Dexter's Final Cut

by Jeff Lindsay

  Patrick’s Facebook page had shown that he was an outdoorsy type. Would he try to camp out? He could not know ahead of time that the opportunities for sleeping under the stars are somewhat limited within the city of Miami. There are no campgrounds in Miami, other than a few RV parks. So would he sleep on a park bench? Not likely—in a city that depends so heavily on tourism, such things were vigorously discouraged. But the idea of camping seemed right—it was cheap and anonymous, and it fit what I knew of him. So how would he do it?

  Hoping for no more than some small visual confirmation, I clicked onto the Web and went once more to his Facebook page. And there, lo and behold …

  As I have mentioned, I am not a fan of Facebook. It seems to me like a kind of quiet and subtle virus that worms its way into every aspect of the living tissue of daily existence, until it is impossible to think about cereal without finding an ad for Raisin Bran in your in-box. I am sure the endless intrusive connections can be a great deal of fun for some people, but it really doesn’t make sense for Dexter.

  It would make no more sense for Patrick, but he had made himself a second home there anyway, so I flipped to his page for a look—and spent a full half minute staring in disbelief.

  As we have observed earlier, people really do put some surprising things on their Facebook pages, almost as if they are trying to make it easier for the thing to take control of their lives. Still, there really ought to be limits, don’t you think? Especially if one is on a killing spree—shouldn’t one maintain a certain discreet silence, assuming one has all one’s mental facilities? I mean, seriously, could anyone really be this stupid?

  Apparently, someone could, especially Patrick Bergmann. And so I stared, thinking that I was surely hallucinating, because in consensus reality, nothing is ever this easy. But for all my staring, the page didn’t change. It still showed a picture of Patrick standing next to some kind of cement pillar with Biscayne Bay in the background. Behind him and across the water the skyline of downtown Miami stuck up aggressively, and underneath the picture it said, CAMPING IN MIAMI!

  I had hoped for some tiny hint, but this—I had to fight down an irrational moment of affection for good old Facebook and remember that, after all, I was the one who had thought to look there, based on my uncannily accurate assessment of Patrick’s personality. And there it was, right where I had hoped it would be.

  If I had been feeling a little squeamish about taking out Patrick without Dexter’s Due Process, all such tender feelings vanished now. Anyone this completely clueless did not deserve another day of using up oxygen that I might want someday. It was a clear civic duty to yank this idiot out of existence ASAP, before he had a chance to contaminate the gene pool.

  I studied the picture; for some reason I thought I had seen this spot before, and it was more than the familiarity of the Miami skyline and water. I suppose I could have figured out the location by triangulating the angle on the high-rise buildings in the background with the azimuth of the sun’s arc times pi or something, but I was sure I had seen this exact spot before, and almost as sure I would remember why if I stared at it long enough. And sure enough, after only a few minutes of Zen concentration, I had it.

  As noted earlier, there are not really very many places in Miami where camping is encouraged. But there is one place where it is absolutely required. And this picture had been taken there, beyond all reasonable doubt.

  Miami Law has its own peculiar logic—or lack of it—and Patrick had landed in one of the most shining examples. An ordinance had passed forbidding sexual predators from living within twenty-five hundred feet of anything that might contain children. But these same poor benighted pedophiles were required by the parole board to live within those same city limits. Because twenty-five hundred feet is, when you think about it, a relatively long distance, it turned out that there was only one place where these people could live that satisfied both requirements—underneath the Julia Tuttle Causeway, on a spoil island halfway between Miami and Miami Beach.

  Patrick was there. It could be nowhere else. Still, Due Diligence is Dexter’s middle name, so I Googled the location and looked at a few pictures: They matched up perfectly. Patrick was indeed camping out in the sexual predators’ colony, under a bridge on the Julia Tuttle Causeway. A small leathery something stirred within me, and a jittery twinge of excitement rose up to meet it.

  I had him.

  SEVENTEEN

  MIDDAY MIAMI. THE SUN WAS HIGH AND HOT, ALTHOUGH not as hot in this mild autumn as it had been just a few months ago. Still, the number of license plates on cars from the North said very clearly that it was more pleasantly hot here than it was in New Jersey or Michigan at this time of year. It felt very odd to drive among the mildly vacuous tourists in the bright afternoon, cuddling my intended shadows to my breast and whispering soft promises to them that yes, indeed, we really were on our way to do what only we can do so well, no matter that it was day and not night, no matter that there was no sound track from a silver-red moon floating down to us, no soft chorus of sweet anticipation from a deep blue nighttime sky. Here there is only the alien noise of the docile and happy early afternoon traffic on the throughway, not even the homicidal comfort of rush hour, and this is the wrong music, tempo far too easy, harmonies off or missing; it is all different, unsettling, wrong, not at all what we are used to.

  Midday and moonless, idling along among the families from Ohio and retired couples from Iowa and the businessmen from Brazil, instead of lurking in the shade of a night meant for mischief, and it all seems so improper, as if we have wandered into a church and found everyone naked.

  But it is what we have, it is where and when we are, what we must deal with, no matter that it all feels so unsuitable, so unreal, so very much not right now. How can it be? Here in the sunlight—how can it happen? How can we swim through the glare of a beach-perfect day to do our night-dark best? There has never before been a Dexter by Daylight, and the shadow babies inside that slither out so happily into the dark of a Joyful Night are not happy to come out and play in this high-noon shimmer of light and breeze and bright red sunburns on pale white bodies. They are not happy at all, and the Dark Passenger is not happy, and so Dexter, too, is far from pleased with things as they are.

  But things are, inarguably, what they are. We must take them as we find them, and in the very short time given us we must prepare. And so we meander through the traffic and down onto Eighth Street. Calle Ocho, home of cafecitas and pastelitas, and, as tempting as these things usually are, we bypass them this time and pull into the parking lot of a pool supply store. We blink once more at the unwanted sun, and then go into the store, where we buy a small plastic water-testing kit, paying cash, and then head back out to the parking lot, where we open the trunk.

  From inside the trunk we lift out a short-sleeved white shirt, and standing there in the very scant shelter beside our little car we change into it. There is a skinny black clip-on tie in its pocket and this, too, we put on. Finally and very importantly, we take out a clipboard, and now our disguise is complete and we are ready. We are no longer Dexter Daystalker; we have magically morphed into Anonymous Official Man.

  It is an old disguise, but it is always effective. People see a clipboard and a tie and they see nothing else. In this case they will see Nameless Official Water Tester, and as we mosey through the predators’ camp, scanning for a red Ninja or any other sign of our prey, we will pause now and then to take water samples and scribble notes, secure in the knowledge that a clipboard provides better invisibility than Harry Potter’s cloak.

  In the car we unwrap our water-testing kit and place it on top of the clipboard in the passenger seat, and then we are away, out onto Ocho and north to NE 36th Street, and then out onto the Julia Tuttle Causeway.

  Traffic is thin by Miami standards and we move easily out the causeway. We drive past the predators’ colony, looking casually-carefully for any sign of Patrick and, seeing none, we pull over onto the shoulder some fifty yards past.
We gather the props for our little costume drama, and then we open the door and step out into the dreadful wrongness of that bright noontime sun. We stand for a moment and blink, hoping that somehow it will grow slightly darker for our purpose, or at least that we may become slightly easier with the ceaseless blinding light that assaults us so unpleasantly.

  But neither of these things happens. The sun hammers down, and we are still uneasy, and we have so very little time. So we take a deep breath, hold our clipboard firmly in our hand, and march back toward the bridge that shelters the colony.

  The sun seems hotter on the walk back to the bridge and we are sweating freely by the time we step off the road and down into the shade under the bridge—sweating when we should be all icy cool control, sweating with the strangeness as well as the heat, watching with mild alarm as great hot drops roll down off our forehead, skitter down our nose, and splat onto the concrete. We are sweating, and it is daylight, and there are people all around and these things should not be, and it makes our footsteps seem a size too large as they slap the cement in their too-loud awkward off-rhythm. But we move ahead because we must, past the first tent, where a hairless middle-aged black man is weight-lifting with two one-gallon plastic milk containers filled, apparently, with water. His arms are thin, but the veins stand out as he curls his arms open and shut, open and shut. He stares at us and we nod; he looks away quickly, and we step past him to the water’s edge, where we kneel and fill our little plastic analyzer with water. We hold it up to the sun and squint at it for a moment, and then we dump it, stand, scribble on the clipboard, and move on.

  On to the second tent, which is quiet and unoccupied, and then deeper into the shadow under the bridge, and seeing the day turn even three small shades darker makes us breathe a little easier; it is far from night, but it is moving in the right direction, and we move with it, staying in the shadows and easing slowly along the water’s edge, stopping twice more for our dumb show with the water and the clipboard.

  We are in the heart of it now and we pause, looking around at the otherworldly sprawl of the camp. There are lean-tos made of cardboard, and some made of wood with tin roofs, and others no more than sheets of plastic stretched tight to make a tent, and a few actual tents, all mixed together as if they had been scooped up at random and then tumbled out carelessly onto the concrete under the bridge.

  At my right, the concrete slopes upward to meet the surface of the road, and nestled into the junction where road and concrete meet, a woman stares down at me from a sleeping bag, lifeless eyes following me without any interest at all. We stroll on through the camp, looking for anything at all that might speak the name of our speed date, Patrick, and finally, on the far edge of the camp, right at the water’s edge, we find it.

  It is a very nice-looking dome tent, somewhat battered and stained, but still quite clearly a serious, good-quality piece of outdoorsman’s equipment. There is no red motorcycle parked beside it, and no sign of Patrick himself, but we are just as sure as we can be that this is his tent, because he has decorated it as only Patrick could.

  On each side of the zippered flap that serves as the tent’s only door, there is a one-gallon milk jug, the same kind used by the hairless weight lifter. These, too, are filled with water, to hold them steadily in place as they support their top-heavy burden.

  A stick has been jammed into the mouth of each jug, and on top of each stick is a cat’s head.

  The heads have been very neatly cut from the bodies, and they look to be freshly dead, and they stare out at us with identical expressions of openmouthed kitty horror.

  Between them, propped against the tent’s door flap, is a crude hand-lettered sign. It says, THIS CUD HAPPIN 2 U, and underneath in smaller letters, STAY OUT!

  The combination of poor spelling and neat cat butchery is as telling as a photograph; this is Patrick’s tent. And we feel at last the chill all-ready steady-handed glee of impending wickedness and almost see the light around us creep slowly down the spectrum past the wretched bright yellow of noon and deep into the orange, and red, and—

  But red. But wait; where is the red motorcycle? We see it nowhere and we know he would keep it close—even a hillbilly like Patrick would know he could not leave it unguarded near the road.

  We look around; there is no place visible where a bike could be stored, and the happy shadows bleach away from us and back into daytime dinginess. There is no motorcycle—unless it was in the tent? But it is a small tent, and the warning sign was leaning against the tent’s flap in a way that indicated he had placed it there from the outside, probably as he left, and there are no small flaps or wrinkles across the canvas to tell of movement, not even a small and sleepy breath, and we watch another fat bead of sweat roll off our nose as we come crashing back to daylight and disappointment.

  Patrick is not here.

  In the middle of the day, in our only small window of opportunity, Patrick has wandered away where he should not be. He has spoiled everything.

  We fight down the ornery urge to give the tent a spiteful kick, and just to be completely safely thorough we move past the tent to the water, listening very carefully for any soft snoring or rumbling from inside the tent. There is nothing, no sound, and we are thinking very unhappy thoughts as we kneel down and perform our watery pantomime one more time.

  Just to be very sure, we stand up and turn too fast, pretending to stumble, and giving the tent a hearty “accidental” thump. There is no response from inside.

  “Sorry!” we say in a loud official voice, and we wait for an answer. “Hello? Anybody home?” Again there is no response.

  It is definite. Patrick is not here.

  And although we loiter for another twenty minutes, performing meaningless tricks with the clipboard, he does not return, and we finally have to admit that staying any longer would be highly suspicious, and we must pack up our toys and admit the painful obvious truth:

  We have crapped out.

  We thread our way back through the camp, pausing twice to scribble bad words on the clipboard, and then climb back up onto the causeway and trudge to the car in a weary, bitter, very unhappy sheen of sweat. We try very hard to think positive thoughts, to come up with some small scrap of something that will make this whole hopeless trip seem like anything other than a complete waste of time. And finally, as we thread our way through the traffic at the end of the causeway, one tiny glimmer of optimism leaks through all the cranky sludge, and we sigh and accept it as the very best we can hope for:

  At least there is now time for lunch.

  I had a quick lunch alone in a restaurant on Calle Ocho, a new place that had opened so recently that the waitress was still polite. The food was good. I topped it off with a cafecita and then drove slowly and thoughtfully back to the office. I wondered where Patrick had gone. He knew he could not get to Jackie in daylight. If he was keeping the schedule I thought he was, this was his sleeping time, and he should have been lounging there in his tent in peaceful repose. Of course, it was possible that he had run out of buffalo jerky and gone to a convenience store to get more. But after all my preparation, and my endless dithering about doing it quickly and in daylight, it was oddly deflating to come away from the afternoon with nothing to show for it except a small spot on my shirt from some spilled black beans.

  Now I would have to sit around for another hour with Robert and Renny and pretend to be mild and patient—and then I would still have to go down to the meeting with Cody’s teacher. That conference had seemed like a good idea when it was my excuse for slipping away, and my alibi. Now it began to seem like a great deal of dull niggling scut work, pointless and annoying posturing with an elementary school teacher, someone who could never understand Cody nor his difficulty in adjusting. The teacher would want to discuss ways to help Cody make a happy accommodation to his new grade, and strategies for success in fitting in, and the teacher could not hear the truth, would not believe it even if I spoke in plain one-syllable rhyming words accompanied b
y bright crayon-colored illustrations. No teacher in any school in the Dade County public school system could ever understand the simple unvarnished truth.

  Cody would never adjust, never be happy, and never fit in.

  Cody was not, and never would be, a normal healthy boy who wanted to play ball and tease the girls. Cody wanted other things that the school system could never give him, and his only chance of being well adjusted was to learn how to get them, and how to pretend to be human, how to live by the Harry Code—and all those things he had to learn from another monster: me.

  The things Cody wanted, needed, are frowned upon by the intolerant society in which we live, and we could never explain it, not any part of it, not at all. And so we would sit with the teacher and dither and dance and exchange fake smiles and grandiose clichés and pretend to feel hope for a bright and shiny future for a boy who would unstoppably grow into a Dark Legacy already written in blood instead of chalk. And thinking about how I must unavoidably avoid this truth with the teacher and instead spend forty-five minutes mouthing cheerful brainless New Age buzzwords with someone who Really Cared made me want to ram my car into the Buick filled with blue-haired ladies from Minnesota that chugged along on the road beside me.

  But it was all part of maintaining my disguise as Proud Papa Dexter, and there was no way around it. At least I had the evening to look forward to after that: lollygagging on a chaise longue with Jackie and eating strawberries as the sun set. It would almost make the frustration and annoyance of the rest of the day worthwhile.

  And I thought again of what it might be like if only I could live Jackie’s lifestyle full-time: no teacher conferences, no housepainting while standing in a mound of fire ants, no squalling and screeching and dirty diapers. Nothing but eternal vigilance in a bejeweled setting. It was a fantasy, of course, nothing more than a way to soothe the grumpy beast within after its day of disappointments. But it was a very good fantasy, and lingering inside it was good enough to put a very small smile on my face by the time I got back to my office.