Dexter Is Delicious

TWENTY-SIX

And that is how i found myself sitting in Deborah's car a few hours later and watching the doorway at Club Fang. There wasn't a whole lot to see at first. People trickled out a few at a time and either wandered away down the street or climbed into a car and drove off. As far as I could tell, nobody turned into a bat, or flew off on a broom. Nobody noticed us, but Deborah had reparked the car in a dark spot across the street, in the shadow of a delivery van nosed up onto the sidewalk. She didn't have much to say, and I was still too peeved for light conversation.

This was Deborah's case, and this was Deborah's hunch, and yet here I was getting ready to take on the stupid part. I didn't even agree with her that it had to be done, but merely because I was her brother-and adopted, at that-I had to do it. I don't ask for fair; I know better than that. But shouldn't things at least make sense? I go through life and work hard to blend in, follow the rules, and be a good sport-and yet when it comes time for the cigar to explode, somehow it's always me puffing on it.

But there was no point in arguing anymore. If I refused to break into the club, Deborah would do it, and she was right; as a sworn officer of the law, she could go to prison if they caught her, while I would probably just get community service, picking up trash at a park, or teaching inner-city kids to knit. And Deb's stay in the ICU with the knife wound was far too recent for me to let her take any kind of risk-which I'm quite sure was part of her calculations. So it was Dexter through the window, and that was that.

Just before dawn, the sign above the club's door switched off and a lot of people came out at the same time, and then nothing at all happened for half an hour. Out over the far end of the ocean the sky got lighter and somewhere a bird began to sing, which showed how little he knew. The first jogger went by on Ocean Drive, and a delivery truck rumbled past. And finally, the black door swung open and Lurch came out, followed by the two bouncers, then Bobby Acosta, and a couple of other drudges I hadn't seen before. A few minutes later, Kukarov himself came out, locked the door, and got into a Jaguar parked half a block away. The car started right up, which contradicted all I had ever heard about Jaguars, and Kukarov drove away, off into the dawn to Morticia and a peaceful day of rest in his crypt.

I looked at Deborah, but she just shook her head, so I waited some more. A bright orange finger of light poked up out over the ocean, and then suddenly it was a new day. Three young men in tiny swimsuits walked by speaking German and headed for the beach. I pondered the rising sun and, in a rush of dawn-inspired optimism, decided there was a one-in-three chance that this was not my last day on earth.

"Okay," Deborah said at last, and I looked at her. "It's time," she said.

I looked at the club. It didn't feel to me like it was time-time for bed, maybe, but not time for sneaking into the dragon's den, not in all this daylight. Dexter needs shadows, darkness, guttering moonlight. Not bright morning in the Twinkie Capital of the Western World. But as usual, I was not being offered a choice.

"There might be somebody in there. A guard or whatever," she said. "So be careful."

I really didn't feel like dignifying that kind of remark with a response, so I simply took a deep breath and tried to bring up the darkness to prepare myself.

"You got your phone, right?" she went on. "If there's trouble, or if you see her and she's, like, got a guard, just call nine-one-one and get out of there. It should be simple."

"Not as simple as sitting in the car," I said, and I admit I was irritated. On top of everything else, Debs had suddenly developed motormouth. How can a guy call his Passenger when everyone else wants to chat?

"Fine," she said. "Just be careful, that's all I'm saying, all right?"

It was quite clear to me that the small talk was not going to stop, so I put a hand on the door and said, "I'm sure I'll be fine. What could possibly go wrong, breaking into a nest of vampires and cannibals who have already kidnapped and murdered several people?"

"Jesus, Dexter," Deborah said, but I felt no mercy.

"After all, I have a cell phone," I said. "If they catch me, I'll threaten to text."

"All right, shit," she said. I pushed the car door open.

"Pop the trunk," I said to her.

She blinked. "What?"

"Open up the trunk of the car," I repeated. She opened her mouth to say something or other, but I was already out of the car and around to the trunk. The release thumped and I opened it, found the tire iron, and slid it into my pocket, pulling my shirt over the protruding handle to hide it. I closed the trunk and stepped around to Deborah's window. She rolled it down.

"Farewell, sis," I said. "Tell Mother I died game."

"For Christ's sake, Dexter," she said, and I crossed the street, leaving her muttering a few syllables of worried profanity.

In truth, I was hoping that it was going to be as simple as Deborah wanted to believe it would be. Getting in would certainly be easy enough for someone of my modest abilities-I had broken into many places, in the pursuit of my innocent hobby, that seemed a great deal more formidable than this one, and most of those were inhabited by real monsters, not these playtime Halloween freaks, with their opera capes and fake teeth. In the light of the morning sun that now poured onto South Beach, it seemed very hard to take their adolescent party games at all seriously.

It was also surprisingly hard to bring the Dark Passenger online. I really needed the soft voice of guidance, the invisible cloak of interior darkness, that only the Passenger could provide, but in spite of the brief flutter of alarm in the club, apparently the snit was not over. I paused on the far side of the street and closed my eyes, placing my hand on a telephone pole and thinking, Hello? Anybody home? Somebody was home, but they still didn't feel like visiting: I felt a slow and silken rustle of wings, as if it were merely recrossing its legs and waiting for something good to happen. Come on, I thought. Still nothing.

I opened my eyes. A truck went by on Ocean Drive, its radio playing salsa music much too loud. But it was the only music I heard. Apparently, I was going to have to do this alone.

All right, then: When the going gets tough and so on. I put my hands in my pockets and started to amble around the building as if I didn't really have anyplace to go and was just gawking. Gee whiz, look at the palm trees. Nothin' like that back in Iowa. Golly.

I strolled around the building one time, looking it over without really seeming to do anything but walk and gawk. As far as I could tell, nobody cared enough to be impressed by my wonderful Innocent Act, but it never hurts to be thorough, so I played tourist for five minutes. The building took up the entire block, and I walked along past all four sides. The vulnerable spot was obvious: In a short and narrow alleyway on the far side of the club's door there was a Dumpster. It stood beside a doorway that obviously led into the club's kitchen. The door was protected from view unless someone stood right in the mouth of the alley.

I pulled my right hand out of my pocket and "accidentally" scattered half a handful of coins onto the sidewalk and, stooping to pick them up, I looked around me in all directions. Unless there was somebody on a rooftop with binoculars, I was not being watched. I left thirty-seven cents on the sidewalk and slid quickly into the alley.

It was much darker in the narrow alley, but that did not encourage the Passenger to start a conversation, and I hurried to the Dumpster all alone. I reached the back door quickly and examined it. It had two dead-bolt locks on it, which was discouraging. I could have opened them both easily enough given a little time and my own set of very special tools, but I had neither, and the tire iron would just not do: The door was out of the question. I would have to get inside by some other, less genteel entryway.

I looked up at the building: Directly above the doorway was a row of windows, one every five or six feet, that went along the side of the building to the street. The second one to my left was in easy reach from the top of the Dumpster, and an agile person could pull himself up and through the window without too much trouble. No problem: Dexter is deft, and assuming I could slide open the window it would be simple.

The Dumpster had two lids, side by side, and one of them was open. I put both hands on the closed side-and something bolted up and out of the opening with a horrible screech and flew past my ear and I was absolutely paralyzed by sheer terror before I recognized it as a cat. It was tattered and filthy and beat-up, but it landed a few feet away and arched its back and spit at me in the full Halloween pose. I just looked back and for a second I thought the music had started up again in the club, until I realized the thumping was only my heartbeat. The cat turned and stalked away out of the alley, I leaned on the Dumpster and took a deep breath, and the Passenger stirred itself just enough to give me a serves-you-right chuckle.

I took a moment to recover, and then, just to be safe, I looked inside the Dumpster. There didn't seem to be anything else inside except garbage, which I thought was a very positive development. I hoisted myself up onto the closed side and, looking once more toward the mouth of the alley to make sure nobody was watching, I reached up and touched the window. I pushed at it and it rattled ever so slightly. Good news: That meant it was not nailed shut, or sealed by too many years of sloppy paint jobs.

I could not see the very top of the window frame, but as far as I could tell there was no alarm sensor anywhere on the frame, which was also good news but not too surprising. Most places save a little money by pretending that any break-in will take place on the ground floor. It was nice to know that even vampires can be thrifty.

I reached for the tire iron and almost dropped it as it cleared my pocket. It would have hit the Dumpster's lid with enough of a clatter to wake up the whole neighborhood, and I realized my hands were slick with sweat. This was a new experience; always before I had been icy cold and calm, but between the Passenger's sulking and the feral cat's levitation I seemed to be in something of a stew. Certainly sweat was understandable-this was Miami. But fear sweat? On Dexter the Dark and Dashing, the King of Cool? This was not a good sign, and I paused one more time for a deep breath before I reached up and slid the tire iron between the window and the bottom of the frame.

I pulled down on the tire iron's handle, gently at first, and then with increasing force as the window refused to budge. I didn't want to pull too hard, since the frame might well give way, which would shatter the glass and make so much noise that I might as well bounce a dozen tire irons off the Dumpster's lid. I pulled for about ten seconds, slowly increasing the pressure, and just when I thought I would have to try something else there was a pop! and the window slid upward. I held very still for a moment, listening for any movement or shouting or alarms going off. Nothing: I pulled myself up, slid through the window, and pulled it closed behind me.

I stood up and looked around me. I was in a hallway that dead-ended at the street to my left and led to a corner down to the right. There was one door along the hall, and I went quietly over to it. There was a dead-bolt lock on the door, but no doorknob. I pushed gently and the door opened. The room was completely dark, but there was a faint smell of Lysol and urine, and I suspected it was a restroom. I stepped inside, closed the door, and found a light switch by feeling along the wall. I flipped it on; it was, in fact, a small restroom, with a sink, one toilet, and a cupboard built into the wall. Just to be thorough I opened the cupboard and found nothing more sinister than toilet paper. There was nothing else in the room, no place they could have hidden a body, alive or dead, so I switched off the light and stepped back out into the hallway.

I cat-footed down the hall to the corner, where I paused, and then slowly and carefully peeked around. The hallway was empty, lit by a single security lamp that hung above a door halfway down. There were two other doors along the hall, and what looked like the top of a staircase at the far end.

I stepped around the corner and went to the first door on my left. I turned the knob slowly and carefully, and it gave way. I pushed the door open and went in, once again closing the door behind me and feeling for the light switch on the wall. I found it, flipped it on. The light was dimmer than even that from the security light in the hall, but it was enough to show a private party room. There was a flat-screen TV on the left wall, and a long, low couch along the right with a coffee table in front of it. Behind the couch was a bar topped with greenish marble, with a small refrigerator underneath. Along the back wall, a thick red velvet curtain hung down.

I went to the bar. There were a few bottles, but instead of glasses there was a rack of what looked like laboratory beakers. I picked one up; it was, indeed, a Pyrex beaker. The side was stamped FIRST NATIONAL BLOOD BANK in gold letters.

I pulled the velvet curtain away from the wall. There was a door behind it, and I pulled it open, holding the curtain up and away so I could see inside. It was nothing more than a small closet, empty except for cleaning supplies: broom, mop, and bucket, a bag of rags. I closed the door and dropped the curtain.

The next door along the hall was on the right, underneath the security light. It was locked, and I procrastinated by moving along the hall to the last door down on my left. It was unlocked; I slipped inside and found another private party room, a virtual duplicate of the first one.

That left the locked door. Reason told me that anything worth seeing would be locked away, but it also told me that the lock would be a good one, and I would not get it open without leaving some very obvious hints that I had been there, and possibly even setting off an alarm. Did I want to stay invisible, or just assume that if I found Samantha Aldovar it didn't matter who knew I had been there? I hadn't talked about it with Deborah, and it had just become an important question. I thought about it, and after only a moment of really high-order thinking, I decided that I was here to find Samantha, and I had to look everywhere-especially places that they didn't want anyone to see, like behind this locked door.

And so, with my courage screwed to the sticking place, I went to work on the locked door with the tire iron. I tried to be quiet and leave the fewest possible marks, but I was a little better controlling the noise than the damage to the wooden doorframe, and by the time I had the door pried open it looked like it had been attacked by rabid beavers. Still, the door was open, and I went through it.

As far as carefully hidden secrets went, the room would have been a major disappointment to anyone but an accountant. It was clearly the club's office, with a large wooden desk, a computer, and a four-drawer filing cabinet. The computer had been left on, and I sat at the desk and quickly scanned the hard drive. There were some Quicken files showing that the club was making a nice profit, some Word documents, standard letters to club members and prospective members. There was a rather large file named Coven.wpd that was password-encrypted with a security program so old I could have broken it in two minutes. But I didn't have two minutes, so I merely admired their naivete and moved on.

There was nothing else remotely interesting, no file labeled Samantha.jpg or anything similar that might have told me where she was. I went quickly through the drawers of the desk and the filing cabinet, and again found nothing.

All right-I had trashed the doorframe for no reason. I did not feel any real guilt about that, which was a relief, but I had wasted quite a lot of time, and I had to start thinking about finishing my mission and getting out of here; there could well be a cleaning crew coming in, or Kukarov returning to admire his office doorframe.

I left the office and pushed the door closed, and then I headed for the stairs. I was reasonably sure that I didn't need to look through the main public areas of the club. It was just plain impossible that everybody who came in was in on the cannibalism-there was no way that hundreds of people could keep a secret like that. So if Samantha really was here somewhere, it would be in an area that most people didn't see.

And so I went down the stairs and across the dance floor without pausing to look around. At the back, behind the raised area that Bobby had stood on with his goblet, there was a short hallway, and I went down it. It led to the kitchen area and the back door I had admired from the outside. It was not an elaborate kitchen, just a small stove, microwave, sink, with a metallic hanging rack holding pots and several very nice-looking knives. At the far side of the room was a large metal door that looked like it led to a walk-in refrigerator. Nothing else, not even a locked pantry.

Out of a compulsion to be thorough more than anything else I went over to the refrigerator. There was a small window at eye level, made of thick plate glass, and to my surprise, it revealed that there was a light on inside the walk-in. Since I had always believed that the light goes out when you close the door, I stuck my nose to the glass and peeked in.

The refrigerator was about six feet wide and stretched back a good eight feet. There were rows of shelves on each side, most of them loaded with a series of large, gallon-size jars, and stuck up against the back wall was something you don't usually see in a refrigerator: an old folding cot.

And stranger than that, the cot was occupied. Sitting there quietly, huddled up inside a blanket, was a bundle that appeared to be a young human female. Her head was down and she was not moving, but as I watched she raised her head slowly, as if she was exhausted or drugged, and her eyes met mine.

It was Samantha Aldovar.

Without a moment's thought I grabbed for the handle of the door and pulled. It was not locked from the outside, although I could see that it could not be opened from the inside. "Samantha," I called to her. "Are you all right?"

She gave me a weary smile. "Really great," she said. "Is it time?"

I had no idea what that meant, so I just shook it off. "I'm here to rescue you," I said. "Take you home to your parents."

"Why?" she said, and I decided that she was indeed doped. It made sense; drugs would keep her calm and reduce the amount of work it took to watch her. But it also meant I would have to carry her out of here.

"All right," I said. "Just a second." I looked around me for something to prop the door open, and settled on a large five-gallon cooking pot that hung from the rack above the stove. I grabbed it, stuck it between the refrigerator door and the frame, and went into the refrigerator.

I got just two steps in when I realized what was in all the jars that filled the shelves in the big refrigerator.

Blood.

Jar after jar, gallon after gallon, they were filled with blood, and for a very long moment I looked at the blood and it looked back and I could not move. But I took a deep breath, let it out, and reality slid back into focus. It was just a fluid, nicely locked away where it couldn't hurt anybody, and the important thing was to get Samantha and get out of here. So I took the last few steps to the cot and looked down at her.

"Come on," I said. "You're going home."

"Don't want to," she said.

"I know," I said soothingly, thinking that this was a clear example of Stockholm syndrome. "Let's go." I put an arm around her and lifted her off the cot and she came up without resistance. I slung her arm around my shoulder and walked her toward the door and freedom.

"Wait a sec," she said, and the words were a little slurred. "Need my purse. On the bed," she said, nodding toward the cot, and she took her arm off me and held on to the shelf.

"Okay," I said, and I returned to the cot and looked down. I didn't see a purse-but I did hear a clatter, and I turned around to see that Samantha had kicked the five-gallon pot out of the way and, as I watched, was pulling the refrigerator door closed.

"Stop!" I said, which felt even stupider than it sounds, and I guess Samantha thought so, too, because she didn't stop, and before I could get to her she had slammed the door shut and turned to look at me with an expression of half-glazed triumph on her face.

"Told you," she said. "I don't want to go home."