by Jeff Lindsay
“Oh, not that many,” Brian said. “Five or six? Not many.”
“And how many cabins?” I asked him.
Brian shrugged. “You have to understand, I didn’t go down there,” he said. “I just glanced down when Raul came up. His cabin—the main one—it’s all the way up at the front.” He frowned. “I saw four or five doors along the hall. One’s the kitchen….I’d guess three more cabins.”
“The kids will be together in one of the cabins,” Deborah said.
“You’d better hope so,” I said. Personally, I would have put kids in the bilge—especially mine.
“They will be in a cabin,” Debs said positively. “But as far from Raul as possible.”
I thought that part made sense, and I glanced at Brian. He nodded. “That’s probably right,” he said. “Raul does like children. But he also likes his privacy, especially when he’s with his mujeres.”
“Good,” I said, trying to sound dynamic, forceful, and optimistic, as if we’d actually accomplished something. “So how do we do this?”
The two of them looked up at me, and I had to suppress a snort, because their faces wore identical expressions of blank befuddlement. They were both equally surprised at the question; neither of them had a clue how to go about our little quest, and it was the only thing they’d agreed on yet. Once again, the one thing that can always be relied upon to unite absolutely anybody and everybody is Ignorance.
Deborah broke the spell by standing up abruptly. “We got about four hours until dawn,” she said. “Let’s just go, and take it as it comes. Whatever it takes.”
I opened my mouth to object and point out that careful planning is the mother of success—but Brian was already nodding his head and standing up. “We’ll take my car,” he said, looking at me. “Over to your boat? After that, we’ll just have to wing it.” He turned and walked out of the room, and with no more than a nod at me, Deborah followed, and I could only shrug and trail along behind.
As I said, Ignorance unites us all.
TWENTY-FOUR
Biscayne Bay at night can be a very beautiful place. A warm wind usually blows across the surface, and the water glows with a slight luminescence, and if there is some moonlight and the waves are behaving, it can remind you that every now and then, being alive and on a boat here on the bay is a very good thing.
I steered my boat south from my rented dock in Coconut Grove, and I was reminded of exactly that: I was glad to be alive and on the water on a beautiful moonlit night. And I really did appreciate the charms of a predawn boat trip on the waters of my beloved home. But I also thought I would like to stay alive, and I would have a much better chance of that if the moon was not quite so bright.
There was no way in the world we could hope to approach Raul’s yacht unseen, not with this three-quarter moon beaming down in rancid glee. I had always felt a cool and welcome comfort from the moonlight. It had been my friend and ally, my strength and my refuge. Tonight it was no such thing. Like everything else I held dear it had turned against me. The cold light of this traitorous moon would get me killed, and I took no joy from the sight of it. And it shone mercilessly down from a sky that was almost completely clear. Far off on the horizon, over toward Bimini, there was a dark line of clouds scudding along, low and fast, but where we were there was only a lethally bright sky above.
Because of a very light chop, we traveled at a good speed, just over twenty-five knots. Even south of Cape Florida, where the swells can pick up from the roll of the open ocean, the water was calm enough to let us maintain the pace. We would be there in about half an hour—and perhaps that made me enjoy the ride even more. Because if the visibility was this good when we arrived, I was quite sure that this would be the last boat ride I ever took. Raul would have sentries, and they could not avoid seeing us, and that would be just about the end of it. And of us.
We had talked about this, of course. The car ride from Deborah’s house to my boat had been full of talk. I had listed what might happen, what we might do about it, and how to maximize what was truly a very slim chance of success. And even though Debs and Brian remained united in shrugging off all the certain dangers I could think of, I have to admit that at least things were going much better than I could have hoped in the personal relations department. Debs had somehow kept herself from shooting Brian, and he had not slashed her throat and bounded away for the high ground.
Before climbing into Brian’s car we had maximized our firepower—Debs took a pump-action shotgun from the trunk of her car, as well as her first-aid kit, which I thought was rather pessimistic. And she brought her Glock pistol, which made me glad. She had a sentimental attachment to Harry’s old .38 revolver and I’d been afraid she’d bring it, even though it had half the number of shots and half the firepower of the Glock. Brian and I had our pistols, reloaded and ready to go, each of us with a spare clip.
It was only a ten-minute drive from Deb’s house to my rented dock space in a quiet residential area of the Grove. The house was owned by an elderly couple who lived in New Jersey most of the year, for some reason. They were very glad to have someone stopping by their Southern manse from time to time, which might discourage burglars, and they gave me a very good rate. And my boat, in spite of sitting unused for several months, was in excellent shape and needed only a few moments of chug and spew from the bilge pump before it was ready to go.
As we motored out the short canal to the bay I opened the dry locker on my boat, and grabbed some very good fillet knives, which were a lot quieter than guns, and might preserve our element of surprise a few extra minutes. The fact that they were also a great deal more fun than guns was not really a factor. Brian was delighted with the one I gave him, of course. Debs refused to take one and that, too, really wasn’t much of a surprise.
In addition to all that lethal hardware, my brother had insisted on bringing along the canvas bag he’d taken from Ivan. It was full of sinister-looking things Brian insisted on calling “toys” and which he was convinced we might need. “If nothing else,” he’d said brightly, “it can cover our tracks afterward.” And again, astonishingly, Debs had agreed.
“If one of those things can destroy the evidence,” she said, “we bring it.”
So we were lugging along a couple of very ugly bombs, unknown and probably unstable explosive devices, merely because we might get a chance to use them. And maybe we would. But first we had to get on board Raul’s yacht silently and alive, and to do that we had to approach it without being seen. So far, we had come up with no way to do that, other than go-take-a-look-and-see-what’s-what. If it had been up to me, this casual plan of attack would not have been plan B—not even C. I don’t like to improvise. When I slide out into the night for the purpose of making Mischief, I need to have a plan, and I need to stick with it. Beginning, middle, and end, all thought out ahead of time, and all executed in good order. Far too much could go wrong, even when it’s just me and one carefully selected playmate, one who suspects nothing until it is too late for suspicions to do any good.
In this case we were approaching perhaps a dozen men who were expecting trouble and were paid handsomely to prevent surprises—and we were improvising. I hated it, and I hated having no choice but to go through with it, and even on a beautiful night like this one I could not shake the feeling that things could not possibly go well. There was only one likely outcome, and that was a violent finish to the Saga of Dexter—and just when things were looking up for me, too. With Anderson killed in such a toxic setting, I was reasonably sure the case against me would go away, even without Kraunauer, and I would be free once more to live a happy life of perfectly balanced wage slavery and Wicked Fun. But unless a true miracle occurred, all that was about to end.
I was left alone with my dark thoughts—there was no point in trying to have an encouraging conversation over the noise of the engine and wind—but from what I could see of Debs and Brian, they were not thinking of sunlit rose gardens full of kittens and ice cream eith
er. Deborah simply sat and scowled at her feet, and Brian stood in the bow, holding the bowline and staring anxiously ahead. It did not cheer me up at all to see them; none of us looked like something a dozen well-armed mercenaries would find terribly threatening.
My thoughts, left to themselves, turned even darker. This was a hopeless errand, doomed to failure, and failure meant certain death, and death was something I have always tried to avoid—at least, my own. And why, after all, did we really need to go to all this bother? To save the children? Why? When you come right down to it, who really needs children? And especially these children. The only thing special about them was that Lily Anne and Nicholas carried DNA from me and Debs—and if either of us truly felt the need to replicate that, there was a lot more where that came from. As for Cody and Astor, they were Dark Yearlings, waiting to grow into something like me. Surely no reasonable person could want more Passenger-infested night stalkers in the world.
And in any case, didn’t all the child-rearing experts agree that it was actually a bad thing to do too much for your kids? It was well known that if you hover protectively around them, they never learn to fend for themselves. They would grow up to be wards of the state, permanently on food stamps and welfare, knocking over gas stations on the weekends. Weren’t we really just enabling these kids, shoving them into a life of crime and servile dependency on others?
And if we went home now and the worst happened to the children—so what? They were easily replaced—if not by breeding, then why not by adoption? There are millions of homeless children in the world—which proved again that kids were a low-value commodity, didn’t it? I mean, there are very few homeless Bentleys in the world. Probably near to zero, except for Kraunauer’s, and it wouldn’t be homeless for very long. People would line up around the block to claim it—but on that same block there might be a dozen children nobody wanted, and no one would lift a finger for them. Didn’t that prove something? Wouldn’t a reasonable being conclude that the only logical, fair, and healthy thing to do was turn around, head for home, and give the children a chance to develop by taking care of themselves?
It was pure and unassailable logic. But, of course, there was no point in trying to get anybody else to see it. Human beings have never really been influenced by logic, whatever they tell themselves. And I was fairly sure that Deborah, at least, would not see things in this rational and sensible light. And Brian, for all his laudable lack of emotion, seemed quite determined to put an end to Raul. If he had to rescue a few kids to do that, he didn’t appear to mind very much, as long as taking out Raul was part of the deal.
As if he had heard me think about him, Brian turned around and met my eye. He nodded once and flashed his truly terrible fake smile, and then turned back around to face front again. There was no help there. I was almost certainly the only one of us with his head screwed on properly and wanting to turn around and go home. And I couldn’t help thinking that by a wonderful coincidence, I was steering the boat—my boat. I could do it—just a slow invisible nudge of the wheel to put us into a big circular loop, back to home and sanity. I really should do it—and someday Debs and Brian would realize I had saved their lives, and they’d thank me for it.
Something touched my elbow; startled, I turned and saw that Deborah was standing there. She didn’t look like she was ready to thank me for anything. She just leaned close to my ear and said, “How soon?”
I glanced down at my GPS Chartplotter. We were only a couple of miles out from Toro Key. Too close to turn around; I had dithered too long.
“We should see it in a few minutes,” I said to Debs. She nodded, and for a moment she just stood there, silent. And then surprisingly, perhaps more surprisingly than anything else that had happened lately, she put her hand on my arm, squeezed hard for a moment, and then went up to stand beside Brian.
It was a very touching moment, in both the physical and sentimental sense of the word. My sister, symbolically reaching across the great gaping space that had grown between us, and saying, We are in this together. You and me, Dex, side by side, all the way to the rapidly approaching final curtain. If we go down, we go down together. Very warm, very human, and it really should have made me buck up. I’m sure that’s what it usually does, at least to those of us who have emotions. I don’t, so it didn’t. And I did not want to go down at all, together or alone.
Ahead of me I could see the bright flash from Fowey Rocks Light, which was due east of Soldier Key, a small island a few miles north of Toro. We had to be getting closer, but I just kept steering the boat onward, feeling more and more certain that I was aiming us directly at our doom.
Debs saw the yacht first. I watched her lean over to Brian and say something, pointing at a spot just ahead and to the left. Brian looked where she pointed, nodded, and came back to me.
“That has to be it,” he said, leaning in next to my ear.
I throttled back immediately, bringing us down to a slow and, I hoped, mostly silent glide across the water. I nudged the boat left a few points, and soon I could see it too. At first it was no more than a spot of muted brightness high above the water, the anchor light required by law. This one was a little dimmer than it should have been, probably on purpose, but it passed muster.
Brian went back up to the bow and stared intently at the spot. We moved slowly closer and a vague silhouette appeared under the light and began to take on the shape of a large and expensive boat. And as that shape got closer and clearer, I had to wonder whether I had chosen the wrong profession, because what we were looking at was no mere yacht. This was a superyacht, the kind that sheikhs and Greek arms dealers buy for their summer vacations on the Mediterranean, the kind that can leave Athens while a gourmet meal is served and race all the way to Venice in time for dessert. This yacht was only about sixty feet long, but the lines screamed out speed, class, and megabucks. Whatever else he might be—and mostly really was—no one would ever accuse Raul of being cheap. I began to wonder just how much cash Brian had taken from him. It had to be an awful lot for Raul even to notice it was gone.
They had dropped anchor on the bay side, just north of the key, in the only hole deep enough for a boat that size, as far as I knew. But it was protected from the bigger ocean waves and the prevailing winds this time of year, and if the little launch was in the same class as the yacht, Raul could make it from here to Miami in about twenty minutes. And if he needed a sudden getaway, he was pointed straight out at the Atlantic, and it would be a quick hop back to Mexico in a yacht as fast as this one.
Two hundred yards away, I turned south and sped up a little, running parallel now to the yacht, and hoping they would think we were no more than a passing boat filled with early morning anglers. It made sense; there was a reef just south of Toro that offered good fishing. But it made no sense at all to Brian and Debs; they turned and looked back at me in perfect unison. “What are you doing?” Debs said in a savage whisper.
“We can’t see enough,” Brian said in the same tone.
I shook my head. “We can’t see,” I said, “so they can’t see us, either. That’s a good thing,” I added, since neither of them seemed to understand that.
Debs came back to my side again. “Dexter, we have to know about the guards,” she said. “How many, where they are—we can’t go in blind.”
“If they spot us getting close we aren’t going in at all,” I said.
Brian joined us, standing at my other elbow. “Brother, it would be nice to know—”
“Are you both out of your fucking heads?” I snapped. They looked at me with equal surprise, and I admit I was feeling it, too. I almost never use bad words—there are so many good ones that sting more. But seriously, I seemed to be the only one of us interested in staying alive. Brian and Debs were treating this like a snipe hunt. “We go past like we’re headed to the reef to fish. Then we approach from the bow,” I said firmly. “Quietly. That’s our best chance of staying unseen.” And I think I sounded quite commanding.
&n
bsp; “It’s too high,” Debs said petulantly. “I’m not a fucking chimp—we can’t climb up the anchor line.”
“There’s a boarding ladder in the locker back there,” I said, nodding toward the rear of my boat. “Go get it.” And the first confirmation of my new authority came when Debs turned quickly away and got the ladder from the locker. She returned just as quickly and held it out to me.
The ladder had six wooden steps and two hooks at the top end. I needed it because my boat has high gunwales for offshore use, and if ever I wanted to swim or snorkel, I hooked the ladder on.
“You have a plan, brother?” Brian asked.
“I do,” I said, still sounding very much in charge. “We glide up from the front. You”—I nodded at Brian—“climb onto the gunwale of this boat, and hook the ladder to the yacht’s rail.”
“It’s still too high,” Deborah said.
“Then you and I, Brian,” I said, ignoring Debs and her negativity, “climb up the ladder onto the deck. Debs, you wait with the boat and—”
“Fuck you—I’m not waiting in the boat like some fucking cheerleader!” she said.
I skipped over the obvious fact that neither boats nor execution squads are generally equipped with cheerleaders, and instead just told her, “Deborah, we have to take the kids off at the stern. So you have to bring the boat around after Brian and I take out the deck watch, okay?” She set her face in a fierce, dark pout, and so even though it wasn’t quite playing fair, I added, “It’s got to be done quietly—it’s knife work, Debs.”
She glared a little more, but then she nodded. “Fine,” she said. “But you call me up there right away or so help me—”
“Good, that’s settled,” I said. For the next few minutes nobody had anything to say. I had to think that was a good thing, considering the blather they’d been spouting so far. I didn’t need the distraction and arguments, and I didn’t need anybody objecting that it was still an insane, suicidal plan. Because it was; I was sure there would be somebody on the bridge, and he would certainly be looking out over the bow from time to time. It was just barely possible that we could get ridiculously lucky and time it so that he was looking away when we climbed on board—but I didn’t feel lucky. Nothing about this whole absurd expedition felt lucky. I had only a heavy sick feeling of dread and a cold lump in my stomach and a totally unshakable conviction that we were all about to die—or at least that I was, which is just as bad, as far as I’m concerned.
