by Jeff Lindsay
“You’re not just trying to drop Doakes in the shit, are you?”
Deborah asked me.
“In Captain Matthews’s conference room,” I said, “when Kyle saw Doakes for the first time, there was a moment when I thought they recognized each other.”
“I didn’t notice that,” Deborah said with a frown.
“You were busy blushing,” I said. She blushed again, which I thought was a little redundant. “Besides, Doakes was the one who knew who to call when he saw the crime scene.”
“Doakes knows some stuff,” Chutsky admitted. “From his military service.”
“What kind of stuff?” I asked. Chutsky looked at me for a long time, or anyway his sunglasses did. He tapped on the 9 2
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table with that silly pinkie ring and the sunlight flashed off the large diamond in the center. When he finally spoke it felt like the temperature at our table had dropped ten degrees.
“Buddy,” he said, “I don’t want to cause you any trouble, but you have to let go of this. Back off. Find a different hobby.
Or else you are in a world of shit—and you will get flushed.”
The waiter materialized at Kyle’s elbow before I could think of something wonderful to say to that. Chutsky kept the sunglasses turned toward me for a long moment. Then he handed the menu to the waiter. “The bouillabaisse is really good here,” he said.
Deborah disappeared for the rest of the week, which did very little for my self-esteem, because no matter how terrible it was for me to admit it, without her help I was stuck. I could not come up with any sort of alternative plan for ditching Doakes.
He was still there, parked under the tree across from my apartment, following me to Rita’s house, and I had no answers. My once-proud brain chased its tail and caught nothing but air.
I could feel the Dark Passenger roiling and whimpering and struggling to climb out and take the steering wheel, but there was Doakes looming up through the windshield, forcing me to clamp down and reach for another can of beer. I had worked too hard and too long to achieve my perfect little life and I was not going to ruin it now. The Passenger and I could wait a bit longer. Harry had taught me discipline, and that would have to see me through to happier days.
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“Patience,” Harry said. He paused to cough into a Kleenex.
“Patient is more important than smart, Dex. You’re already smart.”
“Thank you,” I said. And I meant it politely, really, because I was not at all comfortable sitting there in Harry’s hospital room. The smell of medicine and disinfectant and urine mixed with the air of restrained suffering and clinical death made me wish I was almost anywhere else. Of course, as a cal-low young monster, I never wondered if Harry might not feel the same.
“In your case, you have to be more patient, because you’ll be thinking you’re clever enough to get away with it,” he said.
“You’re not. Nobody is.” He paused to cough again, and this time it took longer and seemed to go deeper. To see Harry like this—indestructible, supercop, foster-father Harry, shaking, turning red and weepy-eyed from the strain—was almost too much. I had to look away. When I looked back a moment later, Harry was watching me again.
“I know you, Dexter. Better than you know yourself.” And this was easy to believe until he followed up with, “You’re ba-sically a good guy.”
“No I’m not,” I said, thinking of the wonderful things I had not yet been allowed to do; even wanting to do them pretty much ruled out any kind of association with goodness. There was also the fact that most of the other pimple-headed hormone-churning twinkies my age who were considered good guys were no more like me than an orangutan was. But Harry wouldn’t hear it.
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“Yes, you are,” he said. “And you have to believe that you are. Your heart is pretty much in the right place, Dex,” he said, and with that he collapsed into a truly epic fit of coughing. It lasted for what seemed like several minutes, and then he leaned weakly back onto his pillow. He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again they were steely Harry blue, brighter than ever in the pale green of his dying face. “Patience,” he said. And he made it sound strong, in spite of the terrible pain and weakness he must have felt.
“You still have a long way to go, and I don’t have a whole lot of time, Dexter.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. He closed his eyes.
“That’s just what I mean,” he said. “You’re supposed to say no, don’t worry, you have plenty of time.”
“But you don’t,” I said, not sure where this was going.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “But people pretend. To make me feel better about it.”
“Would you feel better?”
“No,” he said, and opened his eyes again. “But you can’t use logic on human behavior. You have to be patient, watch and learn. Otherwise, you screw up. Get caught and . . . Half my legacy.” He closed his eyes again and I could hear the strain in his voice. “Your sister will be a good cop. You,” he smiled slowly, a little sadly, “you will be something else. Real justice. But only if you’re patient. If your chance isn’t there, Dexter, wait until it is.”
It all seemed so overwhelming to an eighteen-year-old ap-prentice monster. All I wanted was to do The Thing, very simple really, just go dancing in the moonlight with the bright blade flowing free—such an easy thing, so natural and D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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sweet—to cut through all the nonsense and right down to the heart of things. But I could not. Harry made it complicated.
“I don’t know what I’ll do when you’re dead,” I said.
“You’ll do fine,” he said.
“There’s so much to remember.”
Harry reached a hand out and pushed the button that hung on a cord beside his bed. “You’ll remember it,” he said. He dropped the cord and it was almost as though it pulled the last of the strength from him as it flopped back down by the bedside. “You’ll remember.” He closed his eyes and for a moment I was all alone in the room. Then the nurse bustled in with a syringe and Harry opened one eye. “We can’t always do what we think we have to do. So when there’s nothing else you can do, you wait,” he said, and held out his arm for his shot. “No matter what . . . pressure . . . you might feel.”
I watched him as he lay there, taking the needle without flinching and knowing that even the relief it brought was temporary, that his end was coming and he could not stop it—and knowing, too, that he was not afraid, and that he would do this the right way, as he had done everything else in his life the right way. And I knew this, too: Harry understood me. No one else ever had, and no one else ever would, through all time in all the world. Only Harry.
The only reason I ever thought about being human was to be more like him.
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And so i was patient. it was not an easy thing, but it was the Harry thing. Let the bright steely spring inside stay coiled and quiet and wait, watch, hold the hot sweet release locked tight in its cold box until it was Harry-right to let it skitter out and cartwheel through the night.
Sooner or later some small opening would show and we could vault through it. Sooner or later I would find a way to make Doakes blink.
I waited.
Some of us, of course, find that harder to do than others, and it was several days later, a Saturday morning, that my telephone rang.
“Goddamn it,” said Deborah without any preamble. It was almost a relief to hear that she was her recognizable cranky self again.
“Fine, thanks, and you?” I said.
“Kyle is making me nuts,” she said. “He says there’s nothing we can do but wait, but he won’t tell me what we’re wait-
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ing for. He disappears for ten or twelve hours and won�
�t tell me where he was. And then we just wait some more. I am so fucking tired of waiting my teeth hurt.”
“Patience is a virtue,” I said.
“I’m tired of being virtuous, too,” she said. “And I am sick to death of Kyle’s patronizing smile when I ask him what we can do to find this guy.”
“Well, Debs, I don’t know what I can do except offer my sympathy,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I think you can do a whole hell of a lot more than that, Bro,” she said.
I sighed heavily, mostly for her benefit. Sighs register so nicely on the telephone. “This is the trouble with having a reputation as a gunslinger, Debs,” I said. “Everybody thinks I can shoot the eye out of a jack at thirty paces, every single time.”
“I still think it,” she said.
“Your confidence warms my heart, but I don’t understand a thing about this kind of adventure, Deborah. It leaves me completely cold.”
“I have to find this guy, Dexter. And I want to rub Kyle’s nose in it,” she said.
“I thought you liked him.”
She snorted. “Jesus, Dexter. You don’t know anything about women, do you? Of course I like him. That’s why I want to rub his nose in it.”
“Oh, good, now it makes sense,” I said.
She paused, and then very casually said, “Kyle said some interesting things about Doakes.”
I felt my long-fanged friend inside stretch just a little and absolutely purr. “You’re getting very subtle all of a sudden, Deborah,” I said. “All you had to do was ask me.”
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“I just asked, and you gave me all that crap about how you can’t help,” she said, suddenly good old plain-speaking Debs again. “So how about it. What have you got?”
“Nothing at the moment,” I said.
“Shit,” said Deborah.
“But I might be able to find something.”
“How soon?”
I admit that I was feeling irked by Kyle’s attitude toward me. What had he said? I would be “in the shit and you will get flushed”? Seriously—who wrote his dialogue? And Deborah’s sudden onset of subtlety, which had been my traditional bailiwick, had done nothing to calm me down. So I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. “How about by lunchtime?” I said.
“Let’s say I’ll have something by one o’clock. Baleen, since Kyle can pick up the check.”
“This I gotta see,” she said, and then added, “The stuff about Doakes? It’s pretty good.” She hung up.
Well, well, I said to myself. Suddenly, I did not mind the thought of working a little bit on a Saturday. After all, the only alternative was to hang out at Rita’s and watch moss grow on Sergeant Doakes. But if I found something for Debs, I might at long last have the small opening I had hoped for. I merely had to be the clever boy we all believed I was.
But where to start? There was precious little to go on, since Kyle had pulled the department away from the crime scene before we had done much more than dust for prints. Many times in the past I had earned a few modest brownie points with my police colleagues by helping them track down the sick and twisted demons who lived only to kill. But that was because I understood them, since I am a sick and twisted demon myself. This time, I could not rely on getting any hints D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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from the Dark Passenger, who had been lulled into an uneasy sleep, poor fellow. I had to depend on my own bare-naked native wit, which was also being alarmingly silent at the moment.
Perhaps if I gave my brain some fuel, it would kick into high gear. I went to the kitchen and found a banana. It was very nice, but for some reason it did not launch any mental rockets.
I threw the peel in the garbage and looked at the clock.
Well, dear boy, that was five whole minutes gone by. Excellent. And you have already managed to figure out that you can’t figure anything out. Bravo, Dexter.
There really were very few places to start. In fact, all I had was the victim and the house. And since I was fairly certain that the victim would not have a lot to say, even if we gave him back his tongue, that left the house. Of course it was possible that the house belonged to the victim. But the decor had such a temporary look to it, I was sure it did not.
Strange to simply walk away from an entire house like that.
But he had done so, and with no one breathing down his neck and forcing a hasty and panicked retreat—which meant that he had done it deliberately, as part of his plan.
And that should imply that he had somewhere else to go.
Presumably still in the Miami area, since Kyle was here looking for him. It was a starting point, and I thought of it all by myself. Welcome home, Mr. Brain.
Real estate leaves fairly large footprints, even when you try to cover them up. Within fifteen minutes of sitting down at my computer I had found something—not actually a whole footprint, but certainly enough to make out the shape of a couple of toes.
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The house on N.W. 4th Street was registered to Ramon Puntia. How he expected to get away with that in Miami, I don’t know, but Ramon Puntia was a Cuban joke name, like
“Joe Blow” in English. But the house was paid for and no taxes were due, a sound arrangement for someone who valued privacy as much as I assumed our new friend did. The house had been bought with a single cash payment, a wire transfer from a bank in Guatemala. This seemed a bit odd; with our trail starting in El Salvador and leading through the murky depths of a mysterious government agency in Washington, why take a left turn into Guatemala? But a quick online study of contemporary money laundering showed that it fit very well. Apparently Switzerland and the Cayman Is-lands were no longer à la mode, and if one wished for discreet banking in the Spanish-speaking world, Guatemala was all the rage.
This raised the interesting question of how much money Dr. Dismember had, and where it came from. But it was a question that led nowhere at the moment. I had to assume that he had enough for another house when he was done with the first one, and probably in the same approximate price range.
All right then. I went back to my Dade County real estate database and looked for other properties recently purchased the same way, from the same bank. There were seven; four of them had sold for more than a million dollars, which struck me as a bit high for disposable property. They had probably been bought by nothing more sinister than run-of-the-mill drug lords and Fortune 500 CEOs on the run.
That left three properties that seemed possible. One of them was in Liberty City, a predominantly black inner-city D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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area of Miami. But on closer inspection, it turned out to be a block of apartments.
Of the two remaining properties, one was in Homestead, within sight of the gigantic dump heap of city garbage known locally as Mount Trashmore. The other was also in the south end of town, just off Quail Roost Drive.
Two houses: I was willing to bet that someone new had just moved in to one of them, and was doing things that might startle the ladies from the welcome wagon. No guarantees, of course, but it certainly seemed likely, and it was, after all, just in time for lunch.
Baleen was a very pricey place that I would not have attempted on my own modest means. It has the kind of oak-paneled elegance that makes you feel the need for a cravat and spats. It also has one of the best views of Biscayne Bay in the city, and if one is lucky there are a handful of tables that take advantage of this.
Either Kyle was lucky or his mojo had bowled over the headwaiter, because he and Deborah were waiting outside at one of these tables working on a bottle of mineral water and a plate of what appeared to be crab cakes. I grabbed one and took a bite as I slid into a chair facing Kyle.
“Yummy,” I said. “This must be where good crabs go when they die.”
“Debbie says you have something for us,” Kyle said. I looked at my sister, who had always bee
n Deborah or Debs but certainly never Debbie. She said nothing, however, and appeared willing to let this egregious liberty go by, so I turned my attention back to Kyle. He was wearing the designer sunglasses again, and his ridiculous pinkie ring sparkled as he brushed the hair carelessly back from his forehead.
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“I hope I have something,” I said. “But I do want to be careful not to get flushed.”
Kyle looked at me for a long moment, then he shook his head and a reluctant smile moved his mouth perhaps a quarter of an inch upward. “All right,” he said. “Busted. But you’d be surprised how often that kind of line really works.”
“I’m sure I’d be flabbergasted,” I said. I passed him the printout from my computer. “While I catch my breath, you might want to look at this.”
Kyle frowned and unfolded the paper. “What’s this?”
Deborah leaned forward, looking like the eager young police hound she was. “You found something! I knew you would,” she said.
“It’s just two addresses,” said Kyle.
“One of them may very well be the hiding place of a certain unorthodox medical practitioner with a Central American past,” I said, and I told him how I found the addresses. To his credit, he looked impressed, even with the sunglasses on.
“I should have thought of this,” he said. “That’s very good.” He nodded and flicked the paper with a finger. “Follow the money. Works every time.”
“Of course I can’t be positive,” I said.
“Well, I’d bet on it,” he said. “I think you found Dr. Danco.”
I looked at Deborah. She shook her head, so I looked back at Kyle’s sunglasses. “Interesting name. Is it Polish?”
Chutsky cleared his throat and looked out over the water.
