by Jeff Lindsay
I wiggled the point of the stake back into the opening as far as I could and pounded even harder. I could feel it sinking slowly through, and then suddenly I pounded and the stake dropped several inches. I stopped pounding and began to work the wood back and forth, stretching the metal back, making the hole as big as possible. I worked it and worried it and jammed the stake sideways and even put my shoe back on and kicked at it, and for twenty minutes the metal of the trailer fought back, but at last I had a way out.
I paused for a moment, looking at the hole I had made. I was exhausted and sore and soaked with sweat, but I was one step away from freedom.
“I’m outta here,” I called to Samantha. “This is your last chance to get away.”
“Bye-bye,” she called back. “Have a nice trip.” It seemed a little bit callous after all we had gone through together, but it was probably all I would get from her.
“Okay,” I said, and I climbed into the locker, pushing my legs down into the hole I had made. My feet touched ground and I wiggled the rest of me downward. It was a very tight fit, and I felt first my pants and then my shirt catch on the metal edges and tear. I held my arms up above my head and kept wiggling and in just a moment I was through, sitting on the warm and wet dirt of the Everglades. I could feel it soak through my pants, but it felt wonderful, much better than the floor of the trailer.
I took a deep breath; I was free. Around me was the trailer’s concrete-block foundation, holding it several feet off the ground. There were two gaps in it, one of them close by and opposite the trailer’s door. I rolled onto my stomach and crawled toward it. And just as my head poked out into the light of day and I began to think I was going to get away, a massive hand came down and grabbed me by the hair. “That’s far enough, asshole,” a voice snarled at me, and I felt myself lifted almost straight up with only a short pause to bang my head against the trailer. Through the bright lights bursting in my already painful head I could see my old friend, the bouncer with the shaved head. He threw me up against the side of the trailer and, as he had when he knocked me out in the refrigerator, he pinned me with a forearm across my throat.
Behind him I could see that the trailer sat in a small clearing, surrounded by the lush vegetation of the Everglades. A canal ran along one side, and mosquitoes hummed and homed in on us happily. Somewhere a bird called. And from a path at the near end of the clearing came Kukarov, the club manager, followed by two other nasty-looking men, one of them carrying the insulated lunch bucket and the other a leather tool pouch.
“Well, piggy,” Kukarov said with a truly awful smile. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I have a dentist’s appointment,” I said. “I really can’t miss it.”
“Yes, you can,” Kukarov said, and the bouncer slapped me, hard. On top of the growing collection of head pains I already had, it hurt far more than it should have.
People who know me well will tell you that Dexter never loses his temper, but enough was enough. I swung my foot up, fast and hard, and kicked the bouncer in the crotch with enough force to make him let go of me and bend over, and he began to make small retching noises. And since that had been so easy and rewarding I turned to face Kukarov with my hands raised to fighting position.
But he was holding a pistol, and pointing it directly between my eyes. It was a very large and expensive pistol, a .357 Magnum by the look of it. The hammer was pulled back, and the only thing darker than the hole at the end of the barrel was the expression in his eyes.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Try it.”
It was an interesting suggestion, but I decided against it, and raised my hands up high. He watched me for a moment and then, backing away a few steps without taking his eyes off me, he called to the others. “Tie him up,” he said. “Smack him around a little, but don’t damage the meat. We can use a male piggy.”
One of them grabbed me and pulled my arms behind me, hard enough to hurt, and the other one started pulling duct tape off a roll. He had just gotten a few loops around my wrists when I heard what might be the most beautiful sound I had ever heard in my life—the squeal of a bullhorn, followed by Deborah’s voice coming through it.
“This is the police,” she said. “You are surrounded. Drop your weapons and lie facedown on the ground.”
The two helpers flinched away from me and looked at Kukarov with their mouths hanging open. The bouncer was still leaning on his knees and retching. Kukarov snarled. “I’ll kill this asshole!” he shouted, and I could see his finger tighten on the trigger as he raised the pistol.
A single shot split the air and the front half of Kukarov’s head disappeared. He whipped away sideways as if pulled by a rope and fell in a heap on the ground.
The two other cannibals dove to the ground in unison, and even the bouncer flopped over onto his face, and I watched as Deborah charged out of the vegetation at the edge of the clearing and ran toward me, followed by at least a dozen police officers, including a bunch of heavily armed and armored guys from SRT, the Special Response Team, and Detective Weems, the ebony giant from the Miccosukee Tribal Police.
“Dexter,” Deborah called. She grabbed me by the arms and looked into my face for a moment. “Dex,” she said again, and it was gratifying to see a little anxiety on her face. She patted my arms and almost smiled, a very rare display for her. Of course, since it was Debs, she had to spoil the effect immediately. “Where’s Samantha?” she said.
I looked at my sister. My head was pounding, my pants were torn, my throat and my face hurt from the bouncer’s rough treatment, I was embarrassed by what I had recently done, my hands were still taped behind me—and I was thirsty. I had been beaten, kidnapped, drugged, beaten again, and threatened with a very large revolver, all without a single complaint—but Debs could only think about Samantha, who was well fed and sitting inside in air-conditioned comfort—sitting there willingly, even eagerly, whining about minor discomforts while I tried and failed to dodge all the slings and arrows and, I could not fail to notice, an increasing number of mosquitoes that I could not swat with my hands taped behind me.
But of course, Deborah was family, and anyway I couldn’t use my hands, so slapping her was out of the question. “I’m fine, sis,” I said. “Thank you for asking.”
As always, it was wasted on Deborah. She grabbed my arms and shook me. “Where is she?” she said. “Where is Samantha?”
I sighed and gave it up. “Inside the trailer,” I said. “She’s fine.” Deborah looked at me for a second and then whirled away around the trailer to the door. Weems followed her and I heard a loud crunching noise as he apparently pulled the door off its hinges. A moment later he wandered past, the door dangling by its knob from one enormous hand. Debs came right after him with an arm around Samantha, leading her away to the car and murmuring, “I’ve got you, you’re all right now,” to a plainly pissed-off Samantha, who was hunched over and muttering, “Leave me alone.”
I looked around the little clearing. A handful of cops in SRT outfits were cuffing Kukarov’s guys, none too gently. Things were definitely winding down—except for a new and frantic burst of activity from the nine million mosquitoes that had found my unprotected head. I tried to swat them away—impossible, of course, with my hands taped behind me. I shook my head to scare them away, but it didn’t work, and it hurt so much that it wasn’t worth it even if it did. I tried to wave my elbows at them—also impossible, and I thought I heard the mosquitoes laughing at me and licking their chops as they called all their friends to the feast.
“Could somebody please undo my hands?” I said.
THIRTY-ONE
I DID EVENTUALLY GET THE DUCT TAPE OFF MY WRISTS. AFTER all, I was surrounded by cops, and it would have been terribly wrong for so many sworn officers of the law to keep me tied up as if I was some kind of—well, to be honest, I actually was some kind of, but I was trying really hard not to be one anymore. And since they did not know what I had been, it made sense that sooner or later one of them wo
uld take pity on me and cut me loose. And one of them finally did: It was Weems, the gigantic man from the tribal police. He came over and looked at me, a very large smile growing on his very large face, and shook his head. “Why you standing there with your hands all taped up?” he said. “Nobody love you no more?”
“I guess I’m just a low priority,” I said. “Except to the mosquitoes.”
He laughed, a high-pitched and overly joyful sound that went on for several seconds—much too long, in my still-taped opinion, and just when I was thinking of saying something rather sharp he pulled out a huge pocketknife and flipped the blade open. “Let’s get you slapping flies again,” he said, and motioned with the blade for me to turn around.
I was happy to oblige, and very quickly he laid the edge of the knife onto the tape binding my wrists. The knife was apparently very sharp; there was almost no pressure at all, and the tape burst open. I brought my hands in front of me and peeled off the tape. It also peeled off most of the hair on my wrists, but since my first swat at the back of my neck squashed at least six mosquitoes, it seemed like a good trade-off.
“Thank you very much,” I said.
“No problem,” he told me in that soft, high voice. “Nobody oughta be all bound up like that.” He laughed at his own great wit and I, thinking it was the least I could do in return for his kindness, gave him a small sample of my very best fake smile.
“Bound up,” I said. “That’s very good.” I might have been laying it on a bit thick, but I was grateful, and in any case my head still hurt too much for any really good comeback to blossom in it.
It wouldn’t have mattered in any case, because Weems was no longer paying attention. He had gone very still, tilted his nose up into the air, and half closed his eyes as if he were hearing something calling his name in the far distance.
“What is it?” I said.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he shook his head. “Smoke,” he said. “Somebody got an illegal fire going out there.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the heart of the Everglades. “This time of year, that’s not good.”
I didn’t smell anything except the standard loamy Everglades aroma, plus sweat and a faint trace of gunpowder that still hung in the air, but I was certainly not going to argue with my rescuer. Besides, I would have been arguing with his back, since he had already spun away and headed off toward the edge of the clearing. I watched him go, rubbing my wrists and taking my terrible vengeance on the mosquitoes.
There was really not a great deal more to see around the trailer. The regular cops were frog-marching the cannibals away to durance vile, and the viler the better, as far as I was concerned. The SRT guys were standing around one of their own, probably the one who had made the shot that took off Kukarov’s face; his expression was a combination of ebbing adrenaline and shock, and his fellow shooters watched him protectively.
Altogether, the excitement was fading and it was clearly time for Dexter’s Departure. The only problem, of course, was that I had no transportation, and depending on the kindness of strangers is always an iffy thing. Depending on the kindness of family is often much worse, of course, but it still seemed like the best bet, so I went to look for Deborah.
My sister was sitting in the front seat of her car trying to be sensitive, nurturing, and supportive of Samantha Aldovar. These were not things that came naturally to her, and it would have been tough sledding even if Samantha were willing to play along. She was not, of course, and the two of them were rapidly approaching an emotional impasse when I slid into the backseat.
“I’m not going to be all right,” Samantha was saying. “Why do you keep saying that like I’m some kind of ree-tard?”
“You’ve had a really big shock, Samantha,” Debs said, and in spite of the fact that she clearly meant to be soothing, I could almost hear quotation marks around her words, as if she was reading from The Rescued Hostage Handbook. “But it’s over now.”
“I don’t want it over, goddamn it,” she said. She looked back at me as I closed the car door. “You bastard,” she said to me.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“You brought them here,” she said. “This was all a setup.”
I shook my head. “Nope,” I said. “I have no idea how they found us.”
“Riiiiight,” she sneered.
“Really,” I said, and I turned to Debs. “How did you find us?”
Deborah shrugged. “Chutsky came out to wait with me. When the carpet van came, he slapped a tracer on it.” It made sense: Her boyfriend, Chutsky, a semiretired intelligence operative, would certainly have the right sort of toys for that. “So they carried you out and drove away; we stayed back and followed. When we all got out here in the swamp, I called in for SRT. I really hoped we’d get Bobby Acosta, too, but we couldn’t wait.” She looked back at Samantha. “Saving you was the highest priority we had, Samantha.”
“For fuck’s sake, I didn’t want to be saved,” Samantha said. “When are you going to get that?” Deborah opened her mouth, and Samantha rode right over her with, “And if you say I’m going to be all right again, I swear to God I’ll scream.”
To be honest, it would have been a relief if she had screamed. I was so tired of Samantha’s carping that I was ready to scream myself, and I could see that my sister was not far behind me. But apparently Debs still nurtured the delusion that she had rescued an unwilling victim from a terrible experience, and so even though I could see her knuckles turn white with the effort of refraining from strangling Samantha, Deborah kept her cool.
“Samantha,” she said very deliberately. “It’s perfectly natural for you to be a little confused right now about what you’re feeling.”
“I am so totally not confused,” Samantha said. “I’m feeling pissed off, and I wish you hadn’t found me. Is that perfectly natural, too?”
“Yes,” Deborah said, although I could see a little doubt creeping into her face. “In a hostage situation, the victim often starts to feel an emotional bond with her captors.”
“You sound like you’re reading that,” Samantha said, and I had to admire her insight, even though her tone still set my teeth on edge.
“I’m going to recommend that your parents get you some counseling—” Deborah said.
“Oh, great, a shrink,” Samantha said. “That’s all I need.”
“It will help you if you can talk to somebody about all that’s happened to you,” Deborah said.
“Sure, I can’t wait to talk about all that’s happened to me,” Samantha said, and she turned and looked right at me. “I want to talk about all of it, because some stuff happened that was, you know, totally against my will, and everybody is really going to want to hear about that.”
I felt a sharp and very unwelcome shock—not so much at what she said, but at the fact that she was saying it to me. There was no way to mistake what she meant; but would she really tell everyone about our little ecstasy-inspired interlude, and claim it was against her will? It hadn’t occurred to me that she would—after all, it was kind of a private thing, and it hadn’t actually been my will, either. I hadn’t put the drugs into the water bottle, and it certainly wasn’t something I would ever brag about.
But an awful sinking feeling began to bloom in my stomach as her threat began to hit home. If she claimed it had been against her will—technically speaking, the word for that was “rape,” and although it was really quite far outside my normal area of interest, I was pretty sure the law frowned on it, nearly as much as some other things I had done. If that word came up, I knew that none of my clever and wonderful excuses would count for anything. And I could not really blame anyone for believing it; older man about to die, penned up with young woman, no one would ever know—it was a picture that wrote its own caption. Perfectly believable—and totally unforgivable, even if I thought I’d been about to die. I had never heard a rape defense based on extenuating circumstances, and I was pretty sure it wouldn’t work.
&n
bsp; And no matter what I said, even if Dexter’s eloquence overflowed the bounds of human speech and moved the marble statue of justice to tears—the very best outcome would be he-said/she-said, and I would still be a guy who’d taken advantage of a helpless captive girl, and I knew very well what everyone would think of me. After all, I had cheered aloud every time I heard about older married men losing their jobs and their families for having sex with younger women—and that was exactly what I had done. Even if I convinced everyone that the drugs made me do it and it really wasn’t my fault, I would be finished. Drug-induced teen sex party sounded more like a tabloid headline than an explanation.
And not even the greatest lawyer who had ever lived could get me off the hook with Rita. There was still a lot I did not understand about human beings, but I had seen enough daytime drama to figure this one out. Rita might not believe I had committed rape, but that wouldn’t matter. She would not care if I had been bound hand and foot, drugged, and then forced to have sex at gunpoint. She would divorce me when she found out, and she would raise Lily Anne without me. I would be all alone, out in the cold without roast pork, with no Cody and Astor, and no Lily Anne to brighten my days; Dex-Daddy Dumped.
No family, no job—nothing. She would probably even take custody of my fillet knives. It was terrible, hideous, unthinkable; everything I cared about yanked away, my entire life flung into the Dumpster—and all because I’d been drugged? It was far beyond unfair. And some of this must have shown on my face, because Samantha kept looking at me, and she began to nod her head.
“That’s right,” she said. “You just think about that.”
I looked back at Samantha and I did think about it. And I wondered if just this once I could dispose of somebody because of something they hadn’t done yet; proactive playtime.
