by Jeff Lindsay
“Shit,” she said through her tightly clenched teeth. “Matthews pulled my BOLO.”
“We knew this was coming,” I said.
Debs nodded. “It’s here,” she said, and then, looking past me to the road, she added, “Aw, shit.”
I turned and followed her gaze. Deke was climbing out of his car, hitching up his pants, and giving a big smile to the woman who stood in front of the news van brushing her hair and setting up a shot. She actually stopped brushing for a moment and gaped back at him, and he nodded to her and sauntered toward us. She watched him go for a moment, licked her lips, and went back to her hair with renewed vigor.
“Technically, he is your partner,” I said.
“Technically he’s a brain-dead asshole,” she said.
“Hey,” Deke said as he strolled up to us. “Captain says I should keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t fuck nothing else up.”
“How the hell are you going to know if I fuck up?” Debs snarled at him.
“Oh, hey, you know,” he said, shrugging. He looked back at the TV newswoman. “I mean, just don’t talk to the press or something, right?” He winked at Deborah. “Anyway, I got to stay with you now,” he said. “Keep this thing on track.”
For a moment I thought she would let loose a blast of seven separate killing remarks that would drop Deke where he stood and singe the Acostas’ manicured lawn, but Debs had clearly received the same message from the captain, and she was a good soldier. Discipline won out and she just looked at Deke for a long moment and finally said, “All right. Let’s check the other names on this list,” and walked meekly to her car.
Deke pulled up his pants again and watched her go. “Well, all right,” he said, and followed her. The TV newswoman watched him go with a somewhat distracted expression, until her producer almost smacked her with a microphone.
I got a ride back to headquarters with one of the squad cars, driven by a cop named Willoughby who seemed obsessed with the Miami Heat. I learned a great deal about point guards and something called the pick and roll by the time I got out of the car. I am sure it was wonderfully useful information, and someday it will come in handy, but I was nevertheless very grateful to climb out into the afternoon heat and trudge back to my little cubicle.
And there I was, left to my own devices for most of the rest of the day. I went to lunch and tried out a new place not too far away that specialized in falafels. Unfortunately, it also specialized in dark hairs swimming in a vile sauce, and I came back from my break with a very unhappy stomach. I went through some routine lab work, filed a few papers, and enjoyed the solitude until about four o’clock, when Deborah wandered into my cubicle. She was carrying a thick folder and she looked as distressed as my stomach. She hooked a chair out with her toe and slouched into it without speaking. I put down the file I was reading and gave her my attention.
“You look beat, sis,” I said.
She nodded and looked at her hands. “Long day,” she said.
“You checked out the other names on the dentist’s list?” I asked her, and again she just nodded, and so, because I wanted to help her be a little more socially adept, I added, “With your partner, Deke?”
Her head jerked up and she glared at me. “That fucking idiot,” she said, and then she shrugged and slumped again.
“What did he do?” I asked.
She shrugged again. “Nothing,” she said. “He’s not totally terrible at the routine stuff. Asks all the standard questions.”
“So why the long face, Debs?” I asked.
“They took away my suspect, Dexter,” she said, and once again I was struck by the weary vulnerability that crept into her voice. “The Acosta kid knows something; I know it. He may not be hiding those girls, but he knows who is, and they won’t let me go after him.” She waved a knuckle toward the hallway. “They even have that asshole Deke babysitting me to make sure I don’t do anything that might embarrass the commissioner.”
“Well,” I said, “Bobby Acosta may not be guilty of anything.”
Debs showed me her teeth. It would have been a smile if she were not so clearly miserable. “He’s guilty as shit,” she said, and she held up the folder in her hand. “He’s got a record you wouldn’t believe—even without the stuff they blacked out when he was a minor.”
“A juvie record doesn’t make him guilty this time,” I said.
Deborah leaned forward, and for a moment I thought she was going to hit me with Bobby Acosta’s file. “The hell it doesn’t,” she said, and then, happily for me, she opened the file instead of swinging it at my head. “Assault. Assault with intent. Assault. Grand theft auto.” She looked up at me apologetically as she said “grand theft” and shrugged before dropping her eyes back to the folder. “Twice he was arrested because he was caught on the scene when somebody died in suspicious circumstances, and it should have been manslaughter at the very least, but both times his old man bought him out of trouble.” She closed the folder and slapped it with the back of her hand. “There’s a lot more,” she said. “But it all ends the same way, with blood on Bobby’s hands and his father bailing him out.” She shook her head. “This is one bad, fucked-up kid, Dexter. He’s killed at least two people, and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he knows where those girls are. If he hasn’t already killed them, too.”
I thought Debs was probably right. Not because a record of past crimes always meant present guilt—but I had felt a slow and sleepy stir of interest from the Passenger, a speculative raising of inner eyebrows as Deborah read from the file, and the old Dexter would very definitely have added the name of Bobby Acosta to his little black book of potential playmates. But of course, Dexter 2.0 didn’t do those things. Instead, I merely nodded sympathetically. “You may be right,” I said.
Deborah jerked her head up. “May be,” she said. “I am right. Bobby Acosta knows where those girls are, and I can’t fucking touch him because of his old man.”
“Well,” I said, acutely conscious of speaking a cliché but unable to think of anything else worth saying, “you really can’t fight city hall, you know.”
Deborah stared at me for a moment with an absolutely blank face. “Wow,” she said. “Did you think that up by yourself?”
“Well, come on, Debs,” I said, and I admit I was a little peevish. “You knew this would happen, and it happened, so why should it bother you?”
She blew out a long breath, and then folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them, which was somehow much worse than the snarling comeback I’d expected. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s not just this.” She turned her hands over and looked at the back side. “Maybe it’s … I don’t know. Everything.”
If everything really was bothering my sister, it was much easier to understand her weary misery; being in charge of everything would be a crushing burden. But in my small experience with humans, I have learned that if someone says they are oppressed by everything, it usually means one small and very specific something. And in my sister’s case, even though she had always acted like she was in charge of everything, I thought this would hold true; some particular something was eating at her and making her act like this. And remembering what she had said about her live-in boyfriend, Kyle Chutsky, I thought that was probably it.
“Is it Chutsky?” I said.
Her head jerked up. “What. You mean does he beat me up? Is he cheating on me?”
“No, of course not,” I said, holding up a hand in case she decided to hit me. I knew he wouldn’t dare cheat on her—and the idea of anybody trying to beat up my sister was laughable. “It’s just what you were saying the other day. About, you know—tick-tock, bio clock?”
She drooped over again and looked at her hands in her lap. “Uh-huh. I said that, didn’t I,” she said. She shook her head slowly. “Well, it’s still true. And fucking Chutsky—he won’t even talk about it.”
I looked at my sister, and I admit that my feelings did me no credit, because my firs
t truly conscious reaction to Deb’s outpouring was to think, Wow! I really am feeling empathy with an actual human emotion! Because Deborah’s continuing descent into a soft pudding of self-pity had actually reached me, deep down on the brand-new human level recently opened by Lily Anne, and I found that I did not have to search my memory for a response from some old daytime drama. I really felt something, and that was very impressive to me.
So without actually thinking it through at all, I got up from my chair and went over to her. I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently and said, “I’m sorry, sis. Is there anything I can do?”
And naturally enough, Deborah stiffened and slapped my hand away. She stood up and looked at me with something that was at least halfway back to her natural snarl. “For starters, you can stop acting like Father Flanagan,” she said. “Jesus, Dex. What’s got into you?”
And before I could utter a single syllable of completely logical rebuttal, she stalked out of my office and disappeared down the hall.
“Glad to help,” I said to her back.
Maybe I was just too new to having feelings to really understand them and act accordingly. Or maybe it was just going to take Debs a little time to get used to the new, compassionate Dexter. But it was starting to seem even more likely to me that some terribly wicked person or persons had put something sinister in the Miami water supply.
Just as I was getting ready to leave for the day, the weirdness went up one more notch. My cell phone rang and I glanced at it, saw that it was Rita, and answered. “Hello?” I said.
“Dexter, hi, um, it’s me,” she said.
“Of course it is,” I said encouragingly.
“Are you still at work?” she said.
“Just getting ready to leave.”
“Oh, good, because—I mean, if, instead of picking up Cody and Astor?” she said. “Because you don’t have to tonight.”
A quick mental translation told me that I didn’t have to pick up the kids for some reason. “Oh, why not?” I said.
“It’s just, they’re already gone,” she said, and for one terrible moment, as I struggled to understand what she meant, I thought that something awful had happened to them.
“What—Where did they go?” I managed to stammer.
“Oh,” she said. “Your brother picked them up. Brian. He’s going to take them for Chinese food.”
What a wonderful world of new experiences I was having with being human. Right now, for example, I was struck speechless with astonishment. I felt wave after wave of thoughts and feelings wash over me: things like anger, amazement, and suspicion, ideas like wondering what Brian was really up to, why Rita would ever go along with it, and what Cody and Astor would do when they remembered that they didn’t like Chinese food. But no matter how copious and specific my thoughts were, nothing at all came out of my mouth, except, “Uhk,” and as I struggled for coherent sounds, Rita said, “Oh. I have to go. Lily Anne is crying. Bye.” And she hung up.
I’m sure it was only a few seconds that I stood there listening to the sound of absolutely nothing, but it seemed like a very long time. Eventually I became aware that my mouth was dry, since it was hanging open, and my hand was sweaty from where I had clamped the cell phone into my fist. I closed my mouth, put the phone away, and headed for home.
Rush hour was in full swing as I headed south from work, and oddly enough, all the way home I saw no acts of random violence, no violent swerving or fist waving, no shots fired. The traffic inched along as slowly as ever, but nobody really seemed to mind. I wondered if I should have read my horoscope—perhaps that would explain what was going on. It could well be that somewhere in Miami really knowledgeable people—druids, perhaps—were nodding their heads and murmuring, “Ahhh, Jupiter is in a retrograde moon of Saturn,” and pouring another cup of herb tea while they lounged around in Birkenstocks. Or maybe it was a group of the vampires Debs was chasing—was it called a flock? Perhaps if enough of them sharpened their teeth a new age of harmony would dawn for us all. Or at least for Dr. Lonoff, the dentist.
I spent a quiet evening at home watching TV and holding Lily Anne whenever I could. She did a lot of sleeping, but it worked for her just as well if I was holding her at the time, so I did. It seemed to me to indicate a remarkable degree of trust on her part. On the one hand, I hoped she would grow out of that, since it was not terribly wise to trust others so much. But on the other tiny, perfect hand, it filled me with a sense of wonder and a resolve to protect her from all the other beasts of the night.
I found myself sniffing Lily Anne’s head frequently—certifiably odd behavior, I know, but, from what I could gather, completely in keeping with my new human persona. The smell was remarkable, unlike anything else I had ever smelled. It was an odor that was almost nothing at all, and it did not really fit into any category like “sweet” or “musty,” although it contained elements of both—and more, and neither. But I sniffed and was unable to say what the smell was, and then I sniffed again just because I wanted to, and then suddenly a new odor welled up from the region of the diaper, one that was quite easy to identify.
Changing a diaper is really not as bad as it sounds, and I didn’t mind it at all. I am not suggesting that I would embrace it as a career choice, but at least in the case of Lily Anne’s diaper it was something that did not actually cause me any suffering—in some ways it was even enjoyable, since I was doing a very specific and necessary service for her. I got further pleasure from seeing Rita swoop in like a dive-bomber, probably to make sure I didn’t accidentally boil the baby, and then pause and just watch when she saw my quiet competence, and I felt a warm glow of satisfaction when I finished and she took the baby off the changing table, saying only, “Thank you, Dexter.”
While Rita fed Lily Anne, I returned to the TV and watched a hockey game for a few minutes. It was disappointing; in the first place, the Panthers were already down by three goals, and in the second place, there were no fights. I had originally been attracted to the game because of the honest and laudable bloodlust the players showed. Now, however, it occurred to me that I really ought to frown on that sort of thing. The New Me, Diaper Daddy Dexter, was strongly opposed to violence and could not possibly approve of a sport like hockey. Perhaps I could switch to bowling. It seemed awfully boring, but there was no blood, and it was certainly more exciting than golf.
Before I could reach any decision, Rita came back with Lily Anne. “Would you like to burp her, Dexter?” she said with a Madonna-like smile—the Madonna in the paintings, not the one with the fancy bra.
“I would like nothing better,” I said, and weirdly enough, I meant it. I placed a small towel over my shoulder and held the baby facedown on it. And once again, for some reason it was not at all awful, even when Lily Anne made her delicate barfing noises and small bubbles of milk came out and onto the towel. I found myself murmuring quiet congratulations to her with each little blarp she made, until finally she drifted back into sleep and I switched her around to the front position, holding her to my chest and gently moving her from side to side in a rock-a-bye motion.
I was in this position when Brian brought Cody and Astor home at around nine o’clock. Technically, this was pushing the envelope a bit, since nine o’clock was bedtime and now the kids would be at least fifteen minutes late climbing into their beds. But Rita didn’t seem to mind, and it would have been churlish of me to object, since everyone had so clearly had a very good time. Even Cody was almost smiling, and I made a note to find out what conceivable Chinese restaurant Brian might have taken them to in order to get that kind of reaction.
I was at a bit of a disadvantage, since I was holding Lily Anne, but as Rita hustled the two older kids off to pajamas and teeth brushing I stood up for a friendly word with my brother. “Well,” I said as he stood by the door with an air of quiet satisfaction, “they look like they had a good time.”
“Oh, they did,” he said with his dreadful fake smile. “Remarkable children, both of them.”
“Did they eat the spring rolls?” I asked, and Brian looked extremely blank for a moment.
“The spring—Oh yes, they devoured everything I put in front of them,” he said, and there was such an ominous happiness in the way he said it that I was absolutely certain we were not talking about food.
“Brian,” I said, but I got no further as Rita came whirling out.
“Oh, Brian,” she said, snatching Lily Anne from my arms. “I don’t know what on earth you did, but the children had a wonderful time. I’ve never seen them like this.”
“It was entirely my pleasure,” he said, and it made small icicles blossom along my spine.
“Won’t you sit for a few minutes?” Rita said. “I could make some coffee, or a glass of wine …?”
“Oh, no,” he said happily. “Thank you very much, dear lady, but I really must be going. Believe it or not, I have an appointment this evening.”
“Oh!” Rita said with a guilty blush. “I hope you didn’t—I mean, with the children, and you might have—You shouldn’t—”
“Not at all,” Brian said, as if it had all made sense. “I have plenty of time. But I must take my fond farewells now.”
“Well,” Rita said, “if you’re sure that—And I really can’t thank you enough because it’s—”
“Mom!” Astor called from down the hall.
“Oh, dear,” Rita said. “Excuse me, but—thank you so much, Brian.” And she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
“Entirely my pleasure,” Brian said again, and Rita smiled and hurried away to Astor and Cody.
Brian and I looked at each other for a moment, and while there was a great deal I wanted to say to him, I did not really know what it was specifically enough to say it. “Brian,” I said again, but it stopped there, and he smiled that terrible fake, knowing smile.