by Jeff Lindsay
I was far too tired to respond. I did manage to stumble through a shower before falling into bed, but even though I could feel the accumulated slime and grime of the dreadful day all over me, it was hard work to stay awake under the stream of hot water long enough to get thoroughly clean, and it was with a feeling of almost supernatural bliss that I finally collapsed onto the pillow, closed my eyes, and pulled the sheet up to my chin.…
And naturally enough, once I was actually in bed, I couldn’t sleep at all. I lay there with my eyes closed, and I could feel a deep sleep welling up just on the other side of the pillow, but it would not come to me. I listened to Cody and Astor down the hall, still playing the Wii, now a little more hushed at Rita’s insistence, since I was, as she told them, trying to sleep—and I was trying, really I was, but I was having no success.
Thoughts trudged through my brain like a slow-motion parade. I thought about the four of them just down the hall: my little family. It still seemed faintly bizarre. Dex-Daddy, protector and provider, family man. Even more bizarre was that I liked it.
I thought about my brother. I still didn’t know what he was up to, why he kept coming around. Was it really possible that he simply wanted to feel some kind of family connection? It was very hard to believe—but then, it would have been just as hard to believe it about me before Lily Anne, and here I was, forswearing all Dark Delights and wallowing in the bosom of a real family. Maybe Brian wanted the same simple, human connection. Maybe he wanted to change, too.
And maybe I could clap my hands three times and bring Tinker-bell back to life, too. It was just as likely; Brian had lived his whole life on the Dark Path and he couldn’t possibly change, not that much. He had to have some other reason for shoehorning into my nest, and sooner or later it would come out. I didn’t think he would hurt my family—but I would watch him until I knew for certain what he was doing.
And of course, I thought about Samantha and her threat to tell all. Was it just a threat, an acting out of her large frustration at being alive and well and uneaten? Or would she really talk, tell everyone a vindictive version of what had happened? The moment that awful word “rape” was out, everything changed forever, and not for the better. It would be Dexter in the Docket, ground to a pulp beneath the wheels of the injustice system. It was horrible beyond measure, and completely unfair. No one who knew me could possibly think of me as a leering sex-mad ogre. I had always been a very different kind of ogre. But people believe clichés, even when they’re untrue, and the older man with the teen girl qualified as one. It truly wasn’t my fault—but who would hear that without a wink and a smirk? I hadn’t willingly taken the drugs—would she really punish me for a situation in which I had been the real victim? It was hard to say for sure, but I thought she might. And that would destroy every piece of my carefully constructed life.
But what could I do? I could not avoid the idea that killing her would solve everything—and I could even get her to cooperate by promising to nibble a few small pieces before I finished her off. I wouldn’t, of course—yuck—but if a small lie makes somebody happy, where’s the harm?
It would never come to that, anyway. It seemed like another great irony, but I couldn’t kill Samantha, as much as we both wanted it. Not that I had grown a conscience yet; it was just that it would be totally contrary to the Harry Code, and far too dangerous, too, since she was very much in the spotlight right now, much too closely watched for me to get close. No, it was too risky. I would have to think of some other way to save my life.
But what? The solution would not come to me, and neither would slumber, and the thoughts kept up their leaden tumbling across the soggy floor of my sleep-starved brain. Covens—who cared if it was led by a woman or a man? Kukarov was dead, and the coven was over.
Except for Bobby Acosta. Maybe I could find him and feed him Samantha. And then give him to Deborah. It would cheer them both up.
Debs really needed cheering: She had been acting very weird lately. Did it mean something? Or was it just the emotional hangover from her knife wound?
Knives—could I really give up my Dark Delights forever? For Lily Anne?
Lily Anne: I thought about her for what seemed like a long time, and then suddenly it was morning.
THIRTY-THREE
I TOOK RITA’S ADVICE AND SLEPT LATE THE NEXT MORNING. I woke up to the sounds of an empty house; a distant drip in the shower, the air conditioner coming on, and the tick of the dishwasher switching gears down the hall in the kitchen. I lay there for a few minutes enjoying the relative quiet and the feeling of dopey fatigue that ran through me from my toes to my tongue. Yesterday had been quite a day and, on the whole, I thought it was a very good thing that I had survived it. My neck was still a little stiff, but the headache was gone and I felt a lot better than I should have—until I remembered Samantha.
So I lay there awhile longer wondering if there was anything at all I could do to persuade her not to talk. There was a very small chance that I could reason with her, I suppose. I had managed it once, in Club Fang’s refrigerator, and reached soaring heights of emotive rhetoric I had never touched before. Could I do it again, and would it work on her a second time? I was not sure—and as I mulled my chances that moth-eaten line about “the tongues of men and of angels” popped into my head. I couldn’t remember how it ended, but I didn’t think it was happy. I wished I’d never read Shakespeare.
I heard the front door open and Rita hustled into the house, home from dropping the children at school. She went through the living room and into the kitchen making all the loud and distinct sounds of someone trying to be quiet. I heard her talking softly to Lily Anne as she changed a diaper, and then she went back into the kitchen and a moment later I heard the coffee machine clear its throat and begin to brew. Soon the smell of fresh coffee drifted into the bedroom, and I began to feel a little bit better. I was home, with Lily Anne, and all was well, at least for now. It was not really a rational feeling, but then, as I was learning, feelings never are, and you might as well enjoy the good ones while you can. There aren’t very many of them, and they don’t last long.
I sat up on the side of the bed at last, slowly rotating my neck to get the last of the soreness out of it. It didn’t work, but it wasn’t too bad. I stood up, which was a little harder than it should have been. My legs were stiff and a bit sore, too, and so I tottered into the shower and ran hot water all over myself for ten long and luxurious minutes, and it was a renewed and nearly normal Dexter who finally made his way into his clothes and all the way to the kitchen, where a medley of heavenly smells and sounds told me that Rita was hard at work.
“Oh, Dexter,” she said, and she put down the spatula and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “I heard you in the shower, and so I thought—would you like some blueberry pancakes? I had to use the frozen berries, which aren’t really as—But how are you feeling? Because it isn’t—I could make you eggs instead and freeze the pancakes for—Oh, honey, sit down; you look exhausted.”
I made it into a chair with Rita’s help and said, “Pancakes would be wonderful,” which they were. I ate far too many of them, telling myself that I had earned it, and trying not to listen to the wicked whisper in my inner ear saying that after all, this could be the last time, unless I did something final about Samantha.
After breakfast I sat in the chair and sipped several cups of coffee, in the vain hope that it would live up to the advertisement and fill me with energy. It was very good coffee, but it didn’t quite wash away the fatigue, and so I dawdled around the house a bit longer. I sat and held Lily Anne for a while. She threw up on me once, and I thought how strange it was that it didn’t bother me. And then she fell asleep in my arms and I just sat for a while longer and enjoyed that, too.
But finally the small and unwelcome voice of duty began to nag at me, and so I put Lily Anne in her basket, gave Rita a kiss, and headed out the door.
Traffic was light, and I let my mind wander a little bit as I headed up Dixie Highwa
y, but as I nosed onto the Palmetto Expressway I began to get a very uneasy feeling that things were not what they should be and I brought Dexter’s mighty brain back online and searched for what was wrong. It was a very quick search, not because of the power of my logic, but because of the power of the smell, which was coming from behind me, somewhere in the backseat of my car. It was a terrible smell, an odor of old and unnameable things decomposing and fermenting and growing deader and deader, and I could not say what it might be except that it was awful and getting worse.
I couldn’t see anything behind me while driving, even when I tipped the mirror down, and as I drove north to work I pondered, until a school bus wandering across the road brought my attention back to driving. Even in light traffic it does not do to turn your thoughts away from the road, not in Miami, so I rolled down the window and concentrated on getting to work alive.
And as I pulled into the lot at work and slowed to nose into my parking spot, the smell built up again and I thought about it. The last time I had driven my car had been right before the whole mess with Samantha that started at Fang, and before that—
Chapin.
I had taken the car to my playdate with Victor Chapin, and I had carried away the leftovers in garbage bags when I was done—was it possible that some small piece had fallen out and was still there, slowly rotting in the heat of a car closed up all day, and now making this hideous smell? Unthinkable, I was always so careful—but what else could it be? The odor was far beyond dreadful, and now it seemed to get worse, fumes fanned by my near-panic. I stepped on the brake and turned all the way around to look—
A garbage bag. I had missed one somehow—but that was impossible, I could never be so stupid, so careless—
Except I had hurried that night, rushed through the whole thing to get it done and get back to bed. Laziness—stupid, selfish sloth, and now here I was at police headquarters with a bag of body parts in my car. I shoved the gear lever into park and climbed out, and the panic sweat was already soaking my back and rolling off my face as I opened the back door and knelt down to look.
Yes, a garbage bag. But how? How did it get here, on the floor in the backseat, when all the others had gone carefully into the trunk, and then—
And then a car pulled into the slot next to mine and after a bright stab of total panic I took a deep and calming breath. This was not a problem, not for me. Whoever it was, I would simply give them a cheerful hello and they would be off and into the building, and I would drive this bag of Chapin away. No big deal, I was just good old Dexter, the blood-spatter guy, and there was no one on the entire force who had any reason to think otherwise.
No one, except for the man who climbed out of the car and glared down at me. Or to be precise, the two-thirds of a man. His hands and feet were gone, of course, as well as his tongue, and he carried a small notebook computer to help him speak, and as I struggled for breath, he flipped it open and, without taking his eyes off me, he punched buttons to make an electronic sentence.
“What—is—in—bag?” Sergeant Doakes said through his computer.
“Bag?” I said, and I admit it was not my very best moment.
Doakes glared at me, and whether it was just the fact that he hated me and suspected me of being what I really was, or whether I actually looked guilty squatting there and fingering a bag of leftovers, I don’t know. Whatever the case, I saw a bright gleam of something horrible flash into his eyes and before I could do anything except gape, Doakes jerked forward, whipped his metallic claw of a hand down, and grabbed the bag out of my car.
And as I watched with horror and dread and a growing sense of my own very imminent mortality, he placed his artificial voice box on the roof of the car, opened the bag, reached inside with a triumphant show of teeth at me—and pulled out a truly filthy, rotting, and horrible diaper.
And as I watched Doakes’s face run the entire spectrum from victory to utter disgust, I remembered. As I had left for my impromptu session with Chapin, Rita had thrust the bag of dirty diapers at me. In my haste, I had left it for later. Then the whole business of Deke’s death, my abduction, the dreadful episode with Samantha—it had all driven that tiny unimportant diaper bag out of my mind. But as the memory flooded back, I felt a rising happiness wash back in with it, made even tastier by the realization that Lily Anne, that wonderful, magical child—Lily Anne, the diaper queen, the paragon of poop—my own sweet Lily Anne had saved me with her dirty diapers. And even better, she had humiliated Doakes at the same time.
Life was good; fatherhood was once more a wonderful adventure.
I stood up and faced Doakes with great good cheer. “I know it’s toxic,” I said. “And it probably breaks several city ordinances, too.” I held out my hand for the bag. “But I beg you, Sergeant, don’t arrest me. I promise to throw it away properly.”
Doakes turned his eyes away from the diaper and onto me, and he looked at me with an expression of loathing and rage so powerful that for just a moment it overpowered the open diaper bag. Then he very carefully said, “Nguggermukker,” and opened the claw holding the bag. It dropped to the pavement, and a moment later the diaper he held in the other claw flopped down beside it.
“Nguggermukker?” I said brightly. “Is that Dutch?” But Doakes just grabbed his silver voice box from the roof of the car, turned away from me and the dirty diapers, and stomped away across the parking lot on his two artificial feet.
I felt utter and complete relief as I watched him go, and when he vanished at the far end of the parking lot I took a deep, relaxing breath—which was a very big mistake, considering what lay at my feet. Coughing slightly, and blinking away the tears, I bent down and pushed the diaper back into the bag, twisted the bag closed, and carried it to the Dumpster.
It was one-thirty in the afternoon by the time I finally got to my desk. I fiddled with a few lab reports, ran a routine test on the spectrometer, and suffered through a cup of truly despicable coffee while the hands on the clock trudged ’round the dial to four-thirty. And just when I thought I had made it safely all the way through my first day back from bondage, Deborah walked in with a horrible expression on her face. I could not read it, but I knew that something had gone terribly wrong, and it seemed to be something she was taking rather personally. And because I have known Deborah my whole life and I knew how her mind worked, I assumed it meant trouble for Dexter.
“Good afternoon,” I said brightly, in the hope that if I was cheerful enough the problem would go away, whatever it was. It didn’t, of course.
“Samantha Aldovar,” my sister said, looking straight through me, and all my anxiety from the night before washed over me, and I knew that Samantha had talked already and Deborah was here to arrest me. My irritation with the girl went up several notches; she couldn’t even wait a decent interval for me to come up with some kind of airtight excuse. It was as if her tongue was spring-loaded and had to burst out into furious activity the moment she took her first free breath. She had probably been babbling about me before the front door of her house even swung shut, and now it was all over for me. I was finished, washed up, completely—and with no pun intended—screwed. I was immediately filled with apprehension, alarm, and bitterness. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned discretion?
Still, it was done, and there was nothing left for Dexter except to face the music and pay the piper. So taking a deep breath, I looked it square in the face and did so. “It wasn’t my fault,” I said to Deborah, and I began to gather my soggy wits for Stage One of Dexter’s Defense.
But Deborah blinked, and a small frown of confusion crept into the bleakness on her face. “What the fuck do you mean, it’s not your fault?” she said. “Who said anything about—How could it possibly be your fault?”
Once again, I had the sensation that everyone else was working off a fully rehearsed script, and I was being asked to improvise. “I just meant—nothing,” I said, hoping for a clue on what my line was supposed to be.
“Jesus fuck,�
� she said. “Why is everything always about you?”
I suppose I could have said, Because somehow I am always in the middle of it, usually unwilling, and usually because you have pushed me there, but cooler heads prevailed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s wrong, Debs?”
She stared at me a little longer, and then shook her head and slumped down in the chair beside my desk. “Samantha Aldovar,” she repeated. “She’s gone again.”
Sometimes I think it is a very good thing that I have had so many years of practice at showing only what I want to show on my face, and this was absolutely one of those times, because my first impulse was to shout, Whoopee! Good girl! and burst into lighthearted song. And so it was quite possibly one of the greatest demonstrations of acting skill our age has yet seen when I managed instead to look shocked and concerned. “You’re kidding,” I said, thinking, I really hope you’re not kidding.
“She stayed home from school today, resting,” Deborah said. “I mean, she went through an awful lot.” It apparently didn’t occur to my sister that I had gone through even more, but nobody’s perfect. “So around two o’clock, her mother went out to the store,” she said. “And she comes back a little while ago, and Samantha was gone.” Deborah shook her head. “She left a note: ‘Don’t look for me; I’m not coming back.’ She ran, Dex. She took off and ran.”
I was feeling so much better that I actually managed to fight down the impulse to say, I told you so. After all, Debs had refused to believe me when I told her Samantha had gone into cannibal captivity willingly, even eagerly, the first time. And since I was right about that, it made perfect sense that she would take off again at the first opportunity. It was not a terribly noble thought, but I hoped she found a good hiding place.
