by Jeff Lindsay
“I’ll be right back,” I called. “Fix me another drink!”
“Right!” he said with his phony smile. “Ha! Banzai!” And he went back in to the party with a cheery wave. I turned to look for Doakes.
He had been parked right across the street from wherever I was for so long that I should have spotted him immediately, but I didn’t. When I finally saw the familiar maroon Taurus, I realized what a clever thing he had done. He was parked up D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
2 1 9
the street under a large tree, which blocked any light from the streetlights. It was the kind of thing a man trying to hide might do, but at the same time it would allow Dr. Danco to feel confident that he could get close without being seen.
I walked over to the car and as I approached the window slid down. “He’s not here yet,” Doakes said.
“You’re supposed to come in for a drink,” I said.
“I don’t drink.”
“You obviously don’t go to parties, either, or you would know that you can’t do them properly sitting across the street in your car.”
Sergeant Doakes didn’t say anything, but the window rolled up and then the door opened and he stepped out.
“What’re you gonna do if he comes now?” he asked me.
“Count on my charm to save me,” I said. “Now come on in while there’s still someone conscious in there.”
We crossed the street together, not actually holding hands, but it seemed so odd under the circumstances that we might as well have. Halfway across a car turned the corner and came down the street toward us. I wanted to run and dive into a row of oleanders, but was very proud of my icy control when instead I merely glanced at the oncoming car. It cruised slowly along, and Sergeant Doakes and I were all the way across the street by the time it got to us.
Doakes turned to look at the car, and I did, too. A row of five sullen teen faces looked out at us. One of them turned his head and said something to the others, and they laughed. The car rolled on by.
“We better get inside,” I said. “They looked dangerous.”
Doakes didn’t respond. He watched the car turn around at 2 2 0
J E F F L I N D S A Y
the end of the street and then continued on his way to Vince’s front door. I followed along behind, catching up with him just in time to open the front door for him.
I had only been outside for a few minutes, but the body count had grown impressively. Two of the cops beside the fountain were stretched out on the floor, and one of the South Beach refugees was throwing up into a Tupperware container that had held Jell-O salad a few minutes ago. The music was pounding louder than ever, and from the kitchen I heard Vince yelling, “Banzai!” joined by a ragged chorus of other voices. “Abandon all hope,” I said to Sergeant Doakes, and he mumbled something that sounded like, “Sick motherfuckers.” He shook his head and went in.
Doakes did not take a drink and he didn’t dance, either. He found a corner of the room with no unconscious body in it and just stood there, looking like a cut-rate Grim Reaper at a frat party. I wondered if I should help him get into the spirit of the thing. Perhaps I could send Camilla Figg over to seduce him.
I watched the good sergeant stand in his corner and look around him, and I wondered what he was thinking. It was a lovely metaphor: Doakes standing silent and alone in a corner while all around him human life raged riotously on. I probably would have felt a wellspring of sympathy for him bubbling up, if only I could feel. He seemed completely unaffected by the whole thing, not even reacting when two of the South Beach gang ran past him naked. His eyes fell on the nearest monitor, which was portraying some rather startling and original images involving animals. Doakes looked at it without interest or emotion of any kind; just a look, then his gaze moved on to the cops on the floor, Angel under the table, D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
2 2 1
and Vince leading a conga line in from the kitchen. His gaze traveled all the way over to me and he looked at me with the exact same lack of expression. He crossed the room and stood in front of me.
“How long we got to stay?” he asked.
I gave him my very best smile. “It is a bit much, isn’t it? All this happiness and fun—it must make you nervous.”
“Makes me want to wash my hands,” he said. “I’ll wait outside.”
“Is that really a good idea?” I asked.
He tilted his head at Vince’s conga line, which was collapsing in a heap of spastic hilarity. “Is that?” he said. And of course he had a point, although in terms of sheer lethal pain and terror a conga line on the floor couldn’t really compete with Dr. Danco. Still, I suppose one has to consider human dignity, if it truly exists somewhere. At the moment, looking around the room, that didn’t seem possible.
The front door swung open. Both Doakes and I turned to face it, all our reflexes up on tiptoe, and it was a good thing we were ready for danger because otherwise we might have been ambushed by two half-naked women carrying a boom box. “Hello?” they called out, and were rewarded with a ragged high-pitched roar of “WHOOOO!” from the conga line on the floor. Vince struggled out from under the pile of bodies and swayed to his feet. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey everybody! Strippers are here! Banzai!” There was an even louder “WHOOOO!” and one of the cops on the floor struggled to his knees, swaying gently and staring as he mouthed the word, “Strippers . . .”
Doakes looked around the room and back at me. “I’ll be outside,” he said, and turned for the door.
2 2 2
J E F F L I N D S A Y
“Doakes,” I said, thinking it really wasn’t a good idea. But I got no more than one step after him when once again I was savagely ambushed.
“Gotcha!” Vince roared out, holding me in a clumsy bear hug.
“Vince, let me go,” I said.
“No way!” he chortled. “Hey, everybody! Help me out with the blushing bridegroom!” There was a surge of ex–conga liners from the floor and the last standing cop by the fountain and I was suddenly at the center of a mini–mosh pit, the press of bodies heaving me toward the chair where Camilla Figg had passed out and rolled onto the floor. I struggled to get away, but it was no use. There were too many of them, too filled with Vince’s rocket juice. I could do nothing but watch as Sergeant Doakes, with a last molten-stone glare, went through the front door and out into the night.
They levered me into the chair and stood around me in a tight half-circle and it was obvious that I was going nowhere.
I hoped Doakes was as good as he thought he was, because he was clearly on his own for a while.
The music stopped, and I heard a familiar sound that made the hairs on my arms stand up straight: it was the ratchet of duct tape spooling off the roll, my own favorite prelude to a Concerto for Knife Blade. Someone held my arms and Vince wrapped three big loops of tape around me, fastening me to the chair. It was not tight enough to hold me, but it would certainly slow me enough to allow the crowd to keep me in the chair.
“All righty then!” Vince called out, and one of the strippers turned on her boom box and the show began. The first stripper, a sullen-looking black woman, began to undulate in front D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
2 2 3
of me while removing a few unnecessary items of clothing.
When she was almost naked, she sat on my lap and licked my ear while wiggling her butt. Then she forced my head between her breasts, arched her back, and leaped backward, and the other stripper, a woman with Asian features and blond hair, came forward and repeated the whole process. When she had wiggled around on my lap for a few moments, she was joined by the first stripper, and the two of them sat together, one on each side of me. Then they leaned forward so that their breasts rubbed my face, and began to kiss each other.
At this point, dear Vince brought them each a large glass of his murderous fruit punch, and they drank it off, still wiggling rhythmically. One of them muttered, “Whoo. Good pu
nch.” I couldn’t tell which one of them said it, but they both seemed to agree. The two women began to writhe a great deal more now and the crowd around me began to howl like it was full moon at a rabies convention. Of course, my view was somewhat obscured by four very large and unnaturally hard breasts—two in each shade—but at least it sounded like everyone except me was having a great deal of fun.
Sometimes you have to wonder if there is some kind of ma-lign force with a sick sense of humor running our universe. I knew enough about human males to know that most of them would happily trade their excess body parts to be where I was. And yet, all I could think of was that I would be equally pleased to trade a body part or two to get out of this chair and away from the naked squirming women. Of course, I would have preferred it to be somebody else’s body part, but I would cheerfully collect it.
But there was no justice; the two strippers sat there on my lap, bouncing to the music and sweating all over my beauti-
2 2 4
J E F F L I N D S A Y
ful rayon shirt and each other, while around us the party raged on. After what seemed like an endless spell in purga-tory, broken only by Vince bringing the strippers two more drinks, the two roiling women finally moved off my lap and danced around the circling crowd. They touched faces, sipped from the partyers’ drinks, and grabbed at an occasional crotch. I used the distraction to free my hands and remove the duct tape, and it was only then that I noticed that no one was paying any attention at all to Dimpled Dexter, the theoretical Man of the Hour. One quick look around showed me why: everyone in the room was standing in a slack-jawed circle watching the two strippers as they danced, completely naked now, glistening with sweat and spilled drinks. Vince looked like a cartoon the way he stood there with his eyes almost bulged out of his head, but he was in good company. Everyone who was still conscious was in a similar pose, staring without breathing, swaying slightly from side to side. I could have barreled through the room blasting away on a flaming tuba and no one would have paid me any attention.
I stood up, walked carefully around behind the crowd, and slipped out the front door. I had thought that Sergeant Doakes would wait somewhere near the house, but he was nowhere to be seen. I walked across the street and looked in his car. It was empty, too. I looked up and down the street and it was the same. There was no sign of him.
Doakes was gone.
C H A P T E R 2 4
There are many aspects of human existence that I will never understand, and I don’t just mean intellectu-ally. I mean that I lack the ability to empathize, as well as the capacity to feel emotion. To me it doesn’t seem like much of a loss, but it does put a great many areas of ordinary human experience completely outside my comprehension.
However, there is one almost overwhelmingly common human experience I feel powerfully, and that is temptation.
And as I looked at the empty street outside Vince Masuoka’s house and realized that somehow Dr. Danco had taken Doakes, I felt it wash over me in dizzying, nearly suffocating waves. I was free. The thought surged around me and pum-meled me with its elegant and completely justified simplicity.
It would be the easiest thing in the world just to walk away.
Let Doakes have his reunion with the Doctor, report it in the morning, and pretend that I’d had too much to drink—my engagement party, after all!—and I wasn’t really sure what had happened to the good sergeant. And who would contradict 2 2 6
J E F F L I N D S A Y
me? Certainly no one inside at the party could say with anything approaching realistic certainty that I was not watching the peep show with them the whole time.
Doakes would be gone. Whisked away forever into a final haze of lopped off limbs and madness, never to lighten my dark doorway again. Liberty for Dexter, free to be me, and all I had to do was absolutely nothing. Even I could handle that.
So why not walk away? For that matter, why not take a slightly longer stroll, down to Coconut Grove, where a certain children’s photographer had been waiting for my attentions much too long? So simple, so safe—why, indeed, not? A perfect night for dark delight with a downbeat, the moon nearly full and that small missing edge lending the whole thing a casual, informal air. The urgent whispers agreed, rising in a hissed insistent chorus.
It was all there. Time and target and most of a moon and even an alibi, and the pressure had been growing for so long now that I could close my eyes and let it happen all by itself, walk through the whole happy thing on autopilot. And then the sweet release again, the afterglow of buttery muscles with all the knots drained out, the happy coasting into my first complete sleep of far too long now. And in the morning, rested and relieved, I would tell Deborah . . .
Oh. Deborah. There was that, wasn’t there?
I would tell Deborah that I had taken the sudden opportunity of a no-Doakes zone and gone dashing into the darkness with a Need and a Knife as the last few fingers of her boyfriend trickled away into a trash heap? Somehow, even with my inner cheerleaders insisting that it would be all right, I didn’t think she would go for it. It had the feel of something final in my relationship with my sister, a small lapse in judg-
D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
2 2 7
ment, perhaps, but one she would find a bit hard to forgive, and even though I am not capable of feeling actual love, I did want to keep Debs relatively happy with me.
And so once again I was left with virtuous patience and a feeling of long-suffering rectitude. Dour Dutiful Dexter. It will come, I told my other self. Sooner or later, it will come. Has to come; it will not wait forever, but this must come first. And there was some grumbling, of course, because it had not come in far too long, but I soothed the growls, rattled the bars with false good cheer one time, and pulled out my cell phone.
I dialed the number Doakes had given me. After a moment there was a tone, and then nothing, just a faint hiss. I punched in the long access code, heard a click, and then a neutral female voice said, “Number.” I gave the voice Doakes’s cell number. There was a pause, and then it read me some coordinates; I hurriedly scribbled them down on the pad. The voice paused, and then added, “Moving due west, 65 miles per hour.” The line went dead.
I never claimed to be an expert navigator, but I do have a small GPS unit that I use on my boat. It comes in handy for marking good fishing spots. So I managed to put in the coordinates without bumping my head or causing an explosion.
The unit Doakes had given me was a step up from mine and had a map on the screen. The coordinates on the map translated to Interstate 75, heading for Alligator Alley, the corridor to the west coast of Florida.
I was mildly surprised. Most of the territory between Miami and Naples is Everglades, swamp broken up by small patches of semidry land. It was filled with snakes, alligators, and Indian casinos, which did not seem at all like the kind of place to relax and enjoy a peaceful dismemberment. But the 2 2 8
J E F F L I N D S A Y
GPS could not lie, and supposedly neither could the voice on the phone. If the coordinates were wrong, it was Doakes’s doing, and he was lost anyway. I had no choice. I felt a little guilty about leaving the party without thanking my host, but I got into my car and headed for I-75.
I was up on the interstate in just a few minutes, then quickly north to I-75. As you head west on 75 the city gradu-ally thins away. Then there is one final furious explosion of strip malls and houses just before the toll booth for Alligator Alley. At the booth I pulled over and called the number again.
The same neutral female voice gave me a set of coordinates and the line went dead. I took it to mean that they were no longer moving.
According to the map, Sergeant Doakes and Dr. Danco were now settling comfortably into the middle of an unmarked watery wilderness about forty miles ahead of me. I didn’t know about Danco, but I didn’t think Doakes would float very well. Perhaps the GPS could lie after all. Still, I had to do something, so I pulled back onto the road, paid my toll, and
continued westward.
At a spot parallel to the location on the GPS, a small access road branched off to the right. It was nearly invisible in the dark, especially since I was traveling at seventy miles per hour. But as I saw it whiz past I braked to a stop on the shoulder of the road and backed up to peer at it. It was a one-lane dirt road that led nowhere, up over a rickety bridge and then straight as an arrow into the darkness of the Everglades. In the headlights of the passing cars I could only see about fifty yards down the road, and there was nothing to see. A patch of knee-high weeds grew up in the center of the road between D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
2 2 9
the two deeply rutted tire tracks. A clump of short trees hung over the road at the edge of darkness, and that was it.
I thought about getting out and looking for some kind of clue, until I realized how silly that was. Did I think I was Tonto, faithful Indian guide? I couldn’t look at a bent twig and tell how many white men had been past in the last hour.
Perhaps Dexter’s dutiful but uninspired brain pictured him as Sherlock Holmes, able to examine the wheel ruts and deduce that a left-handed hunchback with red hair and a limp had gone down the road carrying a Cuban cigar and a ukelele. I would find no clues, not that it mattered. The sad truth was, this was either it or I was all done for the night, and Sergeant Doakes was done for considerably longer.
Just to be absolutely sure—or at any rate, absolutely free of guilt—I called Doakes’s top secret telephone number again.
The voice gave me the same coordinates and hung up; wherever they were, they were still there, down this dark and dirty little road.
I was apparently out of choices. Duty called, and Dexter must answer. I turned the wheel hard and started down the road.
