by Jeff Lindsay
I was still unhappy when I left the meeting. I had come with a small faint hope of finding one tiny crumb that might lead to a bigger trail of bread crumbs I could follow to find my Witness. I left with even that small hope completely demolished. Once again I had absolutely nothing. Hope is always a bad idea.
Still, there was one very small lead, and I hurried to my computer to see where it went. I did a thorough search on Bernard Elan, and then Bernie Elan. Most of the official records were wiped clean, replaced with “Deceased.” He had done a very complete job, whatever he might be calling himself now.
I did find a number of old articles about a Bernie Elan who played third base for a minor-league ball club in Syracuse, the Chiefs. Apparently he was a power hitter but never got the hang of the curveball, and never got called up to the majors, and after a season and a half he was gone. There was even a picture. It showed a man in a baseball uniform in profile, swinging at a pitch. The photo was grainy and a bit out of focus, and although I could tell he did have a face, I could not have said what it looked like, or even how many noses he had. There were no other pictures of Bernie anywhere on the Internet.
That was it; there was nothing else to find. I now knew my Witness had played baseball, and he was good with a computer. That narrowed it down to no more than a few million people.
The next few days went by in a sweat-stained blur, and not just because summer had really hit and turned the heat up a notch. Dexter was in a true dither, an all-time, all-star, all-out tizzy of near panic. I was jumpy, distracted, unable to focus on anything except the thought that someone I didn’t know was coming my way to do Something I couldn’t possibly prepare for. I had to be watchful, ready for anything—but how? What? Where would it come from, and when? How could I know what to do when I didn’t know when, why, and to whom I would do it?
And yet, I had to be ready for it every moment of every day, waking and sleeping. It was an impossible task, and it had all my wheels spinning furiously without actually moving me anywhere but deeper into a funk. In my feverish paranoia, every step I heard was Him, sneaking up behind me with bad intentions and a Louisville Slugger.
Even Vince Masuoka noticed; it would have been hard not to, since I jumped like a scalded cat every time he cleared his throat. “My boy,” he said at last, looking at me across the lab over his laptop screen, “you are seriously on edge.”
“I work too hard,” I said.
He shook his head. “Then you need to party even harder.”
“I am a married man with three kids and a demanding job,” I said. “I don’t party.”
“Listen to the wisdom of age,” he said in his Charlie Chan voice. “Life is much too short not to get drunk and go naked now and then.”
“Sage advice, Master,” I said. “Perhaps I could try that tonight, at Cub Scouts.”
He nodded and looked very serious. “Excellent. Teach them young, and they will truly learn,” he said.
That night actually was our weekly Cub Scout meeting. Cody had been going for a year now, even though he did not like it. Rita and I had agreed that it was good for him and might help to bring him out of his shell. Naturally enough, I knew that the only way to really bring him out of his shell was to give him a knife and some living creature to experiment on, but that was a subject I thought best to avoid with his mother, and Cub Scouts was the best alternative. And I really did think it would be good for him, by helping him to learn how to behave like a real human boy.
So that night I came home from work, rushed through a meal of leftover Pollo Tropical as Rita worked at the kitchen table, and hustled Cody into the car in his blue Scout uniform, which he put on every week with barely controlled hatred. He thought that the whole idea of a uniform involving short pants was not merely terrible fashion but also humiliating to anyone who was forced into wearing them. But I had persuaded him that the scouting experience was a valuable way to learn how to blend in, and I tried to make him understand that this part of his training was every bit as important as learning where to put leftover body parts, and he had gone along with the program for a whole year now without any actual open rebellion.
On this night we arrived at the elementary school where the meetings were held with a few minutes to spare, and we sat in the car quietly. Cody liked to wait until just before the meeting started before he went inside, probably because Blending In was still a very unpleasant strain for him. So most evenings we would sit together and do nothing except exchange a few words. He never said much, but his two- or three-word sentences were always worth hearing, and in spite of my great discomfort with clichés, I would have to say we had Bonded. Tonight, though, I was so busy looking for something sinister lurking in every shadow that I wouldn’t have heard Cody if he’d recited the entire Kama Sutra.
Luckily, he didn’t seem to feel talkative, and he did no more than watch studiously as the other boys climbed out of their cars and went in, some with a parent and some alone. Of course, I was watching them all just as carefully.
“Steve Binder,” Cody said suddenly, and I jumped a bit reflexively. Cody looked at me with something like amusement, and nodded at a large unibrowed boy stalking past us and into the building. I looked back at Cody and raised an eyebrow; he shrugged. “Bully,” he said.
“Does he pick on you?” I asked, and he shrugged again. But before he could answer in actual words I felt a small strange tickling on the back of my neck and a slight uncomfortable shifting of nonexistent bulk somewhere deep inside; I turned to look behind me. Several cars came into the parking lot and drove to nearby spaces. I could see nothing sinister about any of them, nothing unusual that would have caused the Passenger to stir as it had. Just a short string of minivans, and one battered Cadillac at least fifteen years old.
For one brief moment I wondered whether one of them was Him, my Shadow, somehow already moving closer—because something had sent a small electric twinge up from the Basement and into my conscious mind. Impossible—but I looked hard at each car as it rolled to a stop. For the most part they were generic suburban vehicles, the same ones we saw here every week. Only the Cadillac was different, and I watched as it parked and a stocky man got out, followed by a round young boy. It was a perfectly normal picture, exactly what you would expect to see. There was nothing odd or threatening about them, nothing at all, and they went inside to the meeting without throwing hand grenades or setting fire to anything. I watched them go, but the stocky man did not look at me or do anything except put a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder and shepherd him inside.
Not him, not possibly anything at all except what it seemed to be, a man taking a kid in to Scouts. It would be lunacy to think that my Shadow could somehow know I would be here tonight, and then round up a boy on short notice, just to get close to me. I took a deep breath and tried to clear the Stupid out. It wouldn’t happen here, whatever it was. Not tonight.
And so I resolutely pushed away the small and nagging warning flag that flapped in my face, and turned back to Cody—only to see that he was staring at me.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said. And almost certainly it really was nothing, just a passing twitch of the radar, perhaps caused by sensing someone’s anger at their favorite parking spot being taken.
But Cody didn’t think so; he turned and stared around the parking lot, just as I had. “Something,” he said positively. And I looked at him with interest.
“Shadow Guy?” I asked him. That was his name for his very own small Dark Passenger, planted in him courtesy of the repeated traumas he had received from his now-imprisoned biological father. If Cody and Shadow Guy had heard the same soft alarm bell ringing, it was worth paying attention.
But Cody just shrugged. “Not sure,” he said, which very closely matched my feelings. We both looked around us at the parking lot for a moment, our heads swiveling in near unison. Neither of us saw anything out of the ordinary. And then the Cub Scout den leader, a large and enthusiastic man nam
ed Frank, stuck his head out the door and began to holler that it was time to start, and so Cody and I got out of the car and headed in with the other stragglers. I glanced over my shoulder one last time, noticing with something close to paternal pride that Cody did exactly the same thing at the same time. Neither of us saw anything more alarming than more boys in blue uniform shorts, so I shrugged it off and we went into the meeting.
This evening’s den meeting was like most of the others: uneventful and even a little tedious. The only thing that broke the routine was the introduction of a new assistant leader, the stocky man I had seen getting out of the old Cadillac. His name was Doug Crowley. I watched him carefully, still feeling a little twitchy from my false alarm in the parking lot, but there was absolutely nothing about him that was even interesting, let alone threatening. He was about thirty-five years old and seemed dull, bland, and earnest. The round young boy he had brought in was a ten-year-old Dominican kid named Fidel. He wasn’t Crowley’s child; Crowley was a volunteer for the Big Brothers program, and he had offered to assist Frank. Frank welcomed him, thanked him, and then began some discussion of our upcoming camping trip to the Everglades. There was a report on the ecology of the area from two boys who were working on a badge project on the subject, and then Frank talked about how to practice fire safety when you were camping. Cody endured the whole tedious program with grim patience, and did not quite sprint for the door when it was over. And home we went, to our not-big-enough house with its table full of Rita’s papers instead of food, with no sign along the way of anything more threatening than a bright yellow Hummer with a too-loud sound system.
The next day at work was endless. I kept waiting for some terrible something to hit me from any possible angle, and it kept not happening. And the day after that was no different, and the day after that. Nothing happened; no sinister stranger loomed up out of the shadows; no fiendish traps were sprung upon me. There was no deadly serpent hidden in my desk drawer, no assegais hurtling at my neck from a passing car, nothing. Even Deborah and her blistering arm punches were taking a holiday. I saw her and even spoke to her, of course. Her arm was still in a cast, and I would have expected her to call on me quite often for help, but she did not. Duarte was apparently picking up the slack, and Debs seemed content to live on a much lower dose of Dexter.
So life seemed to be slipping back into the ordinary rhythm of Dexter’s Dull Days, hour plodding calmly into boring hour with no threat of any kind, no variation in routine, no sign of change at all, at work or at home. Nothing but more of the same. I knew it was coming, but every day that it did not come seemed to make it less likely that it would come at all. Very stupid, I know, but it was—dare I say it?—entirely human of me. No one can stay on high alert around the clock, endlessly, day after day. Not even the Ever-vigilant Dark Scout, Dexter. Not when ordinary synthetic reality was so seductive.
And so I relaxed, ever so slightly. Normal life: It’s comforting exactly because it is dull and often pointless, and it slowly lulls us all into a state of waking slumber. It makes us fixate on stupid, meaningless things like running out of toothpaste or breaking a shoelace, as if these things were overwhelmingly significant—and all the while the truly important stuff we are ignoring is sharpening its fangs and slinking up behind us. In the one or two brief moments of real insight we get in our lives, we may realize that we are being hypnotized by irrelevant trivia, and we may even wish for something exciting and different to come along to help us focus and drive these stupid niggling trifles out of our minds. Because staying constantly alert is impossible, even for me. The more nothing happens, the more unlikely it all seems, until finally, I actually found myself wishing that whatever it was, it would just happen so it would all be over.
And, of course, one of the few great truths of Western thought is this: Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.
And I did.
EIGHTEEN
IT WAS A HOT AND HUMID AFTERNOON AT AROUND THREE o’clock, and I had just gotten back to my office from a routine appearance at a rather dull crime scene. A man had shot his neighbor’s dog, and the neighbor had shot him. The results were typical of the unfortunate mess that results so often nowadays from our modern obsession with large-caliber weapons. I tried to maintain a professional interest in separating the dog’s blood from the man’s, but there was so much of both I gave up. We had a confession, so it was clear who our killer was, and there didn’t seem like much point in getting terribly worked up about it. Nobody else on the scene was having much luck staying focused, either. We had all seen this sort of thing many times before, cops and forensics wonks alike, and after all the recent hammer excitement, a normal garden-variety shooting homicide seemed irrelevant and a little bit dull.
So I wrapped up my part of the work rather quickly, and as I strolled into my office and slumped into my chair I was not thinking about the outraged dog owner who was now sitting in a cell at the detention center, nor even about the poor disemboweled pit bull he had avenged. Idiotically enough, I even stopped thinking about my Shadow, since I was in the safety of my own little nook, surrounded by the might of Miami-Dade’s fearless police force. Instead, I was pondering a vastly more important question: how to persuade Rita to take one small evening off from working at home and cook us a real dinner. It was a touchy problem, and it would call for a rare and difficult combination of flattery and firmness, mixed with just the right touch of compassionate understanding, and I was certain it would be a real challenge to my skill as a Human Impersonator.
I practiced a couple of facial expressions that blended all the right things into a believable mask until I thought I had them right, and in one of those weird moments of self-awareness, I suddenly saw myself from the outside, and I had to stop. I mean, here I was, with a relentless invisible enemy laying siege to Castle Dexter, and instead of sharpening my sword and piling boulders on the battlements I was playing with my face in the hopes of getting Rita to make me a decent last meal. And I had to ask myself—did that really make sense? Was it truly the best way to prepare for what was certainly coming at me? And I had to admit that the answer was a very definite, Probably not.
But what actually was the best way to get ready? I thought about what I knew, which was almost nothing, and realized that once again I had let the uncertainty push me away from what I do best. I needed to drop my passive waiting and get back to being proactive. I had to circle back downwind, find something that told me more about my Shadow, and somehow track him back to his lair and let Dark Nature take its course once more. Thinking coldly, rationally, realistically, I knew that he was no match for me. I had been hunting people like him my entire adult life, and he was no more than a wannabe, a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a poor sad clown trying to turn himself into a knockoff of the Very Real Deal that was Me. And I could oh-so-easily make that overwhelming truth very clear to him—all I had to do was find him.
But how? I no longer knew what kind of car he drove. I couldn’t even be sure he was still living in the same area, down in South Miami near my house. It was very likely that he had gone somewhere else—where? I didn’t know enough about him to guess where he might go to ground, and that was a problem. The first rule of being a successful hunter is to understand your prey, and I did not. I needed to get a better sense of how he thought, what made him tick, even if it was only background and not actually an address or a passport number. And the only window into his world I knew about was Shadowblog. I had read and reread that tedious, self-involved drivel a dozen times already, and I had not learned anything worth repeating. But I read through it once more anyway, and this time I tried to build a profile of the person behind the rant.
The biggest building block, of course, was his anger. At the moment it seemed to be directed mostly at me, but there was more than enough to go around. It started with the unfairness of the game of baseball that never gave him a fair shot at the majors, even though he did everything they asked and always played by the rules.
It rambled on endlessly about Assholes who cut corners, cheated, committed crimes without punishment, and even more Assholes who thought hacking a Web site was funny. He certainly wasn’t happy with his ex-wife, “A,” either, or with the typical Miami drivers he encountered.
The anger clearly came from a rigid and overdeveloped sense of morality, and it had been there for a long time, burbling under the surface and waiting for some reason to boil over and become about something specific. He raged against everybody who didn’t follow the rules as he saw them, and spoke longingly of “the Priest” and his teachings. Wonderful news, a real clue: I was looking for an angry Catholic, which narrowed it down to only about seventy-five percent of Miami’s population. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, but it was no good. All I could think of was how badly I wanted to tape him down and teach him about True Penance, the kind that comes in the Dark Confession Booth at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Dexter’s Knife. I could almost see him squirming, fighting helplessly against the duct tape that held him down, and I had just begun to savor the picture when Vince Masuoka stumbled into the room in a complete dither.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Oh, my God, holy shit.”
“Vince,” I said, irritated because he had interrupted the first happy thoughts I’d had in days. “In traditional Western culture, we like to separate deity and feces.”
He lurched to a halt and blinked at me and then, with truly annoying single-mindedness, he said, “Holy shit,” again.
“All right, fine, holy shit,” I said. “Can we move on to the next syllable, please?”
“It’s Camilla,” he said. “Camilla Figg?”
“I know who Camilla is,” I said, still peeved—and then I heard a distant rustle of dark wings and I realized I was sitting up straighter in my chair and feeling a soft tendril of interest from the Passenger slide up my spine.