Dearly devoted Dexter

by Jeffry P. Lindsay

  Doakes just glanced at it and put it down inside the back door of the van. Since he didn’t seem terribly chatty I asked, “Do you have any ideas about what we should do next?”

  He looked at me and didn’t say anything and I looked back expectantly, and I suppose we could have stood like that until the pigeons began to nest on our heads, if it hadn’t been for the paramedics. “Okay, guys,” the senior one said, and we moved aside to let them get to Frank. The stocky paramedic seemed to be perfectly all right now, as if he was here to put a splint on a boy with a twisted ankle. His partner still looked quite unhappy, however, and even from six feet away I could hear his breathing.

  I stood beside Doakes and watched them slide Frank onto the gurney and then wheel him away. When I looked back at Doakes he was staring at me again. Once more he gave me his very unpleasant smile. “Down to you and me,” he said. “And I don’t know about you.” He leaned against the battered white van and crossed his arms. I heard the paramedics slam the ambulance door, and a moment later the siren started up. “Just you and me,” Doakes said again, “and no more referee.”

  “Is this more of your simple country wisdom?” I said, because here I was, having sacrificed an entire left shoe and a very nice bowling shirt, to say nothing of my hobby, Deborah’s collarbone, and a perfectly good motor-pool car-and there he stood without so much as a wrinkle in his shirt, making cryptically hostile remarks. Really, the man was too much.

  “Don’t trust you,” he said.

  I thought it was a very good sign that Sergeant Doakes was opening up to me by sharing his doubts and feelings. Still, I felt like I should try to keep him focused. “That doesn’t matter. We’re running out of time,” I said. “With Frank finished and delivered, Danco will start on Kyle now.”

  He cocked his head to one side and then shook it slowly. “Don’t matter about Kyle,” he said. “Kyle knew what he was getting into. What matters is catching the Doctor.”

  “Kyle matters to my sister,” I said. “That’s the only reason I’m here.”

  Doakes nodded again. “Pretty good,” he said. “Could almost believe that.”

  For some reason, it was then that I had an idea. I admit that Doakes was monumentally irritating-and it wasn’t just because he had kept me from my important personal research, although that was clearly bad enough. But now he was even critiquing my acting, which was beyond the boundaries of all civilized behavior. So perhaps irritation was the mother of invention; it doesn’t seem all that poetic, but there it is. In any case, a little door opened up in Dexter’s dusty cranium and a small light came shining out; a genuine piece of mental activity. Of course, Doakes might not think much of it, unless I could help him to see what a good idea it actually was, so I gave it a shot. I felt a little bit like Bugs Bunny trying to talk Elmer Fudd into something lethal, but the man had it coming. “Sergeant Doakes,” I said, “Deborah is my only family, and it is not right for you to question my commitment. Particularly,” I said, and I had to fight the urge to buff my fingernails, Bugs-style, “since so far you have not done doodley-squat.”

  Whatever else he was, cold killer and all, Sergeant Doakes was apparently still capable of feeling emotion. Perhaps that was the big difference between us, the reason he tried to keep his white hat so firmly cemented to his head and fight against what should have been his own side. In any case, I could see a surge of anger flicker across his face, and deep down inside there was an almost audible growl from his interior shadow. “Doodley-squat,” he said. “That’s good, too.”

  “Doodley-squat,” I said firmly. “Deborah and I have done all the legwork and taken all the risks, and you know it.”

  For just a moment his jaw muscles popped straight out as if they were going to leap out of his face and strangle me, and the muted interior growl surged into a roar that echoed down to my Dark Passenger, which sat up and answered back, and we stood like that, our two giant shadows flexing and facing off invisibly in front of us.

  Quite possibly, there might have been ripped flesh and pools of blood in the street if a squad car hadn’t chosen that moment to screech to a halt beside us and interrupt. A young cop jumped out and Doakes reflexively took out his badge and held it toward them without looking away from me. He made a shooing motion with his other hand, and the cop backed off and stuck his head into the car to consult with his partner.

  “All right,” Sergeant Doakes said to me, “you got something in mind?”

  It wasn’t really perfect. Bugs Bunny would have made him think of it himself, but it was good enough. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I do have an idea. But it’s a little risky.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Thought it might be.”

  “If it’s too much for you, come up with something else,” I said. “But I think it’s all we can do.”

  I could see him thinking it over. He knew I was baiting him, but there was just enough truth to what I had said, and enough pride or anger in him that he didn’t care.

  “Let’s have it,” he said at last.

  “Oscar got away,” I said.

  “Looks like it.”

  “That only leaves one person we can be sure Dr. Danco might be interested in,” I said, and I pointed right at his chest. “You.”

  He didn’t actually flinch, but something twitched on his forehead and he forgot to breathe for a few seconds. Then he nodded slowly and took a deep breath. “Slick motherfucker,” he said.

  “Yes, I am,” I admitted. “But I’m right, too.”

  Doakes picked up the scanner radio and moved it to one side so he could sit on the open back gate of the van. “All right,” he said. “Keep talking.”

  “First, I’m betting he’ll get another scanner,” I said, nodding at the one beside Doakes.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So if we know he’s listening, we can let him hear what we want him to hear. Which is,” I said with my very best smile, “who you are, and where you are.”

  “And who am I?” he said, and he didn’t seem impressed by my smile.

  “You are the guy who set him up to get taken by the Cubans,” I said.

  He studied me for a moment, then shook his head. “You really putting my pecker on the chopping block, huh?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “But you’re not worried, are you?”

  “He got Kyle, no trouble.”

  “You’ll know he’s coming,” I said. “Kyle didn’t. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be just a little bit better than Kyle at this kind of thing?”

  It was shameless, totally transparent, but he went for it. “Yes, I am,” he said. “You’re a good ass-kisser, too.”

  “No ass-kissing at all,” I said. “Just the plain, simple truth.”

  Doakes looked at the scanner beside him. Then he looked up and away over the freeway. The streetlights made an orange flare off a drop of sweat that rolled across his forehead and down into one eye. He wiped at it unconsciously, still staring away over I-95. He had been staring at me without blinking for so long that it was a little bit unsettling to be in his presence and have him look somewhere else. It was almost like being invisible.

  “All right,” he said as he looked back at me at last, and now the orange light was in his eyes. “Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER 22

  SERGEANT DOAKES DROVE ME BACK TO HEADQUARTERS. It was a strange and unsettling experience to sit so close to him, and we found very little to say to each other. I caught myself studying his profile out of the corner of my eye. What went on in there? How could he be what I knew he was without actually doing something about it? Holding back from one of my playdates was setting my teeth on edge, and yet Doakes apparently didn’t have any such trouble. Perhaps he had gotten it all out of his system in El Salvador. Did it feel any different to do it with the official blessings of the government? Or was it simply easier, not having to worry about being caught?

  I could not know, and I certainly could not see myself asking him. Just to underline the poi
nt, he came to a halt at a red light and turned to look at me. I pretended not to notice, staring straight ahead through the windshield, and he faced back around when the light changed to green.

  We drove right to the motor pool and Doakes put me in the front seat of another Ford Taurus. “Gimme fifteen minutes,” he said, nodding at the radio. “Then call me.” Without another word, he got back into his car and drove away.

  Left to my own devices, I pondered the last few surprise-filled hours. Deborah in the hospital, me in league with Doakes-and my revelation about Cody during my near-death experience. Of course, I could be totally wrong about the boy. There might be some other explanation for his behavior at the mention of the missing pet, and the way he shoved the knife so eagerly into his fish could have been perfectly normal childish cruelty. But oddly enough, I found myself wanting it to be true. I wanted him to grow up to be like me-mostly, I realized, because I wanted to shape him and place his tiny feet onto the Harry Path.

  Was this what the human reproductive urge was like, a pointless and powerful desire to replicate wonderful, irreplaceable me, even when the me in question was a monster who truly had no right to live among humans? That would certainly explain how a great many of the monumentally unpleasant cretins I encountered every day came to be. Unlike them, however, I was perfectly aware that the world would be a better place without me in it-I simply cared more about my own feelings in the matter than whatever the world might think. But now here I was eager to spawn more of me, like Dracula creating a new vampire to stand beside him in the dark. I knew it was wrong-but what fun it would be!

  And what a total muttonhead I was being! Had my interval on Rita’s sofa really turned my once-mighty intellect into such a quivering heap of sentimental mush? How could I be thinking such absurdities? Why wasn’t I trying to devise a plan to escape marriage instead? No wonder I couldn’t get away from Doakes’s cloying surveillance-I had used up all my brain cells and was now running on empty.

  I glanced at my watch. Fourteen minutes of time wasted on absurd mental blather. It was close enough: I lifted the radio and called Doakes.

  “Sergeant Doakes, what’s your twenty?”

  There was a pause, then a crackle. “Uh, I’d rather not say just now.”

  “Say again, Sergeant?”

  “I have been tracking a perp, and I’m afraid he made me.”

  “What kind of perp?”

  There was a pause, as though Doakes was expecting me to do all the work and hadn’t figured out what to say. “Guy from my army days. He got captured in El Salvador, and he might think it was my fault.” Pause. “The guy is dangerous,” he said.

  “Do you want backup?”

  “Not yet. I’m going to try to dodge him for now.”

  “Ten-four,” I said, feeling a little thrill at getting to say it at last.

  We repeated the basic message a few times more, just to be sure it would get through to Dr. Danco, and I got to say “ten-four” each time. When we called it a night around 1:00 AM, I was exhilarated and fulfilled. Perhaps tomorrow I would try to work in “That’s a copy” and even “Roger that.” At last, something to look forward to.

  I found a squad car headed south and persuaded the cop driving to drop me at Rita’s. I tiptoed over to my car, got in, and drove home.

  When I got back to my little bunk and saw it in a state of terrible disarray, I remembered that Debs should have been here but was, instead, in the hospital. I would go see her tomorrow. In the meantime, I’d had a memorable but exhausting day; chased into a pond by a serial limb-barber, surviving a car crash only to be nearly drowned, losing a perfectly good shoe, and on top of all that, as if that wasn’t bad enough, forced to buddy up with Sergeant Doakes. Poor Drained Dexter. No wonder I was so tired. I fell into bed and went to sleep at once.

  Early the next day Doakes pulled his car in beside mine in the parking lot at headquarters. He got out carrying a nylon gym bag, which he set down on the hood of my car. “You brought your laundry?” I asked politely. Once again my lighthearted good cheer went right by him.

  “If this works at all, either he gets me or I get him,” he said. He zipped open the bag. “If I get him, it’s over. If he gets me…” He took out a GPS receiver and placed it on the hood. “If he gets me, you’re my backup.” He showed me a few dazzling teeth. “Think how good that makes me feel.” He took out a cell phone and placed it next to the GPS unit. “This is my insurance.”

  I looked at the two small items on the hood of my car. They did not seem particularly menacing to me, but perhaps I could throw one and then hit someone on the head with the other. “No bazooka?” I asked.

  “Don’t need it. Just this,” he said. He reached into the gym bag one more time. “And this,” he said, holding out a small steno notebook, flipped open to the first page. It seemed to have a string of numbers and letters on it and a cheap ballpoint was shoved through the spiral.

  “The pen is mightier than the sword,” I said.

  “This one is,” he said. “Top line is a phone number. Second line is an access code.”

  “What am I accessing?”

  “You don’t need to know,” he said. “You just call it, punch in the code, and give ’em my cell phone number. They give you a GPS fix on my phone. You come get me.”

  “It sounds simple,” I said, wondering if it really was.

  “Even for you,” he said.

  “Who will I be talking to?”

  Doakes just shook his head. “Somebody owes me a favor,” he said, and pulled a handheld police radio out of the bag. “Now the easy part,” he said. He handed me the radio and got back into his car.

  Now that we had clearly laid out the bait for Dr. Danco, step two was to get him to a specific place at the right time, and the happy coincidence of Vince Masuoka’s party was too perfect to ignore. For the next few hours we drove around the city in our separate cars and repeated the same message back and forth a couple of times with subtle variations, just to be sure. We had also enlisted a couple of patrol units Doakes said just possibly might not fuck it up. I took that to be his understated wit, but the cops in question did not seem to get the joke and, although they did not actually tremble, they did seem to go a little overboard in anxiously assuring Sergeant Doakes that they would not, in fact, fuck it up. It was wonderful to be working with a man who could inspire such loyalty.

  Our little team spent the rest of the day pumping the airwaves full of chatter about my engagement party, giving directions to Vince’s house and reminding people of the time. And just after lunch, our coup de grâce. Sitting in my car in front of a Wendy’s, I used the handheld radio and called Sergeant Doakes one last time for a carefully scripted conversation.

  “Sergeant Doakes, this is Dexter, do you copy?”

  “This is Doakes,” he said after a slight pause.

  “It would mean a lot to me if you could come to my engagement party tonight.”

  “I can’t go anywhere,” he said. “This guy is too dangerous.”

  “Just come for one drink. In and out,” I wheedled.

  “You saw what he did to Manny, and Manny was just a grunt. I’m the one gave this guy to some bad people. He gets his hands on me, what’s he gonna do to me?”

  “I’m getting married, Sarge,” I said. I liked the Marvel Comics flavor of calling him Sarge. “That doesn’t happen every day. And he’s not going to try anything with all those cops around.”

  There was a long dramatic pause in which I knew Doakes was counting to seven, just as we had written it down. Then the radio crackled again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll come by around nine o’clock.”

  “Thanks, Sarge,” I said, thrilled to be able to say it again, and just to complete my happiness, I added, “This really means a lot to me. Ten-four.”

  “Ten-four,” he said.

  Somewhere in the city I hoped that our little radio drama was playing out to our target audience. As he scrubbed up for his surgery, would he pause,
cock his head, and listen? As his scanner crackled with the beautiful mellow voice of Sergeant Doakes, perhaps he’d put down a bone saw, wipe his hands, and write the address on a scrap of paper. And then he would go happily back to work-on Kyle Chutsky?-with the inner peace of a man with a job to do and a full social calendar when he was done for the day.

  Just to be absolutely sure, our squad-car friends would breathlessly repeat the message a few times, and without fucking it up; that Sergeant Doakes himself would be at the party tonight, live and in person, around nine o’clock.

  And for my part, with my work done for a few hours, I headed for Jackson Memorial Hospital to look in on my favorite bird with a broken wing.

  Deborah was wrapped in an upper-body cast, sitting in bed in a sixth-floor room with a lovely view of the freeway, and although I was sure they were giving her some kind of painkiller, she did not look at all blissful when I walked into her room. “Goddamn it, Dexter,” she greeted me, “tell them to let me the hell out of here. Or at least give me my clothes so I can leave.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better, sister dear,” I said. “You’ll be on your feet in no time.”

  “I’ll be on my feet the second they give me my goddamn clothes,” she said. “What the hell is going on out there? What have you been doing?”

  “Doakes and I have set a rather neat trap, and Doakes is the bait,” I said. “If Dr. Danco bites, we’ll have him tonight at my, um, party. Vince’s party,” I added, and I realized I wanted to distance myself from the whole idea of being engaged and it was a silly way to do it, but I felt better anyway-which apparently brought no comfort to Debs.

  “Your engagement party,” she said, and then snarled. “Shit. You got Doakes to set himself up for you.” And I admit it sounded kind of elegant when she said it, but I didn’t want her thinking such things; unhappy people heal slower.

  “No, Deborah, seriously,” I said in my best soothing voice. “We’re doing this to catch Dr. Danco.”

  She glared at me for a long time and then, amazingly, she sniffled and fought back a tear. “I have to trust you,” she said. “But I hate this. All I can think about is what he’s doing to Kyle.”