Dexter Is Delicious

THIRTY-THREE

I took Rita's advice and slept late the next morning. I woke up to the sounds of an empty house; a distant drip in the shower, the air conditioner coming on, and the tick of the dishwasher switching gears down the hall in the kitchen. I lay there for a few minutes enjoying the relative quiet and the feeling of dopey fatigue that ran through me from my toes to my tongue. Yesterday had been quite a day and, on the whole, I thought it was a very good thing that I had survived it. My neck was still a little stiff, but the headache was gone and I felt a lot better than I should have-until I remembered Samantha.

So I lay there awhile longer wondering if there was anything at all I could do to persuade her not to talk. There was a very small chance that I could reason with her, I suppose. I had managed it once, in Club Fang's refrigerator, and reached soaring heights of emotive rhetoric I had never touched before. Could I do it again, and would it work on her a second time? I was not sure-and as I mulled my chances that moth-eaten line about "the tongues of men and of angels" popped into my head. I couldn't remember how it ended, but I didn't think it was happy. I wished I'd never read Shakespeare.

I heard the front door open and Rita hustled into the house, home from dropping the children at school. She went through the living room and into the kitchen making all the loud and distinct sounds of someone trying to be quiet. I heard her talking softly to Lily Anne as she changed a diaper, and then she went back into the kitchen and a moment later I heard the coffee machine clear its throat and begin to brew. Soon the smell of fresh coffee drifted into the bedroom, and I began to feel a little bit better. I was home, with Lily Anne, and all was well, at least for now. It was not really a rational feeling, but then, as I was learning, feelings never are, and you might as well enjoy the good ones while you can. There aren't very many of them, and they don't last long.

I sat up on the side of the bed at last, slowly rotating my neck to get the last of the soreness out of it. It didn't work, but it wasn't too bad. I stood up, which was a little harder than it should have been. My legs were stiff and a bit sore, too, and so I tottered into the shower and ran hot water all over myself for ten long and luxurious minutes, and it was a renewed and nearly normal Dexter who finally made his way into his clothes and all the way to the kitchen, where a medley of heavenly smells and sounds told me that Rita was hard at work.

"Oh, Dexter," she said, and she put down the spatula and gave me a kiss on the cheek. "I heard you in the shower, and so I thought-would you like some blueberry pancakes? I had to use the frozen berries, which aren't really as-But how are you feeling? Because it isn't-I could make you eggs instead and freeze the pancakes for-Oh, honey, sit down; you look exhausted."

I made it into a chair with Rita's help and said, "Pancakes would be wonderful," which they were. I ate far too many of them, telling myself that I had earned it, and trying not to listen to the wicked whisper in my inner ear saying that after all, this could be the last time, unless I did something final about Samantha.

After breakfast I sat in the chair and sipped several cups of coffee, in the vain hope that it would live up to the advertisement and fill me with energy. It was very good coffee, but it didn't quite wash away the fatigue, and so I dawdled around the house a bit longer. I sat and held Lily Anne for a while. She threw up on me once, and I thought how strange it was that it didn't bother me. And then she fell asleep in my arms and I just sat for a while longer and enjoyed that, too.

But finally the small and unwelcome voice of duty began to nag at me, and so I put Lily Anne in her basket, gave Rita a kiss, and headed out the door.

Traffic was light, and I let my mind wander a little bit as I headed up Dixie Highway, but as I nosed onto the Palmetto Expressway I began to get a very uneasy feeling that things were not what they should be and I brought Dexter's mighty brain back online and searched for what was wrong. It was a very quick search, not because of the power of my logic, but because of the power of the smell, which was coming from behind me, somewhere in the backseat of my car. It was a terrible smell, an odor of old and unnameable things decomposing and fermenting and growing deader and deader, and I could not say what it might be except that it was awful and getting worse.

I couldn't see anything behind me while driving, even when I tipped the mirror down, and as I drove north to work I pondered, until a school bus wandering across the road brought my attention back to driving. Even in light traffic it does not do to turn your thoughts away from the road, not in Miami, so I rolled down the window and concentrated on getting to work alive.

And as I pulled into the lot at work and slowed to nose into my parking spot, the smell built up again and I thought about it. The last time I had driven my car had been right before the whole mess with Samantha that started at Fang, and before that Chapin.

I had taken the car to my playdate with Victor Chapin, and I had carried away the leftovers in garbage bags when I was done-was it possible that some small piece had fallen out and was still there, slowly rotting in the heat of a car closed up all day, and now making this hideous smell? Unthinkable, I was always so careful-but what else could it be? The odor was far beyond dreadful, and now it seemed to get worse, fumes fanned by my near-panic. I stepped on the brake and turned all the way around to look A garbage bag. I had missed one somehow-but that was impossible, I could never be so stupid, so careless Except I had hurried that night, rushed through the whole thing to get it done and get back to bed. Laziness-stupid, selfish sloth, and now here I was at police headquarters with a bag of body parts in my car. I shoved the gear lever into park and climbed out, and the panic sweat was already soaking my back and rolling off my face as I opened the back door and knelt down to look.

Yes, a garbage bag. But how? How did it get here, on the floor in the backseat, when all the others had gone carefully into the trunk, and then And then a car pulled into the slot next to mine and after a bright stab of total panic I took a deep and calming breath. This was not a problem, not for me. Whoever it was, I would simply give them a cheerful hello and they would be off and into the building, and I would drive this bag of Chapin away. No big deal, I was just good old Dexter, the blood-spatter guy, and there was no one on the entire force who had any reason to think otherwise.

No one, except for the man who climbed out of the car and glared down at me. Or to be precise, the two-thirds of a man. His hands and feet were gone, of course, as well as his tongue, and he carried a small notebook computer to help him speak, and as I struggled for breath, he flipped it open and, without taking his eyes off me, he punched buttons to make an electronic sentence.

"What-is-in-bag?" Sergeant Doakes said through his computer.

"Bag?" I said, and I admit it was not my very best moment.

Doakes glared at me, and whether it was just the fact that he hated me and suspected me of being what I really was, or whether I actually looked guilty squatting there and fingering a bag of leftovers, I don't know. Whatever the case, I saw a bright gleam of something horrible flash into his eyes and before I could do anything except gape, Doakes jerked forward, whipped his metallic claw of a hand down, and grabbed the bag out of my car.

And as I watched with horror and dread and a growing sense of my own very imminent mortality, he placed his artificial voice box on the roof of the car, opened the bag, reached inside with a triumphant show of teeth at me-and pulled out a truly filthy, rotting, and horrible diaper.

And as I watched Doakes's face run the entire spectrum from victory to utter disgust, I remembered. As I had left for my impromptu session with Chapin, Rita had thrust the bag of dirty diapers at me. In my haste, I had left it for later. Then the whole business of Deke's death, my abduction, the dreadful episode with Samantha-it had all driven that tiny unimportant diaper bag out of my mind. But as the memory flooded back, I felt a rising happiness wash back in with it, made even tastier by the realization that Lily Anne, that wonderful, magical child-Lily Anne, the diaper queen, the paragon of poop-my own sweet Lily Anne had saved me with her dirty diapers. And even better, she had humiliated Doakes at the same time.

Life was good; fatherhood was once more a wonderful adventure.

I stood up and faced Doakes with great good cheer. "I know it's toxic," I said. "And it probably breaks several city ordinances, too." I held out my hand for the bag. "But I beg you, Sergeant, don't arrest me. I promise to throw it away properly."

Doakes turned his eyes away from the diaper and onto me, and he looked at me with an expression of loathing and rage so powerful that for just a moment it overpowered the open diaper bag. Then he very carefully said, "Nguggermukker," and opened the claw holding the bag. It dropped to the pavement, and a moment later the diaper he held in the other claw flopped down beside it.

"Nguggermukker?" I said brightly. "Is that Dutch?" But Doakes just grabbed his silver voice box from the roof of the car, turned away from me and the dirty diapers, and stomped away across the parking lot on his two artificial feet.

I felt utter and complete relief as I watched him go, and when he vanished at the far end of the parking lot I took a deep, relaxing breath-which was a very big mistake, considering what lay at my feet. Coughing slightly, and blinking away the tears, I bent down and pushed the diaper back into the bag, twisted the bag closed, and carried it to the Dumpster.

It was one-thirty in the afternoon by the time I finally got to my desk. I fiddled with a few lab reports, ran a routine test on the spectrometer, and suffered through a cup of truly despicable coffee while the hands on the clock trudged 'round the dial to four-thirty. And just when I thought I had made it safely all the way through my first day back from bondage, Deborah walked in with a horrible expression on her face. I could not read it, but I knew that something had gone terribly wrong, and it seemed to be something she was taking rather personally. And because I have known Deborah my whole life and I knew how her mind worked, I assumed it meant trouble for Dexter.

"Good afternoon," I said brightly, in the hope that if I was cheerful enough the problem would go away, whatever it was. It didn't, of course.

"Samantha Aldovar," my sister said, looking straight through me, and all my anxiety from the night before washed over me, and I knew that Samantha had talked already and Deborah was here to arrest me. My irritation with the girl went up several notches; she couldn't even wait a decent interval for me to come up with some kind of airtight excuse. It was as if her tongue was spring-loaded and had to burst out into furious activity the moment she took her first free breath. She had probably been babbling about me before the front door of her house even swung shut, and now it was all over for me. I was finished, washed up, completely-and with no pun intended-screwed. I was immediately filled with apprehension, alarm, and bitterness. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned discretion?

Still, it was done, and there was nothing left for Dexter except to face the music and pay the piper. So taking a deep breath, I looked it square in the face and did so. "It wasn't my fault," I said to Deborah, and I began to gather my soggy wits for Stage One of Dexter's Defense.

But Deborah blinked, and a small frown of confusion crept into the bleakness on her face. "What the fuck do you mean, it's not your fault?" she said. "Who said anything about-How could it possibly be your fault?"

Once again, I had the sensation that everyone else was working off a fully rehearsed script, and I was being asked to improvise. "I just meant-nothing," I said, hoping for a clue on what my line was supposed to be.

"Jesus fuck," she said. "Why is everything always about you?"

I suppose I could have said, Because somehow I am always in the middle of it, usually unwilling, and usually because you have pushed me there, but cooler heads prevailed. "I'm sorry," I said. "What's wrong, Debs?"

She stared at me a little longer, and then shook her head and slumped down in the chair beside my desk. "Samantha Aldovar," she repeated. "She's gone again."

Sometimes I think it is a very good thing that I have had so many years of practice at showing only what I want to show on my face, and this was absolutely one of those times, because my first impulse was to shout, Whoopee! Good girl! and burst into lighthearted song. And so it was quite possibly one of the greatest demonstrations of acting skill our age has yet seen when I managed instead to look shocked and concerned. "You're kidding," I said, thinking, I really hope you're not kidding.

"She stayed home from school today, resting," Deborah said. "I mean, she went through an awful lot." It apparently didn't occur to my sister that I had gone through even more, but nobody's perfect. "So around two o'clock, her mother went out to the store," she said. "And she comes back a little while ago, and Samantha was gone." Deborah shook her head. "She left a note: 'Don't look for me; I'm not coming back.' She ran, Dex. She took off and ran."

I was feeling so much better that I actually managed to fight down the impulse to say, I told you so. After all, Debs had refused to believe me when I told her Samantha had gone into cannibal captivity willingly, even eagerly, the first time. And since I was right about that, it made perfect sense that she would take off again at the first opportunity. It was not a terribly noble thought, but I hoped she found a good hiding place.

Deborah sighed heavily and shook her head again. "I never heard of Stockholm syndrome so strong the victim ran back to the bad guys," she said.

"Debs," I said, and now I really couldn't help it, "I told you. It's not Stockholm. Samantha wants to be eaten. It was her fantasy."

"That's bullshit," she said angrily. "Nobody wants that."

"Then why did she run away again?" I said, and she just shook her head and looked down at her hands.

"I don't know," she said. She stared at her hands where they lay in her lap, as if the answer might be written on her knuckles, and then she straightened up. "It doesn't matter," she said. "What matters is where she went." She looked up at me. "So where would she go, Dex?"

To be honest, I didn't really care where Samantha went, as long as she stayed there. Still, I had to say something.

"What about Bobby Acosta?" I said, and it made sense. "Did you find him yet?"

"No," she said, very grumpy, and she shrugged. "He can't stay lost forever," she said. "We're bringing way too much heat. Besides," she said, and she raised both palms, "his family has money, and political clout, and they're gonna figure they can get him off."

"Can they?" I asked.

Deborah looked at her knuckles "Maybe," she said. "Fuck. Yeah, probably. We got witnesses who can connect him to Tyler Spanos's car-but a good lawyer could chop up those two Haitians in two seconds on the stand. And he ran from me-but that's not much, either. The rest is guesswork and hearsay so far, and-Shit, yeah, I guess he could walk." She nodded to herself and looked at her hands again. "Yeah, sure, Bobby Acosta will walk," she said softly. "Again. And then nobody goes down for this…" She studied her knuckles again, and then looked up at me, and her face was wearing an expression unlike anything I had ever seen before.

"What is it?" I said.

Deborah bit her lip. "Maybe," she said. She looked away. "I don't know." She looked back at me and took a deep breath. "Maybe there's something, you know," she said. "Something you could do about it."

I blinked several times, and I just barely managed to stop myself from looking down to see if there was still a floor underneath our feet. It was impossible to misunderstand what she was suggesting. As far as Debs was concerned I only did two things, and my sister was not talking about using my forensic skills on Bobby Acosta.

Deborah was the one person on earth who knew about my hobby. I thought she had come to accept it, however reluctantly-but to have her suggest that I should actually use it on somebody was so completely outside the limits of what I thought Deborah would ever approve of that the idea never occurred to me, and I was truly stunned. "Deborah," I said, and the shock had to be showing in my voice. But she leaned as far forward as she could without tipping out of her chair and lowered her voice.

"Bobby Acosta is a killer," she said with savage intensity. "And he's going to walk-again-just because he's got money and clout. It's not right, and you know it-and that has to be the kind of thing that Dad wanted you to take care of."

"Listen," I said, but she wasn't quite done.

"Goddamn it, Dexter," she said, "I tried like hell to understand you, and what Daddy wanted with you, and I finally do-I get it, okay? I know exactly what Daddy was thinking. Because I'm a cop like he was, and every cop comes up against a Bobby Acosta someday, somebody who does murder and walks, even if you do everything right. And you can't sleep and you grind your teeth and you want to scream and strangle somebody but it's your job to eat the shit and like it and there's nothing you can do about it." She actually stood up, and she leaned her fist on my desk and put her face about six inches away from mine. "Until now," she said. "Until finally Daddy solved this whole thing, the whole fucked-up mess." She poked me in the chest. "With you," she said. "And now I need you to be what Daddy wanted you to be, Dexter. I need you to take care of Bobby Acosta."

Debs glared at me for several seconds as I scrambled for something to say. And in spite of my well-deserved reputation for a glib tongue and a ready wit, there were absolutely no words there for me to grab on to and speak. I mean, really; I had been trying so hard to reform, to live a normal life, and because of that I had been drugged, forced into an orgy, taunted and beaten by cannibals-and now my sister, a sworn officer of the law and a lifelong opponent of everything I held dear, was actually asking me to kill someone. I began to wonder if perhaps I was still lying somewhere, tied up and drugged, and hallucinating all this. The idea was very comforting-but my stomach was growling, and my chest hurt where Debs had poked me, and I realized that something so unpleasant was probably true, and that meant I had to deal with it.

"Deborah," I said carefully. "I think you're a little bit upset-"

"You're goddamned right I'm upset," she said. "I bust my ass to get Samantha Aldovar back, and now she's gone again-and I'm betting Bobby Acosta has her, and he's going to get away with it."

Of course, it would have been more accurate for Debs to say she had busted my ass getting Samantha back-but now was not the best time to correct her, and anyway I suspected she was right about Bobby Acosta. Samantha had gotten into this because of him, and he was one of the last people left who could still help her fulfill her dream. But at least it offered a way out of the awkward moment-if I could steer the conversation on to where Acosta was, rather than what to do with him.

"I think you're right," I said. "Acosta got her started on all this. Samantha would go to him now."

Deborah still didn't sit back down, and she was still looking at me with red spots on her cheeks and fire in her eyes. "All right," she said. "I'm going to find the little bastard. And then…"

Sometimes a short reprieve and a change of subject is the very best you can hope for, and clearly I was there now. I could only hope that in the time it took to find Acosta, Debs would calm down a little bit and decide that feeding her felon to Dexter was not the wisest course. Maybe she would shoot him herself. In any case, I was off the hook-temporarily, at least.

"Okay," I said. "How are you going to find him?"

Deborah straightened up and ran a hand through her hair. "I'll talk to his old man," she said. "He's got to know Bobby's best chance is to walk in here with a lawyer."

That was almost certainly true-but then, Joe Acosta was a rich and powerful man, and my sister was a tough and stubborn woman, and a meeting of two such people would probably go a lot smoother if at least one person present had just a tiny smidgen of tact. Deborah had never had any; she probably couldn't even spell it. And judging from his reputation, Joe Acosta was the kind of man who would buy tact if he ever needed any. So that left me.

I stood up. "I'll come with you," I said.

She studied me for a moment, and I thought perhaps she was going to tell me "no" out of sheer perverseness. But then she nodded. "Okay," she said, and she headed out the door.