Double Dexter

THIRTY-THREE

A lot of people do nothing in Key West. It s a good place for that. You can watch everyone moving along Duval Street and wonder what strange alien race they belong to. Or you can go down to the water and look at the pelicans, watch the boats bobbing at anchor or racing past in the harbor, crowded with sunburned partiers, and if you look up you can see the planes flying low overhead towing their banners.

For five minutes, that s all I did. I slumped right into the national pastime of the Conch Republic and I did nothing. I just stood on the dock and watched the water, the boats, the birds. There didn t seem to be a whole lot more I could do. The boat with Cody and Astor was gone, speeding away across the ocean. It was already more than a mile away and I couldn t call it back and I couldn t run after it across the water.

So I did nothing. And it seems a little bit ironic, but apparently there is actually one place in Key West where you can t do that, and I had found it. I became aware that people were pushing past me, briskly moving coils of rope and hoses and two-wheeled carts stuffed with baggage, food and ice, and dive gear. And judging by the irritated glances they sent me, I was in their way.

Finally one of them stopped beside me, dropping the handles of a cart filled with scuba tanks and straightening up to face me. Say there, Captain, he said in a bluff and friendly voice.

Wonder if you could move off to the side a bit? We got to load the boat for a dive trip.

I turned away from the water and looked him in the face. It was a friendly and open dark brown face, and just in case I might be a potential customer, he added, Right out to the reef, it s absolutely beautiful. Oughta see it sometime, Captain.

A tiny little gleam of hope flickered deep in the dark corners of my brain. You don t go anywhere near Fort Jefferson, do you?

The man laughed. Tortugas? No, sir, you just missed the last boat down there. Next one s tomorrow morning.

Of course as always, hope was a stupid waste of time. My one small flicker hissed out and the gray fog rolled back in. And because people always insist on talking to you when you want to be alone with your quiet despair, the man went on babbling at me with his cheerful huckster s patter.

Now, Tortugas are worth seeing, too, you know. You can t believe Fort Jefferson till you see it. Maybe the best way to see it, by air? Got a brochure over here He trotted five steps to his right and rummaged in a dock locker, then came back and handed me a glossy, brightly colored pamphlet. Here ya go, he said.

My girlfriend works for them. They fly down there four times a day? Beautiful, coming in low over the fort, and then you splash down, very cool, very exciting

He thrust the brochure into my hand and I took it. It said, ALBATROSS AIRLINES! across the top and suddenly it really was exciting, the most exciting thing in the world. It s a seaplane? I said, staring at the pictures.

Sure, has to be, no landing strip down there, he said.

It would be a lot quicker than the boat, wouldn t it? I said.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Conch Lines boat takes a good three hours, maybe a little more. This ll have you there in like forty minutes. Great trip, too.

It didn t matter to me if the trip was great. If it got me to the Dry Tortugas before Crowley got there, before he could set his Dexter-Smashing Trap, it could be the most miserable trip of all time and I would still want to hug the pilot. Thank you, I said, and I actually meant it.

Sure thing, he said. Uh, so if you wouldn t mind? He gestured to one side of the dock and raised his eyebrows to help me find my way out of his path, but I was already gone, sprinting down the dock, past the shops and restaurants and into the parking lot, where for once luck was with me and a bright pink Key West taxi was just disgorging its load of pale overweight passengers, and I jumped in as the last of them paid the driver.

Hiya, bud, the driver said. She was about fifty, with a square face that had been savaged and turned to old worn leather by the sun, and she stretched it into a brief professional smile for me. Where to?

It was a fair question, and I realized I didn t know the answer. Luckily, I was still clutching the pamphlet, so I opened it up and scanned it rapidly. Airport, I said, as I found it on the page. And as quickly as possible.

You got it, she said, and we were off, out of the parking lot, across the island, and out on the far side on Roosevelt. My phone rang; it was Rita again. I turned my phone off.

The cab rolled past Smathers Beach. A wedding party clustered on the sand, the bride and groom standing at the edge of the water under a white canopy, the kind they use in Jewish weddings a hoopoe? No, that was a bird. Something like that. I couldn t think of the word. That didn t seem as important as the fact that we were finally turning off the beachfront road into the airport.

I jumped out of the cab and flung money at the driver without counting it or waiting for change, and as I ran into the terminal I thought, Chuppah. That was the name of the Jewish wedding canopy. Remembering the word pleased me a whole lot more than it should have, and I made a mental note to think about why that mattered some other day.

I found Albatross Airlines down at the far end of the terminal. A woman in a brown uniform stood behind the counter. She was about fifty, with a leathery face that looked like my cab driver s twin. I wondered if she was the girlfriend of my new friend on the dock. For his sake, I hoped not.

Can I help you? she said in a voice like a very butch raven.

I need to get to the Dry Tortugas as fast as possible, I told her.

She nodded at the sign on the back wall. Our next flight is at noon, she cawed.

I need to get there now, I told her.

Noon, she said.

I took a very deep breath and told myself that caving in somebody s head is not always the best solution. It s an emergency, I said.

She snorted. A seaplane emergency? she said with heavy sarcasm.

Yes, I said, and she blinked in surprise.

My kids are on the boat down to the Dry Tortugas, I said.

Nice trip, she said.

They re with somebody a man who might hurt them.

She shrugged. You can use my phone, call the cops, she said. They ll call the ranger station down there.

I can t call the cops, I said, hoping she wouldn t ask me why.

Why not? she said.

I thought quickly; clearly the truth was not an option here, but that has never been much of an obstacle for me. Um, I said, waiting for something plausible to slide into the out-box.

He s he s my brother-in-law. And, you know. It s family. And if the cops get involved it would break my sister s heart. And my mother would you know. It s a family thing, and, uh, she has a heart condition.

Uh-huh, she said dubiously.

I was clearly getting nowhere with her, in spite of my wonderful creativity. But I did not despair. I had been to Key West before, and I knew how to get things done here. I reached for my wallet.

Please, I said, counting out a hundred dollars.

Isn t there something we can do?

The money vanished before I finished my sentence. I don t know, she said. Lemme ask Leroy.

There was a door on the back wall under the schedule and she went through it. A minute later she came back out, followed by a man in a pilot s uniform. He was about fifty, with hard blue eyes and a boxer s flattened nose.

What s up, Skipper? he said.

I need to get to the Tortugas as fast as possible, I said.

He nodded. Jackie said, he told me. But our next scheduled flight is in two hours, and we have to keep the schedule. Nothing I can do. Sorry.

No matter how sorry he might have been, he didn t leave, and that meant he wasn t refusing he was negotiating.

Five hundred dollars, I said.

He shook his head and leaned on the counter. Sorry, bud, I just can t do it, he said. The company has a policy.

Seven hundred, I said, and he shook his head.

It s my children; they re young and helpless, I said.

I could lose my job, he told me.

A thousand dollars, I said, and he stopped shaking his head.

Well, he said.

Those of us who are fiscally responsible look with scorn and condemnation on profligates who max out their credit cards. But the hard-eyed buccaneer behind the counter very quickly dropped me into exactly that financial hot water. It took two of my cards, but when I had finally sated his unholy lust for my money, it took only five minutes more and I was buckling myself into the passenger seat of his aircraft. Then we lumbered down the runway, gathering speed, until we finally waddled up into the sky.

The man on the dock, and the brochure he had given me, had assured me that the flight down to the Dry Tortugas was beautiful and memorable. If it was, I don t remember it. All I saw was the hand on my watch crawling forward. It seemed to be moving much slower than normal: Tick. Long pause. Tick. Another. This was taking too long I had to get there first. How long had it been since the boat pulled away from the dock? I tried to put the numbers together in my head. It shouldn t have been hard, but for some reason all my concentration was on grinding my teeth and I couldn t think about the time.

Luckily for my teeth, I didn t have to. There she is, the pilot said, nodding out the window. It was the first thing he d said since we were airborne, and I stopped grinding my teeth for a moment and looked at him. He nodded again. The boat, he said. With your kids.

I looked out the window. Below us I could see the bright white deck of a large, fast-moving boat, trailing a long wake behind it. Even from our height I could see a few people on the deck, but I couldn t tell if any of them were Cody and Astor.

Relax, the pilot told me. We ll get in a good forty-five minutes before they do.

I didn t relax, but I felt a little better. I watched as we passed over the boat and left it behind us, and finally, just as it dropped out of sight, the pilot spoke again. Fort Jefferson, he said.

The fort began to take shape as we got closer, and it was impressive. It s big, I said.

The pilot nodded. You could fit Yankee Stadium inside with room to spare, he said. And although I couldn t think of any reason why someone might want to try that, I nodded anyway.

Very nice, I said.

I shouldn t have encouraged him; he began to ramble, a long blather about the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln and even something about a missing hospital on a nearby sandbar, and I tuned him out and concentrated on the fort. It really was huge, and if I let Crowley get loose on the inside, I might never find him. But on the far side of the fort there was a pier jutting out, and as far as I could see it was the only one attached to the island.

The boat has to dock there, right? I said. The pilot glanced at me, with his mouth half-open. I had interrupted him in the middle of a story about a lighthouse that was just visible a mile or so across the water from the fort.

That s right, he said. But you see some of the people get off it, you wish they d just dump em out there. He nodded at the stretch of dark blue water between the fort and the lighthouse. Leave em for the Channel Hog.

The what?

He smirked at me. Channel Hog, he said. Biggest goddamned hammerhead shark known to man. Over twenty feet long, and always hungry. I truly would not recommend taking a swim out there, buddy.

I ll keep it in mind, I said. When do we, um, splash down?

He looked a little peeved that I had failed to appreciate his wit, but he shrugged it off. After all, he had enough of my money to take the sting out of such a small snub.

Right about now, he said, and he banked the plane, bringing it in low over the Channel Hog s front hall. The plane s pontoons smacked down, sending up showers of clean and fresh-looking salt water, and the noise of the engine rose up to a higher pitch for a moment as we slowed and turned toward the fort. It really was huge, and it stuck up out of the flat expanse of water around it, looking very imposing and out of place, with its enormous redbrick walls looming up over a few palm trees. Closer up I could see a row of gaping holes across the upper part of the fort, probably unfinished gun ports. They had a haunted look to them, as if they were the empty eye sockets of some gigantic skull leering down at me, and it gave the place a slightly spooky appearance.

The pilot slowed the plane a little more, and we bumped through the small waves past some pilings from a vanished jetty and turned into a very nice little harbor. A cluster of yachts was anchored at the far side, and a smaller boat with a National Park Service logo on the side was tied at the dock. We slowed, turned, and slid in next to it.

I walked off the dock and onto the brick path that led into the fort, looking for the perfect place to wait for Crowley someplace where I could see him without being seen, and take him before he knew I was anywhere near. I do love a surprise, and I wanted to give Crowley one of my best.

The sun was still hot and blindingly bright, and I didn t see any good places to lurk on the outside. The brick path led to a wooden bridge over a moat, where a few people stood. They were dressed in shorts and flip-flops and they all had earbuds crammed into their ears, each of them swaying slightly to a different beat as they stared at a sign that said:

FORT JEFFERSON DRY TORTUGAS NATIONAL PARK

It was only six words, and it shouldn t have taken very long to read, but maybe they couldn t concentrate with their music blasting directly into their skulls. Or maybe they were just slow readers. In any case, I didn t think the sign would make a good hiding place, even without the postliterate witnesses.

I moved past them and crossed the bridge. At its other end, directly underneath an American flag flying from the top rampart, a large and dark gateway led inside the walls. Even crossing the moat, I couldn t see what was inside, except for a circle of daylight on the far side. I went through the square marble arch and stepped in, and I paused, because I couldn t see anything at all in the sudden gloom. It was like stepping into midnight, and I had to blink for a moment as my eyes adjusted.

And as I stood there squinting in the darkness, a small light came on in the deeper darkness between my ears, and I actually heard myself murmur, Aha.

This was the place. This was where I would wait for Crowley. I could see out, all the way to the dock where the ferry would tie up, but he could not see me here, nestled in the shadows. And he would come off the boat, thinking that I was sixty miles behind him, and he would walk up the path, across the moat, and into this archway, where he would be temporarily blinded, as I had been. And then he would take that one last step, right into the True Darkness of Dexter s Delight. It was perfect.

Of course, it left me with the problem of what to do next. I could easily surprise Crowley, overpower him before he knew what was happening but what then? I had none of my special party favors with me: no noose, no duct tape, nothing. And I was in a very public place. It would be easy enough to knock him out but then I would have a large and unconscious body to cope with, never an easy assignment, even without the assorted tourists who might be dawdling nearby. I could drag the body somewhere, but then I would certainly be observed, which would leave me with nothing but some truly lame excuse like, My friend is drunk. Or I could finish him off quickly right here in the dark gateway and simply leave him, making a rapid but nonchalant exit with the kids. If we got most of the way to the dock before we were seen, we just might get away with it.

I bit my lip so hard I nearly broke the skin. This whole thing was all if and hope, and I hated that. There were people wandering around all over, and if only one of them saw what I did it was too many. There was going to be a dead body, and I was going to be seen with it before it died. And since I was already under police scrutiny for two murders, I didn t think they would buy the good old standby of saying it was an accident.

But there really was no choice. I had to do this, I had to do it now, and this dark archway gave me my best chance. I just had to hope I would get a small break. I d never relied on luck before, and it made me very unhappy to do so now. I didn t believe in it. It was too much like praying for a new bicycle.

A middle-aged man and woman walked into my shadowy retreat from the interior of the fort. They held hands and ambled past me, hardly seeing me, their flip-flops slapping on the hard stone floor, and then they disappeared out the other side toward the dock. I thought it through again, and it didn t get any better. But I didn t think of any other choices either. My best new thought came when I remembered that technically, Crowley had kidnapped Cody and Astor. If I was truly cornered, I could claim I had been defending them and throw myself on the mercy of the court. I was pretty sure there wasn t a lot of that in any Florida court, and I didn t think much of it would be reserved for me, but it didn t really matter. This was my only shot, and I would just have to take it and let things sort themselves out later.

In any case, I really wanted to do this. I wanted Crowley dead, and I wanted to do it myself, and nothing else was quite as important as that. If that meant a long vacation behind bars, so be it. I probably deserved it.

I looked at my watch. The boat should arrive in about half an hour. I couldn t lurk here in the shadows the whole time without somebody wondering what I was doing. So I continued on through the gateway and walked into the fort.

It seemed even bigger on the inside. The walls folded around a huge green lawn speckled with trees and crossed by a few pathways that led away to the far side, which seemed to be very far away. There were a few buildings, probably where the park rangers lived. To the right was a sign that read, VISITOR CENTER, and beyond it on the top of the wall a black lighthouse stuck up into the bright blue sky.

The top story of the high brick wall gaped in an endless chain of large openings, a series of huge doorways with no doors. The bottom floor echoed this pattern, with smaller, squatter doorways leading into blank darkness inside the walls. It was a vast arena of dark and secluded spots, so many of them over such a huge area that the 10^th Mountain Division could not have covered it all, let alone a small handful of park rangers, and I could see why Crowley had chosen it. It was the perfect setting for a recreational murder, followed by a haunting.

I went to the right, past the doorway into the Visitor Center and along the wall, peering into dark and empty rooms. Underneath the lighthouse I found a stairway leading up to the top of the wall, and I climbed it, coming out on top into the bright sunlight again. I squinted and looked around, and the intensity of the light hurt my eyes. I wished I d brought sunglasses. But I also wished I d brought a bazooka, or at least a baseball bat, so the glasses seemed a little bit trivial.

I went to the edge of the wall and looked down. Below me the moat came right up to the wall, and beyond that there was a sandy roadway between the fort and the beach. A fat man in a tiny bathing suit walked by on the sand, following a large black dog. Beyond him was a sliver of beach and several large boats moored just a few yards out from the sand. Someone on the deck of one of the yachts yelled something, and there was a brief blare of music.

I turned to my left, walking along the top of the wall in the direction the ferry would be coming from, picking my way through sand and tufts of grass, past a big black cannon where three kids were playing pirate. Beyond them I saw a chunk of loose brick lying in the sand. It had split in three pieces and fallen out of its slot in the wall. I glanced around me casually; the pirates were on the far side of their cannon, and there was no one else in sight. I stooped and picked up a piece of the brick and slid it into my pocket. It wasn t quite a bazooka, but it was better than nothing.

It was a five-minute walk across the top of the wall to the far side of the fort. When I finally got there I was soaked in sweat and I had a slight headache from the sun s sharp glare. I stood there and looked back toward Key West, squinting through the reflected gleam of light off the water. I waited for ten minutes or so, doing no more than scanning the horizon. Three more people walked past me, two middle-aged women chattering away in deep harsh voices, and one old man with a bandage on the side of his head. And then a small white speck appeared in the distance, even brighter than the blaze of sunlight off the water, and I watched as it grew bigger and brighter, and in only a few minutes it was big enough to be sure. It was the ferry, bringing me Cody and Astor and an end to the threat of Crowley. They were almost here, and it was time.

I hurried back to the staircase and went down to the gateway to wait.