Dearly Devoted Dexter (32 page)

And it all came back into focus on the two hollow moons that were actually the pair of thick lenses set in large black frames and wedged onto the face of a small, wiry man with a mustache who was bending over me with a syringe in his hand.

Dr. Danco, I presume?

I didn’t think I had said it out loud, but he nodded and said, “Yes, they called me that. And who are you?” His accent was slightly strained, as if he had to think a little too hard about each word. There was a trace of Cuban to it, but not like Spanish was his native tongue. For some reason his voice made me very unhappy, as if it had an odor of Dexter Repellant to it. But deep inside my lizard brain an old dinosaur lifted its head and roared back and so I did not cringe away from him as I had at first wanted to. I tried to shake my head, but found that very hard to do for some reason.

“Don’t try to move yet,” he said. “It won’t work. But don’t worry, you’ll be able to see everything I do to your friend on the table. And soon enough it will be your turn. You can see yourself, then, in the mirror.” He blinked at me, and a light touch of whimsy came into his voice. “It’s a wonderful thing about mirrors. Did you know that if someone is standing outside the house looking into a mirror, you can see them from inside the house?”

He sounded like an elementary-school teacher explaining a joke to a student he was fond of, but who might be too dumb to get it. And I felt just dumb enough for that to make sense, because I had walked right into this with no thought deeper than,
Gee, that’s interesting
. My own moon-driven impatience and curiosity had made me careless and he had seen me peeping in. Still, he was gloating, and that was annoying, so I felt compelled to say something, however feeble.

“Why yes, I knew that,” I said. “And did you know that this house has a front door, too? And no peacocks on guard this time.”

He blinked. “Should I be alarmed?” he said.

“Well, you never know who might come barging in uninvited.”

Dr. Danco moved the left corner of his mouth upward perhaps a quarter of an inch. “Well,” he said, “if your friend on the operating table is a fair sample, I think I may be all right, don’t you?” And I had to admit that he had a point. The first-team players had not been impressive; what did he have to fear from the bench? If only I wasn’t still a little dopey from whatever drugs he had used on me, I’m quite sure I would have said something far more clever, but in truth I was still in a little bit of a chemical fog.

“I do hope I’m not supposed to believe that help is on the way?” he said.

I was wondering the same thing, but it didn’t seem entirely smart to say so. “Believe what you like,” I said instead, hoping that was ambiguous enough to give him pause, and cursing the slowness of my normally swift mental powers.

“All right then,” he said. “I believe you came here alone. Although I am curious about why.”

“I wanted to study your technique,” I said.

“Oh, good,” he said. “I’ll be happy to show you—firsthand.” He flickered his tiny little smile at me again and added, “And then feet.” He waited for a moment, probably to see if I would laugh at his hilarious pun. I felt very sorry to disappoint him, but perhaps later it might seem funnier, if I got out of this alive.

Danco patted my arm and leaned in just a bit. “We’ll have to have your name, you know. No fun without it.”

I pictured him speaking to me by name as I lay strapped to the table, and it was not a cheerful image.

“Will you tell me your name?” he asked.

“Rumplestiltskin,” I said.

He stared at me, his eyes huge behind the thick lenses. Then he reached down to my hip pocket and worked my wallet out. He flipped it open and found my driver’s license. “Oh. So YOU’RE Dexter. Congratulations on your engagement.” He dropped my wallet beside me and patted my cheek. “Watch and learn, because all too soon I will be doing the same things to you.”

“How wonderful for you,” I said.

Danco frowned at me. “You really should be more frightened,” he said. “Why aren’t you?” He pursed his lips. “Interesting. I’ll increase the dosage next time.” And he stood up and moved away.

I lay in a dark corner next to a bucket and a broom and watched him bustle about the kitchen. He made himself a cup of instant Cuban coffee and stirred in a huge amount of sugar. Then he moved back to the center of the room and stared down at the table, sipping thoughtfully.

“Nahma,” the thing on the table that had once been Sergeant Doakes pleaded. “Nahana. Nahma.” Of course his tongue had been removed—obvious symbology for the person Danco believed had squealed on him.

“Yes, I know,” Dr. Danco said. “But you haven’t guessed a single one yet.” He almost seemed to be smiling as he said that, although his face did not look like it was formed to make any expression beyond thoughtful interest. But it was enough to set Doakes off into a fit of yammering and trying to thrash his way out of his bonds. It didn’t work very well, and didn’t seem to concern Dr. Danco, who moved away sipping his coffee and humming along off-key to Tito Puente. As Doakes flopped about I could see that his right foot was gone, as well as his hands and tongue. Chutsky had said his entire lower leg had been removed all at once. The Doctor was obviously making this one last a little longer. And when it was my turn—how would he decide what to take and when?

Piece by small dim piece my brain was clearing itself of fog. I wondered how long I had been unconscious. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing I could discuss with the Doctor.

The dosage
, he had said. He had been holding a syringe as I woke up, been surprised that I was not more frightened— Of course. What a wonderful idea, to inject his patients with some kind of psychotropic drug to increase their sense of helpless terror. I wished I knew how to do that. Why hadn’t I gotten medical training? But, of course, it was a little late to worry about that. And in any case, it sounded very much like the dosage was adjusted just right for Doakes.

“Well, Albert,” said the Doctor to the sergeant, in a very pleasant and conversational voice, slurping his coffee, “what’s your guess?”

“Nahana! Nah!”

“I don’t think that’s right,” said the Doctor. “Although perhaps if you had a tongue, it might have been. Well, in any case,” he said, and he bent to the edge of the table and made a small mark on a piece of paper, almost like he was crossing something out. “It is rather a long word,” he said. “Nine letters. Still, you have to take the good with the bad, don’t you?” And he put down his pencil and picked up a saw, and as Doakes bucked wildly against his bonds the Doctor sawed off Doakes’s left foot, just above the ankle. He did it very quickly and neatly, placing the severed foot beside Doakes’s head as he reached over to his array of instruments and picked up what looked a large soldering iron. He applied this to the new wound and a wet hiss of steam billowed up as he cauterized the stump for minimal blood flow. “There now,” he said. Doakes made a strangled noise and went limp as the smell of seared flesh drifted through the room. With any luck at all he would be unconscious for a while.

And I, happily, was a little more conscious all the time. As the chemicals from the Doctor’s dart gun seeped out of my brain, a sort of muddy light began to trickle in.

Ah, memory. Isn’t it a lovely thing? Even when we are in the middle of the worst of times, we have our memories to cheer us. I, for example, lay there helpless, able only to watch as dreadful things happened to Sergeant Doakes, knowing that soon it would be my turn. But even so, I had my memories.

And what I remembered now was something Chutsky had said when I rescued him. “When he got me up there,” he had said, “he said, ‘Seven,’ and ‘What’s your guess?’” At the time I had thought it a rather strange thing to say, and wondered if Chutsky had imagined it as a side effect of the drugs.

But I had just heard the Doctor say the same things to Doakes: “What’s your guess?” followed by, “Nine letters.” And then he had made a mark on the piece of paper taped to the table.

Just as there had been a piece of paper taped near each victim we had found, each time with a single word on it, the letters crossed out one at a time. HONOR. LOYALTY. Irony, of course: Danco reminding his former comrades of the virtues they had forsaken by turning him over to the Cubans. And poor Burdett, the man from Washington whom we found in the shell of the house in Miami Shores. He had been worth no real mental effort. Just a quick five letters, POGUE. And his arms, legs, and head had been quickly cut off and separated from his body. P-O-G-U-E. Arm, leg, leg, arm, head.

Was it really possible? I knew that my Dark Passenger had a sense of humor, but it was quite a bit darker than this—this was playful, whimsical, and even silly.

Much like the Choose Life license plate had been. And like everything else I had observed about the Doctor’s behavior.

It seemed so completely unlikely, but—

Doctor Danco was playing a little game as he sliced and diced. Perhaps he had played it with others in those long years inside the Cuban prison at the Isle of Pines, and maybe it had come to seem like just the right thing to serve his whimsical revenge. Because it certainly seemed like he was playing it now—with Chutsky, and with Doakes and the others. It was quite absurd, but it was also the only thing that made sense.

Doctor Danco was playing hangman.

“Well,” he said, squatting beside me again. “How do you think your friend is doing?”

“I think you have him stumped,” I said.

He cocked his head to one side and his small, dry tongue flicked out and over his lips as he stared at me, his eyes large and unblinking through his thick glasses. “Bravo,” he said, and he patted my arm again. “I don’t think you really believe this will happen to you,” he said. “Perhaps a ten will persuade you.”

“Does it have an E in it?” I asked, and he rocked back slightly as if some offensive odor had drifted up to him from my socks.

“Well,” he said, still without blinking, and then something that may have been related to a smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “Yes, there are two E’s. But of course, you guessed out of turn, so . . .” He shrugged, a tiny gesture.

“You could count it as a wrong guess—for Sergeant Doakes,” I suggested, quite helpfully, I thought.

He nodded. “You don’t like him. I see,” he said, and he frowned a little. “Even so, you really should be more afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” I said. Sheer bravado, of course, but how often does one get a chance to banter with an authentic villain? And the shot seemed to go home; Danco stared at me for a long moment before he finally gave his head a very slight shake.

“Well, Dexter,” he said, “I can see we’re going to have our work cut out for us.” And he gave me his tiny, almost invisible smile. “Among other things,” he added, and a cheerful black shadow reared up behind him as he spoke, thundering a happy challenge to my Dark Passenger, which slid forward and bellowed back. For a moment we faced off like that, and then he finally blinked, just once, and stood up. He walked back over to the table where Doakes slumbered so peacefully, and I sank back in my homey little corner and wondered what sort of miracle the Great Dexterini might come up with for this, his greatest escape.

Of course, I knew that Deborah and Chutsky were on their way, but I found that more worrisome than anything else. Chutsky would insist on restoring his damaged manhood by charging in on his crutch waving a gun in his only hand, and even if he allowed Deborah to back him up, she was wearing a large cast that made movement difficult. Hardly a rescue team to inspire confidence. No, I had to believe that my little corner of the kitchen was simply going to become crowded, and with all three of us taped and doped there would be no help coming for any of us.

And truthfully, in spite of my brief spatter of heroic dialogue, I was still somewhat woozy from whatever had been in Danco’s sleepy dart. So I was doped, tightly bound, and all alone. But there’s always some positive to every situation, if you just look hard enough, and after trying to think of one for a moment, I realized that I had to admit that so far I had not been attacked by rabid rats.

Tito Puente swung into a new tune, something a bit softer, and I grew more philosophical. We all have to go sometime. Even so, this would not make my list of top ten preferred ways to perish. Falling asleep and not waking up was number one on my list, and it got rapidly more distasteful after that.

What would I see when I died? I can’t really bring myself to believe in the soul, or Heaven and Hell, or any of that solemn nonsense. After all, if human beings have souls, wouldn’t I have one, too? And I can assure you, I don’t. Being what I am, how could I? Unthinkable. It’s hard enough just to be me. To be me with a soul and a conscience and the threat of some kind of afterlife would be impossible.

But to think of wonderful, one-of-a-kind me going away forever and never coming back—very sad. Tragic, really. Perhaps I should consider reincarnation. No control there, of course. I could come back as a dung beetle, or even worse, come back as another monster like me. There was certainly nobody who would grieve over me, especially if Debs went out at the same time. Selfishly, I hoped I would go first. Just get it over with. This whole charade had gone on long enough. Time to end it. Perhaps it was just as well.

Tito started a new song, very romantic, singing something about “Te amo,” and now that I thought of it, it might very well be that Rita would grieve over me, the idiot. And Cody and Astor, in their damaged way, would surely miss me. Somehow I had been picking up an entire train of emotional attachments lately. How could this keep happening to me? And hadn’t I been thinking much the same thoughts far too recently, as I hung upside down underwater in Deborah’s flipped car? Why was I spending so much time dying lately, and not getting it right? As I knew only too well, there really wasn’t much to it.