Dexter Is Dead

FIVE

It must be that somewhere there truly is a malevolent deity who watches over the Wicked with tender care. Because Kraunauer did not die, and his word was as good as gold — better, really, when you consider the terrible inflation on the gold market lately. In any case, gold would not have sprung Dexter overnight, and Kraunauer did. Bright and early the next morning, well before I had another chance at the epicurean ecstasy of TGK’s lunch, I was blinking in the sunlight of the parking lot at the front of the building and wondering what happened next.

They had given me back my clothing and all else they had taken from me on my arrival — plus a thick folder of paperwork that I assumed gave details of my release and terrible threats dealing with my certain reincarceration. I had bundled it all up and changed gratefully into my own clothes. To be perfectly honest, I had grown a wee bit weary of the cheerful orange jumpsuit, and it was very nice to wear my own, relatively bland clothing again. On the downside, my pants still had some bloodstains on them from the hectic multivictim evening of carnage that had unfolded just prior to my arrest, and the jumpsuit had at least always been a hundred percent bloodstain free. Still, the successful life is a series of trade-offs, and I shed no tears over the loss of my jumpsuit. I’d also gotten back my wallet, my phone, and even my belt. The belt was the real clincher; it was a truly euphoric feeling to know that I could hang myself now if I wanted to. I didn’t, of course, but I might consider it soon if I couldn’t think of a way to get home. I’d arrived in a police car. Sadly, there were none waiting to give me a ride. And in truth, I’d had quite enough of police for the time being. Walking would be far preferable, and it was good for me, too. A nice, brisk fifteen-mile stroll to my house would get the blood flowing, put a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.

On the other hand, this was Miami — which is to say that it was hot and getting hotter. It would be a terrible shame if I got out of jail only to die of heatstroke. Perhaps if I waited long enough, a cab would turn up. And if I waited only a little longer, they might build a rail line right to the door. It seemed just as likely.

There were few other options that I could see. Although they had given me back my phone, it was of course completely dead after its unhappy incarceration. So I stood just outside the front door, looking stupidly around me. I’d come in through the back, on the opposite side of the building. The view here in front was far more pleasant; towering up behind me was the delightfully ominous gray facade of the building, and wrapped around me, in a thought-provoking design moment, was a high barbed-wire fence. Cars were parked absolutely everywhere and anywhere they might, even in spaces that were not actually spaces. The parked vehicles stretched around three sides of the building and overflowed a large lot in back. They were crammed in two-deep under trees, on top of median strips, and in No Parking Fire Zone spots. Anywhere else in the city such madcap abandonment of vehicles would certainly be rewarded with towing and impoundment. It made one reflect on the irony that here, at the actual jail, where the most nefarious repeat meter violators and illegal parking offenders were incarcerated, there was no apparent parking enforcement.

It also made one reflect on a further irony: that with so many vehicles lying about unused, not a single one of them was available to give poor liberated Dexter a lift. It didn’t seem fair. But of course, nothing in life ever is fair, outside of a few old-fashioned board games.

Ah, well. Freedom is a two-edged sword, for it carries with it the terrible burden of Self-Reliance. And I now knew, from hard-earned experience, that my spirit yearned to breathe free air, and I should be willing to pay the price.

And I was. But in truth, if paying the price meant walking home, I would rather have put Freedom on a credit card.

So I stood there blinking in the bright sunlight and wishing I had sunglasses. And my car. And what the hell, a Cuban sandwich and an Iron Beer. And I had been standing there for a good three minutes before I became aware of a horn beeping nearby, at regular intervals. The sound came from my right. Out of no more than idle curiosity, I glanced that way.

Some fifty feet away, the car-crammed driveway bent right. Just beyond that, on the far side of the tall chain-link fence, there was a big vacant lot, also overflowing with cars.

Standing half-hidden by the open door of one of those cars, one arm reaching in to sound the horn, stood a man in resort clothing, baseball cap, and large wraparound sunglasses. He raised a hand and waved, beeped the horn once more, and as I realized with a start that he was waving at me, I also realized who he was, in spite of his outlandish Tourist costume. It was my brother, Brian.

The laws of our Universe are not terribly lenient when it comes to unbelievable coincidence. Seeing Brian here, so soon after he had sent me a Get Out of Jail Free card in the person of Mr. Frank Kraunauer, could not possibly be random chance. And so it was with almost no pause at all that I deduced that Brian had come to get me, and that I should take advantage of his presence. I therefore strode briskly over to the fence that separated his car from the detention center.

Brian watched me walk toward him, his terrible fake smile almost too dazzling to bear in the bright daylight. When I was ten feet away he lifted a hand and pointed to my right. “There’s a hole in the fence,” he said. He jabbed his index finger. “Right over there.”

Sure enough, there was indeed a hole in the fence, just a few feet away. It looked well used, and it was large enough to allow me through comfortably. In no time at all I was standing in the mud beside my brother’s green Jeep and showing him most of my teeth. “Brian,” I said.

“In person,” he said. He gestured at the passenger side of his car. “May I offer you a ride, brother?”

“You may,” I said. “And I will accept it with thanks.”

Brian climbed into the driver’s seat as I walked around the car, and he had the motor running, and with it the air conditioner, by the time I climbed in. “I also need to thank you for the splendid gift,” I said as I fastened my seat belt. “Frank Kraunauer was a wonderful surprise.”

“Oh, well,” Brian said modestly. “It was really nothing at all.”

“It was a whole lot,” I said. “I’m free.”

“Yes,” Brian said. “But not permanently…?”

I shook my head. “Probably not. That would be too much to expect, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “Oh, this wicked world.”

“Kraunauer got the judge to release me — the paperwork was a complete mess — but the state attorney will almost certainly try again. He really wants this case.”

“And therefore you?” he said.

“And me,” I said. “But I’m free for now.” I bowed to him, as much as I could while wearing a seat belt. “So thank you.”

“Well, after all,” Brian said, backing the car away from the fence, “what is family for?”

I thought somewhat unhappily of my other family, with particular reference to Deborah. “I sometimes wonder,” I said.

“In any case,” Brian said, putting the car into forward and bumping us through the mud of the vacant lot, toward the street, “it seemed little enough to do. You would do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”

“Well,” I said. “I certainly would now. Although I’m not sure if I could afford Kraunauer.”

“Oh, that,” he said dismissively, waving one hand. “I’ve had a little windfall. And it’s only money.”

“Still,” I said, “I am awfully grateful. It does get to be a little close in there.”

“Yes, doesn’t it?” Brian said. He turned out onto the side street, and then right onto NW 72nd Ave. I watched his profile, so much like my own, as he drove us happily away, and I wondered whether he had actually spent time inside TGK. There was a great deal I didn’t know about Brian, particularly about his past. We had been separated when very young: me to Harry and Doris and life as a Morgan — or a faux-Morgan, as it now turned out. Brian hadn’t had it so easy; he’d grown up in a series of foster homes, reformatories, and possibly jails. He had never offered much detail about this time, and I hadn’t asked. But it seemed a good bet to me that he knew very well what life was like on the Inside.

He turned and saw me looking at him, and raised an eyebrow. “Well,” he said happily. “What now?”

It may sound stupid — no surprise, considering my recent behavior — but I didn’t have an answer. I had been so focused on getting out that I hadn’t really thought beyond that. “I don’t know,” I said.

“As it happens,” Brian said, “I thought you might want to lie low for a while?” He turned to me and raised his eyebrows. “Yes? So I took the liberty of getting you a small, quiet hotel room.”

I blinked. “That’s very kind of you, brother.”

“Oh, no trouble at all,” he said happily. “I put it on a nice, anonymous credit card.”

I thought about it for a moment. Brian was absolutely right that I needed to stay out of sight until I knew which way the wind was blowing. But oddly enough, although I would not go so far as to say that I was actually homesick, I felt the need to see a few familiar places and things, just to wipe away the memory of my cell and feel truly free again.

“Can you take me to my house?” I said. “I’d like to shower, change clothes. And maybe just sit on a real couch for a little while.”

“Of course,” he said. “And after that?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s too much I don’t know.”

“About?” he prompted.

I sighed heavily, feeling the full weight of freedom settle onto my shoulders. It had seemed so simple when the world was made up of no more than my cell and the yard and guessing what that stuff was in the sandwich. Now…“I guess everything,” I said. “All I really know is that Detective Anderson hates me, and he’ll do anything to make all this stick to me. And apparently,” I said, turning away to look ruefully out the window, “Deborah hates me just as much.”

“So I have gathered,” he said neutrally. He avoided Deborah with great care, which was really the only smart thing to do, since the one time she had ever seen him was that night a few years back when he had grabbed her, taped her up inside a storage box, and encouraged me to kill her. That type of encounter can make a relationship a bit awkward going forward. Deborah thought Brian was dead, if she thought about him at all. As a sensible monster, Brian preferred not to shatter that illusion.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m not sure of my status at work, but I need to talk to my friend Vince and see what the evidence against me looks like.”

“Vince is the Asian fellow?” Brian asked, and I nodded. “Yes, you had mentioned him before.” He drove us up the ramp and onto the Palmetto Expressway, headed east.

“Even if I’m suspended or fired, I think Vince will help,” I said.

“Ahem,” Brian said. It sounded very phony, just the way you’d write it. “As it happens, I have been to visit dear Vince.”

I looked at him with surprise. For Brian to go anywhere near so much as a patrol car was a risk. To go down to headquarters was near-toxic insanity. “Really?” I said. “You went inside? To the lab?”

He showed his teeth again. “I did not,” he said. “I waited for Vince to leave for lunch. I followed him to a little bistro near Eighth Street, Chez Octavio’s?”

I nodded. I knew Octavio’s; it was hardly a Chez. It was more like a basura, and it served quite possibly the worst Cuban food in the city. But it was extremely cheap, and so was Vince. “What did you learn?” I asked.

“Some very interesting things,” Brian said, waving happily to a large tanker truck that swerved in front of him for no reason. “To begin with, Vincent Masuoka really is your friend.” He flashed me his terrible fake smile. “Up to a point.”

“Everyone has a point, I think,” I said.

“Quite true. Vince’s point, however, is well past what you might imagine.” He paused to lean on the horn as a pickup truck with three large hounds in the bed meandered across two lanes, apparently for the sole purpose of getting in front of us and slowing down. Brian swerved into the right lane and passed. The hounds watched us with mournful apathy as we went by.

“In any case,” Brian went on, “Vince withstood a great deal of pressure from Detective Anderson.”

“Pressure to do what?”

Brian smiled at me again. “Oh, practically nothing at all,” he said merrily. “A few tiny trifles, like suppressing evidence, falsifying reports, lying under oath — the kind of everyday chore you and I wouldn’t even blink at.”

“And Vince refused?” I said, marveling a little. Vince was not large, and to call him timid is something of an understatement.

“He refused,” Brian said, nodding. “Up to and including a visit from Anderson in the large and angry flesh. He even told your supervisor, who offered to remove Vince from the case if he didn’t want to play along. And then,” he said, rather dramatically, I thought, “he did the truly unthinkable.”

“Really,” I said. I tried to think of what might constitute unthinkable behavior for Vince, and failed. “What?”

“He went to the state attorney’s office and Told All,” Brian said solemnly. “With documentary evidence, reports and so on, all crudely doctored in Anderson’s hand.”

“Well,” I said. “That is unthinkable.” And it was — not that Anderson crudely doctored the documents, of course. I had already assumed as much. But first of all, for anyone in the department to report anyone else in the department to the state attorney was completely outside the Code. Second, for that person to be Vince, a known mouse — it nearly defied imagination. “What happened? Is that why Kraunauer got me out so quickly?”

“Oh, no, dear brother,” Brian chirped. “Disabuse yourself of such naive notions. The world is not nearly so simple.”

“Neither is getting an answer,” I said. “What did the state attorney do?”

“Is there a more modern way to say, ‘Go play in the traffic’?” Brian asked thoughtfully. “I’m not sure we say that anymore.”

“The state attorney said that?”

“Words to that effect,” Brian said. We bumped down onto the surface street, and he glanced at me. “Are your illusions shattered, brother?”

“My illusions don’t generally involve the state attorney,” I said.

“Well, then,” Brian said. “It seems unlikely that a mere detective would lean on the state attorney. But I suppose stranger things have happened.”

“I’m sure they have,” I said. “But I don’t think that’s what happened.” Brian glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. “Not even a unibrowed mental-midget thug like Anderson would try to intimidate the state attorney,” I said. “But…”

I thought about it: A hardworking and honest whistleblower brings the SA’s office a documented report of authentic malfeasance, malpractice, and malingering. And the SA’s office does not, as one might expect, give said whistleblower a manly handshake and heartfelt thanks and then leap into indignant action against the heinous perpetrator. Instead, they tell Vince to go away and leave them alone — to play, if you will, in the traffic. On the face of it, it ran somewhat contrary to our general expectations of what a prosecutor’s office should do. But, of course, as I knew all too well, nothing at all in our justice system is actually about what it is supposed to be about. I suppose the same might be said of most things in life; when is the last time you met a waiter who is actually a waiter and not a frustrated actor/writer/dancer killing time until lightning strikes? But, of course, with Justice, where so many shattered lives hang in the balance, the stakes are much higher, and one really does hope for better.

Ah, well. Hope is for people who can’t see the Truth. As it happened, in this one instance, I thought I saw Truth. “Aha,” I said. “If that doesn’t sound too corny?”

“No more corny than ‘go play in the traffic,’ ” Brian said. “So tell me.”

“In the first place,” I said, “my case is a very public national black eye for the department.”

“International,” Brian said. “It was all over the news in Mexico, too.”

“So they need to have it solved,” I said. “And they need to have it done by convicting someone like me.”

“Well, then,” Brian said. “Who better than you yourself?”

“None other,” I said. “But there’s more. Imagine you are a lawyer.”

“Please,” Brian said with a very real shudder. “I have some standards.”

“And now imagine that one of your clients — or many of them — have been convicted on evidence supplied by Detective Anderson.”

“Oh,” Brian said.

“Yes,” I said. “When you learn that Anderson has doctored evidence once—”

“Then you can easily persuade a judge he doctored evidence twice,” Brian said.

I nodded. “Or more. Maybe every time, in every single case. And Detective Anderson has a rather large caseload,” I said. “Most of the detectives do.”

“And suddenly the streets are flooded with released felons,” Brian said.

“Right,” I said. “Which many people would prefer to avoid.”

“Ah, well,” Brian said happily. “We live in wicked times.”

“Very busy times, too,” I said. “And suddenly every conviction of the last five years is overturned. And?” Now it was my turn to pause dramatically.

“Oh, dear, there’s more?” Brian said in mock horror.

“Just this,” I said. “The state attorney is elected in Florida.”

“Oh, bravo!” Brian said with real good cheer. “What wonderful stupidity!”

“It is, isn’t it?” I said. “The quality of mercy is not strained — but it is handed out by someone who got the job by pandering to the lowest possible common denominator.”

“And they must present an impressive record of convictions to get reelected,” Brian said.

“Yup.”

“And so the picture is complete,” he said. He steered us up the on-ramp and onto I-95 south.

“Very nearly,” I said.

“Great heavens, there’s more?” said Brian with mock horror.

“Quite possibly,” I said.

“Do tell.”

“Well,” I said slowly, “just speculation here, but if it was me…?”

“Oh, dear,” Brian said. For the first time he frowned. “Poor dear Vince — surely they wouldn’t?”

I shrugged. “As I said. Speculation. They might not actually kill him.”

“But in any case,” Brian said, “disgrace, dishonor, discredit, and dismissal.”

“Almost certainly,” I said.

“And that we cannot allow,” Brian said. “Since he is our hole card, and we need him alive, well, and highly credible.”

I looked at my brother with some fondness. He had cut right to the very practical chase, without dithering around about friendship, gratitude, or honor. It was nice to be around somebody who thought so much like me. “Precisely,” I said.

“If some dreadful accident happened to Anderson…?” he suggested.

“I admit it’s tempting,” I said. “But it would look a little too convenient for me.”

“You would have a wonderful alibi,” he said, a little too seductively, I thought. “No one could ever pin it on you.”

I shook my head. “Deborah would know,” I said. “She has already hinted that she might rat me out someday.”

“Mmm,” he said, and I knew what he would suggest before he ever said it. “There could be two dreadful accidents….”

I opened my mouth to tell him to forget it, drop it, put the thought permanently out of his mind. Not Deborah, never my sister, no matter what might happen. It was out of the question, off the menu, not remotely a possibility — and I paused, closed my mouth, and pondered. It had been pure unthinking reflex to deny the merest thought of Accidenting Deborah, and like so many reflexive denials, it did not truly bear the weight of logical thought. I would never have considered it before, even for a moment; family loyalty and obligation, all drilled into me by Harry and so many years of acceptance and practice, made it impossible. Deborah was unthinkably untouchable. She was Home and Hearth, Kith and Kin, as much a part of me as my arm.

But now?

Now, after she had so thoroughly disdained, dismissed, and disowned me? So very completely rejected Me and all I am? Was it really unthinkable to send Debs away on the Long Dark Journey now, when she had already suggested that she did not find it at all unthinkable to do exactly that to Me?

I felt a small, sly, slithering purr from deep inside, where the Passenger napped, nestled in webs and shadows, and I heard it whisper to me what I realized I already knew.

It was not unthinkable, not at all. It was, in fact, suddenly very thinkable.

More: It could even be painted with a light patina of true justice, in a sort of Old Testament way. Debs was willing to see me dead — didn’t it make perfect, eye-for-an-eye sense for me to see her dead first?

I remembered her words: never really my brother. They still stung, and I felt a slow-burning anger smoldering at the outer edges of my Harry-built propriety. I was never really her brother? Fine. That meant that she was never really my sister. We were now and forevermore unsibling, unfamily, unrelated.

And that meant…

I became aware that Brian was humming happily, so very far off-key that I could not even recognize the melody. He would be just as happy, and perhaps much happier, if I gave him permission to do away with Debs. He didn’t understand my past objections, and certainly felt no hesitation himself. After all, he had never thought he was related to Deborah; that had been my tragic fallacy. And even though he was no more capable of human feelings than any other reptile, it was Brian who had come to my aid, after Debs had refused with great self-righteous loathing. The Great Illusion of my bond with Deborah had been exposed, rejected, flung from the fracas at the first real trial. And instead, blood had proved true after all.

And yet…

I still found it very hard to picture the world without Debs.

Brian had stopped humming, and I looked at him. He looked back, his terrible fake smile in place. “Well, brother?” he said. “Today’s special? Two for the price of one?”

I could not hold his gaze. I looked away out the window. “Not yet,” I said.

“All righty, then,” he said, and I could hear disappointment in his voice. But he drove on, and I continued to look out the window. I buried myself in dark musings, and didn’t really see any of the scenery, even as we approached my house and it got more and more familiar. Neither of us spoke again until, some twenty minutes later, Brian did.

“We’re here,” he said, slowing the car. And then he said, “Uh-oh,” and I looked out the window. He was driving us slowly past my house, the home where I had lived with Rita for such a long time. And right in front of the house, another car was already parked.

A police car.