Dexter Is Dead

by Jeff Lindsay

  I pick up the phone on my side.

  “Mr. Morgan,” he says briskly—and without even looking at the papers. Perhaps he didn’t want to soil the leather folder.

  “Yes. I mean, that’s me, but…?”

  He nods again, and gives me a smile that seems friendly, but I can tell it is every bit as cold and phony as my own. “I am Frank Kraunauer.”

  I blink. This is a name I have only read in the papers. It is a name that is spoken, if at all, only in reverent whispers. Celebrity lawyer Frank Kraunauer springs another horribly guilty client while sipping champagne on his yacht. Of course the inhuman fiend was guilty, but he had Frank Kraunauer defending him. Killers and cartel kingpins rejoice in his presence, for Kraunauer has but to speak and the chains of their bondage wither and die. He is the Home Run King of our courts; every swing sends another felon over the walls.

  And he is now, for some reason, here to see little old me?

  Kraunauer gives me several seconds to absorb the incredible cachet of his name, and then he goes on. “I have been retained to represent you. Of course, if you prefer to keep your present court-appointed attorney, Mr. Feldman…?” He lets his smile widen as he says it, clearly amused at the thought that anyone would be naive enough to prefer Bernie to Himself.

  Personally, I am not amused. I am startled, confused—and, it must be said, I am also somewhat suspicious. “I don’t know,” I say carefully. “Who retained you?”

  He nods patiently, giving the impression of a man who appreciates caution in prospective clients. “The arrangement is a little unusual,” he admits—this from a man who defended wholesale drug dealers, and was probably accustomed to being paid in suitcases full of blood-soaked Krugerands. “But I am instructed to tell you that I have been engaged by a Mr. Herman O. Atwater.” He cocked his head to one side, looking simultaneously amused and yet breathtakingly self-assured and competent. Of course, his suit helped a lot. “You are familiar with Mr. Atwater?” he said, raising a perfectly trimmed eyebrow.

  It was a performance well worth taking in and even applauding. But Dexter is not Dazzled; Dexter’s brain is, at last, whirling at its favored rate of nine million revolutions per minute. In the first and most obvious place, I do not know anyone named Herman O. Atwater, and I never have. Second, it defies believability to think that a complete stranger would hire the most brilliant, and consequently expensive attorney in Miami for me. Therefore, the name must be made up for some reason.

  But why? The only possible motive for a fake name is to preserve anonymity, which means that Mr. Atwater didn’t want anyone to know he was involved with me—

  But wait: He would certainly want me to know who he was. Or, to be fair, she. Only someone close to me would go to the expense of hiring Kraunauer, whose fees were legendary. But nobody actually is close to me, at least among the living. It couldn’t be my friends, since aside from Vince I don’t really have any. And I know only too bitterly well that Deborah didn’t do it. She’d made her position abundantly clear, and I could not believe it had changed so dramatically.

  If I eliminate friends, and eliminate family, then who was left? In all the world, there is no one else who really gives a rodent’s rectum whether I lived or died—although it did seem like the list of those who preferred me dead was getting a bit lengthy lately. So, not a stranger, not a friend, not family, which left—

  I blink again. A tiny little ray of light peeks into the dark and stormy maelstrom of Dexter’s brain.

  I had been trying very hard to come up with something clever. Somebody had just outdone me, neatly and completely. They had, in fact, run several laps around me while I still stood in the blocks, cringing from the starter’s pistol. And in a surge of warm and wonderful relief, I felt my mental powers return to me at last, and I knew who it was. It was all right there in the name.

  Herman O. Atwater.

  The “O” did not stand for Oscar, nor Oliver, nor even Oliphant. It did not, in fact, stand at all. It connected. With Herman. As in herman-o. Hermano. Which any resident of My Fair City could tell you is the Spanish word for brother.

  Atwater was simply the clincher, the final clue, the one hint so completely private and personal that no one else in the world could possibly know what it meant. Not a name either, but a location: at the water, the most significant place of my life. At the water, in a shipping container, where I had been ripped out of normal life and reborn into blood. At the water, where poor, traumatized four-year-old Dexter had been found, after three days of sitting in a pool of his mother’s blood, all alone in the world, except for Mommy’s severed head—and one other, relatively living thing, though just as thoroughly dead inside as I was.

  A small, cold shipping container at the water, all snug and abandoned in the dreadful sticky red mess, just the three of us: Mommy, Me, and my hermano. My Blood Relations.

  My brother, born anew like me at the water’s edge. Hermano Atwater.

  Brian.

  I had not been flung onto the dung heap by all my family after all. My True Family had come through. My brother, Brian, had hired the best lawyer in town for me.

  If it had taken as long for all these thoughts to whip through my brain as it took to lay them out, I am sure Kraunauer would have had to leave for an important appointment with his mani-pedi practitioner. But when Dexter’s brain is in high gear, such a dazzling train of wit is quicker than the blink of an eye, and in almost no elapsed time at all, I was smiling and nodding at Kraunauer. “Of course,” I said into the phone. “Dear Herman. How thoughtful of him.”

  “You are familiar with Mr. Atwater?” he repeated.

  “Naturally,” I said.

  “And is it your wish to have me represent you in this matter? Rather than Mr. Feldman?” he said with his small, slightly superior smile.

  The smile I gave him back was much larger, and a great deal more real. “Absolutely,” I said.

  He nodded his head, twice, and opened the beautiful leather folder, all in a way that said, Of course, what else, and now let’s get down to business. He looked down at the pages and shook his head. “I’m afraid there have been some rather…singular…” He paused and looked up at me. “Irregularities?”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but recent experience told me it probably wasn’t positive. “Irregular how?” I asked, not altogether sure I wanted to hear the answer. “I mean, in a good way?”

  “Good,” he said, as if it was a dirty word. “Not if you care about the law.” He shook his head disapprovingly, but a single tooth gleamed, like a wolf trying and just barely failing to hide his fangs, and he held up the paperwork. “I’m afraid I can’t call any of this good.”

  “Oh,” I said, not quite sure how to feel about that. “So, what does it mean? I mean, for me…?”

  Kraunauer smiled, and now the wolf fangs were out for all to see. “Let’s just put it this way,” he said. “If you’re still sitting here in TGK tomorrow at this time, it means I’m dead.” He closed the folder and allowed his smile to get much, much broader. “And I don’t plan on dying anytime soon, Mr. Morgan.”

  FIVE

  It must be that somewhere there truly is a malevolent deity who watches over the Wicked with tender care. Because Kraunauer did not die, and his word was as good as gold—better, really, when you consider the terrible inflation on the gold market lately. In any case, gold would not have sprung Dexter overnight, and Kraunauer did. Bright and early the next morning, well before I had another chance at the epicurean ecstasy of TGK’s lunch, I was blinking in the sunlight of the parking lot at the front of the building and wondering what happened next.

  They had given me back my clothing and all else they had taken from me on my arrival—plus a thick folder of paperwork that I assumed gave details of my release and terrible threats dealing with my certain reincarceration. I had bundled it all up and changed gratefully into my own clothes. To be perfectly honest, I had grown a wee bit weary of the cheerful orange jumpsuit, and it was
very nice to wear my own, relatively bland clothing again. On the downside, my pants still had some bloodstains on them from the hectic multivictim evening of carnage that had unfolded just prior to my arrest, and the jumpsuit had at least always been a hundred percent bloodstain free. Still, the successful life is a series of trade-offs, and I shed no tears over the loss of my jumpsuit. I’d also gotten back my wallet, my phone, and even my belt. The belt was the real clincher; it was a truly euphoric feeling to know that I could hang myself now if I wanted to. I didn’t, of course, but I might consider it soon if I couldn’t think of a way to get home. I’d arrived in a police car. Sadly, there were none waiting to give me a ride. And in truth, I’d had quite enough of police for the time being. Walking would be far preferable, and it was good for me, too. A nice, brisk fifteen-mile stroll to my house would get the blood flowing, put a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.

  On the other hand, this was Miami—which is to say that it was hot and getting hotter. It would be a terrible shame if I got out of jail only to die of heatstroke. Perhaps if I waited long enough, a cab would turn up. And if I waited only a little longer, they might build a rail line right to the door. It seemed just as likely.

  There were few other options that I could see. Although they had given me back my phone, it was of course completely dead after its unhappy incarceration. So I stood just outside the front door, looking stupidly around me. I’d come in through the back, on the opposite side of the building. The view here in front was far more pleasant; towering up behind me was the delightfully ominous gray facade of the building, and wrapped around me, in a thought-provoking design moment, was a high barbed-wire fence. Cars were parked absolutely everywhere and anywhere they might, even in spaces that were not actually spaces. The parked vehicles stretched around three sides of the building and overflowed a large lot in back. They were crammed in two-deep under trees, on top of median strips, and in No Parking Fire Zone spots. Anywhere else in the city such madcap abandonment of vehicles would certainly be rewarded with towing and impoundment. It made one reflect on the irony that here, at the actual jail, where the most nefarious repeat meter violators and illegal parking offenders were incarcerated, there was no apparent parking enforcement.

  It also made one reflect on a further irony: that with so many vehicles lying about unused, not a single one of them was available to give poor liberated Dexter a lift. It didn’t seem fair. But of course, nothing in life ever is fair, outside of a few old-fashioned board games.

  Ah, well. Freedom is a two-edged sword, for it carries with it the terrible burden of Self-Reliance. And I now knew, from hard-earned experience, that my spirit yearned to breathe free air, and I should be willing to pay the price.

  And I was. But in truth, if paying the price meant walking home, I would rather have put Freedom on a credit card.

  So I stood there blinking in the bright sunlight and wishing I had sunglasses. And my car. And what the hell, a Cuban sandwich and an Iron Beer. And I had been standing there for a good three minutes before I became aware of a horn beeping nearby, at regular intervals. The sound came from my right. Out of no more than idle curiosity, I glanced that way.

  Some fifty feet away, the car-crammed driveway bent right. Just beyond that, on the far side of the tall chain-link fence, there was a big vacant lot, also overflowing with cars.

  Standing half-hidden by the open door of one of those cars, one arm reaching in to sound the horn, stood a man in resort clothing, baseball cap, and large wraparound sunglasses. He raised a hand and waved, beeped the horn once more, and as I realized with a start that he was waving at me, I also realized who he was, in spite of his outlandish Tourist costume. It was my brother, Brian.

  The laws of our Universe are not terribly lenient when it comes to unbelievable coincidence. Seeing Brian here, so soon after he had sent me a Get Out of Jail Free card in the person of Mr. Frank Kraunauer, could not possibly be random chance. And so it was with almost no pause at all that I deduced that Brian had come to get me, and that I should take advantage of his presence. I therefore strode briskly over to the fence that separated his car from the detention center.

  Brian watched me walk toward him, his terrible fake smile almost too dazzling to bear in the bright daylight. When I was ten feet away he lifted a hand and pointed to my right. “There’s a hole in the fence,” he said. He jabbed his index finger. “Right over there.”

  Sure enough, there was indeed a hole in the fence, just a few feet away. It looked well used, and it was large enough to allow me through comfortably. In no time at all I was standing in the mud beside my brother’s green Jeep and showing him most of my teeth. “Brian,” I said.

  “In person,” he said. He gestured at the passenger side of his car. “May I offer you a ride, brother?”

  “You may,” I said. “And I will accept it with thanks.”

  Brian climbed into the driver’s seat as I walked around the car, and he had the motor running, and with it the air conditioner, by the time I climbed in. “I also need to thank you for the splendid gift,” I said as I fastened my seat belt. “Frank Kraunauer was a wonderful surprise.”

  “Oh, well,” Brian said modestly. “It was really nothing at all.”

  “It was a whole lot,” I said. “I’m free.”

  “Yes,” Brian said. “But not permanently…?”

  I shook my head. “Probably not. That would be too much to expect, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said. “Oh, this wicked world.”

  “Kraunauer got the judge to release me—the paperwork was a complete mess—but the state attorney will almost certainly try again. He really wants this case.”

  “And therefore you?” he said.

  “And me,” I said. “But I’m free for now.” I bowed to him, as much as I could while wearing a seat belt. “So thank you.”

  “Well, after all,” Brian said, backing the car away from the fence, “what is family for?”

  I thought somewhat unhappily of my other family, with particular reference to Deborah. “I sometimes wonder,” I said.

  “In any case,” Brian said, putting the car into forward and bumping us through the mud of the vacant lot, toward the street, “it seemed little enough to do. You would do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well,” I said. “I certainly would now. Although I’m not sure if I could afford Kraunauer.”

  “Oh, that,” he said dismissively, waving one hand. “I’ve had a little windfall. And it’s only money.”

  “Still,” I said, “I am awfully grateful. It does get to be a little close in there.”

  “Yes, doesn’t it?” Brian said. He turned out onto the side street, and then right onto NW 72nd Ave. I watched his profile, so much like my own, as he drove us happily away, and I wondered whether he had actually spent time inside TGK. There was a great deal I didn’t know about Brian, particularly about his past. We had been separated when very young: me to Harry and Doris and life as a Morgan—or a faux-Morgan, as it now turned out. Brian hadn’t had it so easy; he’d grown up in a series of foster homes, reformatories, and possibly jails. He had never offered much detail about this time, and I hadn’t asked. But it seemed a good bet to me that he knew very well what life was like on the Inside.

  He turned and saw me looking at him, and raised an eyebrow. “Well,” he said happily. “What now?”

  It may sound stupid—no surprise, considering my recent behavior—but I didn’t have an answer. I had been so focused on getting out that I hadn’t really thought beyond that. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “As it happens,” Brian said, “I thought you might want to lie low for a while?” He turned to me and raised his eyebrows. “Yes? So I took the liberty of getting you a small, quiet hotel room.”

  I blinked. “That’s very kind of you, brother.”

  “Oh, no trouble at all,” he said happily. “I put it on a nice, anonymous credit card.”

  I thought about it for a
moment. Brian was absolutely right that I needed to stay out of sight until I knew which way the wind was blowing. But oddly enough, although I would not go so far as to say that I was actually homesick, I felt the need to see a few familiar places and things, just to wipe away the memory of my cell and feel truly free again.

  “Can you take me to my house?” I said. “I’d like to shower, change clothes. And maybe just sit on a real couch for a little while.”

  “Of course,” he said. “And after that?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s too much I don’t know.”

  “About?” he prompted.

  I sighed heavily, feeling the full weight of freedom settle onto my shoulders. It had seemed so simple when the world was made up of no more than my cell and the yard and guessing what that stuff was in the sandwich. Now…“I guess everything,” I said. “All I really know is that Detective Anderson hates me, and he’ll do anything to make all this stick to me. And apparently,” I said, turning away to look ruefully out the window, “Deborah hates me just as much.”

  “So I have gathered,” he said neutrally. He avoided Deborah with great care, which was really the only smart thing to do, since the one time she had ever seen him was that night a few years back when he had grabbed her, taped her up inside a storage box, and encouraged me to kill her. That type of encounter can make a relationship a bit awkward going forward. Deborah thought Brian was dead, if she thought about him at all. As a sensible monster, Brian preferred not to shatter that illusion.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I’m not sure of my status at work, but I need to talk to my friend Vince and see what the evidence against me looks like.”

  “Vince is the Asian fellow?” Brian asked, and I nodded. “Yes, you had mentioned him before.” He drove us up the ramp and onto the Palmetto Expressway, headed east.

  “Even if I’m suspended or fired, I think Vince will help,” I said.