Double Dexter (37 page)

And so instead of exploding out of my car to bludgeon Crowley with my swollen hands, I simply sat behind the wheel and rolled down the window as the other driver approached. He came right up to my car, looked down at me, and smiled: a beautiful, blissful smile that revealed hundreds of shiny, sharp teeth, and in the face of such complete happiness there was only one thing I could say.

“Sergeant Doakes,” I said, with a very good imitation of mild surprise. “What on earth are you doing here at this hour?”

F
OR A LONG AND UNEASY MOMENT, SERGEANT DOAKES DID
not answer. He just looked down at me and smiled his bright predator’s smile until I began to feel like the lack of conversation was turning a bit uncomfortable. Even more disquieting than the sergeant’s toothy silence, I remembered the gym bag on the floor of the backseat, right behind me. The contents of that bag would be difficult to explain to someone with a nasty, suspicious mind—someone, in other words, exactly like Doakes—and if he were to open the bag and see my collection of innocent toys it could well make for a few very awkward moments, since I was under Official Suspicion for using just such items.

But Dexter was raised on danger and bred on bluff, and this was exactly the kind of crisis that brought out the very best in me. So I took the initiative and broke the ice.

“This is an amazing coincidence,” I said brightly. “I was just out for some antihistamines.” I showed him my swollen hands, but he didn’t seem interested. “Do you live around here somewhere?” I paused for his reply; he didn’t give me one, and as the silence grew I had to fight down the impulse to ask whether the cat had his tongue, before I realized that he was not carrying his speech synthesizer. “Oh,
I’m sorry,” I said. “You don’t have your talking machine, do you? Well, then, I’ll cut this short. Nothing worse than a one-sided conversation.” And, reaching to roll up the window, I added a cheery, “Good night, Sergeant!”

Doakes leaned forward and put both his shiny prosthetic claws on the top of my window and pushed down. He was not smiling now, and the muscles in his cheeks flexed visibly as he leaned down and kept my window from closing. I wondered briefly what would happen if his pressure broke the glass: Was it possible that a shard of broken window would spear up past his silver claws and slice his wrists open? The thought of Doakes bleeding out in the parking lot beside my car was very appealing—but of course, there was also the possibility that the horrible wet blood would spurt out of him, into the car, and cover me in awful sticky red mess, which was an image that made my skin crawl. Not just the nasty appalling blood, but
Doakes
’s vile blood; it was a thought so revolting that for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

But car windows are made of safety glass. They do not shatter into shards. They explode into a pile of small pebbles, and it would take a great deal of ingenuity to use them to kill Doakes, unless I could persuade him to eat them. That didn’t seem likely, so with a philosophical shrug, I stopped cranking the window and returned the good sergeant’s stare. “Was there something else?” I asked politely.

Sergeant Doakes had never been known for his skill as a conversationalist, and having his tongue removed had done nothing to add to his talent in that area. And so while it was clear that there was a great deal on his mind, he did not share it with me. He just stared, and his cheek muscles continued to bulge out even though he was no longer pushing down on the window. Finally, when a lesser man than Dexter would have cracked under the strain, Doakes leaned in even closer to me. I looked back at him. It was very awkward, but at least he didn’t smell as bad as Hood, and I managed to endure it without collapsing into tears and confessing.

And finally Doakes must have realized that, in the first place, there was quite literally nothing he could say and, in the second, I was not going to break down and admit that I was exactly what he thought I was, and out on a mission to do precisely what he suspected. He
straightened up slowly, never taking his eyes off me, nodded a couple of times, as if to say,
All righty then
. Then he showed just the front row of his impressive set of teeth, a feral half grin that was much more troubling than the full smile, and he made that clichéd macho gesture we have all seen in so many movies: two fingers pointed at his own eyes, and then one pointed directly at me. Of course, since he had no fingers, he had to point with his bright and shiny prosthetic claw, and it took a little extra imagination on my part to decipher the signal. But the message was very clear:
I’m watching you
. He let that sink in for a moment, just pointing the claw and glaring at me without blinking. Then he turned abruptly away, strolled back around to the driver’s side of his car, opened the door, and got in.

I waited for a moment, but Doakes did not put his car in gear. He just sat there, half turned to watch me, even though I was doing nothing more interesting than sweating. Clearly, he was going to be very literal-minded in carrying out his threat. He would
watch
me, no matter what I did or did not do. He was watching me now, and I remembered that I was supposed to be buying some antihistamine, and he was very intently watching me not buy it. And so, after a few more awkward moments, I got out of my car and went inside the convenience mart. I grabbed a box of something I had seen a commercial for, paid for it, and went back to my car.

Doakes was still watching. I put my own car in gear, backed out of the parking spot, and began the drive back to my house. I didn’t need to look in the rearview mirror to know that Doakes was following along right behind.

I drove slowly home, and the headlights of Doakes’s car stayed in the exact center of my rearview mirror the whole way, never wavering and never dropping back more than thirty feet. It was a wonderful textbook example of following somebody with what is called an open tail, and I really wished that Doakes was off at Detective College teaching the technique, instead of bedeviling me with it. Just a few minutes ago I had been so very nearly happy, filled with paella and purpose, and now I was right back on the horns of my dilemma. I absolutely
had
to take care of Crowley, and as soon as possible—but “soon” and “possible” were both far, far out of reach as long as Sergeant Doakes stayed welded to my bumper.

And even worse than the teeth-grinding frustration was the growing awareness of my own inept stupidity. It wasn’t just Crowley who was running rings around me; Sergeant Doakes was, too. I should have known. Of
course
he would be watching me. He had waited for years to have me in this exact predicament. It was what he lived for, and he would not need to eat or sleep or polish his prosthetics as long as he had Dexter squirming in his crosshairs.

I was trapped, well and truly snookered, and there was no way out. If I didn’t get Crowley, he would get me. If I tried to get him, Doakes would get me instead. Either way, Dexter was Got.

I turned it every way I could, but it always came out the same. I had to do something and I couldn’t do anything—the perfect puzzle, and Miss Marple was nowhere around to help me solve it. By the time I parked the car in front of my house I had ground a layer of enamel off my teeth, smacked my swollen hands on the steering wheel with surprisingly painful results, and almost chewed through my lower lip. None of those things had provided an answer.

I sat behind the wheel with the engine off for a minute, too completely frustrated to move. Doakes drove slowly past, turned around, and parked where he had before, with a perfect view of me and my house. He switched off his engine and his headlights and he sat and watched me. I sat and ground my teeth some more, until they began to hurt almost as much as my hands. It was no good; I could sit here until I found a way to injure all my body parts, or I could accept the fact that I was stuck, go in the house, and snatch a few hours of troubled sleep. Maybe an answer would blossom in my subconscious mind while I slept. Just as likely, maybe a meteor shower would fall in the night and crush both Doakes and Crowley.

I decided on sleep anyway. At least I would be well rested when the end came. I got out of my car, locked it, and went in to bed.

And to my very great surprise, strangely, amazingly, wonderfully, an answer actually did come to me while I slept. It did not appear to me in a dream; I almost never have dreams, and on the rare occasions when I do they are shameful little things, full of obvious and embarrassing symbolism, and I would never listen to any word of advice they might offer.

Instead, when I opened my eyes to the early morning sounds of
Rita in the bathroom, a single clear image was floating in my forebrain: the cheerful, synthetically smiling face of Brian, my brother. I closed my eyes again and wondered why I should wake up thinking of him, and why the mental picture of his artificial grin should make me feel so happy. Of course, he was family, and having family should naturally be a source of bliss for us all. But there was a great deal more to it than that. Beyond sharing my DNA, Brian was also the one and only person in the whole wide world who could play the music for Dexter’s Dark Dance nearly as well as I did. And even better, he was also the one and only person in the world who might play a request.

I lay in bed with a nearly real smile growing on my own face, and I thought about it as Rita bustled back into the bedroom, got dressed, and hurried away into the kitchen. I tried to frown the idea away, thinking of all that might be wrong with it. I told myself I was merely clutching at straws, lying in a sleep-induced cloud of dunderheaded hope. It couldn’t possibly work; it was too simple, too effective, and ten seconds of clear and alert consciousness would almost certainly prove to me that this was no more than a stupidly optimistic pipe dream.

But alertness grew, and no negative epiphany grew with it, and the smile kept returning to push away my great frown of logic. It just might work.

Give Crowley’s address to Brian, explain the problem to him, and let nature take its course.

It was an elegant solution, and the only real problem with it was that I would not get to do away with Crowley in person. I wouldn’t even get to watch, and that seemed terribly unfair. I had really,
really
wanted to do this myself: to watch the miserable self-inflated creature sweat and squirm and try to twist away as I slowly, carefully, fondly, took him farther and farther away from any taste of hope and closer to the dark circle at the end of his bright quick moment of light—

But a large part of learning to be an adult is admitting to yourself that nothing is ever perfect. We all have to sacrifice small indulgences from time to time in order to achieve our larger goals, and I would just have to behave like a grown-up and accept that the results were more important than my petty personal gratification. The essential
thing here was to send Crowley off on his merry way into deep dark eternity, and it didn’t really matter whether he got there without my help, just as long as he actually got there, and quickly.

I got out of bed, showered, dressed, and sat at the table in the kitchen, and I could find nothing wrong with my idea. Certainty grew as I ate a very good breakfast of waffles and Canadian bacon, and by the time I pushed away the empty plate and poured myself a second cup of coffee, it had grown into a full-size plan. Brian would help me; he was my brother. And it was exactly his kind of problem, something that played to his strengths and at the same time gave him a chance to enjoy himself—and even help his only sibling. It was neat and efficient and satisfying and I actually found myself ruminating on how good it was to have a big brother. It’s true what they say: Family really is the most important thing in life.

By the time Rita cleared away the breakfast dishes, I was filled with smug good cheer and a truly annoying fondness for life as well as waffles, as I now found it was nudging me close to singing out loud. The problem was as good as solved, and I could get back to dealing with the other blip on my radar: Doakes and Hood and their attempt to rain on my parade. But I felt so very good about the solution to my Shadow, some of the optimism spilled over, and I began to believe that I would find a way out of that problem, too. Perhaps I could go back to sleep and simply wait for another idea to burble out of my unconscious mind.

My family’s morning preparations clattered around me, rose to a climax, and then, just before the part where I knew from experience that the front door would begin to slam and go on slamming at least four times, Rita came in and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Two thirty,” she said. “I forgot to tell you last night because you fell asleep? And before that I just wanted, you know—because the paella really takes time?”

Once more I had the sensation of being in the middle of a conversation that had started a few minutes ago without me. But on a morning so full of bright hope, I could be patient. “It was very good paella,” I said. “What did you forget to tell me?”

“Oh,” she said. “Just that at two thirty. I mean, today? And I’ll meet you there. Because I made the appointment while you and
Cody? And then when you both came home so completely— Anyway, it went right out of my head.”

Several brilliantly funny remarks crowded into my mouth and fought for space on my tongue, but once again I somehow made myself stay focused on the larger point, which was that I still had no idea what Rita was talking about. “I’ll be there at two thirty,” I said. “If you promise to tell me where it is and why I’m going there.”

Astor yelled, “Mom!” and the front door slammed once and Rita frowned and shook her head. “Oh,” she said. “Didn’t I …? But Carlene at work, like I said. Her brother-in-law? He’s the lawyer,” she said, and turning her head toward the front door she yelled, “Just a minute, Astor!”

It might be only that I was getting used to her disjointed conversations, but I actually understood what Rita was saying after only a few seconds of struggling to put the pieces together. “We have an appointment with a lawyer?” I said.