Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark (19 page)

I searched for an automatic sinister reply, and found
nothing.

“You will see,” he said in his terrible flat and raw voice.
“He will get you anyway, even without me. It is too late for you.”

And there it was. As close to a confession as I needed that he had been
following me with sinister intent. But all I could think to say was, “Who
is he?”

He forgot he was taped to the bench and tried to shake
his head. It didn't work, but it didn't seem to bother him much, either.
“They will find you,” he repeated. “Soon enough.” He
twitched a little, as if he was trying to wave a hand, and said, “Go
ahead. Kill me now. They will find you.”

I looked down at him, so passively taped and ready for my special attentions,
and I should have been filled with icy delight at the job ahead of me-and I was
not. I was not filled with anything except emptiness, the same feeling of
hopeless futility that had come over me while I waited outside the house.

I shook myself out of the funk and taped Starzak's mouth shut. He
flinched a little, but other than that he continued to look straight away, with
no show of any kind of emotion.

I raised my knife and looked down at my unmoving and
unmoved prey. I could still hear his awful wet breath rattling in and out
through his nostrils and I wanted to stop it, turn out his lights, shut down
this noxious thing, cut it into pieces and seal them into neat dry garbage
bags, unmoving chunks of compost that would no longer threaten, no longer eat
and excrete and flail around in the patternless maze of human life-

And I could not.

I called silently for the familiar rush of dark wings to sweep out of
me and light up my knife with the wicked gleam of savage purpose, and nothing
came. Nothing moved within me at the thought of doing this sharp and necessary
thing I had done so happily so many times. The only thing that welled up inside
me was emptiness.

I lowered the knife, turned away, and walked out into
the night.

SOMEHOW I PULLED MYSELF OUT OF BED AND WENT IN TO work
the next day, in spite of the gnawing sense of dull despair that bloomed in me
like a brittle garden of thorns. I felt wrapped in a fog of dull pain that hurt
only enough to remind me that it, too, was without purpose, and there seemed no
point to going through the empty motions of breakfast, the long slow drive to
work, no reason at all beyond the slavery of habit. But I did it, allowing
muscle memory to push me all the way into the chair at my desk, where I sat, turned
on the computer, and let the day drag me off into gray drudgery.

I had failed with Starzak. I was no longer me, and had
no idea who or what I was.

Rita was waiting for me at the door when I got home
with a look of anxious annoyance on her face.

“We need to decide about the band,” she
said. “They may already be booked.”

“All right,” I
said. Why not decide about bands? It was as meaningful as anything else.

“I picked up all the CDs from where you dropped
them yesterday,” she said, “and sorted them by price.”

“I'll listen to them tonight,” I said, and although Rita
still seemed peeved, eventually the evening routine took over and calmed her
down, and she settled into cooking and cleaning while I listened to a series of
rock bands playing “Chicken Dance” and “Electric Slide.”
I'm sure that ordinarily it would have been as much fun as a toothache, but
since I couldn't think of anything else in the world worth doing, I labored
through the whole stack of CDs and soon it was time for bed again.

At 1 A.M. the music came back to me, and I don't mean
“Chicken Dance.” It was the drums and trumpets, and a chorus of
voices came with them and rolled through my sleep, lifting me up into the heavens,
and I woke up on the floor with the memory of it still echoing in my head.

I lay on the floor for a long time, unable to form any
truly coherent thought about what it meant, but afraid to go to sleep in case
it should come back again. Eventually I did get into bed, and I suppose I even
slept, since I opened my eyes to sunlight and sound coming from the kitchen.

image

It was a Saturday morning, and Rita made blueberry pancakes, a very
welcome nudge back to everyday life. Cody and Astor piled into the flapjacks
with enthusiasm, and on any normal morning I would not have held back either.
But today was not a normal morning.

It is difficult to understate how large the shock must be to put Dexter
off his feed. I have a very fast metabolism, and require constant fuel in order
to maintain the wonderful device that is me, and Rita's pancakes fully qualify
as high-test unleaded. And yet, time and again I found myself staring at the
fork as it wavered halfway between the plate and my mouth, and I was unable to
muster the necessary enthusiasm for completing the motion and putting in food.

Soon enough, everyone else was finished with the meal, and I was still
staring at half a plate of food. Even Rita noticed that all was not well in
Dexter's Domain.

“You've hardly touched your food,” she said.
“Is something wrong?”

“It's this case I'm working on,” I said, at
least half truthfully. “I can't stop thinking about it.”

“Oh,” she said. “You're sure that…I
mean, is it very violent?”

“It's not that,” I said, wondering what she
wanted to hear. “It's just…very puzzling.”

Rita nodded. “Sometimes if you stop thinking
about something for a while, the answer comes to you,” she said.

“Maybe you're right,” I said, which was
probably stretching the truth.

“Are you going to finish your breakfast?”
she said.

I stared down at my plate with its pile of half-eaten
pancakes and congealed syrup. Scientifically speaking, I knew they were still
delicious, but at the moment they seemed about as appealing as old wet
newspaper. “No,” I said.

Rita looked at me with alarm. When Dexter does not finish his
breakfast, we are in uncharted territory. “Why don't you take your boat
out?” she said. “That always helps you relax.” She came over and
put a hand on me with aggressive concern, and Cody and Astor looked up with the
hope of a boat ride written on their faces, and it was suddenly like being in
quicksand.

I stood up. It was all too much. I could not even meet
my own expectations, and to be asked to deal with all theirs too was
suffocating. Whether it was my failure with Starzak, the pursuing music, or
being sucked down into family life, I could not say. Maybe it was the
combination of all of them, pulling me apart with wildly opposite gravities and
sucking the pieces into a whirlpool of clinging normaley that made me want to
scream, and at the same time left me unable even to whimper. Whatever it was, I
had to get out of here.

“I have an errand I have to run,” I said,
and they all looked at me with wounded surprise.

“Oh,” Rita said. “What kind of
errand?”

“Wedding business,” I blurted out, without
any idea what I was going to say next, but trusting the impulse blindly. And
happily for me, at least one thing went right, because I remembered my
conversation with the blushing, groveling Vince Masuoka. “I have to talk
to the caterer.”

Rita lit up. “You're going to see Manny Borque?
Oh,” she said. “That's really-”

“Yes, it is,” I assured her. “I'll be
back later.” And so at the reasonable Saturday-morning time of fifteen
minutes before ten o'clock, I bid a fond farewell to dirty dishes and
domesticity, and climbed into my car. It was an unusually calm morning on the
roads, and I saw no violence or crime of any kind as I drove to South Beach,
which was almost like seeing snow at the Fontainebleau. Things being what they
were for me lately, I kept an eye on the rearview mirror. For just a minute I
thought that a little red Jeep-style car was following me, but when I slowed
down it went right past me. The traffic stayed light, and it was still only ten
fifteen when I had parked my car, rode up in the elevator, and knocked on Manny
Borque's door.

There was a very long spell of utter silence, and I
knocked again, a little more enthusiastically this time. I was about to try a
truly rousing salute on the door when it swung open and an exceedingly bleary
and mostly naked Manny Borque blinked up at me. “Jesus' tits,” he
croaked. “What time is it?”

“Ten fifteen,” I said brightly.
“Practically time for lunch.”

Perhaps he wasn't really awake, or perhaps he thought it was so funny
it was worth saying again, but in any case he repeated himself: “Jesus'
tits.”

“May I come in?” I asked him politely, and he blinked a few
more times and then pushed the door open all the way.

“This better be good,” he said, and I followed him in, past
the hideous art-thing in his foyer and on to his perch by the window. He hopped
up onto his stool, and I sat on the one opposite.

“I need to talk to you about my wedding,” I said, and he
shook his head very grumpily and squealed out, “Franky!” There was no
answer and he leaned on one tiny hand and tapped the other on the table.
“That little bitch had better-Goddamn it, Franky!” he called out in
something like a very high-pitched bellow.

A moment later there was a scurrying sound from the
back of the apartment, and then a young man came out, pulling a robe closed as
he hurried in and brushing back his lank brown hair as he came to a halt in

front of Manny. “Hi,” he said. “I mean,
you know. Good morning.”

“Get coffee very quickly,” Manny said
without looking up at him.

“Um,” Franky said. “Sure. Okay.” He hesitated for
half a second, just long enough to give Manny time to fling out his minuscule
fist and shriek, “Now, goddamn it!” Franky gulped and lurched away
toward the kitchen, and Manny went back to leaning his full eighty-five pounds
of towering grumpiness on his fist and closing his eyes with a sigh, as though
he were tormented by numberless hordes of truly idiotic demons.

Since it seemed obvious that there could be no
possibility of conversation without coffee, I looked out the window and enjoyed
the view. There were three large freighters on the horizon, sending up plumes
of smoke, and closer in to shore a good scattering of pleasure boats, ranging
from the multimillion-dollar playtoys headed for the Bahamas all the way down
to a cluster of Windsurfers in close to the beach. A bright yellow kayak was
offshore, apparently heading out to meet the freighters. The sun shone, the
gulls flew by searching for garbage, and I waited for Manny to receive his
transfusion.

There was a shattering crash from the kitchen, and Franky's muted wail
of “Oh, shit.” Manny tried to close his eyes tighter, as if he could
seal out all the agony of being surrounded by terrible stupidity. And only a
few minutes later, Franky arrived with the coffee service, a silver
semi-shapeless pot and three squat stoneware cups, perched on a transparent
platter shaped like an artist's palette.

With trembling hands Franky placed a cup in front of
Manny and poured it full. Manny took a tiny sip, sighed heavily without any
sense of relief, and opened his eyes at last. “All right,” he said.
And turning to Franky, he added, “Go clean up your hideous mess, and if I
step on broken glass later, I swear to God I will disembowel you.” Franky
stumbled away, and Manny took another microscopic sip before turning his bleary
glare on me. “You want to talk about your wedding,” he said as if he
couldn't really believe it.

“That's right,” I said, and he shook his
head.

“A nice-looking man like you,” he said.
“Why on earth would you want to get married?”

“I need the tax break,” I said. “Can we
talk about the menu?”

“At the crack of dawn, on a Saturday? No,”
he said. “It's a horrible, pointless, primitive ritual,” and I
assumed he was talking about the wedding rather than the menu, although with
Manny one really couldn't be sure. “I am truly appalled that anyone would
willingly go through with it. But,” he said, waving his hand dismissively,
“at least it gives me a chance to experiment.”

“I wonder if it might be possible to experiment a
little cheaper.”

“It might be,” he said and for the first time he showed his
teeth, but it could only be called a smile if you agree that torturing animals
is funny, “but it just won't happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because I've already decided what I want to do,
and there's nothing you can do to stop me.”

To be perfectly truthful
there were several things I could think of to stop him, but none of
them-enjoyable as they might be-would pass the strict guidelines of the Harry
Code, and so I could not do them. "I don't

suppose sweet reason would
have any effect?“ I asked hopefully. He leered at me. ”How sweet did
you have in mind?“ he said. ”Well, I was going to say please and
smile a lot,“ I said. ”Not good enough,“ he said. ”Not by a
great deal.“ ”Vince said you were guessing five hundred dollars a
plate?“ ”I don't guess,“ he snarled. ”And I don't give a
shit about counting your fucking pennies.“ ”Of course not,“ I
said, trying to soothe him a bit. ”After all, they're not your
pennies.“ ”Your girlfriend signed the fucking contract,“ he
said. ”I can charge you anything I fucking feel like.“ ”But
there must be something I can do to get the price down a little?“ I said
hopefully. His snarl loosened into his patented leer again. ”Not in a
chair,“ he said. ”Then what can I do?“ ”If you mean what
can you do to get me to change my mind, nothing. Not a thing in the world. I
have

people lined up around the block trying to hire me-I
am booked two years in advance, and I am doing you a very large favor.“
His leer widened into something almost supernatural. ”So prepare yourself
for a miracle. And a very hefty bill."

I stood up. The little gnome was obviously not going
to bend in the least, and there was nothing I could do about it. I really
wanted to say something like “You haven't heard the last of me,” but
there didn't seem much point to that either. So I just smiled back, said,
“Well then,” and walked out of the apartment. As the door closed
behind me, I could hear him, already squealing at Franky, “For Christ's
sake move your big ass and get all that shit off my fucking floor.”

As I walked toward the elevator I felt an icy steel
finger brush the back of my neck and for just a moment I felt a faint stirring,
as if the Dark Passenger had put one toe in the water and run away after seeing
that it was too cold. I stopped dead and slowly looked around me in the
hallway.

Nothing. Down at the far end a man was fumbling with
the newspaper in front of his door. Otherwise, the hall was empty. I closed my
eyes for just a moment. What? I asked. But there was no answer. I was still
alone. And unless somebody was glaring at me through a peephole in one of the
doors, it had been a false alarm. Or, more likely, wishful thinking.

I got in the elevator and went down.

image

As the elevator door slid
shut the Watcher straightened up, still holding the newspaper from where he had
taken it off the mat. It was a good piece of camouflage, and it might work
again. He stared down the hall and wondered what was so interesting in that
other apartment, but it didn't really matter. He would find out. Whatever the
other had been doing, he would find out.

He counted slowly to ten and then sauntered down the hallway to the
apartment the other had visited. It would only take a moment to find out why he
had gone in there. And then-

The Watcher had no real idea what was really going through the other's
mind right now, but it was not happening fast enough. It was time for a real
push, something to break the other out of his passivity. He felt a rare pulse
of playfulness welling up through the dark cloud of power, and he heard the
flutter of dark wings inside.