Double Dexter (40 page)

T
HE REST OF THE EVENING WENT BY IN A MAD FRENZY OF
activity. My last calm moment came when I called Deborah and asked her to recommend a lawyer. She said she had a buddy in Professional Compliance and would get me the name of the guy they all hated most to come up against. And then Rita called out, “Dinner!” and the doorbell rang, and at the same time Astor started yelling at Cody to stop cheating and Lily Anne began to cry.

I went to the front door and opened it. Brian stood there, dressed in dark clothing, and for once, the smile he gave me did not seem completely synthetic. “Hello, brother,” he said happily, and the tone of his voice made the hair rise on the back of my neck, and in the Deep Downstairs the Dark Passenger hissed and uncurled in uneasy anticipation.

Brian’s voice seemed deeper, colder than normal, and there was a smoldering Something flickering in his eyes, and I knew very well what all that added up to.

“Brian,” I said. “Are you … Did you …?”

He shook his head and his smile got wider. “Not yet,” he said. “On my way now.” I watched him with something very like jealousy
while his smile grew bigger and even more real. “Here,” he said, and he held out several pages of paper stapled together and completely covered with closely written entries that seemed to be mostly numbers.

For one wild second I thought the paper was somehow connected to what we both knew he was about to do, and I took the paper from him without really looking at it. “What is it?” I asked him.

“It’s your list,” he said, and when I didn’t answer he added, “The list of houses. For the auction. I told your lovely wife I would bring it by.”

“Oh. Right,” I said, and I finally looked at the top sheet. One glance was enough to see that it was indeed a list of Miami addresses, with columns for square footage, number of rooms, and so on. “Well,” I said. “Thank you. Um … have you had dinner?” I held the door open wider to invite him in.

“I have … other plans for the evening,” he said, and there was no mistaking the edge in his voice. “As you know,” he added softly.

“Yes,” I said. “I guess I just …” I looked at him in his dark clothes and darker purpose and now it truly was envy that roiled through me, but there was in truth only one thing I could say and so I said it. “Good luck, brother.”

“Thank you, brother,” he said, and he nodded at the list in my hands. “You, too.” And his smile might have had just a touch of mockery to it as he added, “With your houses.” Then he turned and hurried away to his car and drove off into the growing darkness as I could only watch and wish I was going along with him.

“Dexter?” Rita called from the kitchen, snapping me out of my wistful funk. “It’s getting cold!”

I closed the door and went to the table, where the meal was already in full and frantic swing. And things did not calm down all through dinner. It seemed like a near felony to rush through Rita’s stir-fried pork, but we did. I tried to eat calmly and actually taste things, but the kids were totally wound up about the sudden trip to Key West, and Rita was far above us all and cranked to the pitch of a hummingbird’s hyperrhythmic fluttering. In between each mouthful of food, she would snap out a list of things that each of us absolutely
had to do right after we finished eating, and by the time the dishes were all in the sink I found that I had caught the frantic rhythm, too.

I left the table and hurried through packing my clothes. There really wasn’t a great deal to the job, in spite of the fact that Rita spent several all-consuming hours at it. For my part, I grabbed a swimsuit and a few complete changes of clothing and chucked them into a gym bag, while Rita sprinted back and forth between the closet and the bed, where her enormous suitcase sat gaping open and empty. When I was finished I took my bag and put it beside the front door, and then went to check on Cody and Astor.

Cody was sitting on the bed with a full backpack beside him, watching his sister as she stared menacingly into her closet. She took out a shirt, held it up, made a horrible face, and put it back. I watched, fascinated, as she repeated the procedure twice. Cody looked at me and shook his head.

“Are you all packed, Cody?” I asked him.

He nodded, and I looked at Astor. She jiggled in place, chewed on her lip, and stomped her foot, but other than that she seemed to be making very little progress. And so, thinking that it was the correct fatherly thing to do, I took the very great risk of trying to speak to her. “Astor?” I said.

“Leave me
alone
!” she snarled over her shoulder. “I am trying to
pack
! And I have
no clothes at all
!” And she flung a handful of objectionable stuff that was apparently not really clothing off the hangers and onto the floor and kicked it.

Cody raised an eyebrow at me. “Girls,” he said.

He was probably right that it was a gender thing, because Astor’s high-strung performance was almost identical to the one Rita gave me a few moments later when I went back into the bedroom. Rita was holding a sundress in her hand and staring at it like it had killed Kennedy, and there was a pile of dresses and blouses on the floor beside the bed—slightly neater than Astor’s furiously flung heap, but very much the same kind of thing. “How are you doing?” I asked Rita cheerfully.

She snapped her head around and looked at me with the expression of a startled and rather angry deer, as if I had interrupted her in
the middle of some intense and private meditation. “What?” she said, and gave me a shake of her head and a very cranky frown. “Oh, Dexter,
please
not now,” she said. “Honestly, you don’t even— Can’t you go put gas in the car or something? I have to— This is
repulsive
!” she said, flinging the sundress onto the pile beside the bed.

I left Rita to her high-octane dithering, and put my suitcase and Cody’s backpack in the car. I checked the gas gauge and saw that it was nearly full. And then I stood beside the car and thought about what my brother was doing right now, as I did no more than shuffle around carrying luggage. If everything had gone well he would have started by now. It didn’t seem fair that he got to have all the fun, when I was the one who’d had to put up with Crowley all this time. But at least that was over. By the time I went to sleep tonight, Crowley would have gone the way of the dodo and the balanced budget. My troubles were winding down to a wicked ending, and that was all good, even if every cell of my body was pleading with me to follow Brian off to Playtime.

But I would have to content myself with standing in the moonlight and trying to picture my brother’s happy activities. And just in case I needed a reminder of why that was, one glance up the street to the vacant lot was enough. The Ford Taurus containing the ever-vigilant Sergeant Doakes was still parked there, and I imagined I could see his teeth gleaming at me through the windshield. I sighed, waved at him, and went inside.

Rita was still flinging clothing around and muttering rapidly under her breath when I went to bed. I closed my eyes and tried very hard to sleep, but it’s a very difficult thing to do when you are in the middle of a minor cyclone. Time and again I would drift into slumber, only to be jerked awake by the sound of coat hangers clashing angrily, or hundreds of shoes cascading onto the closet floor. Occasionally Rita would say some very surprising things under her breath, or rush out of the room altogether and then hurtle back in again a moment later clutching some arcane object that she would then cram into the bulging suitcase.

Altogether, it made wooing Morpheus a great deal more difficult than usual. I napped and woke up, napped and woke up, until finally, around two thirty, Rita closed her suitcase, thumped it onto the floor,
and crawled in beside me, and I dropped off into deep, wonderful sleep at last.

In the morning, we raced through breakfast at high speed, and actually got the car loaded and ready at a very reasonable hour. Everyone climbed in as I folded up Lily Anne’s stroller and threw it into the back and we were good to go. But as I started the car and put it in gear, a Ford Taurus pulled in and blocked us.

There was no great mystery about who might be driving the other car. I got out and, as I did, the Ford’s passenger door opened and Detective Hood stepped out and gave me a good-morning sneer.

“Sergeant Doakes said you were packing your car,” he said.

I looked past him to the Ford; Doakes’s happy face was just visible behind the glare on the windshield. “Did he?” I said.

Hood leaned in toward me until his face was only a few inches from mine. “I don’t want you thinking you can run away from this, sport,” he said, and his breath smelled like low tide at the fish cannery.

I am a very good imitation, but I am not really a good person. I have done many very bad things, and I hope to live long enough to do many more. And to be completely objective, I almost certainly deserve all the things Hood and Doakes wanted to do to me. But while I wait for the long arm of the law to grab me by the neck, I also deserve to breathe air that is not fouled with the stench of unwashed and rotting dental apocalypse.

I put a stiff index finger into Hood’s sternum and pushed him away. For a moment he thought he was going to tough it out—but I had chosen my spot well, and he had to back off.

“You can arrest me,” I told Hood, “or you can follow me. Otherwise, get out of my way.” I pushed a little harder and he had to take another step back. “And for God’s sake, brush your teeth.”

Hood slapped my hand away and glared at me. I glared back; it takes very little energy, and I could do it all day if that was what he wanted. But he got tired of our staring match first. He looked over his shoulder at Doakes, then back at me. “All right, sport. I’ll be seeing you.” He stared a moment longer, but when I didn’t melt he just turned away, climbed back in beside Doakes, and the car backed away about fifty feet down the street.

I watched them for a moment to see if they would do anything, but they were apparently happy just to watch me. So I got back in our car and began the long drive south.

Doakes stayed right behind us almost all the way to Key Largo. But when it became clear even to his limited reasoning faculties that I was not going to leap out of my car and onto a seaplane and escape to Cuba, he pulled off, turned around, and then drove back toward Miami. After all, there was only one road in and out of the Keys, and I was on it. A few phone calls and they would probably even turn up my reservation in Key West if they wanted to. Fine, I wasn’t doing anything I wouldn’t do in front of them. I put them out of my mind and concentrated on the traffic, which was already getting worse.

The drive from Miami down to Key West has never been a pleasant one if you are interested in actually getting there. On the other hand, if what you really want to get out of the trip is a nice, slow, meandering crawl through an endless column of bumper-to-bumper traffic that winds through a garish wonderland of T-shirt stores and fast-food joints, and you like to stop in the middle of the road now and then so you can gape at some roadside sign and memorize the words to tell all your friends back in Ohio, while everyone in all the cars behind you swelters in the July sun that no air-conditioning can ever overcome, and all the drivers of those other cars stare anxiously at the needle on the temperature gauge of their car as it climbs steadily into the red and they snarl at you through the blinding glare of the windshield and wish you would simply burst into flames and disappear from the face of the earth even though there are a thousand cars filled with people just like you on the road ahead waiting to take your place and start the whole hideously slow crawl all over again—if that is your idea of a dream vacation in the Promised Land, come to the Keys! Paradise awaits!

It really should be a two- or three-hour drive. I have never made it in less than six, and this time it was seven and a half hours of sweltering road rage before we finally pulled into the parking lot of the Surfside Hotel in downtown Key West.

A remarkably skinny black man in a dark uniform leaped in front of our car and opened the door for me, then raced around to the other side of the car and held the door for Rita as she clambered out, and
we all stood there for a moment, dazed and blinded by the merciless heat of July in Key West. The guy in the uniform trotted back to stand in front of me. Apparently he didn’t feel the heat—or perhaps he was so thin he simply had nothing in his system that could make sweat. In any case, his face was bone-dry, and he was jumping around in a dark jacket without showing any sign at all that the very air we were all breathing was so hot and humid you could hold an egg in your hand and watch it boil.

“Checking in, sir?” the man said, with the heavy lilt of some Caribbean island in his voice.

“I hope so,” I said. “Especially if you have air-conditioning.”

The man nodded his head as if he heard this all the time. “Every room, sir. May I help you with your bags?”

It seemed like a very reasonable request, and we all watched as the man piled our bags onto a cart—except for Cody, who would not let go of his backpack. I don’t know whether he was suspicious of the uniformed man, or he had something in the pack he didn’t want anyone else to see; with Cody, either was possible. But it didn’t seem as important as getting into the cool, dark lobby of the hotel as quickly as possible, before the soles of our shoes melted and we stuck to the pavement and sagged helplessly in place while all the flesh melted off our bones.

We followed Captain Skinny inside, and as we stepped into the lobby the cool air hit me with a force that numbed my lips and made time slow down. But we all made it over to reception somehow without slipping into hypothermic shock. The man at the desk inclined his head at us with great gravity and said, “Good afternoon, sir. Do you have a reservation?”

I nodded back and said we had, in fact, reserved a room—and Rita leaned in front of me and blurted out, “Not a room, it’s a suite? Because it’s supposed to be, I mean, and anyway when we got it—online? And Dexter said—my husband. I mean, Morgan.”