I felt a very strong satisfaction with this solution: it’s nice when things can work out so nicely, and the neatness of it appealed to my inner monster, the tidy one that likes to see problems properly bagged up and thrown away. Besides, it was only fair.
Wonderful: I would spend some quality time with Alex Doncevic.
I began by checking online to see his status, and rechecking every fifteen minutes when it became clear that he was about to be released. At 4:32 his paperwork was in its final stages, and I moseyed down to the parking lot and drove over to the front door of the detention center.
I got there just in time, and there were plenty of people there ahead of me. Simeon really knew how to throw a party, especially if the press were involved, and they were all there waiting in a huge, unruly mob, the vans and satellite dishes and beautiful haircuts all competing for space. When Doncevic came out on Simeon’s arm, there was a clatter of cameras and the multiple thud of many elbows trying to clear a way, and the crowd surged forward like a pack of dogs pouncing on raw meat.
I watched from my car as Simeon made a long and heartwarming statement, answered a few questions, and then pushed through the crowd, towing Doncevic with him. They got into a black Lexus SUV and drove away, and after a moment, I followed.
Following another car is relatively simple, particularly in Miami, where there is always traffic, and it always acts irrationally. Since it was rush hour, all these things were even more so. I just had to stay back a bit, leaving a couple of cars between me and the Lexus. Simeon did nothing to show that he thought he was being followed. Of course, even if he spotted me he would assume I was a reporter hoping for a candid shot of Doncevic weeping with gratitude, and Simeon would do nothing more than make sure his good side was to the camera.
I followed them across town to North Miami Avenue, and dropped back a little as they turned onto Northeast Fortieth Street. I was fairly confident I knew where they were going now, and sure enough, Simeon pulled over in front of the building where Deborah had first met my new friend Doncevic. I drove past, circled the block once, and came back in time to see Doncevic get out of the Lexus and head into the building.
Happily for me, there was a parking spot where I could see the door. I pulled into it, turned off the engine, and waited for darkness, which would come as it always did, to find Dexter ready for it. And tonight, at last, after such a long and dreary stay in the daytime world, ready to join with it, revel in its sweet and savage music, and play a few chords of Dexter’s own minuet. I found myself impatient with the ponderous, slowly sinking sun, and eager for the night. I could feel it stretching out for me, leaning in to spread through me, flexing its wings, easing the knots out of the too-long-unused muscles and preparing to spring—
My phone rang.
“It’s me,” said Rita.
“I’m sure it is,” I said.
“I think I have a really good—what did you say?”
“Nothing,” I said. “What’s your really good?”
“What?” she said. “Oh—I’ve been thinking about what we said. About Cody?”
I pulled my mind back from the pulsing darkness I had been feeding and tried to remember what we had said about Cody. It had been something about helping him come out of his shell, but I did not remember that we had actually decided anything beyond a few vague platitudes designed to make Rita feel better while I carefully placed Cody’s feet on the Harry Path. So I just said, “Oh, right. Yes?” in the hope of drawing her out just a bit.
“I was talking to Susan? You know, over on One hundred thirty-seventh? With the big dog,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I remember the dog.” As indeed I did—it hated me, like all domestic animals do. They all recognize me for what I am, even if their masters do not.
“And her son, Albert? He’s been having a really positive experience with the Cub Scouts. And I thought, that might be just right for Cody.”
At first the idea didn’t make any sense at all. Cody? A Cub Scout? It seemed like serving cucumber sandwiches and tea to Godzilla. But as I stammered for a reply, trying to think of something that was neither outraged denial nor hysterical laughter, I actually caught myself realizing that it was not a bad idea. It was, in fact, a very good idea that would mesh perfectly with the plan to make Cody fit in with human children. And so, caught halfway between irritated denial and enthusiastic acceptance, I quite distinctly said, “Hi didda yuh-kay.”
“Dexter, are you all right?” Rita said.
“I, uh, you caught me by surprise,” I said. “I’m in the middle of something. But I think it’s a great idea.”
“Really? You really do?” she said.
“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s the perfect thing for him.”
“I was hoping you’d say so,” she said. “But then I thought, I don’t know. What if—I mean, you really do think so?”
I really did, and eventually I made her believe me. But it took several minutes, since Rita is able to speak without breathing and, quite often, without finishing a sentence, so that she got out fifteen or twenty disconnected words for every one of mine.
By the time I finally persuaded her and hung up, it was slightly darker outside, but unfortunately much lighter inside me. The opening notes of Dexter’s Dance Suite were muted now, some of the rising urgency blurred by the sound track of Rita’s call. Still, it would come back, I was quite sure.
In the meantime, just to look busy, I called Chutsky.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. “She opened her eyes again a few minutes ago. The doctors think she’s starting to come around a little bit.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “I’m coming by a little later. I just have some loose ends to take care of.”
“Some of your people have been coming by to say hi,” he said. “Do you know a guy named Israel Salguero?”
A bicycle went by me in the street. The rider thumped my side mirror and went on past. “I know him,” I said. “Was he there?”
“Yeah,” said Chutsky. “He was here.” Chutsky was silent, as if waiting for me to say something. I couldn’t think of much, so finally he said, “Something about the guy.”
“He knew our father,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Something else.”
“Um,” I said. “He’s from Internal Affairs. He’s investigating Deborah’s behavior in this whole thing.”
Chutsky was very silent for a moment. “HER behavior,” he said at last.
“Yes,” I said.
“She got stabbed.”
“The lawyer said it was self-defense,” I said.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
“I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,” I said. “It’s just regulations, he has to investigate.”
“Son of a goddamn bitch,” Chutsky said. “And he comes around here? With her in a fucking coma?”
“He’s known Deborah a long time,” I said. “He probably just wanted to see if she was okay.”
There was a very long pause, and then Chutsky said, “Okay, buddy. If you say so. But I don’t think I’m going to let him in here next time.”
I was not really sure how well Chutsky’s hook would match up with Salguero’s smooth and total confidence, but I had a feeling it would be an interesting contest. Chutsky, for all his bluff and phony cheerfulness, was a cold killer. But Salguero had been in Internal Affairs for years, which made him practically bulletproof. If it came to a fight, I thought it might do quite well on pay-per-view. I also thought I should probably keep that idea to myself, so I just said, “All right. I’ll see you later,” and hung up.
And so, with all the petty human details taken care of, I went back to waiting. Cars went by. People walked past on the sidewalk. I got thirsty, and found half a bottle of water on the floor in the backseat. And finally, it got completely dark.
I waited a little longer to let the darkness settle over the city, and over me. It felt very good to shrug into the cold and comfy n
ight jacket, and the anticipation grew strong inside with whispered encouragement from the Dark Passenger, urging me to step aside and give it the wheel.
And finally, I did.
I put the careful noose of nylon fishing leader and a roll of duct tape in my pocket, the only tools I had in my car at the moment, and got out.
And hesitated: too long since the last time, far too long since Dexter had done the deed. I had not done my research and that was not good. I had no plan and that was worse. I did not really know what was behind that door or what I would do when I got inside. I was uncertain for a moment and I stood beside the car and wondered if I could improvise my way through the dance. The uncertainty ate away my armor and left me standing on one foot in the dangerous dark without a way to move forward in the first knowing step.
But this was silly, weak, and wrong—and very much Not Dexter. The Real Dexter lived in the Dark, came alive in the sharp night, took joy in slashing out from the shadows. Who was this, standing here hesitating? Dexter does not dither.
I looked up into the night sky and breathed it in. Better: there was only a chunk of rotten yellow moon, but I opened up to it and it howled at me, and the night pounded through my veins and throbbed into my fingertips and sang across the skin stretched tight on my neck and I felt it all change, all grow back into what We must be to do what We would do, and then We were ready to do it.
This was now, this was the night, this was Dark Dexter’s Dance, and the steps would come, flowing from our feet as they had always known they must.
And the black wings reached out from deep inside and spread across the night sky and carried us forward.
We slid through the night and around the block, checking the entire area carefully. Down at the far end of the street there was an alley and we went down it into deeper darkness, cutting back toward the rear of Doncevic’s building. There was a battered van parked at a covered and well-masked loading dock at the back of it—a quick and dry whisper from the Passenger saying, Look: this is how he moved the bodies out and took them to their display points. And soon he would leave the same way.
We circled back around and found nothing alarming in the area. An Ethiopian restaurant around the corner. Loud music three doors down. And then we were back at the front door and we rang the bell. He opened the door and had one small moment of surprise before we were on him, putting him quickly facedown on the floor with the noose on his neck as we taped his mouth, hands, and feet. When he was secure and quiet, we moved quickly through the rest of the place and found no one. We did find some few items of interest; some very nice tools in the bathroom, right next to a large bathtub. Saws and snips and all, lovely Dexter Playtime Toys, and it was quite clearly the white porcelain background from the home movie we had seen at the Tourist Board and it was proof, all the proof we needed now, in this night of need. Doncevic was guilty. He had stood here on the tile by the tub holding these tools and done unthinkable things—exactly the unthinkable acts that we were thinking and would now do to him.
We dragged him into the bathroom and put him in the tub and then we stopped again, just for a moment. A very small and insistent whisper was hinting that all was not right, and it went up our spine and into our teeth. We rolled Doncevic into the tub, facedown, and went quickly through the place again. There was nothing and no one, and all was well, and the very loud voice of the Dark Driver was drowning out the feeble whisper and once again demanding that we steer back to the Dance with Doncevic.
So we went back to the tub and went to work. And we hurried a little because we were in a strange place without any real planning, and also because Doncevic said one strange thing before we took the gift of speech away from him forever. “Smile,” he said, and that made us angry and he was quickly unable to say anything very definite again. But we were thorough, oh yes, and when we were done, we were quite pleased with a job well done. Everything had gone very well indeed, and we had taken a very large step toward getting things back to the way things must be.
And they were that way until it ended, with nothing left but a few bags of garbage and one small drop of Doncevic’s blood on a glass slide for my rosewood box.
And as always, I felt a whole lot better afterward.
FIFTEEN
IT WAS THE NEXT MORNING THAT THINGS BEGAN TO UNRAVEL. I went into work tired but content from my happy chores and the late night they had put me through. I had just settled down with a cup of coffee to attack a heap of paperwork when Vince Masuoka poked his head in the door. “Dexter,” he said.
“The one and only,” I said with proper modesty.
“Did you hear?” he said with an irritating bet-you-didn’t-hear smirk.
“I hear so many things, Vince,” I said. “Which one do you mean?”
“The autopsy report,” he said. And because it was apparently important to him to stay as annoying as possible, he said nothing else, just looked at me expectantly.
“All right, Vince,” I said at last. “Which autopsy report did I not hear about that will change the way I think about everything?”
He frowned. “What?” he said.
“I said, no, I didn’t hear. Please tell me.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what you said,” he said. “But anyway, you know those wacky designer bodies, with all the fruit and stuff in them?”
“At South Beach, and Fairchild Gardens?” I said.
“Right,” he said. “So they get them to the morgue for the autopsy, and the M.E. is like, whoa, great, they’re back.”
I don’t know if you have noticed this, but it is quite possible for two human beings to have a conversation in which one or both parties involved have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. I seemed to be in one of those brain-puzzling chats right now, since so far the only thing I’d gotten from talking to Vince was a profound sense of irritation.
“Vince,” I said. “Please use small and simple words and tell me what you’re trying to say before you force me to break a chair over your head.”
“I’m just saying,” he said, which at least was true and easy to understand, as far as it went, “the M.E. gets those four bodies and says, these were stolen from here. And now they’re back.”
The world seemed to tilt to one side ever so slightly, and a heavy gray fog settled over everything and made it hard to breathe. “The bodies were stolen from the morgue?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Meaning, they were already dead, and somebody took them away and then did all the weird stuff to them?”
He nodded. “It’s just like the craziest thing I ever heard,” he said. “I mean, you steal dead bodies from the morgue? And you play with ’em like that?”
“But whoever did it didn’t actually kill them,” I said.
“No, they were all accidental death, just lying there on their slabs.”
Accidental is such a terrible word. It stands for all the things I have fought against my whole life: it is random, messy, unplanned, and therefore dangerous. It is the word that will get me caught someday, because in spite of all the care in the world, something accidental can still happen and, in this world of ragged chaotic chance, it always does.
And it just had. I had just last night filled a half-dozen garbage bags with someone who was more or less accidentally innocent.
“So it isn’t murder after all,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s still a felony,” he said. “Stealing a corpse, desecrating the dead, something like that. Endangering public health? I mean, it’s gotta be illegal.”
“So is jaywalking,” I said.
“Not in New York. They do it all the time.”
Learning more about the jaywalking statutes in New York did nothing at all to fill me with good cheer. The more I thought about it, the more I would have to say that I was skating perilously close to having real human emotions about this, and as the day went on I thought about it more and more. I felt a strange kind of choking sensation just belo
w my throat, and a vague and aimless anxiety that I could not shake, and I had to wonder: Is this what guilt feels like? I mean, supposing I had a conscience, would mine be troubled now? It was very unsettling, and I didn’t like it at all.
And it was all so pointless—Doncevic had, after all, stuck a knife in Deborah, and if she wasn’t dead, it was not from lack of trying on his part. He was guilty of something rather naughty, even if it was not the more final version of the deed.
So why should I “feel” anything? It is all very well for a human being to say, “I did something that made me feel bad.” But how could cold and empty Dexter possibly say anything of the sort? Even if I did feel something, the odds are very good that it would be something that most of us would agree is, after all, kind of bad. This society does not look with approval on emotions like “Need to Kill,” or “Enjoying Cutting,” and realistically those would be the most likely things to pop up in my case.
No, there was nothing to regret here—it was one small accidental and impulsive tiny little dismemberment. Applying the smooth and icy logic of Dexter’s great intellect resulted in the same bottom line no matter how many times I ran through it: Doncevic was no great loss to anybody, and he had at least tried to kill Deborah. Did I have to hope she would die, simply so I could feel good about myself?
But it was bothering me, and it continued to rankle throughout the morning and on into the afternoon when I stopped at the hospital on my lunch break.
“Hey, buddy,” Chutsky said wearily as I came into the room. “Not much change. She’s opened her eyes a couple of times. I think she’s getting a little stronger.”
I sat in the chair on the opposite side of the bed from Chutsky. Deborah didn’t look stronger. She looked about the same—pale, barely breathing, closer to death than life. I had seen this expression before, many times, but it did not belong on Deborah. It belonged on people I had carefully fitted out to wear that look as I pushed them down the dark slope and away into emptiness as the reward for the wicked things they had done.