Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark (14 page)

I DID MANAGE TO GET THE KIDS HOME BEFORE RITA WENT
over the edge, but it was a very close call that was not made any easier when
she found out that they had been to see severed heads. Still, they were
obviously unbothered and even excited about their day, and Astor's new
determination to be a Mini-Me to my sister Deborah seemed to distract Rita from
anything approaching actual wrath. After all, an early career choice could save
a lot of time and bother later.

It was clear that Rita had a
full head of steam and we were in for Babblefest. Normally I would simply smile
and nod and let her run on. But I was in no mood for anything that smacked of
normal. For the last two days I had wanted nothing but a quiet place and time
to try to figure out where my Passenger had gone, and I had instead been pulled
in every other direction possible by Deborah, Rita, the kids, even my

job, of all things. My disguise had taken over from the thing it was
supposed to be hiding, and I did not like it. But if I could make it past Rita
and out the door, I would finally have some time to myself.

And so, pleading important case work that could not wait for Monday
morning, I slid out the door and drove in to the office, enjoying the relative
peace and calm of Miami traffic on a Saturday night.

For the first fifteen minutes of the drive I could not
lose the feeling that I was being followed. Ridiculous, I know, but I had no
experience with being alone in the night and it made me feel very vulnerable.
Without the Passenger I was a tiger with a dull nose and no fangs. I felt slow
and stupid, and the skin on my back would not stop crawling. It was an overall
feeling of impending creepiness, the sense that I needed to circle around and
sniff the back trail, because something was lurking there hungrily. And
tickling at the edges of all that was an echo of that strange dream music,
making my feet twitch in an involuntary way, as if they had someplace to go
without me.

It was a terrible feeling, and if only I had been
capable of empathy, I'm sure I might have had a moment of awful revelation,
wherein I flung a hand to my forehead and sank to the ground, murmuring
anguished regrets over all the times I had done the stalking and caused this
dreadful feeling in others. But I am not built for anguish-at least, not my
own-and so all I could think about was my very large problem. My Passenger was
gone, and I was empty and defenseless if somebody really was tailing me.

It had to be mere imagination. Who would stalk Dutiful Dexter, plodding
through his completely normal artificial existence with a happy smile, two
children, and a new mortgage to a caterer? Just to be sure, I glanced into the
rearview mirror.

No one of course; no one lurking with an ax and a
piece of pottery with Dexter's name on it. I was turning stupid in my lonely
dotage.

A car was on fire on the shoulder of the Palmetto Expressway, and most
of the traffic was dealing with the congestion by either roaring around it on
the left shoulder or leaning on the horn and shouting. I got off and drove past
the warehouses near the airport. At a storage place just off 69th Avenue a
burglar alarm was clattering endlessly, and three men were loading boxes into a
truck without any appearance of haste. I smiled and waved; they ignored me.

It was a feeling I was getting used to-everyone was ignoring poor empty
Dexter lately, except, of course, whoever it was that had either been following
me or not really following me at all.

But speaking of empty, the way I had weaseled out of a confrontation
with Rita, smooth as it had been, had left me without dinner, and this is not
something I willingly tolerate. Right now I wanted to eat almost as much as I
wanted to breathe.

I stopped at a Pollo Tropical and picked up half a
chicken to take with me. The smell instantly filled the car, and the last
couple of miles it was all I could do to keep the car on the road instead of
screeching to a halt and ripping at the chicken with my teeth.

It finally overwhelmed me in the parking lot, and as I walked in the
door I had to fumble out my credentials with greasy fingers, nearly dropping
the beans in the process. But by the time I settled in at my computer, I was a
much happier boy and the chicken was no more than a bag of bones and a pleasant
memory.

As always, with a full
stomach and a clean conscience I found it much easier to shift my powerful
brain into high gear and think about the problem. The Dark Passenger was
missing; that seemed to imply that it

had some kind of independent existence without me.
That meant it must have come from somewhere and, quite possibly, gone back
there. So my first problem was to learn what I could about where it came from.

I knew very well that mine was not the only Passenger in the world.
Over the course of my long and rewarding career I had encountered several other
predators wrapped in the invisible black cloud that indicated a hitchhiker like
mine. And it stood to reason that they had originated somewhere and sometime,
and not just with me and in my own time. Shamefully enough, I had never
wondered why, or where these inner voices came from. Now, with the whole night
stretching ahead of me in the peace and quiet of the forensics lab, I could
rectify this tragic oversight.

And so without any thought of my own personal safety, I dashed
fearlessly onto the Internet. Of course, there was nothing helpful when I
searched “Dark Passenger.” That was, after all, my private term. I tried
it anyway, just to be safe, and found nothing more than a few online games and
a couple of blogs that someone really should report to the proper authorities,
whoever was in charge of policing teenage angst.

I searched for “interior companion,” “inside
friend,” and even “spirit guide.” Once again there were some
very interesting results that made one wonder what this tired old world was
coming to, but nothing that illuminated my problem. But as far as I know there
has never been only one of anything, and the odds were that I was simply
failing to come up with the correct search terms to find what I needed.

Very well: “Inner guide.” “Internal adviser.”
“Hidden helper.” I went through as many combinations of these as I
could think of, switching around the adjectives, running through lists of
synonyms, and always marveling at how New Age pseudo-philosophy had taken over
the Internet. And still I came up with nothing more sinister than a way to tap
my powerful subconscious to make a killing in real estate.

There was, however, one very interesting reference to
Solomon, of biblical fame, which claimed that the old wise guy had made secret
references to some kind of inner king. I searched for a few tidbits of
information on Solomon. Who would have guessed that this Bible stuff was
interesting and relevant? But apparently when we think of him as being a wise,
jolly old guy with a beard who offered to cut a baby in half just for laughs,
we are missing out on all the good parts.

For example, Solomon built a temple to something called Moloch,
apparently one of the naughty elder gods, and he killed his brother because
“wickedness” was found inside him. I could certainly see that, from a
biblical perspective, interior wickedness might be a fine description of a Dark
Passenger. But if there was a connection here, did it really make sense that
someone with an “inner king” would kill somebody inhabited by
wickedness?

It was making my head spin. Was I to believe that King
Solomon himself actually had a Dark Passenger of his own? Or because he was
supposedly one of the Bible's good guys, should I interpret it to mean that he
found one in his brother and killed him because of it? And contrary to what we
had all been led to believe, did he really mean it when he offered to cut the
baby in half?

Most important of all, did it really matter what had happened several
thousand years ago on the far side of the world? Even supposing that King
Solomon had one of the original Dark Passengers, how did that help me get back
to being lovable deadly me? What did I actually do with all this fascinating
historical lore? None of it told me where the Passenger came from, what it was,
or how to get it back.

I was at a loss. All right,
then, it was clearly time to give up, accept my fate, throw myself on the mercy
of the court, assume the role of Dexter, quiet family man and former Dark
Avenger. Resign myself to the idea that I would never again feel the hard cool
touch of the moonlight on my electrified nerve endings as I slid through the
night like the avatar of cold, sharp steel.

I tried to think of something to inspire me to even
greater heights of mental effort in my investigation, but all I came up with
was a piece of a Rudyard Kipling poem: “If you can keep your head when all
about you are losing theirs,” or words to that effect. It didn't seem like
it was enough. Perhaps Ariel Goldman and Jessica Ortega should have memorized
Kipling. In any case, my search had taken me no place helpful.

Fine. What else could someone call the Passenger?
“Sardonic commentator,” “warning system,” “inside
cheerleader.” I checked them all. Some of the results for inside
cheerleader were really quite startling, but had nothing to do with my search.

I tried “watcher,” “interior
watcher,” “dark watcher,” “hidden watcher.”

One last long shot, possibly having to do with the fact that my
thoughts were once again turning toward food, but quite justified nevertheless:
“hungry watcher.”

Again, the results were mostly New Age blather. But one blog caught my
eye, and I clicked on it. I read the opening paragraph and, although I did not
actually say “Bingo,” that was certainly the gist of what I thought.

“Once again into the night with the Hungry
Watcher,” it began. “Stalking the dark streets that teem with prey,
riding slowly through the waiting feast and feeling the pull of the tide of
blood that will soon rise to cover us with joy…”

Well. The prose was somewhat purple, perhaps. And the part about the
blood was a little bit icky. But that aside, it was a pretty good description
of how I felt when I went off on one of my adventures. It seemed likely that I
had found a kindred spirit.

I read on. It was all consistent with the experience as I knew of it,
cruising through the night with hungry anticipation as a sibilant inner voice
whispered guidance. But then, when the narrative came to the point where I
would have pounced and slashed, this narrator instead made a reference to
“the others,” followed by three figures from some alphabet I didn't
recognize.

Or did I?

Feverishly, I scrabbled across my desk for the folder holding the file
for the two headless girls. I yanked out the stack of photographs, flipped
through them-and there it was.

Chalked on the driveway at Dr. Goldman's house, the
same three letters, looking like a misshapen MLK.

I glanced up at my computer screen: it was a match, no
question about it.

This was way too much to be a coincidence. It clearly meant something
very important; perhaps it was even the key to understanding the entire mess.
Yes, highly significant, with just one small footnote: Significant of what?
What did it mean?

On top of everything else, why was this particular
clue afflicting me? I had come here to work on my own personal problem of a
missing Passenger-had come late at night so I would not be harried by my sister
or other demands of work. And now, apparently, if I wanted to solve my problem
I would have to do it by working on Deborah's case. How come nothing was fair
anymore?

Well, if there was any real reward for complaining I
hadn't seen it so far, in a life filled with suffering and verbal skill. So I
might as well take what was offered and see where it led.

First, what language was the script? I was reasonably certain it wasn't
Chinese or Japanese-but what about some other Asian alphabet I knew nothing
about? I pulled up an online atlas and began checking off countries: Korea,
Cambodia, Thailand. None of them had an alphabet that was even close. What did
that leave? Cyrillic? Easy enough to check. I pulled up a page containing the
whole alphabet. I had to stare at it for a long time; some of the letters
seemed close, but in the end I concluded that it was not a match.

What then? What did that leave? What would somebody really smart do
next, somebody like who I had once been, or even somebody like that all-time
champion of bright guys, King Solomon?

A small beeping sound began to chirp in the back of my
brain, and I listened to it for a moment before I answered it. Yes, that's
right, I said King Solomon. The guy from the Bible with an inner king. What?
Oh, really? A connection, you say? You think so?

A long shot, but easy enough to check, and I did.
Solomon would have spoken ancient Hebrew, of course, which was simple to find
on the Web. And it looked very little like the characters I had found. So that
was that, and there was no connection: ipso facto, or some other equally
compelling Latin saying.

But hold on: Didn't I remember that the original language of the Bible
was not Hebrew but something else? I beat my gray cells brutally, and they
finally came out with it. Yes, it had been something I remembered from that
unimpeachable scholarly source, Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the language I was
looking for was Aramaic.

Once again, it was easy to find a Web site eager to teach us all to
write Aramaic. And as I looked at it, I became eager to learn, because there
was no doubt about it-the three letters were an exact match. And they were, in
fact, the Aramaic counterparts of MLK, just the way they looked.

I read on. Aramaic, like Hebrew, did not use vowels. Instead, you had
to supply them yourself. Very tricky, really, because you had to know what the
word was before you could read it. Therefore, MLK could be milk or milik or
malik or any other combination, and none of them made sense. At least not to
me, which seemed like the important thing. But I doodled anyway, trying to make
sense of the letters. Milok. Molak. Molek-