by Jeff Lindsay
It was a very satisfying and productive day, my Day Before. And I was sitting quietly back in my apartment wrapped in my virtuous thoughts when the telephone rang.
“Good afternoon,” I said into the receiver.
“Can you get over here?” Deborah said. “We have some work to finish up.”
“What sort of work?”
“Don’t be a jerk,” she said. “Come on over,” and she hung up. This was more than a little bit irritating. In the first place, I didn’t know of any kind of unfinished work, and in the second, I was not aware of being a jerk—a monster, yes, certainly, but on the whole a very pleasant and well-mannered monster.
And to top it all off, the way she hung up like that, simply assuming I had heard and would tremble and obey. The nerve of her. Sister or not, vicious arm punch or no, I trembled for no one.
I did, however, obey. The short drive to the Mutiny took longer than usual, this being Saturday afternoon, a time when the streets in the Grove flood with aimless people. I wove slowly through the crowd, wishing for once that I could simply pin the gas pedal to the floorboard and smash into the wandering horde. Deborah had spoiled my perfect mood.
She didn’t make it any better when I knocked on the pent-
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house door at the Mutiny and she opened it with her on-duty-in-a-crisis face, the one that made her look like a bad-tempered fish. “Get in here,” she said.
“Yes master,” I said.
Chutsky was sitting on the sofa. He still didn’t look British Colonial—maybe it was the lack of eyebrows—but he did at least look like he had decided to live, so apparently Deborah’s rebuilding project was going well. There was a metal crutch leaning against the wall beside him, and he was sipping coffee. A platter of Danish sat on the end table next to him. “Hey, buddy,” he called out, waving his stump. “Grab a chair.”
I took a British Colonial chair and sat, after snagging a couple of Danish as well. Chutsky looked at me like he was going to object, but really, it was the very least they could do for me. After all, I had waded through flesh-eating alligators and an attack peacock to rescue him, and now here I was giving up my Saturday for who-knows-what kind of awful chore. I deserved an entire cake.
“All right,” Chutsky said. “We have to figure where Henker is hiding, and we have to do it fast.”
“Who?” I asked. “You mean Dr. Danco?”
“That’s his name, yeah. Henker,” he said. “Martin Henker.”
“And we have to find him?” I asked, filled with a sense of ominous foreboding. I mean, why were they looking at me and saying “we”?
Chutsky gave a small snort as if he thought I was joking and he got it. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “So where are you thinking he might be, buddy?”
“Actually, I’m not thinking about it at all,” I said.
“Dexter,” Deborah said with a warning tone in her voice.
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Chutsky frowned. It was a very strange expression without eyebrows. “What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean, I don’t see why it’s my problem anymore. I don’t see why I or even we have to find him. He got what he wanted—won’t he just finish up and go home?”
“Is he kidding?” Chutsky asked Deborah, and if he’d only had eyebrows they would have been raised.
“He doesn’t like Doakes,” Deborah said.
“Yeah, but listen, Doakes is one of our guys,” Chutsky said to me.
“Not one of mine,” I said.
Chutsky shook his head. “All right, that’s your problem,”
he said. “But we still have to find this guy. There’s a political side to this whole thing, and it’s deep doo-doo if we don’t collar him.”
“Okay,” I said. “But why is it my problem?” And it seemed like a very reasonable question to me, although to see his reaction you would have thought I wanted to fire bomb an elementary school.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and he shook his head in mock admiration. “You really are a piece of work, buddy.”
“Dexter,” Deborah said. “Look at us.” I did look, at Deb in her cast and Chutsky with his twin stumps. To be honest, they did not look terribly fierce. “We need your help,” she said.
“But Debs, really.”
“Please, Dexter,” she said, knowing full well that I found it very hard to refuse her when she used that word.
“Debs, come on,” I said. “You need an action hero, somebody who can kick down the door and storm in with guns blazing. I’m just a mild-mannered forensics geek.”
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She crossed the room and stood in front of me, inches away.
“I know what you are, Dexter,” she said softly. “Remember?
And I know you can do this.” She put her hand on my shoulder and lowered her voice even farther, almost whispering.
“Kyle needs this, Dex. Needs to catch Danco. Or he’ll never feel like a man again. That’s important to me. Please, Dexter?”
And after all, what can you do when the big guns come out? Except summon your reserves of goodwill and wave the white flag gracefully.
“All right, Debs,” I said.
Freedom is such a fragile, fleeting thing, isn’t it?
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However reluctant i had been, i had given my word to help, and so poor Dutiful Dexter instantly attacked the problem with all the resourceful cunning of his powerful brain. But the sad truth was that my brain seemed to be off-line; no matter how diligently I typed in clues, nothing dropped into the out-box.
Of course it was possible that I needed more fuel to function at the highest possible level, so I wheedled Deborah into sending down for more Danish. While she was on the phone with room service Chutsky focused a sweaty, slightly glazed smile on me and said, “Let’s get to it, okay, buddy?” Since he asked so nicely—and after all, I had to do something while I waited for the Danish—I agreed.
The loss of his two limbs had removed some kind of psy-chic lock from Chutsky. In spite of being just a little bit shaky, he was far more open and friendly, and actually seemed eager to share information in a way that would have been unthinkable to the Chutsky with four complete limbs and a pair of ex-
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pensive sunglasses. And so out of what was really no more than an urge to be tidy and know as many details as possible, I took advantage of his new good cheer by getting the names of the El Salvador team from him.
He sat with a yellow legal pad balanced precariously on his knee, holding it still with his wrist while he scrawled the names with his right, and only, hand. “Manny Borges you know about,” he said.
“The first victim,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Chutsky said without looking up. He wrote the name and then drew a line through it. “And then there was Frank Aubrey?” He frowned and actually stuck the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he wrote and then crossed out. “He missed Oscar Acosta. God knows where he is now.” He wrote the name anyway and put a question mark beside it. “Wendell Ingraham. Lives on North Shore Drive, out on Miami Beach.” The pad slipped to the floor as he wrote the name, and he grabbed at it as it fell, missing badly. He stared at the pad where it lay for a moment, then leaned over and retrieved it. A drop of sweat rolled off his hairless head and onto the floor. “Fucking drugs,” he said. “Got me a little woozy.”
“Wendell Ingraham,” I said.
“Right. Right.” He scribbled the rest of the name and without pausing went on with, “Andy Lyle. Sells cars now, up in Davie.” And in a furious burst of energy he went right on and triumphantly scrawled the last name. “Two other guys dead, one guy still in the field, that’s it, the whole team.”
“Don’t any of these guys know Danco is in town?”
He shook his head. Another drop of sweat flew o
ff and nar-
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rowly missed me. “We’re keeping a pretty tight lid on this thing. Need-to-know only.”
“They don’t need to know that somebody wants to convert them to squealing pillows?”
“No, they don’t,” he said, clamping his jaw and looking like he was going to say something tough again; perhaps he would offer to flush them. But he glanced up at me and thought better of it.
“Can we at least check and see which one is missing?” I asked, without any real hope.
Chutsky started shaking his head before I even finished speaking. Two more drops of sweat flew off, left, right. “No.
Uh-uh, no way. These guys always have an ear to the ground.
Somebody starts asking around about them, they’ll know.
And I can’t risk having them run. Like Oscar did.”
“Then how do we find Dr. Danco?”
“That’s what you’re going to figure out,” he said.
“What about the house by Mount Trashmore?” I asked hopefully. “The one you checked out with the clipboard.”
“Debbie had a patrol car drive by. Family has moved in.
No,” he said, “we’re putting all our chips on you, buddy.
You’ll think of something.”
Debs rejoined us before I could think of anything meaningful to say to that, but in truth, I was too surprised at Chutsky’s official attitude toward his former comrades. Wouldn’t it have been the nice thing to do, to give his old friends a running start or at least a heads-up? I certainly don’t pretend to be a paragon of civilized virtue, but if a deranged surgeon was after Vince Masuoka, for instance, I like to think I might find a way to drop a hint into casual conversation by the coffee ma-
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chine. Pass that sugar, please. By the way—there’s a medical maniac after you who wants to lop off all your limbs. Would you like the creamer?
But apparently that wasn’t the way the game was played by the guys with the big manly chins, or at least not by their representative Kyle Chutsky. No matter; I had a list of names, at least, which was a place to start, although nothing else. I had no idea where to begin turning my starting point into some kind of actual helpful information, and Kyle did not seem to be doing quite as well with creativity as he had done with sharing. Deborah was little help. She was totally wrapped up in fluffing Kyle’s pillow, mopping his fevered brow, and making sure he took his pills, a matronly kind of behavior that I would have thought impossible for her, but there it was.
It became apparent that little real work would be accomplished here in the hotel penthouse. The only thing I could suggest was that I return to my computer and see what I could turn up. And so after prying two final Danish out of Kyle’s remaining hand I headed for home and my trusty computer. There were no guarantees that I would come up with anything, but I was committed to trying. I would give it my best effort, poke around at the problem for a few hours and hope that someone might wrap a secret message around a rock and throw it through my window. Perhaps if the rock hit me on the head, it would jar loose some kind of idea.
My apartment was just as I’d left it, which was comforting.
The bed was even made, since Deborah was no longer in residence. I soon had my computer humming and began to search. I checked the real estate database first, but there were no new purchases that fit the pattern of the others. Still, it was D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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obvious that Dr. Danco had to be somewhere. We had run him out of his prepared hidey-holes and yet I was quite sure that he would not wait to begin on Doakes and whoever else from Chutsky’s list might have caught his attention.
How did he decide the order of his victims anyway? By seniority? By how much they pissed him off? Or was it random? If I knew that, it was at least possible that I could find him. He had to go somewhere, and his operations were not the sort of thing one would do in a hotel room. So where would he go?
It was not a rock crashing through the window and bouncing off my head after all, but a very small idea began to trickle onto the floor of Dexter’s brain. Danco had to go somewhere to work on Doakes, obviously, and he couldn’t wait to set up another safe house. Wherever he went had to be in the Miami area, close to his victims, and he could not afford to risk all the variables of grabbing a place at random. A seemingly empty house might suddenly be overrun by prospective buyers, and if he snatched an occupied place he could not know when Cousin Enrico might drop in for a visit. So—why not simply use the home of his next victim? He had to believe that Chutsky, the only one who knew the list until now, was out of action for a while and would not pursue him. By moving in on the next name on the list he could amputate two limbs with one scalpel, as it were, by using his next victim’s house to finish Doakes and then make a leisurely start on the happy homeowner.
It made a certain amount of sense and was a more definite starting point than the list of names. But even if I was right, which of the men would be next?
The thunder rumbled outside. I looked again at the list of 2 7 2
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names and sighed. Why wasn’t I somewhere else? Even playing hangman with Cody and Astor would be a big improvement over this kind of frustrating drudgery. I had to keep after Cody to find the vowels first. Then the rest of the word would start to swim into focus. And when he mastered that, I could start to teach him other, more interesting things. Very strange to have child instruction to look forward to, but I was actually kind of eager to begin. A shame he had already taken care of the neighbor’s dog—it would have been a perfect place to start learning security as well as technique. The little scamp had so much to learn. All the old Harry lessons, passed on to a new generation.
And as I thought of helping Cody along, I realized that the price tag was accepting my engagement to Rita. Could I really go through with it? Fling away my carefree bachelor ways and settle into a life of domestic bliss? Oddly enough, I thought I might be able to pull it off. Certainly the kids were worth a little bit of sacrifice, and making Rita a permanent disguise would actually lower my profile. Happily married men are not as likely to do the kind of thing I live for.
Maybe I could go through with it. We would see. But of course, this was procrastination. It was getting me no closer to my evening out with Reiker, and no closer to finding Danco.
I called my scattered senses back and looked at the list of names: Borges and Aubrey done. Acosta, Ingraham, and Lyle still to go. Still unaware that they had an appointment with Dr. Danco. Two down, three more to go, not including Doakes, who must be feeling the blade now, with Tito Puente playing his dance music in the background and the Doctor leaning over with his so-bright scalpel and leading the ser-
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geant through his dance of dismemberment. Dance with me, Doakes. Baila conmigo, amigo, as Tito Puente would put it. A little bit harder to dance with no legs, of course, but well worth the effort.
And in the meantime, here I was dancing in circles just as surely as if the good Doctor had removed one of my legs.
All right: let’s assume Dr. Danco was at the house of his current victim, not counting Doakes. Of course, I didn’t know who that might be. So where did that leave me? When scien-tific inquiry was eliminated, that left lucky guess. Elementary, dear Dexter. Eeny meeny miney mo—
My finger landed on the notepad on Ingraham’s name.
Well then, that was definite, wasn’t it? Sure it was. And I was King Olaf of Norway.
I got up and walked to the window where I had so many times peered out at Sergeant Doakes parked across the street in his maroon Taurus. He wasn’t there. Soon he wouldn’t actually be anywhere unless I found him. He wanted me dead or in prison, and I would be happier if he simply disappeared—one small piece at a time, or all at once, it made no difference. And
yet here I was working overtime, pushing Dexter’s mighty mental machinery through its awesome paces, in order to rescue him—so he could kill or imprison me. Is it any wonder I find the whole idea of life overrated?
Perhaps stirred by the irony, the almost-perfect moon snickered through the trees. And the longer I stared out, the more I felt the weight of that wicked old moon, sputtering softly just under the horizon and already puffing hot and cold at my spine, urging me into action, until I found myself picking up my car keys and heading for the door. After all, why 2 7 4
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not just go check it out? It would take no more than an hour, and I wouldn’t have to explain my thinking to Debs and Chutsky.
I realized that the idea seemed appealing to me partly because it was quick and easy and if it paid off it would return me to my hard-won liberty in time for tomorrow night’s playdate with Reiker—and even more, I was beginning to develop a small hankering for an appetizer. Why not warm up a little on Dr. Danco? Who could fault me for doing unto him what he oh-so-readily did unto others? If I had to save Doakes in order to get Danco, well, no one ever said life was perfect.
And so there I was, headed north on Dixie Highway and then up onto I-95, taking it all the way to the 79th Street Causeway and then straight over to the Normandy Shores area of Miami Beach, where Ingraham lived. It was night by the time I turned down the street and drove slowly past. A dark green van was parked in the driveway, very similar to the white one Danco had crashed only a few days ago. It was parked next to a newish Mercedes, and looked very much out of place in this tony neighborhood. Well, then, I thought. The Dark Passenger began to mutter words of encouragement but I kept going through the bend in the road past the house and on to a vacant lot before I stopped. Just around the corner I pulled over.
