I had seen it just last night on Doncevic—and even though I had not carefully chosen him, I realized the look truly belonged there, on him. He had put this same look on my sister, and that was enough. There was nothing here to stir unease in Dexter’s nonexistent soul. I had done my job, taken a bad person out of the crawling frenzy of life, and hurried him into a cluster of garbage bags, where he belonged. If it was untidy and unplanned, it was still righteous, as my law enforcement associates would say. Associates like Israel Salguero, who would now have no need to harass Deborah and damage her career just because the man with the shiny head was making noise in the press.
When I ended Doncevic, I had ended that mess, too. A small weight lifted. I had done what Dexter does, and done it well, and my little corner of the world was just a tiny bit better. I sat in the chair and chewed on a really terrible sandwich, chatting with Chutsky and actually getting to see Deborah open her eyes one time, for a full three seconds. I could not say for sure that she knew I was there, but the sight of her eyeballs was very encouraging and I began to understand Chutsky’s wild optimism a little more.
I went back to work feeling a great deal better about myself and things in general. It was a lovely and gratifying way to roll in from lunch, and the feeling lasted all the way into the building and up to my cubicle, where I found Detective Coulter waiting for me.
“Morgan,” he said. “Siddown.”
I thought it was very nice of him to invite me to sit in my own chair, so I sat down. He looked at me for a long moment, chewing on a toothpick that stuck out of one corner of his mouth. He was a pear-shaped guy, never terribly attractive, and at the moment even less so. He had crammed his sizable buttocks into the extra chair by my desk and, aside from the toothpick, he was working on a giant bottle of Mountain Dew, some of which had already stained his dingy white shirt. His appearance, together with the way he stared silently at me as if hoping I would burst into tears and confess to something, was extremely annoying, to say the least. So fighting off the temptation to collapse into a weeping heap, I picked up a lab report from my in-basket and began to read.
After a moment Coulter cleared his throat. “All right,” he said, and I looked up and raised a polite eyebrow at him. “We gotta talk about your statement.”
“Which one?” I said.
“When your sister got stabbed,” he said. “Couple of things don’t add up.”
“All right,” I said.
Coulter cleared his throat again. “So, uh—Tell me again what you saw.”
“I was sitting in the car,” I said.
“How far away?”
“Oh, maybe fifty feet,” I said.
“Uh-huh. How come you didn’t go with her?”
“Well,” I said, thinking it was really none of his business, “I really didn’t see the point.”
He stared some more and then shook his head. “You coulda helped her,” he said. “Maybe stopped the guy from stabbing her.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“You coulda acted like a partner,” he said. It was clear that the sacred bond of partnership was still pulling strongly at Coulter, so I bit back my impulse to say something, and after a moment he nodded and went on.
“So the door opens and boom, he sticks a knife in?”
“The door opens and Deborah showed her badge,” I said.
“You sure about that?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re fifty feet away?”
“I have really good eyesight,” I said, wondering if everyone who came in to see me today was going to be profoundly annoying.
“Okay,” he said. “And then what?”
“Then,” I said, reliving that moment with terrible slow-motion clarity, “Deborah fell over. She tried to get up and couldn’t and I ran to help her.”
“And this guy Dankawitz, whatever, he was there the whole time?”
“No,” I said. “He was gone, and then he came back out as I got close to Deborah.”
“Uh-huh,” Coulter said. “How long was he gone?”
“Maybe ten seconds tops,” I said. “Why does that matter?”
Coulter took the toothpick out of his mouth and stared at it. Apparently it even looked awful to him, because after a moment of thinking about it, he threw it at my wastebasket. He missed, of course. “Here’s the problem,” he said. “The fingerprints on the knife aren’t his.”
About a year ago I’d had an impacted tooth removed, and the dentist had given me nitrous oxide. For just a moment I felt the same sense of dizzy silliness whipping through me. “The—urm—fingerprints …?” I finally managed to stutter.
“Yeah,” he said, swigging briefly from the huge soda bottle. “We took his prints when we booked him. Naturally.” He wiped the corner of his mouth with his wrist. “And we compared them to the ones on the handle of that knife? And hey. They don’t match. So I’m thinking, what the fuck, right?”
“Naturally,” I said.
“So I thought, what if there was two of ’em, ’cuz what else could it be, right?” He shrugged and, sadly for all of us, fumbled another toothpick out of his shirt pocket and began to munch on it. “Which is why I had to ask you again what you think you saw.”
He looked at me with an expression of totally focused stupidity and I had to close my eyes to think at all. I replayed the scene in my memory one more time: Deborah waiting by the door, the door opening. Deborah showing her badge and then suddenly falling—but all I could see in my memory was the man’s profile with no details. The door opens, Deborah shows the badge, the profile … No, that was it. There was no more detail. Dark hair and a light shirt, but that was true of half the world, including the Doncevic I had kicked in the head a moment later.
I opened my eyes. “I think it was the same guy,” I said, and although for some reason I was reluctant to give him any more, I did. He was, after all, the representative of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, no matter how unattractive. “But to be honest, I can’t really be sure. It was too quick.”
Coulter bit down on the toothpick. I watched it bobble around in the corner of his mouth for a moment while he tried to remember how to speak. “So it coulda been two of ’em,” he said at last.
“I suppose so,” I said.
“One of ’em stabs her, runs inside like, shit, what’d I do,” he said. “And the other one goes, shit, and runs out to look, and you pop him one.”
“It’s possible,” I said.
“Two of ’em,” he repeated.
I did not see the point of answering the same question twice, so I just sat and watched the toothpick wiggle. If I had thought I was filled with unpleasant rumblings before, it was nothing to the whirlpool of unease that was forming in me now. If Doncevic’s fingerprints were not on the knife, he had not stabbed Deborah; that was elementary, Dear Dexter. And if he had not stabbed Deborah, he was innocent and I had made a very large mistake.
This really should not have bothered me. Dexter does what he must and the only reason he does it to the well deserving is because of Harry’s training. For all the Dark Passenger cares, it could just as easily be random. The relief would be just as sweet for us. The way I choose is merely the Harry-imposed icy logic of the knife.
But it was possible that Harry’s voice was in me deeper than I had ever thought, because the idea that Doncevic might be innocent was sending me into a tailspin. And even before I could get a grip on this nasty uncomfortable sensation, I realized Coulter was staring at me.
“Yes,” I said, not at all sure what that meant.
Coulter once again threw a mangled toothpick at the trash can. He missed again. “So where’s the other guy?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I told him. And I didn’t.
But I really wanted to find out.
SIXTEEN
I HAVE HEARD COWORKERS SPEAK OF HAVING “THE BLAHS,” and always thought myself blessed that I lacked the ability to provide a host for anything with such an unattractive name
. But the last few hours of my workday could be described in no other way. Dexter of the Bright Knife, Dexter the Duke of Darkness, Dexter the Hard and Sharp and Totally Empty, had the Blahs. It was uncomfortable, of course, but due to the very nature of the thing, I did not have the energy to do anything about it. I sat at my desk and pushed paper clips around, wishing I could just as easily push the pictures out of my head: Deborah falling, my foot connecting to Doncevic’s head, the knife going up, the saw coming down…
Blah. It was as stupid as it was embarrassing and enervating. Okay, technically speaking, Doncevic had been sort of innocent. I had made one lousy little mistake. Big deal. Nobody’s perfect. Why should I even pretend to be? Was I really going to imagine that I felt bad about ending an innocent life? Preposterous. And anyway, what is innocent, after all? Doncevic had been playing around with dead bodies, and he had caused millions of dollars in damage to the city budget and the tourist industry. There were plenty of people in Miami who would gladly have killed him just to stop the bleeding.
The only problem was that one of those people was not me.
I was not much, I knew that. I never pretended to have any real humanity, and I certainly didn’t tell myself that what I did was all right just because my playmates were cut from the same cloth. In fact, I was fairly certain that the world would be a much better place without me. Mind you, I have never been in a very big hurry to make the world a better place in that regard, either. I wanted to stick around as long as possible, because when you die either everything stops forever, or else Dexter was in for a very warm surprise. Neither option seemed like much of a choice.
So I had no illusions about my worth to the rest of the world. I did what I did and didn’t ask for any thanks. But always before, every time since the very first, I had done it by the rules laid down by Saint Harry, my near-perfect adoptive father. This time I had broken the rules, and for reasons that were not clear to me, that made me feel like I deserved to be caught and punished. And I could not convince myself that this was a healthy feeling.
So I battled the Blahs until quitting time and then, without any real increase in energy, I drove over to the hospital again. The rush-hour traffic did nothing to cheer me up. Everybody seemed to be just going through the motions without any real, genuine homicidal rage. A woman cut me off and threw half an orange at my windshield, and a man in a van tried to run me off the road, but to me they seemed to be doing it mechanically, not really putting their hearts into it.
When I got to Deborah’s room, Chutsky was asleep in his chair, snoring loud enough to rattle the windows. So I sat for a little while, watching Deborah’s eyelids quiver. I thought that was probably a good thing, indicating she was getting her REM sleep and therefore getting better. I wondered what she would think of my little mistake when she woke up. Considering what her attitude had been just before she got stabbed, it didn’t seem likely that she would be terribly understanding about even such a minor slipup. After all, she was as much in the grip of Harry’s Shadow as I was, and if she could barely tolerate what I did when it was Harry Approved, she would never go along with something outside his careful limits.
Debs could never know what I had done. Not a big deal, considering I had always hidden everything from her until recently. But it didn’t make me feel any better this time, for some reason. After all, I had done this one for her, as much as anything else—the first time I had ever acted out of noble impulses, and it had turned out very badly. My sister made a really poor Dark Passenger.
Debs moved her hand, just a twitch, and her eyes blinked open. Her lips parted slightly and I was certain she actually focused on me for a moment. I leaned toward her and she watched me, and then her eyelids drifted closed again.
She was slowly getting better, and she was going to make it, I was sure. It might be weeks rather than days, but sooner or later she was going to get up out of that awful steel bed and get to work at being her old self again. And when she did …
… what would she do about me?
I didn’t know. But I had a very bad feeling that it wouldn’t be much fun for either of us; because as I had realized, we were both still living in Harry’s shadow, and I was pretty sure I knew what Harry would say.
Harry would say it was wrong, because this was not the way he had designed Dexter’s life, as I remembered oh so well.
Harry usually looked very happy when he came in the front door from work. I don’t think he ever was truly happy, of course, but he always looked like it, and this was one of my first very important lessons from him: make your face fit the occasion. It may seem like a small and obvious point, but to a fledgling monster still figuring out that he was very different, it was a vital lesson.
I remember sitting in the great banyan tree in our front yard one afternoon because, frankly, that is what the other kids in the neighborhood did, even long after what one what might call optimum tree-climbing age. Those trees were a great place to sit, with their wide horizontal branches, and they served as a clubhouse for everyone under the age of eighteen.
So I sat in mine that afternoon, hoping the rest of the neighborhood would mistake me for normal. I was at an age when everything was starting to change, and I had begun to notice that I was changing in a very different way. For one thing, unlike the other boys, I was not totally consumed with trying to see under Bobbie Gelber’s skirt when she climbed up into the tree. And for another…
When the Dark Passenger started whispering wicked thoughts, I realized that it was a Presence that had always been there; it just had not spoken until now. But now, when my contemporaries were starting to pass around copies of Hustler, it was sending me dreams of a different kind of illustration, perhaps from Vivisection Monthly. And although the images that came to me were disturbing at first, they started to seem more and more natural, inevitable, desirable, and finally, necessary. But another voice, equally strong, told me this was wrong, crazy, very dangerous. And for the most part the two voices fought to a tie and I did nothing but dream, just like all the human boys my age.
But one wonderful night the two whispering armies came together when I realized that the Gelbers’ dog, Buddy, was keeping Mom awake with its nonstop barking. And this was not a good thing. Mom was dying of some untreatable mysterious thing called a lymphoma, and she needed her sleep. And it occurred to me that if I could help Mom sleep, this would be a very good thing, and both voices agreed that this was so—one somewhat reluctantly, of course, but the other, Darker one, with an eagerness that made me dizzy.
And so it was that Buddy, the loudmouthed little dog, launched Dexter on his way. It was clumsy of course, and much messier than I had planned on, but it was also oh so good and right and necessary …
In the following months there were a few more minor experiments; carefully spaced, playmates more carefully chosen, since even in my hot-blooded phase of self-discovery, I understood that if all the pets in the neighborhood disappeared, someone was bound to ask questions. But there was a stray, and a bicycle trip to a different area, and somehow young Luke Darkwalker got by, slowly learning to be happily me. And because I felt so attached to my small experiments, I buried them close at hand, behind a row of bushes in our backyard.
I certainly know better than that now. But at the time, everything seemed so innocent and wonderful, and I wanted to look out at the bushes and bask in the warm glow of the memories from time to time, and I had made my first mistake.
And so that lazy afternoon I sat in my banyan tree and watched as Harry parked the car, got out, and paused. He had on his work face, the one that said, I have seen it all and don’t like most of it. And he stood beside the car for a long moment with his eyes closed, doing nothing more complicated than breathing.
When he opened his eyes again he had an expression on his face that said, I am home and feel very good about that. He took a step toward the front door and I jumped down out of the tree and went to him.
“Dexter,” he said. “How was your day at
school?”
In truth it had been just about like all the others, but even then I knew that wasn’t the appropriate response. “Good,” I said. “We’re studying communism.”
Harry nodded. “That’s important to know about,” he said. “What’s the capital of Russia?”
“Moscow,” I said. “It used to be St. Petersburg.”
“Really,” said Harry. “Why did they change it?”
I shrugged. “They’re atheists now,” I said. “They can’t have a Saint anything, because they don’t believe in them.”
He put a hand on my shoulder and we started walking to the house. “That can’t be much fun,” he said.
“Didn’t you, um, fight communists?” I asked him, wanting to say kill but not quite daring. “In the Marines?”
Harry nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “Communism threatens our way of life. So it’s important to fight it.”
We were at the front door, and he gently pushed me in ahead of him, into the smell of the fresh coffee that Doris, my adoptive mom, always had ready for Harry when he came home from work. She was not yet too sick to move, and she was waiting for him in the kitchen.
They went through their ritual of drinking coffee and talking quietly, as they did every day, and it was such a perfect Norman Rockwell picture that I would certainly have forgotten it almost instantly if not for what happened later that evening.
Doris was already in bed. She had taken to going to sleep earlier and earlier as her cancer got worse and she needed more pain medicine. Harry, Deborah, and I had gathered in front of the TV set as we usually did. We were watching a sitcom, I don’t remember which. There were so many of them at the time that they all could have been lumped together under the title of Funny Minority and the White Guy. The whole purpose of all these shows seemed to be letting us all know that in spite of our small differences we were really all the same. I kept waiting for some clue that this might include me, but neither Freddie Prinze nor Redd Foxx ever chopped up a neighbor. Still, everyone else seemed to enjoy the show. Deborah laughed out loud now and then, and Harry kept a contented smile on his face, and I did my best just to keep a low profile and fit in amid the hilarity.