by Jeff Lindsay
But luckily for Samantha, before I could even reach for the duct tape Deborah decided to impose herself again in the role of compassionate rescuer. “All right,” she said. “This can all wait. Let’s just get you home to your parents now.” And she put her hand on Samantha’s shoulder.
Naturally enough, Samantha pushed the hand off as if it were a loathsome insect. “Great,” she said. “I can’t fucking wait.”
“Put your seat belt on,” Deborah told her, and, completely as an afterthought, she turned to me and said, “I guess you can ride along.”
I almost told her, No, don’t bother, I will stay here and feed mosquitoes, but at the last second I remembered that Deborah’s record with sarcasm was not good, so I just nodded and buckled up.
Deborah called the dispatcher and said, “I’ve got the Aldovar girl. I’m taking her home,” and Samantha muttered, “Big whoopee-shit.” Deborah just glanced at her with something that looked like a rictus but was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile, and then she put the car in gear, and I had a little over half an hour to sit in the backseat and picture my life splintering into a million decorative shards. It was a terribly depressing picture—Dexter Disenfranchised, tossed on the scrap heap, stripped of his carefully built costume and all its comfy props—flung naked and unloved into the cold and lonely world, and I could see no way to avoid it. I’d had to go down on my knees and beg just to get Samantha to do nothing while I tried to escape—and she had been neutral then. Now that she was peeved with me, there was nothing I could possibly do to stop her from telling, short of actual vivisection. I couldn’t even give her back to the cannibals; with Kukarov dead and the rest of the group either captured or on the run, there would be no one left to eat her. The picture was grim and very clear: Samantha’s fantasy was over, she blamed me, and she would take her terrible revenge—and there was nothing I could do about it.
I have never really had an appetite for irony, but I couldn’t help but see more than a little of it here: After all I had done, willingly and joyfully, and now I would be brought down by a sulking young woman and a bottle of water? It was so subtly ludicrous that only the French could truly appreciate it.
Just to underline my predicament and her own determination, Samantha turned and glared at me every few miles as we drove the long, depressing way to her home, back along Route 41 and then over LeJeune and into the Grove to the Aldovars’ house. And just to remind me that even the worst joke has a punch line, when we turned down Samantha’s street and approached her house, Deborah muttered, “Shit,” and I hunched forward and looked through the windshield at what appeared to be a carnival in front of the house.
“That goddamned son of a bitch,” she said, and she smacked the steering wheel with the palm of her hand.
“Who?” I said, and I admit I was eager to see somebody else take a little heat.
“Captain Matthews,” she snarled. “When I called it in, he got the whole fucking press corps here so he can hug Samantha and jut his fucking chin at the cameras.”
And sure enough, as Deborah brought the car to a stop in front of the Aldovars’ house, Captain Matthews appeared at the passenger door as if by magic, and reached in to help a still-sullen Samantha out of the car as flashbulbs popped and even the horde of savage reporters murmured, “Awwww.” The captain flung a protective arm around her shoulders and then waved commandingly at the crowd to move aside and let them through—a truly great moment in the history of irony, since Matthews had summoned them all here to watch this exact moment, and now he was pretending he wanted them to leave him alone while he comforted Samantha. I admired the performance so much that for a full minute I only worried about my future two or three times.
Deborah did not seem quite as impressed as I was. She trailed along behind Matthews with a wicked scowl on her face, shoving at any reporter foolish enough to get in her way, and generally acting like she had just been indicted for waterboarding. I followed the happy little group through the crowd until Matthews reached the front door, where Mr. and Mrs. Aldovar were waiting to smother their wayward daughter with hugs and kisses and tears. It was an extremely touching scene, and Captain Matthews played it perfectly, as if he had been rehearsing for months. He stood beside the family group and beamed at them as the parents snuffled and Samantha scowled and finally, when he could sense that the reporters were reaching the end of their attention span, he stepped in front of them and held up a hand.
Just before he spoke to the crowd, he leaned over to Deborah and said, “Don’t worry, Morgan; I won’t make you say anything this time.”
“Yes, sir,” she said through her teeth.
“Just try to look proud and humble,” he told her, and he patted her shoulder and smiled at her as the cameras rolled. Deborah showed him her teeth, and he turned back to the crowd.
“I told you we would find her,” Matthews told the crowd in a manly growl, “and we found her!” He turned around and looked at the Aldovar trio so the reporters would get a shot of him gloating protectively at them. Then he turned back around and gave a short speech of praise for himself. Of course there was no word about Dexter’s terrible sacrifice, nor even Deborah’s diligence, but perhaps that would have been too much to expect. It went on predictably enough for a little longer, but finally the Aldovars went in their house, the reporters got tired of the captain’s chin, and Deborah grabbed my arm, pulled me through the crowd to her car, and took me home.
THIRTY-TWO
DEBORAH DROVE UP TO DIXIE HIGHWAY AND TURNED SOUTH toward my house without speaking, but after a few minutes the angry glare faded from her face, and her hands on the wheel lost their white-knuckled grip. “Anyway,” she said at last, “the important thing is that we got Samantha.”
I admired my sister’s ability to identify the “important thing,” but I really felt I should point out that it was the wrong one, because it did not include me. “Samantha didn’t want to be got,” I said. “She wants to be eaten.”
Deborah shook her head. “Nobody wants that,” she said. “She said that because she’s maybe a little fucked-up, and she started to identify with the assholes that grabbed her. But wants to be? I mean, eaten?” She made the sour-lemon face again and shook her head. “Come on, Dex.”
I could have told her that I was quite convinced, and that she would be, too, if she talked to Samantha for five minutes. But when Deborah makes up her mind, it takes a written order from the police commissioner to change it, and I didn’t think there was one in the works.
“And besides,” she said, “she’s back with her family now, and they can get her a shrink or whatever. The more important thing for us is to wrap this thing up, round up Bobby Acosta and the last of the group.”
“The coven,” I told her, and maybe I was being pedantic. “Samantha says it’s called a coven.”
Deborah frowned. “I thought that was witches,” she said. “It’s apparently cannibals, too,” I said.
“I don’t think you can call a group of guys a coven,” she said stubbornly. “I think it has to be witches. You know, women.”
It seemed like such a small point, especially after all I had just been through, and I was far too tired to argue it. Happily, my time with Samantha had prepared me to give exactly the right response. “Whatever,” I said. Deborah seemed satisfied with that, and after a few more empty remarks we were at my street. Deborah let me out in front of my house and drove off, and I thought no more about it in the pleasure of being home.
Home was waiting for me, and for some reason I found that surprising and touching. Deborah had called Rita and told her I would be late, not to worry, everything was fine, which seemed very close to callous overconfidence on her part. Rita had seen the news, though, which had made the capture into the evening’s lead story—and really, how could they possibly resist? Cannibals, missing teen, Everglades shootout—it was a perfect story. There had already been a phone call from a premium cable network, trying to get the rights to the story.
In spite of Deborah’s reassurance, Rita had known somehow that I was right in the middle of things and in grave danger, and she responded like a true champion. She was waiting for me at the door in a state of ditherhood that was unmatched in my experience. “Oh, Dexter,” she sniffled as she half-drowned me in hugs and kisses. “We were so—It was on the news, and I saw you there, but even after Deborah called,” she said, and kissed me again. “The children were watching TV, and Cody said, ‘It’s Dexter,’ and I looked—It was a newsbreak,” she said, I suppose reassuring me that I had not made a surprise guest appearance on SpongeBob. “Oh, my God,” she went on, pausing to shudder and then hug me, burying her head up to the shoulders in my neck. “You shouldn’t have to do those things,” she said, with a great deal of justice. “You’re supposed to do forensics and—You don’t even have a gun, and it isn’t—How can they—But your sister said, and on TV they said it was the cannibals and they had you, and at least you found that girl, which I know was very important, but oh, my God, cannibals, I can’t even think how—And they had you, and they could have—” And she finally broke off, possibly from oxygen deprivation, and concentrated on snuffling into my shirt for a minute.
I took advantage of the break to look around with satisfaction at my modest kingdom. Cody and Astor were sitting on the couch watching us with matching expressions of disgust at the emotional exhibition, and right next to them sat my brother, Brian, beaming a huge and dreadful smile at one and all. Lily Anne was in her basket beside the couch, and she waved her toes at me in a warm and heartfelt greeting. It was a perfect family picture, suitable for framing; The Hero Returns to His Home. And although I was not completely pleased to see Brian here I could think of no reason to wish him gone, either. Besides, all the good will was infectious, even the artificial stuff coming from my brother, and the air was filled with a wonderful, saliva-inducing aroma that I recognized as one of the great miracles of the modern world: Rita’s roast pork.
Dorothy was right. There’s no place like home.
It would have been terribly rude to tell Rita she had snuffled long enough, but I had been through an awful lot, including starvation, and the smell that filled the house was setting off a frenzy in my guts that made the overdose of ecstasy look tame. Rita’s roast pork was a great work of art that could have made a statue lunge off its pedestal and cry, “Yummy!” So after I managed to disengage myself and dry my shoulder, I thanked her profusely and headed straight for the table, with only a brief pause to see Lily Anne and count her fingers and toes, just to make sure they were all still there.
And so we sat around the table, looking like a perfect family portrait, and it occurred to me how deceptive pictures can be. At the head of the table, of course, sat Dex-Daddy, a true monster trying to be a little more human. At his left was Brother Brian, a far worse monster and still completely unrepentant; and across from him sat two fresh-faced, innocent-seeming children, who wanted nothing more than to be just like their wicked uncle. And all of them wearing totally fake expressions of the deepest, most mundane humanity possible. It would have made a wonderful subject for Norman Rockwell, especially if he was feeling particularly sardonic.
Dinner went its tasty way, the silence broken mostly by lip smacking, moans of pleasure, and Lily Anne demanding to be fed, probably overcome by the smell and sound of the pork roast. Rita would occasionally shatter the silence with small non sequiturs of concern, rambling on until someone held out their plate for more—which we all did several times, except Lily Anne. And as the meal meandered on to its end and we proved again that “leftover roast pork” was an oxymoron in our house, I was very glad indeed to have returned in one piece to my little nest.
The feeling of bloated satisfaction continued, even after dinner, when Cody and Astor stampeded for the Wii and a game that involved killing awful-looking monsters, and I sat on the couch burping Lily Anne while Rita cleaned up. Brian sat next to me, and we watched the kids absentmindedly for a while before Brian finally spoke.
“Well,” he said at last. “So you survived your run-in with the coven.”
“Apparently,” I said.
He nodded and, as Cody obliterated a very nasty-looking creature, Brian called out, “Good one, Cody!” After a moment he turned back to me and said, “And have they caught the head witch yet?”
“George Kukarov,” I said. “He was shot and killed on the scene.”
“The man who ran that club, Fang?” he said, with surprise in his voice.
“That’s right,” I said. “And I have to say it was a very good shot, and just in time.”
Brian was silent for a minute, and then said, “I always thought the head of a coven had to be a woman.”
This was the second time tonight someone had argued with me about this, and I was a little tired of hearing about it. “It really isn’t my problem,” I said. “Deborah and her task force will round up the rest of them.”
“Not if she thinks that Kukarov guy is the leader,” he said.
Lily Anne erupted with a small but explosive belch, and I felt it soak slowly through the towel and into my shirt as she settled her head down and nodded off to sleep. “Brian,” I said. “I have spent a very bad day with these people, and I’m all done. I don’t care if the real leader of the coven is a man, or a woman, or a two-headed lizard from the Planet Nardone. It’s Deborah’s problem, and I’m all done with it—and why do you care, anyway?”
“Oh, I don’t care,” he said. “But you’re my little brother. Naturally I’m interested.”
And I might have said something else, something really cutting, but Astor overwhelmed any possible response with an anguished wail of “Nooooooo!” and we both jerked around to look at the TV screen, just in time to see the little golden-haired figure that represented her on-screen being eaten by a monster. Cody said, “Ha,” quietly but triumphantly, and raised his controller; the game went on, and I thought no more about witches, covens, and my brother’s interest in them.
The evening wound relentlessly on to its conclusion. I found myself yawning, hugely and loudly, and even though it was a little bit embarrassing, I could not stop myself. Of course, the dreadful ordeal I had been through was taking its toll on my poor battered system, and I am sure that roast pork is loaded with tryptophan or something like it. Perhaps it was the combination, but whatever the case it soon became plain to all that Dex-Daddy was on the ropes and about to join Lily Anne in Dreamland.
And just as I was about to excuse myself from the delightful company—several of whom would not have noticed, judging from their concentration on the video game—the swelling notes of “Ride of the Valkyries” began to pour out of Brian’s cell phone. He pulled it from its holster and glanced at it, frowning, and almost immediately stood up and said, “Oh, darn. I’m afraid I have to leave at once, as delightful as the company may be.”
“It may be,” Astor muttered, watching Cody rack up points on the screen, “but it isn’t yet.”
Brian gave her his large and phony smile. “It is for me, Astor,” he said. “It’s family. But,” he said, and the smile got wider, “duty calls, and I have to go to work.”
“It’s night,” Cody said without looking up.
“Yes, it is,” Brian said. “But sometimes I have to work at night.” And he looked at me happily, almost as if he was about to wink at me, and my curiosity overcame my sleepiness.
“What kind of work are you doing right now?” I asked him.
“Service industry,” he said. “And I really do have to go.” He patted me on the shoulder, the one that Lily Anne wasn’t using, and said, “And I’m sure you need your sleep after all you’ve been through.”
I yawned again, which made it pointless to deny that I really did need sleep. “I think you’re right,” I said, and I stood up. “I’ll walk you out.”
“No need,” Brian said, and headed for the kitchen. “Rita? I thank you again for another wonderful meal and a delightful evening.”
“Alas,” Brian said, “I really do have to leave posthaste.”
“What does that mean?” Astor said. “ ‘Posthaste’?”
Brian winked at her. “It means, quick as a mailman,” he said, and he turned back to Rita and gave her a clumsy hug. “Many thanks, dear lady, and good night.”
“I’m just so sorry that—I mean, it is getting a bit late for work, and you—Maybe a new job? Because this isn’t really—”
“I know,” Brian said. “But this job actually matches my skill set perfectly.” He looked at me, and I felt a cold nausea burble up in the pit of my stomach. He had only one skill that I knew of, and as far as I knew, nobody would pay him for it. “And,” he went on to Rita, “it does have its compensations, and at the moment I do need to do it. And so, a fond farewell to one and all,” he said, and he raised his hand, presumably in fond farewell, and headed for the door.
“Brian,” I said to his back, and I had to stop as another real jaw-creaker of a yawn took control of my entire body.
Brian turned back with a raised eyebrow. “Dexter?” he said.
I tried to remember what I had been about to say, but another yawn hammered it out of my head. “Nothing,” I said. “Good night.”
Once again his terrible fake smile stretched across his face. “Good night, brother,” he said. “Get some sleep.” And he opened the front door and was gone into the night.
“Well,” Rita said. “Brian really is getting to be one of the family.”
I nodded, and I could feel myself sway slightly, as if nodding my head might overcome my balance and pitch me face-forward onto the floor. “Yes, he is,” I said, and of course I punctuated it with a yawn.
“Oh, Dexter, you poor—You need to get to bed right now; you must be—Here, give me the baby,” Rita said. She threw the dish towel into the kitchen and rushed over to grab Lily Anne. In my sadly depleted state it seemed barely short of amazing that she could move so fast. But in no time at all she had Lily Anne tucked into her basket and was propelling me down the hall to the bedroom. “Now,” she said, “you take a nice hot shower and get into bed, and I think you should sleep late in the morning. They can’t really expect—I mean, after all you’ve been through?”
