Dexter Is Dead

FOURTEEN

It seems terribly odd, considering the general tone of recent events, but I actually felt somewhat chipper as I fought my way into the sludge that is Miami traffic. I had a brief moment of uneasiness as I drove away from Kraunauer’s office and headed for the MacArthur Parkway, a small and anxious hiss from the Dark Passenger that said things were not at all what they should be. And sure enough, a moment later, a car right behind me slammed on its brakes and leaned on the horn. I stepped reflexively on my own brakes and looked back, senses on high alert.

But it was no real threat, just an eager idiot, overanxious to get home after a hard day on the job. I watched the car in the mirror, a newish dark blue SUV, as it pulled out into traffic and joined the rest of us in the long, never-ending stream of cars headed for the causeway and home.

Aside from that, I saw no suspicious cars on my tail, and no one on the sidewalk seemed to be pointing a bazooka. I decided that the Passenger was just responding uneasily to our newfound freedom, no doubt simply picking up on tiny things, the perfectly normal universal hostility of the rush-hour drivers all around us, so I dismissed it and settled back to enjoy my own rare and unwarranted high spirits.

There was absolutely no reason for me to feel anything but angst, and yet there was an unquestioned spring of good cheer welling up from some rarely used spot inside. It wasn’t just my excellent prospects for making Debs wait for me, juggling children and gnashing her teeth. A larger part of this unwarranted and uncharacteristic brightness came from the general sense of belonging I got from the savage, merciless ferocity of driving in My City at rush hour. In the past I’d always gotten a sort of My-Country-My-People affinity from being up to my neck in a sea of drivers with a total lack of empathy and a naked lust to kill. It was nice to feel this sense of happy belonging settle over me once more; it meant that some tiny, deeply buried part of Dexter had decided that the world was restored to its natural state and Things were going to be all right.

And another cause of my lunkheaded happiness was certainly born of my sense of accomplishment. I had delivered a vital chunk of evidence into the hands of my powerful and supremely effective lawyer, and thereby put the first nail into Detective Anderson’s coffin, while removing one from my own. But yet another piece of my stupidly good mood, I realized, was because of the effects of being in the company of Kraunauer himself. His aura was almost tangible. There was something about him that impressed me, which all by itself was impressive enough. I had always considered myself the Master of Duplicity, the Paradigm of Synthetic Behavior. No one else had ever come close — until now. Kraunauer left me in the dust. He was the most highly polished faker I had ever met, and I could do nothing but watch and admire every time he favored me with one of his completely artificial smiles. And he had not merely one fake grin; I’d already seen at least seven, each with its own very specific application, each so perfect as to leave me breathless with admiration.

Aside from my appreciation for someone who was better than me at something I held dear, there was an unspoken assumption of command in his bearing. And it worked. Just being near him made me want to please him. It should have been deeply unsettling, but somehow it wasn’t.

I have no real feelings. And I am certainly not capable of love, or even hero worship. There was no one in this world I cared more for than Dexter. But in our short time together, Frank Kraunauer had impressed me in a way no one else ever had, with the possible exception of Harry, my adoptive father. On the face of it, that was beyond absurd, and I wondered about it. Harry had saved me, created me, taught me how to use my gifts, and consequently made my life into something that, until recently at least, I rather enjoyed in my own quiet way. Harry was the All-Father, the Fount of Wisdom, Maker of the only Map of the Dark Path, and I had known him for many years.

But I had only met Kraunauer recently, spent less than an hour in his company, and I didn’t really know him at all, except to know that he was, in his own way, as completely without feelings as I was. I knew this from his reputation, of course. But from being in his company I had also sensed that somewhere behind his eyes there lurked that familiar Dark Emptiness. He was a predator, totally without mercy, the kind of dedicated and enthusiastic shark who didn’t even need the smell of blood in the water to strike. He ripped out chunks of flesh because that’s what he was made to do, and he liked it that way. Naturally enough, that kind of inborn enthusiasm struck a chord in me.

Beyond all that, he was on my side, and it was universally acknowledged that he did not fail. Drug kingpins, brutal dictators, mass murderers — he always came through for his clients, no matter how heinous the crimes they had committed. Because of him, some truly awful, wicked, dreadful monsters roamed free. And if all went as it should, I would soon be one of them. All hail Kraunauer.

So I settled into my seat and relaxed, enjoying the drive. I made it over the causeway in under fifteen minutes, which was disappointing, since I really did want to keep Deborah waiting. But once I turned south onto I-95, things slowed down again to a very satisfying crawl. I inched along, making only a block or two every five minutes, and taking pleasure from traveling so slowly that for the most part, the speed wasn’t even enough to register on the speedometer. With any luck at all, I would make Debs wait for a good half hour or more.

Of course, not everyone was keeping their so-called sister waiting, and very few of the other drivers shared my newfound enthusiasm for creeping along like this. Most of them, in fact, seemed to take against it somewhat, and very few were hesitant about sharing their feelings with the other drivers who were clearly making them go so slow simply by being in front of them. There was a great deal of horn blasting, middle finger raising, and even good old-fashioned fist shaking. All standard fare, but done with real enthusiasm and passion, and therefore a pleasure to behold. I didn’t join in; I simply observed, taking a quiet civic pride in watching my fellow citizens interact with each other in such a genuine and meaningful way.

Just before NW 10th, we slowed even more, which was very gratifying. When I had inched forward enough, I could see that a Jaguar convertible had plowed into a van loaded with seafood. There was an impressive array of dents, broken glass, and twisted bumpers, considering that they couldn’t have been moving very fast when they collided. But the impact had caused the van’s back doors to spring open, and a wonderful variety of fresh and succulent seafood had slid across the Jaguar’s hood and filled the car’s beautiful leather interior. Luckily for all concerned, it looked like most of the fish would stay fresh, since a massive amount of ice had gone with it.

A nicely coiffed woman still sat in the Jaguar’s passenger seat, screaming hysterically, up to her shoulders in fish and ice. The driver was nose-to-nose with two men from the van, and the words they were exchanging did not seem to be the kind that lead to lasting friendship. And because this was, after all, Miami, three young men and one woman, from three different cars, had left their vehicles to gather up the spilled fish and take it home for dinner.

This delightful accident delayed me quite nicely, and it was nearly eight o’clock when I arrived at Deborah’s little house in Coral Gables. It was a modest home, and since my ex-sister had neither the interest nor the patience for gardening, it was somewhat overgrown. There was an assortment of fruit trees that had spilled their crop all over the yard unnoticed, and a crumbling coral rock wall around the place. Her car was in the short driveway, and I parked behind it and got out.

And strangely…I hesitated. I found that I was a little reluctant to face her, to have my nose rubbed one more time in her dislike and contempt for me, which, it should be repeated, was totally undeserved. But it stung anyway. I didn’t like seeing her look at me the way she had when she visited me in jail. Like I was some kind of loathsome contagious affliction, something smeared onto her shoes, perhaps a great and disgusting glob of raccoon feces.

Standing beside my car, I stared at her front door. I knew it didn’t matter what she thought of me — and yet, somehow, it did. It was astonishing, but apparently I still wanted her to like me. She never would, ever again, if she ever had in the first place. She’d made that quite clear, and feelings as strong as she’d shown do not change. So why didn’t I simply saunter up to the door and get this unpleasant business over with? Why should I dither and mope because I didn’t want to face her sneers?

No reason at all. I would do it, and get on with my life — get on with saving my life, in fact, which was enormously more important than any of Deborah’s mean-spirited snits.

So I leaned against the car and did nothing. A car drove by slowly, a dark blue SUV of some kind, probably a Jeep. Hard to be sure — it was one of the new kind, the ones that look like station wagons, and they all look the same. It didn’t matter. I looked up at the sky. Most of it still seemed to be there. That didn’t matter much, either. I looked at the front door of the house again. If Debs peeked out, she would see me here, loitering indecisively, and she might think I was hesitating because of timidity. She might think I actually gave a rodent’s rectum what she thought of me, which was silly. I didn’t care. Not at all. I could go knock on the door anytime I wanted to.

Once again, as seemed to be the case so often in my life, my stomach finally settled things; it growled, reminding me that life goes on, and even more so with a good dinner. And so, rather than risking the wrath of my digestive system, which was much more relevant than the wrath of my nonsister, I straightened up, clutched the custody papers firmly in my left hand, and moseyed up to the door.

Deborah answered in person on the first knock. She looked at me with such a hard, stony face that she must have set the expression in place well before now, so it would be properly congealed when I saw it. She said nothing at all, letting her face do all the talking. Behind her, I could see a dim purple glow from her living room, and hear the sounds of a cartoon show. I recognized one of the voices — it was the only show Cody and Astor could agree on watching, and it involved a platypus, as I recalled.

The kids must be in there, all four of them together, Deb’s son, Nicholas, and my very own Lily Anne, as well as Cody and Astor. I craned my neck slightly to see if I could catch a glimpse, and Deborah immediately pulled the door shut around her, so only her neck and head stuck out and I could no longer see in at all.

I shrugged. If she was that determined to be unpleasant, so be it. And so I saw no need for pleasantries. “I assume you got my message,” I said curtly.

She stared a moment longer, and then without any change in expression, she simply held out her hand.

It took me a moment to realize that she was not offering to shake my hand, but I figured it out at last and gave her the custody papers. She took them, stared at me a few seconds longer, and then, before I could even frame a properly scathing farewell, she shut the door firmly in my face.

Well, if nothing else, the papers were delivered. At least I could scratch one thing off my to-do list. And I supposed I could cross the entire bunch of them off my Christmas card list, as well. I doubted that I would ever again really wish Debs a merry anything, and she would certainly make sure that all four kids remained uncontaminated by my toxic presence. I had watched how she behaved with her boy, Nicholas, and although I would not quite call her a helicopter mom, she would certainly be very aggressive about protecting them from all dreadful forms of mental and psychic pollution, like drugs, violence, and Dexter.

Well, she was in for a little bit of a surprise, at least as far as Cody and Astor were concerned. She thought of them as battered waifs, poor little orphans of the storm, sweet and innocent children who had suffered a series of terrible shocks. She would discover soon enough that they were nothing of the kind; Cody and Astor were undeveloped Dexters. The terrible physical, mental, and psychic abuse they had taken from their bio dad had left them just as empty of empathy and human feeling as I was. And they had not had the Harry Course of Miracles to properly channel the impulses that were already slipping up behind them from the Dark Backseat and gently but firmly trying to take the controls and drive them down the Dark Highway. When these impulses began to take over, as they absolutely must from time to time, Deborah would begin to realize that she was nurturing a viper in her bosom. I almost wished I could be there to see her face when she found out she had changelings in her nest. I had a feeling that the discovery might alter her perspective just a wee little bit.

It brought me a small glow of much-needed comfort, even when I realized that she would blame the whole thing on me. That didn’t matter at all; I was already dead to her, and I could not conceivably get any deader.

So be it. I was never meant to be a father. Another chapter in the Great Book of Me was finished. Time to close the book and move on. No kids, no sister, and no regrets.

I turned away and went back to my rental car.

—

In Miami, many people eat rather late each night. It is part of the city’s cultural heritage, a proud Old World tradition, brought to our shores by our Hispanic brethren. It is not unheard-of to eat dinner at ten o’clock, and certainly nine o’clock is common. But tonight, at a mere eight o’clock, Dexter was simply not in touch with his Cuban side, and he was becoming ever so slightly rapacious. I drove away from Deborah’s crumbling, child-infested cottage and began my search for something appropriate to eat.

There were so many choices, even within a two- or three-mile radius. The possibilities were nearly overwhelming; Chinese or Chinese nouveau; Cuban, of course; Spanish classical or tapas; Thai; at least three varieties of French; ribs and barbecue — truly, that was only scratching the surface. And the beauty of it was that I could go to any of them and eat my fill of My City’s Great Bounty, delectable viands from every land and every body of water on the globe. My mouth began to water. Freedom is truly a wonderful thing.

I very nearly chose Thai — there was a very good place not too far away, just off Miracle Mile. But at the last minute, I had the thought — and I am quite sure it is Politically Incorrect — that Thailand was much too close to Japan, and I’d had sushi for lunch. I turned left instead of right, and headed over to Pepino’s, a cozy Mexican place in Coconut Grove.

Coconut Grove has always moved at a slower pace than the rest of Miami, and so it was no surprise to me that it was apparently still rush hour on Main Highway. The only difference was that most of the rush was centered around finding a parking place. Unfortunately, all the legal spaces were taken. But I was sure I could find one that was nearly legal. I grew up here, and I had a few tricks that latecomers to the Grove didn’t know.

I drove down a side street about half a mile from the restaurant. Fifty yards down, I turned into a dark alley that cut between two boutiques. There was a large Dumpster, overflowing with trash, and just beyond it, unlit and invisible to any meter maids with prying eyes, I parked my car.

But apparently there was at least one other Grove native having a night on the town, because as I walked out of the alley feeling just a little smug, another car turned down the alley and went past me, no doubt looking for a place to park. It was another one of those station wagon — style SUVs, dark blue. There were certainly a lot of them on the roads lately. I wondered why. After all, real station wagons were available, and cheaper. Why buy something nearly identical that costs more, just to get the all-wheel drive? There were no muddy mountain roads here, and no treacherous icy highways. What did that leave? Did all these people really spend their weekends racing through mud in the Everglades?

By the time I had hiked back to the restaurant, I was nearly hallucinating enchiladas. The last two blocks had been true torture, as the scent of cumin, hot sauce, and tacos seemed to be everywhere. But I made it safely, without collapsing into a puddle of drool.

Pepino’s was a small place, but it had a little bar with four plush stools, and the one at the end was empty. I sat and quickly found out why the seat was available; every time anyone went into or out of the kitchen, or the restroom, I had to move, and for a large tray filled with steaming food, I actually had to stand up and skitter along the wall like a cockroach when the lights come on. But my food arrived quickly, and it was good, and in a very short time I was full and happy once more.

The walk back to my car after dinner was far more of a contented saunter than the famished stagger my hunger had forced me into on the way in. And the car was right where I’d left it, too. Life can be so easy when the Universe is feeling cooperative, can’t it?

I drove south to my little torture chamber of a motel, through traffic that was a great deal lighter than rush hour had been. Of course, as a native Miami driver I knew very well that this only meant there were new dangers to watch for. Because there was more room to maneuver, there were more drivers weaving in and out of the lanes at two or three times the speed limit. The motorcycles were bad enough, but they were far from the most numerous. Sports cars, of course, and sedans, SUVs, delivery vans, and even a mammoth flatbed tow truck with a minivan on its bed.

Escalades seemed popular tonight. At least three of them roared by me in the first five miles. Maybe there is some special psychotic wrinkle in everyone who decides to buy a Cadillac. It was an intriguing thought; perhaps I should shop for an Escalade. I didn’t really mind the reckless speed seekers. I was used to it. And it’s no real burden at all; all you have to do is maintain a steady speed and keep to your lane and let them move around you freely. And if they get a little overeager and actually crash into someone, move carefully around the wreckage with a wave and a smile and a feeling of satisfaction that it wasn’t you this time.

So I drove south, and as I did my Mexican banquet began to catch up to me — not in any unspeakably rude digestive way. I just began to get sleepy, as I always did after a large dinner. In fact, I started to feel so entirely drowsy that I was actually looking forward to my horribly misshapen, agony-inducing “bed.” I sped up a little — not enough to make the Escalades think I was competing, of course. That would probably have made them kick it up to warp speed and drive the interloper off the road.

But I did go just fast enough to cut a few minutes from the journey, and just when my drowsy eyes beheld the ancient, half-dead neon sign that marked my hotel, my phone began to chirp. I glanced at the screen — not that I needed to. Only one person would be calling me, and that’s who it was.

“Hello, Brian,” I said into the phone.

“Hello, brother,” he said in his favorite fraudulently happy greeting. “Where are you now?”

“I am just pulling into the parking lot of my hotel,” I said. And as I did so, I noticed that the lot was nearly full, which seemed absurd enough to be nearly surreal.

“Can you manage a little face time?” he said. “I have one or two nuggets of importance for you.”

I sighed, looking around for a place to park. Every slot close to my room had a car in it. “I can barely keep my eyes open,” I said. “Can it wait until morning?”

Brian paused, long enough to make me wonder why. “I suppose so,” he said at last, a little bit hesitantly. “But…Do be a little extra watchful till then?”

“If I was any more watchful I would need at least four eyes,” I said. I saw an open parking spot at last, all the way down at the far end of the lot, easily forty feet from my room.

“All righty then,” Brian said, back to his synthetic good cheer. “Shall we say eight o’clock tomorrow morning, same place?”

“Fine,” I said, pulling into the very last slot in the parking lot. “See you then.”

“ ’Tis devoutly to be wished,” Brian said, and hung up.

I sat there in astonishment for a moment; had my brother really just quoted Hamlet? Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me, but he’d never done anything of the kind before — nothing at all, in fact, that gave even the tiniest hint that he was familiar with Shakespeare, or any other classic work. But Brian was always full of surprises, and this one, at least, was not overtly unpleasant.

I turned the key and shut down my rental car, taking one last moment to reflect with weariness on my long and busy day. But before I got much further than, You done good, kid, I felt my eyes begin to flutter shut. I snapped them open; this was no place to fall asleep, even though it was probably more comfy than my bed. I took a deep breath and climbed out of the car, fumbling the keys and my phone until I got both safely into pockets, closing the car door with a hip, and stumbling wearily down the cracked sidewalk toward my room.

Music was blasting out of two adjacent rooms a few doors from mine. They probably had the door between them open to give the party more space. It was loud enough to rattle the windows, and not loud enough to mask the gleeful and drunken shouting, singing, and cries of Whoo! coming from within. Probably a bachelor party or some such thing. On the one hand, it was nice to have the crowded parking lot mystery explained. On the other hand, it was going to make sleeping a slightly more difficult problem.

I sighed. Where did it stop? When did all the petty persecutions of Poor Deserving Dexter finally trickle to a halt? Impending death or imprisonment wasn’t bad enough. Now I would be hearing a sound track of drunken revelry all night long, too. I was doing fine with protecting Life and Liberty, but apparently someone else’s Pursuit of Happiness would finally do me in. It’s the little things, after all, that finally break us.

Blow, wind, crack your cheeks, I thought. Brian wasn’t the only one who could quote Shakespeare.

I made it to my room without thinking of any other suitably apocalyptic line from Lear, and I was too tired to start in on Othello. I flopped onto the bed facedown — and immediately I was bent into a bow shape, with the soles of my feet facing the back of my head.

I struggled up to my feet and sat on the edge of the bed to remove my shoes. The car keys fell out of my pocket and onto the floor. And as they did, I remembered getting out of the car and fumbling with my phone and the keys, and I couldn’t remember whether I’d locked the car. It didn’t matter; it was easy enough to step to the window, point the car’s clicker down the line, and push the lock button.

I sighed again, more heavily this time. It really is always the little things. Sooner or later, there would be one last niggling little torture flung at my head, something so insignificant that it couldn’t possibly matter to anyone, and it would be the one tiny saddle sore too many that finally sent me screaming and drooling over the edge into red-eyed raving insanity.

But this wasn’t it, not quite. I fought my way up to my feet and trudged over to a spot two feet from the window. I was tired and cranky and didn’t really feel like spending all my precious remaining energy opening the door, stepping outside, and leaning out to watch. And the ancient curtains looked so vile and crusty that I really didn’t want to touch them. But they were also worn thin enough that I could probably see the reflection of the blinking brake lights to show me it had worked. I pointed the clicker and pushed the lock button, watching for the flash of lights.

The flash came right away, but it was far too bright for brake lights, and it was followed by a blast so loud and strong that even as it nearly deafened me, it hurled me back from the window, splinters of glass showering all around me, flinging Dexter together with all that was left of the window into a tattered heap on the floor behind the door.

For a moment I just blinked around me, listening to the sudden cacophony of car alarms from outside. I could feel little spots of sharp pain starting to bloom on my face, and a few more on my chest. I blinked some more; at least my eyes were okay. I looked at my right hand; it had fallen into my lap, bleeding from a couple of cuts. I was still holding the car keys. What I could see of the rest of me seemed fine, but my shirt was torn and spotted with a dozen small blotches of blood. On top of everything else, a brand-new shirt ruined.

I closed my eyes in weary resignation and slid to the floor, completely indifferent to anything that might possibly happen now. Let them take me. And when they did, it would be in a terribly torn shirt, which was the final, crushing indignity.

It really is always the little things.