of these as I could think of, switching around the adjectives, running through lists of synonyms, and always marveling at how New Age pseudo-philosophy had taken over the Internet. And still I came up with nothing more sinister than a way to tap my powerful subconscious to make a killing in real estate.
There was, however, one very interesting reference to Solomon, of biblical fame, which claimed that the old wise guy had made secret references to some kind of inner king. I searched for a few tid-bits of information on Solomon. Who would have guessed that this Bible stuff was interesting and relevant? But apparently when we think of him as being a wise, jolly old guy with a beard who offered to cut a baby in half just for laughs, we are missing out on all the good parts.
For example, Solomon built a temple to something called Moloch, apparently one of the n
aughty elder gods, and he killed his brother because “wickedness” was found inside him. I could certainly see that, from a biblical perspective, interior wickedness might be a fine description of a Dark Passenger. But if there was a connection here, did it really make sense that someone with an “inner king” would kill somebody inhabited by wickedness?
It was making my head spin. Was I to believe that King Solomon himself actually had a Dark Passenger of his own? Or because he was supposedly one of the Bible’s good guys, should I in-terpret it to mean that he found one in his brother and killed him DEXTER IN THE DARK
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because of it? And contrary to what we had all been led to believe, did he really mean it when he offered to cut the baby in half?
Most important of all, did it really matter what had happened several thousand years ago on the far side of the world? Even supposing that King Solomon had one of the original Dark Passengers, how did that help me get back to being lovable deadly me? What did I actually do with all this fascinating historical lore? None of it told me where the Passenger came from, what it was, or how to get it back.
I was at a loss. All right, then, it was clearly time to give up, accept my fate, throw myself on the mercy of the court, assume the role of Dexter, quiet family man and former Dark Avenger. Resign myself to the idea that I would never again feel the hard cool touch of the moonlight on my electrified nerve endings as I slid through the night like the avatar of cold, sharp steel.
I tried to think of something to inspire me to even greater heights of mental effort in my investigation, but all I came up with was a piece of a Rudyard Kipling poem: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs,” or words to that effect. It didn’t seem like it was enough. Perhaps Ariel Goldman and Jessica Ortega should have memorized Kipling. In any case, my search had taken me no place helpful.
Fine. What else could someone call the Passenger? “Sardonic commentator,” “warning system,” “inside cheerleader.” I checked them all. Some of the results for inside cheerleader were really quite startling, but had nothing to do with my search.
I tried “watcher,” “interior watcher,” “dark watcher,” “hidden watcher.”
