Dexter Is Delicious

TWENTY-EIGHT

It's funny how many little sounds you can hear when you think you're sitting in absolute silence. For example, I could hear my heartbeat lub-dubbing away in my ears, and right next to me Samantha took a long, slow breath-and beyond that there was a metallic whirring sound as the little fan ticked on and blew more cold air across the length of the walk-in refrigerator, and I even heard something scuttling in a piece of paper under the cot I sat on, probably a palmetto bug or cockroach.

Even with all this thunderous noise, the most overwhelming sound was the all-enveloping white noise of Samantha's last words as they crashed and echoed around the little room, and after a while they stopped making sense to me, even the individual syllables, and I turned my head to look at her.

Samantha sat unmoving, the annoying smile once again in place on her face. Her shoulders were hunched and she looked straight ahead, not really avoiding eye contact so much as just waiting to see what might happen next, and at last it was more than I could stand.

"I'm sorry," I said. "When I said they're going to eat you, and you said that's what you want-what the hell do you mean?"

She was silent for several seconds, but at least her smile faded and her face settled into a look of dreamy thoughtfulness. "When I was really little," she said at last, "my father was always away somewhere, at a conference or whatever. So when he finally came home he would read these stories to me to make up. You know, fairy tales. And he would come to the part where the ogre or the witch eats somebody, and he would, you know. Make these eating noises and pretend to eat my arm, or my leg. And, you know, I mean, I'm just a kid, and I love it, and I'm like, 'Do it again, do it again.' And he'd go, 'Gobble gobble,' and I'd be laughing like crazy, and…"

Samantha paused and pushed a tuft of hair off her forehead. "After a while," she went on, quieter now, "I started to get older. And…" She shook her head, which made the hair fall back down onto her forehead, and she pushed it away again. "I realized it wasn't the stories I loved so much. It was… my dad gobbling on my arm. And the more I thought about it, the more it was just the idea of somebody eating me. Of having some witch or, you know, just somebody slowly, slowly roasting my body, and cutting off little slices, and eating me, and really… liking it. Liking me, and liking the way I tasted and…"

She took a deep breath and shuddered, but not from fear. "And I get, you know, puberty and all that. And all the other girls are talking about, 'Ooh, this boy, that one, I'd like to do whatever with him, and I'd let him do anything to me'-and I can't really get into that at all, all the squealing and comparing boys and-Because all I can think about, all I really want is, I want to be eaten." She began nodding her head rhythmically and speaking in a low husky voice. "I want to be slow-roasted while I'm still alive and can still watch these people chew me up and go, 'Yum, yum,' and come back for more until…"

She shivered again and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, hugging herself tightly, and I tried to think of something to say, something better than asking if she'd thought of trying counseling. But nothing came to me, except a favorite remark of Deborah's.

"Holy shit," I said to Samantha.

She nodded. "Yeah, I know," she said.

Beyond that there did not seem to be very much to say, but after a moment I remembered that I was paid by the City of Miami to investigate things, so I asked her, "Tyler Spanos?"

"What?" she said.

"You two were friends," I said. "But you seemed to have nothing in common."

She nodded, and the half-dreamy smile slid back onto her face. "Yeah. Nothing except this," she said.

"This was her idea?"

"Oh, no," she said. "These people have been here for, you know, years." She nodded at the jars filled with blood and smiled. "But Tyler, she's a little wild?" She shrugged and her smile got bigger. "Was a little wild. She met this guy at a dark rave."

"Bobby Acosta?"

"Bobby, Vlad, whatever," she said. "So he's trying to impress her, you know, to hook up? And he says, 'I'm in this group; you wouldn't believe what we do. We eat people.' And she says, 'You can eat me,' and he thinks she doesn't get it and says, 'No, I mean really eat them.' And Tyler says, 'Yeah, well, I mean really, too, me and my friend.' "

Samantha shivered again and hugged herself tightly, rocking back and forth very slightly. "We had talked about finding somebody like this. I mean, we did the Yahoo chat groups and all, but it's mostly bullshit and porn, and anyway, how can you trust somebody you meet online? And now this guy comes right out with it and says, 'We eat people.' " She shivered more, really big this time. "Tyler comes to me and says, 'You won't believe what happened last night.' Which she says a lot, and I'm like, 'Okay, again?' And she says, 'No, really,' and she tells me about Vlad and his group…"

Samantha closed her eyes and licked her lips before going on. "It's like a dream come true," she said. "I mean, it's too good. I don't believe her at first. Because Tyler is-was-kind of flaky, and guys could see that and they would say stuff to her just, you know, to have sex with her? And I'm sure she'd taken X or something anyway, so how can I be sure this guy is for real? But she takes me to meet Vlad, and he shows us some pictures and things, and I think, 'This is it.' "

Samantha looked straight at me and brushed the hair from her forehead. It was nice hair, a mousy brown color, but clean and shiny, and she looked for all the world like a normal teenage girl telling a sympathetic adult about something interesting that happened in French class-until she started talking again.

"I always knew I would do this someday," she said. "Find somebody who would eat me. It's what I wanted most. But I thought it would be later, you know, after college or-" She shrugged and shook her head. "But here he was, and Tyler and me are like, 'Why wait?' Why should I spend my parents' money on college, when I can have what I want without it, right now? So we told Vlad, 'Okay, totally, we're in,' and he takes us to meet the head of the group, and…" She smiled. "Here I am."

"And Tyler isn't," I said.

Samantha nodded. "She was always lucky. She got to go first." The smile got bigger. "But I'm next. Soon."

And her apparent eagerness to follow Tyler into the cauldron dried up all my professional zeal, and I had nothing more to say. Samantha just watched me to see what I would do-and for the first time in my life, I had absolutely no idea what that would be. What is the correct facial expression to put on when someone tells you their lifelong fantasy is to be eaten? Should I go for shock? Disbelief? What about moral outrage? I was quite sure the subject had never come up in any of the movies or TV shows I had studied, and even though I am considered a clever and creative person in some circles, I could not imagine anything at all that might be appropriate.

So I stared, and Samantha looked back at me, and there we were: a perfectly normal married man with three kids and a promising career who just happened to enjoy killing people, staring at a perfectly normal eighteen-year-old girl who went to a good school and liked Twilight and who wanted to be eaten, sitting next to each other in a walk-in refrigerator at a vampire club in South Beach. I had been trying so hard lately to achieve some close approximation of normal life, but if this was it, I thought I would prefer something else. Outside of Salvador Dali I really can't believe the human mind could handle anything more extreme.

And at last even the mutual staring began to seem too strange, even for two dedicated non-humans like us, and we both blinked and looked away.

"Anyway," she said. "It doesn't matter."

"What doesn't matter?" I said. "Wanting to be eaten?"

She shrugged, an oddly genuine teen gesture. "Whatever," she said. "I mean, they'll be here soon."

I felt like someone was tickling my spine with an icicle. "Who will?" I said.

"Somebody from the coven," she said, and she glanced back at me. "That's what they call it. The, you know. The group that, um, eats people."

I thought of the file I had seen on the computer. Coven. I wished I had copied it and run for home. "How do you know they're coming?" I said.

She shrugged again. "They have to feed me. Like, three times a day, you know."

"Why should they?" I said. "If they're just going to kill you, why do they have to take care of you?"

She gave me a you-are-so-dumb look, combined with a head shake. "They're going to eat me, not kill me," she said. "They don't want me to get all sick and skinny. I gotta be, you know. Chubbed up. Marbled. For flavor."

Between my job and my hobby I have to say without bragging that I have a pretty strong stomach, but this was putting it to a real test. The idea that she would cheerfully eat three healthy meals a day so her flesh would taste better was just a little too much before breakfast, and I turned away again. But happily for my appetite, a practical thought nudged its way in. "How many of them will come?" I asked.

She looked at me, then looked away. "I don't know," she said. "It's usually just two guys. In case, you know, I decide to change my mind and run. But…" She looked at me. And then down at her feet. "I think Vlad is coming with them this time," she said at last, and it did not sound like a happy thought.

"Why do you think that?" I said.

She shook her head but did not look up. "When it was going to be Tyler," she said, "he started to come with them. And he would, you know… do things to her." She licked her lips but still did not look up. "Not just, you know… Not sex. I mean, not normal sex. He, um. He really, really hurt her. Like that was how he got off, and…" She shuddered, and at last she looked up. "I think that's why they put stuff in my food, some kind of tranquilizer?" she said. "So it keeps me, you know, kind of calm and quiet? Because otherwise…" She looked away again. "Maybe he won't come," she said.

"But at least two guys will come?" I said.

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Are they armed?" I said, and she looked up at me, blank. "You know, knives, guns, bazookas? Are they carrying any weapons?"

"I don't know," she said. "I mean, I would."

I thought that I would, too, and although it might have been uncharitable, I also thought that I would have noticed what weapons my captors were carrying. Of course, I didn't think of myself as a banquet, and that would almost certainly affect my powers of observation.

So there would be two of them, probably armed, which probably meant guns, since this was Miami. And it might mean Bobby Acosta, too, who would have some kind of weapon, since he was a wealthy fugitive. And I was in a small room with no place to hide, and I was burdened with Samantha, who would probably yell, "Watch out!" at them if I tried to surprise them. On the plus side, my heart was pure and I had a bent tire iron.

It wasn't much, but I have learned that if you examine the situation carefully, you can almost always find a way to improve your odds. I stood up and looked around the room, thinking that someone might have left an assault rifle lying on a shelf; I even made myself touch the jars and look behind them, but no such luck. "Hey," Samantha said. "If you're thinking, like, you know-I mean, I don't want to be rescued or anything."

"I think that's wonderful," I said. "But I do." I looked at her, sitting there hunched up in her blanket. "I don't want to be eaten. I have a life, and a family. I have a new baby," I said, "and I want to see her again. I want to watch her grow up, and read her fairy stories."

She flinched a little bit and looked uncertain. "What's her name?" she said.

"Lily Anne."

Samantha looked off to the side again, and I could see her trying to swim through the doubt, so I pushed a little. "Samantha," I said. "Whatever it is you want, you don't have the right to force it on me." I felt remarkably hypocritical preaching to her, but after all, there was an awful lot at stake, and in any case I had been practicing hypocrisy all my adult life.

"But-I want this," she said. "I mean, my whole life…"

"Do you want it enough to kill me?" I said. "Because that's what you're doing."

She looked at me and then looked away again quickly. "No," she said. "But…"

"Yes, but," I said. "But if I don't get past the guys who feed you, I am going to be dead, and you know that."

"I can't just give this up," she said.

"You don't have to," I told her, and she looked at me attentively. "All you have to do is let me escape, and you can stay here."

She chewed on her lower lip for a few seconds. "I don't know," she said. "I mean, how can I trust you not to, you know. Call the cops and come storming back here to get me?"

"By the time I could get back here with the cops," I said, "they will have moved you someplace else."

"Yeah," she said, nodding slowly. "But how do I know you won't, like, drag me out of here and, you know. Save me from myself?"

I went down on one knee in front of her. It was melodramatic, I know, but she was a teenager, and I thought she would probably buy it. "Samantha," I said. "All you have to do is just let me try. Do nothing, and I won't try to get you out of here against your will. You have my solemn word of honor." There was no crash of thunder, not even the sound of distant laughter, and in spite of my recent epidemic of unpleasant emotions, I felt no shame. And I believe I did it very convincingly. In fact, I think it was the performance of a lifetime-I didn't mean a word of it, of course, but under the circumstances I would gladly have promised her a ride on my flying saucer if it would get me out of here.

And Samantha began to look more than half-convinced. "So-I don't know. I mean, what. I just sit here and like don't say anything? That's all?"

"That's all," I said. I took her hand and looked deep into her eyes. "Please, Samantha," I said. "For Lily Anne." Totally shameless, I know, but to my surprise, I found I actually meant it-and even worse, I felt moisture collecting in the corners of my eyes. Perhaps it was just a Method actor moment, but it interfered with my vision and was extremely disconcerting.

And, apparently, extremely effective. "All right," she said, and she actually squeezed my hand. "I won't say anything."

I squeezed back. "Thank you," I said. "Lily Anne thanks you." Again, maybe a bit over-the-top, but there were so few guidelines for this situation. I stood and picked up my tire iron. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. I went to the door and tried to wedge myself in beside the frame, where I would be invisible if they looked through the small window first. I chose the side closest to the handle; the door opened outward, and it would be much easier for them to see into the other corner. I had to hope that they would not notice anything and, after glancing in and seeing Samantha in her place on the cot, they would simply walk in unsuspecting. Then with any luck at all it would be one-two, snicker-snak, and Dexter would go galumphing back.

I had been scrunched into my place for about five minutes when I heard voices coming faintly through the thick door. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and tried to make myself even smaller in my corner. I looked at Samantha, and she licked her lips, but nodded at me. I nodded back, and then I heard someone pulling on the door's handle and the big door swung open.

"Sooo-wee, piggy," somebody said, with a very mean-sounding chuckle. "Oink, oink."

A man stepped through carrying a red nylon insulated bag. I brought the tire iron down on his head, hard, and he pitched forward without another sound. Like greased lightning, I stepped around his body and into the doorway, holding my tire iron up, ready for anything -except for the huge arm that was already swinging at my face and sweeping me back against the wall, and I had time for only one quick glimpse of the massive bouncer with the shaved head, as he pinned me with a forearm across my throat, and Bobby Acosta standing behind him yelling, "Kill the fucker!"

And then the bouncer swung a fist the size of a grand piano at my chin and I was gone into darkness.