Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark (11 page)

Far more interesting, however, was the file that no
one was supposed to open without a warrant, a court order, and a stone tablet
direct from the hand of God. And when I had read through it a second time, my
reaction was even more profound. “Well, well, well, well,” I said,
mildly unsettled at the way the words bounced off the walls of my empty little
office. And since profound revelations are always more dramatic with an
audience, I reached for the phone and called my sister.

In just a few minutes she pushed into my cubicle and sat on the folding
chair. “What did you find?” she said.

“Dr. Gerald Halpern has A Past,” I said, carefully
pronouncing the capital letters so she wouldn't leap across the desk and hug
me.

“I knew it,” she said. “What did he
do?”

“It's not so much what he did,” I said.
“At this point, it's more like what was done to him.”

“Quit screwing around,” she said. “What
is it?”

“To begin with, he's apparently an orphan.”

“Come on, Dex, cut to the chase.”

I held up a hand to try to calm her down, but it clearly didn't work
very well, because she started tapping her knuckles on the desktop. “I am
trying to paint a subtle canvas here, Sis,” I said.

“Paint faster,” she said.

“All right. Halpern went into the foster-care
system in upstate New York when they found him living in a box under the
freeway. They found his parents, who were unfortunately dead of recent and
unpleasant violence. It seems to have been very well-deserved violence.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“His parents were pimping him out to
pedophiles,” I said.

“Jesus,” Deborah said, and she was clearly a little shocked.
Even by Miami standards, this was a bit much.

“And Halpern doesn't remember any of that part. He gets blackouts
under stress, the file says. It makes sense. The blackouts were probably a
conditioned response to the repeated trauma,” I said. “That can
happen.”

“Well, fuck,” Deborah said, and I inwardly
applauded her elegance. “So he forgets shit. You have to admit that fits.
The girl tries to frame him for rape, and he's already worried about tenure-so
he gets stressed and kills her without knowing it.”

“A couple of other things,” I said, and I admit that I
enjoyed the drama of the moment perhaps a little more than was necessary.
“To begin with, the death of his parents.”

“What about it?” she said, quite clearly
lacking any theatrical pleasure at all.

“Their heads were cut off,” I said.
“And then the house was torched.”

Deborah straightened up. “Shit,” she said.

“I thought so, too.”

“Goddamn, that's great, Dex,” she said.
“We have his ass.”

“Well,” I said, “it certainly fits the
pattern.”

“It sure as hell does,” she said. “So
did he kill his parents?”

I shrugged. “They couldn't prove anything. If they could, Halpern
would have been committed. It was so violent that nobody could believe a kid
had done it. But they're pretty sure that he was there, and at least saw what
happened.”

She looked at me hard. “So what's wrong with that? You still think
he didn't do it? I mean, you're having one of your hunches here?”

It stung a lot more than it should have, and I closed my eyes for a
moment. There was still nothing there except dark and empty. My famous hunches were,
of course, based on things whispered to me by the Dark Passenger, and in its
absence I had nothing to go on. “I'm not having hunches lately,” I
admitted. “There's just something that bothers me about this. It
just-”

I opened my eyes and Deborah was staring at me. For the first time
today there was something in her expression beyond bubbly happiness, and for a
moment I thought she was going to ask me what that meant and was I all right. I
had no idea what I would say if she did, since the Dark Passenger was not
something I had ever talked about, and the idea of sharing something that
intimate was very unsettling.

“I don't know,” I said weakly. “It
doesn't seem right.”

Deborah smiled gently. I would have felt more at ease if she had
snarled and told me to fuck off, but she smiled and reached a hand across the
desk to pat mine. “Dex,” she said softly, “the hard evidence is
more than enough. The background fits. The motive is good. You admit you're not
having one of your… hunches.” She cocked her head to the side, still
smiling, which made me even more uneasy. “This one is righteous, Bro.
Whatever is bothering you, don't pin it on this. He did it, we got him, that's
it.” She let go of my hand before either one of us could burst into tears.
“But I'm a little worried about you.”

“I'm fine,” I said, and it sounded false
even to me.

Deborah looked at me for a long moment, and then stood
up. “All right,” she said. “But I'm here for you if you need
me.” And she turned and walked away.

Somehow I slogged through the gray soup of the rest of
the day and made it all the way home to Rita's at the end of the day, where the
soup gelled into an aspic of sensory deprivation. I don't know what we had

for dinner, or what anyone might have said. The only
thing I could bring myself to listen for was the sound of the Passenger rushing
back in, and this sound did not come. And so I swam through the evening on
automatic pilot and finally went to bed, still completely wrapped up in Dull
Empty Dexter.

It surprised me a great deal to learn it, but sleep is not automatic
for humans, not even for the semi-human I was becoming. The old me, Dexter of
the Darkness, had slept perfectly, with great ease, simply lying down, closing
his eyes, and thinking, “One two three GO.” Presto, sleep-o.

But the New Model Dexter had no such luck.

I tossed, I turned, I commanded my pitiful self to go immediately to
sleep with no further dithering, and all to no avail. I could not sleep. I
could only lie there wide-eyed and wonder why.

And as the night dragged on, so did the terrible,
dreary introspection. Had I been misleading myself my entire life? What if I
was not Dashing Slashing Dexter and his Canny Sidekick the Passenger? What if I
was, in fact, actually only a Dark Chauffeur, allowed to live in a small room
at the big house in exchange for driving the master on his appointed rounds?
And if my services were no longer required, what could I possibly be now that
the boss had moved away? Who was I if I was no longer me?

It was not a happy thought, and it did not make me happy. It also did
not help me sleep. Since I had already tossed and turned exhaustively, without
getting exhausted, I now concentrated on rolling and pitching, with much the
same result. But finally, at around 3:30 A.M., I must have hit on the right
combination of pointless movement and I dropped off at last into a shallow
uncomfortable sleep.

The sound and smell of bacon cooking woke me up. I glanced at the
clock-it was 8:32, later than I ever sleep. But of course it was Saturday
morning. Rita had allowed me to doze on in my miserable unconsciousness. And
now she would reward my return to the land of the waking with a bountiful
breakfast. Yahoo.

Breakfast did, in fact, take some of the sourness out of me. It is very
hard to maintain a really good feeling of utter depression and total personal
worthlessness when you are full of food, and I gave up trying halfway through
an excellent omelet.

Cody and Astor had naturally been awake for hours-Saturday morning was
their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to
watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible
before the discovery of LSD. They did not even notice me when I staggered past
them on my way to the kitchen, and they stayed glued to the image of a talking
kitchen utensil while I finished my breakfast, had a final cup of coffee, and
decided to give life one more day to get its act together.

“All better?” Rita asked as I put down my
coffee mug.

“It was a very nice omelet,” I said.
“Thank you.”

She smiled and lunged up out of her chair to give me a
peck on the cheek before flinging all the dishes in the sink and starting to
wash them. “Remember you said you'd take Cody and Astor somewhere this
morning,” she said over the sound of running water.

“I said that?”

"Dexter, you know I
have a fitting this morning. For my wedding gown. I told you that weeks ago,
and you said fine, you would take care of the kids while I went over to Susan's
for the fitting, and then I really

need to go to the florist's and see about some arrangements, even Vince
offered to help me with that, he says he has a friend?"

“I doubt that,” I said, thinking of Manny
Borque. “Not Vince.”

“But I said no thanks. I hope that was all
right?”

“Fine,” I said. “We have only one house
to sell to pay for things.”

“I don't want to hurt Vince's feelings and I'm sure his friend is
wonderful, but I have been going to Hans for flowers since forever, and he
would be brokenhearted if I went somewhere else for the wedding.”

“All right,” I said. “I'll take the
kids.”

I had been hoping for a chance to devote some serious
time to my own personal misery and find a way to start on the problem of the
absent Passenger. Failing that, it would have been nice just to relax a little
bit, perhaps even catch up on some of the precious sleep I had lost the night
before, as was my sacred right.

It was, after all, a Saturday. Many well-regarded
religions and labor unions have been known to recommend that Saturdays are for
relaxation and personal growth; for spending time away from the hectic
hurly-burly, in well-earned rest and recreation. But Dexter was more or less a
family man nowadays, which changes everything, as I was learning. And with Rita
spinning around making wedding preparations like a tornado with blond bangs, it
was a clear imperative for me to scoop up Cody and Astor and take them away from
the pandemonium to the shelter of some activity sanctioned by society as
appropriate for adult-child bonding time.

After a careful study of my options, I chose the Miami Museum of
Science and Planetarium. After all, it would be crowded with other family
groups, which would maintain my disguise-and start them on theirs as well.
Since they were planning to embark on the Dark Trail, they needed to begin
right away to understand the notion that the more abnormal one is, the more
important it is to appear normal.

And going to the museum with Doting Daddy Dexter was
supremely normal-appearing for all three of us. It had the added cachet of
being something that was officially Good for Them, a very big advantage, no
matter how much that notion made them squirm.

So I loaded the three of us into my car and headed
north on U.S. 1, promising the whirling Rita that we would return safely for
dinner. I drove us through Coconut Grove and just before the Ricken-backer
Causeway turned into the parking lot of the museum in question. We did not go
gentle into that good museum, however. In the parking lot, Cody got out of the
car and simply stood there. Astor looked at him for a moment, and then turned
to me. “Why do we have to go in there?” she said.

“It's educational,” I told her.

“Ick,” she said, and Cody nodded.

“It's important for us to spend time
together,” I said.

“At a museum?” Astor demanded. “That's
pathetic.”

“That's a lovely
word,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

“We're not going in
there,” she said. “We want to do something.” “Have you ever
been to this museum?” “No,” she said, drawing the word out into
three contemptuous syllables as only a ten-year-old girl can. “Well, it
might surprise you,” I said. “You might actually learn
something.” “That's not what we want to learn,” she said.
“Not at a museum.” “What is it you think you want to
learn?” I said, and even I was impressed by how very much like a

patient adult I sounded.
Astor made a face. “You know,” she said. “You said you'd show us
stuff.” “How do you know I'm not?” I said. She looked at me
uncertainly for a moment, then turned to Cody. Whatever it was they said to
each other,

it didn't require words. When she turned back to me a moment later, she
was all business, totally self- assured. “No way,” she said.
“What do you know about the stuff I'm going to show you?”
“Dexter,” she said. “Why else did we ask you to show us?”
“Because you don't know anything about it and I do.”

“Duh-uh.” “Your education begins in
that building,” I said with my most serious face. “Follow me and
learn.” I looked at them for a moment, watched their uncertainty grow,
then I turned and headed for the museum. Maybe I was just cranky from a night
of lost sleep, and I was not sure they would follow, but I had to set down the
ground rules right away. They had to do it my way, just as I had come to
understand so long ago that I had to listen to Harry and do it his way.

BEING FOURTEEN YEARS OLD IS NEVER EASY, EVEN FOR
artificial humans. It's the age where biology takes over, and even when the
fourteen-year-old in question is more interested in clinical biology than the
sort more popular with his classmates at Ponce de Leon Junior High, it still
rules with an iron hand.

One of the categorical imperatives of puberty that
applies even to young monsters is that nobody over the age of twenty knows
anything. And since Harry was well over twenty at this point, I had gone into a
brief period of rebellion against his unreasonable restraints on my perfectly
natural and wholesome desires to hack my school chums into little bits.

Harry had laid out a wonderfully logical plan to get
me squared away, which was his term for making things-or people-neat and
orderly. But there is nothing logical about a fledgling Dark Passenger flexing

its wings for the first time and beating them against the bars of the
cage, yearning to fling itself into the free air and fall on its prey like a
sharp steel thunderbolt.

Harry knew so many things I needed to learn to become
safely and quietly me, to turn me from a wild, blossoming monster into the Dark
Avenger: how to act human, how to be certain and careful, how to clean up
afterward. He knew all these things as only an old cop could know them. I
understood this, even then-but it all seemed so dull and unnecessary.

And Harry couldn't really know everything, after all. He could not
know, for example, about Steve Gonzalez, a particularly charming example of
pubescent humanity who had earned my attention.

Steve was larger than me, and at a year or two older;
he already had something on his upper lip that he referred to as a mustache. He
was in my PE class and felt it his God-given duty to make my life miserable
whenever possible. If he was right, God must have been very pleased with the
effort he put into it.

This was long before Dexter became the Living Ice
Cube, and a certain amount of heated and very hard feeling built up inside.
This seemed to please Steve and urge him on to greater heights of creativity in
his persecution of the simmering young Dexter. We both knew this could end only
one way, but alas for him, it was not the way Steve had in mind.

And so one afternoon an unfortunately industrious janitor
stumbled into the biology lab at Ponce de Leon to find Dexter and Steve sorting
out their personality conflict. It was not quite the classical middle-school
face-off of filthy words and swinging fists, although I believe that might have
been what Steve had in mind. But he had not reckoned with confronting the young
Dark Passenger, and so the janitor found Steve securely taped to the table with
a swatch of gray duct tape over his mouth, and Dexter standing above him with a
scalpel, trying to remember what he had learned in biology class the day they
dissected the frog.

Harry came to get me in his police cruiser, in uniform. He listened to
the outraged assistant principal, who described the scene, quoted the student
handbook, and demanded to know what Harry was going to do about it. Harry just
looked at the assistant principal until the man's words dribbled away into
silence. He looked at him a moment longer, for effect, and then he turned his
cold blue eyes on me.

“Did you do what he says you did, Dexter?”
he asked me.

There was no possibility of evasion or falsehood in
the grip of that stare. “Yes,” I said, and Harry nodded.

“You see?” the assistant principal said. He thought he was
going to say more, but Harry turned the look back on him and he fell silent
again.

Harry looked back at me. “Why?” he said.

“He was picking on me.” That sounded
somewhat feeble, even to me, so I added, “A lot. All the time.”

“And so you taped him to a table,” he said,
with very little inflection.

“Uh-huh.”

“And you picked up a
scalpel.”

“I wanted him to
stop,” I said. “Why didn't you tell somebody?” Harry asked me. I
shrugged, which was a large portion of my working vocabulary in those days.
“Why didn't you tell me?” he asked. “I can take care of
it,” I said. “Looks like you didn't take care of it so well,” he
said. There seemed to be very little I could do, so naturally enough I chose to
look at my feet. They apparently

had very little to add to the discussion, however, so I looked up
again. Harry still watched me, and somehow he no longer needed to blink. He did
not seem angry, and I was not really afraid of him, and that somehow made it
even more uncomfortable.

“I'm sorry,” I
said at last. I wasn't sure if I meant it-for that matter, I'm still not sure I
can really be sorry for anything I do. But it seemed like a very politic
remark, and nothing else burbled up in my teenaged brain, simmering as it was
with an oatmeal-thick sludge of hormones and uncertainty. And although I am
sure Harry didn't believe that I was sorry, he nodded again.

“Let's go,” he
said. “Just a minute,” the assistant principal said. “We still
have things to discuss.” "You mean the fact that you let a known
bully push my boy to this kind of confrontation because of poor

supervision? How many times has the other boy been
disciplined?“ ”That's not the point-“ the assistant principal
tried to say. ”Or are we talking about the fact that you left scalpels and
other dangerous equipment unsecured and

easily available to students in an unlocked and
unsupervised classroom?“ ”Really, Officer-“ ”I tell you
what,“ Harry said. ”I promise to overlook your extremely poor
performance in this matter, if

you agree to make a real effort to improve.“
”But this boy-“ he tried to say. ”I will deal with this
boy,“ Harry said. ”You deal with fixing things so I don't have to
call in the school

board.“ And that, of
course, was that. There was never any question of contradicting Harry, whether
you were a murder suspect, the president of the Rotary Club, or a young errant
monster. The assistant principal opened and closed his mouth a few more times,
but no actual words came out, just a sort of sputtering sound combined with
throat-clearing. Harry watched him for a moment, and then turned to me.
”Let's go," he said again.

Harry was silent all the way out to the car, and it was not a chummy
silence. He did not speak as we drove away from the school and turned north on
Dixie Highway-instead of heading around the school in the other direction,
Granada to Hardee and over to our little house in the Grove. I looked at him as
he made his turn, but he still had nothing to say, and the expression on his
face did not seem to encourage conversation. He looked straight ahead at the
road, and drove-fast, but not so fast he had to turn on the siren.

Harry turned left on 17th Avenue, and for a few moments I had the
irrational thought that he was taking me to the Orange Bowl. But we passed the
turnoff for the stadium and kept going, over the Miami River and then right on
North River Drive, and now I knew where we were going but I didn't know why.
Harry still hadn't said a word or looked in my direction, and I was beginning
to feel a certain oppression creeping into the afternoon that had nothing to do
with the storm clouds that were beginning to gather on the horizon.

Harry parked the cruiser and at last he spoke. “Come on,” he
said. “Inside.” I looked at him, but he was already climbing out of
the car, so I got out, too, and followed him meekly into the detention center.

Harry was well known here, as he was everywhere a good
cop might be known. He was followed by calls of “Harry!” and
“Hey, Sarge!” all the way through the receiving area and down the
hall to the cell block. I simply trudged behind him as my sense of grim
foreboding grew. Why had Harry brought me to the jail? Why wasn't he scolding
me, telling me how disappointed he was, devising harsh but fair punishment for
me?

Nothing he did or refused to say offered me any clues.
So I trailed along behind. We were stopped at last by one of the guards. Harry
took him to one side and spoke quietly; the guard looked over at me, nodded,
and led us to the end of the cell block. “Here he is,” the guard
said. “Enjoy yourself.” He nodded at the figure in the cell, glanced
at me briefly, and walked away, leaving Harry and me to resume our
uncomfortable silence.

Harry did nothing to break the silence at first. He
turned and stared into the cell, and the pale shape inside moved, stood up, and
came to the bars. “Why it's Sergeant Harry!” the figure said happily.
“How are you, Harry? So nice of you to drop by.”

“Hello, Carl,” Harry said. At last he turned
to me and spoke. “This is Carl, Dexter.”

“What a handsome lad you are, Dexter,” Carl
said. “Very pleased to meet you.”

The eyes Carl turned on me were bright and empty, but behind them I
could almost see a huge dark shadow, and something inside me twitched and tried
to slink away from the larger and fiercer thing that lived there beyond the
bars. He was not in himself particularly large or fierce-looking-he was even
pleasant in a very superficial way, with his neat blond hair and regular
features-but there was something about him that made me very uneasy.

“They brought Carl in yesterday,” Harry
said. “He's killed eleven people.”

“Oh, well,” Carl said modestly, “more
or less.”

Outside the jail, the thunder crashed and the rain
began. I looked at Carl with real interest; now I knew what had unsettled my
Dark Passenger. We were just starting out, and here was somebody who had
already been there and back, on eleven occasions, more or less. For the first
time I understood how my classmates at Ponce might feel when they came
face-to-face with an NFL quarterback.

“Carl enjoys killing
people,” Harry said matter-of-factly. “Don't you, Carl?”
“It keeps me busy,” Carl said happily. “Until we caught
you,” Harry said bluntly. “Well, yes, there is that of course.
Still…” he shrugged and gave Harry a very phony-looking smile, "it

was fun while it lasted.“ ”You got
careless,“ Harry said. ”Yes,“ Carl said. ”How could I know
the police would be so very thorough?“ ”How do you do it?“ I
blurted out. ”It's not so hard,“ Carl said. ”No, I mean-Um, like
how?" Carl looked at me searchingly, and I could almost hear a purring
coming from the shadow just past his

eyes. For a moment our eyes locked and the world was
filled with the black sound of two predators meeting over one small, helpless
prey. “Well, well,” Carl said at last. “Can it really be?”
He turned to Harry just as I was beginning to squirm. “So I'm supposed to
be an object lesson, is that it, Sergeant? Frighten your boy onto the straight
and narrow path to godliness?”

Harry stared back, showing
nothing, saying nothing. "Well, I'm afraid I have to tell you that there
is no way off this particular path, poor dear Harry. When

you are on it, you are on it for life, and possibly
beyond, and there is nothing you or I or the dear child here can do about
it.“ ”There's one thing,“ Harry said. ”Really," Carl
said, and now a slow black cloud seemed to be rising up around him, coalescing
on the

teeth of his smile, spreading its wings out toward Harry, and toward
me. “And what might that be, pray tell?”

“Don't get caught,” Harry said. For a moment
the black cloud froze, and then it drew back and vanished. “Oh my
God,” Carl said. “How I wish I knew how to laugh.” He shook his
head slowly, from side to side. “You're serious, aren't you? Oh my God.
What a wonderful dad you are, Sergeant Harry.” And he gave us such a huge
smile that it almost looked real.

Harry turned his full
ice-blue gaze on me now. “He got caught,” Harry said to me,
“because he didn't know what he was doing. And now he will go to the
electric chair. Because he didn't know what the police were doing.
Because,” Harry said without raising his voice at all and without
blinking, “he had no training.”

I looked at Carl, watching us through the thick bars
with his too-bright dead empty eyes. Caught. I looked back at Harry. “I
understand,” I said. And I did. That was the end of my youthful rebellion.

image

And now, so many years later-wonderful years, filled with slicing and dicing
and not getting caught-I truly knew what a remarkable gamble Harry had taken by
introducing me to Carl. I could never hope to measure up to his
performance-after all, Harry did things because he had feelings and I never
would-but I could follow his example and make Cody and Astor toe the line. I
would gamble, just as Harry had.

They would follow or not.

SIXTEEN THEY FOLLOWED. The museum was crowded with groups of curious
citizens in search of knowledge-or a bathroom,

apparently. Most of them were between the ages of two and ten, and
there seemed to be about one adult for every seven children. They moved like a
great colorful flock of parrots, swooping back and forth through the exhibits
with a loud cawing sound that, in spite of the fact that it was in at least
three languages, all sounded the same. The international language of children.

Cody and Astor seemed slightly intimidated by the
crowd and stayed close to me. It was a pleasant contrast to the spirit of
Dexterless adventure that seemed to rule them the rest of the time, and I tried
to take advantage of it by steering them immediately to the piranha exhibit.

“What do they look
like?” I asked them. “Very bad,” Cody said softly, staring
unblinking at the many teeth the fish displayed. “Those are piranha,”
Astor said. “They can eat a whole cow.” “If you were swimming
and you saw piranha, what would you do?” I asked them. “Kill
them,” said Cody. “There's too many,” Astor said. “You
should run away from them, and not go anywhere near.” “So anytime you
see these wicked-looking fish you will either try to kill them or run away from
them?” I