Dearly Devoted Dexter

by Jeff Lindsay

  “What?” Deborah demanded.

  I shook my head. “Not possible. Stupid. Just a wild thought that won’t go away.”

  “All right. How wild?”

  “What if— Now I did say this was stupid.”

  “It’s a lot stupider to dick around like this,” she snapped.

  “What’s the idea?”

  “What if Oscar is calling the good Doctor and trying to bargain his way out?” I said. And I was right; it did sound stupid.

  Debs snorted. “Bargain with what?”

  “Well,” I said, “Doakes said he’s carrying a bag. So he could have money, bearer bonds, a stamp collection. I don’t know. But he probably has something that might be even more valuable to our surgical friend.”

  “Like what?”

  “He probably knows where everybody else from the old team is hiding.”

  “Shit,” she said. “Give up everybody else in exchange for his life?” She chewed on her lip as she thought that over. After a minute she shook her head. “That’s pretty far-fetched,”

  she said.

  “Far-fetched is a big step up from stupid,” I said.

  “Oscar would have to know how to get in touch with the Doctor.”

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  “One spook can always find a way to get to another. There are lists and databases and mutual contacts, you know that.

  Didn’t you see Bourne Identity?”

  “Yeah, but how do we know Oscar saw it?” she said.

  “I’m just saying it’s possible.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. She looked out the window, thinking, then made a face and shook her head. “Kyle said something—that after a while you’d forget what team you were on, like baseball with free agency. So you’d get friendly with guys on the other side, and— Shit, that’s stupid.”

  “So whatever side Danco is on, Oscar could find a way to reach him.”

  “So fucking what. We can’t,” she said.

  We were both quiet for a few minutes after that. I suppose Debs was thinking about Kyle and wondering if we would find him in time. I tried to imagine caring about Rita the same way and came up blank. As Deborah had so astutely pointed out, I was engaged and still didn’t get it. And I never would, either, which I usually regard as a blessing. I have always felt that it was preferable to think with my brain, rather than with certain other wrinkled parts located slightly south. I mean, seriously, don’t people ever see themselves, staggering around drooling and mooning, all weepy-eyed and weak-kneed and rendered completely idiotic over something even animals have enough sense to finish quickly so they can get on with more sensible pursuits, like finding fresh meat?

  Well, as we all agreed, I didn’t get it. So I just looked out across the water to the subdued lights of the homes on the far side of the causeway. There were a few apartment buildings close to the toll booth, and then a scattering of houses almost as big. Maybe if I won the lottery I could get a real estate agent 1 7 4

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  to show me something with a small cellar, just big enough for one homicidal photographer to fit in snugly under the floor.

  And as I thought it a soft whisper came from my personal backseat voice, but of course there was nothing I could do about that, except perhaps applaud the moon that hung over the water. And across that same moon-painted water floated the sound of a clanging bell, signaling that the drawbridge was about to go up.

  The radio crackled. “He’s moving,” Doakes said. “Gonna run the drawbridge. Watch for him—white Toyota 4Runner.”

  “I see him,” Deborah said into the radio. “We’re on him.”

  The white SUV came across the causeway and onto 15th Street just moments before the bridge went up. After a slight pause to let him get ahead, Deborah pulled out and followed.

  At Biscayne Boulevard he turned right and a moment later we did, too. “He’s headed north on Biscayne,” she said into the radio.

  “Copy that,” Doakes said. “I’ll follow out here.”

  The 4Runner moved at normal speed through moderate traffic, keeping to a mere five miles per hour above the speed limit, which in Miami is considered tourist speed, slow enough to justify a blast of the horn from the drivers who passed him. But Oscar didn’t seem to mind. He obeyed all the traffic signals and stayed in the right lane, cruising along as if he had no particular place to go and was merely out for a relaxing after-dinner drive.

  As we came up on the 79th Street Causeway, Deborah picked up the radio. “We’re passing 79th Street,” she said.

  “He’s in no hurry, proceeding north.”

  “Ten-four,” Doakes said, and Deborah glanced at me.

  “I didn’t say anything,” I said.

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  “You thought the hell out of it,” she said.

  We moved on north, stopping twice at traffic signals. Deborah was careful to stay several cars behind, no mean feat in Miami traffic, with most of the cars trying to go around, over, or through all the others. A fire engine went wailing past in the other direction, blasting its horn at the intersections. For all the effect it had on the other drivers, it might have been a lamb bleating. They ignored the siren and clung to their hard-won places in the scrambled line of traffic. The man behind the wheel of the fire engine, being a Miami driver himself, simply wove in and out with the horn and siren playing: Duet for Traffic.

  We reached 123d Street, the last place to cross back to Miami Beach before 826 ran across at North Miami Beach, and Oscar kept heading north. Deborah told Doakes by radio as we passed it.

  “Where the hell is he going?” Deborah muttered as she put down the radio.

  “Maybe he’s just driving around,” I said. “It’s a beautiful night.”

  “Uh-huh. You want to write a sonnet?”

  Under normal circumstances, I would have had a splendid comeback for that, but perhaps due to the thrilling nature of our chase, nothing occurred to me. And anyway, Debs looked like she could use a victory, however small.

  A few blocks later, Oscar suddenly accelerated into the left lane and turned left across oncoming traffic, raising an entire concerto of angry horns from drivers moving in both directions.

  “He’s making a move,” Deborah told Doakes, “west on 135th Street.”

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  “I’m crossing behind you,” Doakes said. “On the Broad Causeway.”

  “What’s on 135th Street?” Debs wondered aloud.

  “Opa-Locka Airport,” I said. “A couple of miles straight ahead.”

  “Shit,” she said, and picked up the radio. “Doakes—Opa-Locka Airport is out this way.”

  “On my way,” he said, and I could hear his siren cutting on before his radio clicked off.

  Opa-Locka Airport had long been popular with people in the drug trade, as well as with those in covert operations. This was a handy arrangement, considering that the line between the two was often quite blurry. Oscar could very easily have a small plane waiting there, ready to whisk him out of the country and off to almost anyplace in the Caribbean or Central or South America—with connections to the rest of the world, of course, although I doubted he would be headed for the Su-dan, or even Beirut. Someplace in the Caribbean was more likely, but in any case fleeing the country seemed like a reasonable move under the circumstances, and Opa-Locka Airport was a logical place to start.

  Oscar was going a little faster now, although 135th Street was not as wide and well traveled as Biscayne Boulevard. We came up over a small bridge across a canal and as Oscar came down the far side he suddenly accelerated, squealing through traffic around an S curve in the road.

  “Goddamn it, something spooked him,” Deborah said. “He must have spotted us.” She sped up to stay with him, still keeping two or three cars back, even though there seemed little point now to pretending we weren’t following him.
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  Something had indeed spooked him, because Oscar was driving wildly, dangerously close to slamming into the traffic or running up onto the sidewalk, and naturally enough, Debs was not going to let herself lose this kind of pissing contest.

  She stayed with him, swerving around cars that were still trying to recover from their encounters with Oscar. Just ahead he swung into the far left lane, forcing an old Buick to spin away, hit the curb, and crash through a chain-link fence into the front yard of a light blue house.

  Would the sight of our little unmarked car be enough to cause Oscar to behave this way? It was nice to think so and made me feel very important, but I didn’t believe it—so far, he had acted in a cool and controlled way. If he wanted to ditch us it seemed more likely that he would have made some kind of sudden and tricky move, like going over the drawbridge as it went up. So why had he suddenly panicked? Just for something to do, I leaned forward and looked into the side mirror. The block letters on the surface of the mirror told me that objects were closer than they appeared. Things being what they were, this was a very unhappy thought, because only one object appeared in the mirror at the moment.

  It was a battered white van.

  And it was following us, and following Oscar. Matching our speed, moving in and out of traffic. “Well,” I said, “not stupid after all.” And I raised my voice to go over the squeal of tires and the horns of the other motorists.

  “Oh, Deborah?” I said. “I don’t want to distract you from your driving chores, but if you have a moment, could you look in your rearview mirror?”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean,” she snarled, but 1 7 8

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  she flicked her eyes to the mirror. It was a piece of good luck that we were on a straight stretch of road, because for just a second she almost forgot to steer. “Oh, shit,” she whispered.

  “Yes, that’s what I thought,” I said.

  The I-95 overpass stretched across the road directly ahead, and just before he passed under it Oscar swerved violently to the right across three lanes and turned down a side street that ran parallel to the freeway. Deborah swore and wrenched her car around to follow. “Tell Doakes!” she said, and I obediently picked up the radio.

  “Sergeant Doakes,” I said. “We are not alone.”

  The radio hissed once. “The fuck does that mean?” Doakes said, almost as if he had heard Deborah’s response and admired it so much he had to repeat it.

  “We have just turned right on 6th Avenue, and we are being followed by a white van.” There was no answer, so I said again, “Did I mention that the van is white?” and this time I had the great satisfaction of hearing Doakes grunt, “Motherfucker.”

  “That’s exactly what we thought,” I said.

  “Let the van in front and stay with him,” he said.

  “No shit,” Deborah muttered through clenched teeth, and then she said something much worse. I was tempted to say something similar, because as Doakes clicked off his radio, Oscar headed up the on-ramp onto I-95 with us following, and at the very last second he yanked his car back down the paved slope and onto 6th Avenue. His 4Runner bounced as it hit the road and teetered drunkenly to the right for a moment, then accelerated and straightened up. Deborah hit the brakes and we spun through half a turn; the white van slid ahead of us, bounced down the slope, and closed the gap with the D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R

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  4Runner. After half a second, Debs straightened us out of our slide and followed them down onto the street.

  The side road here was narrow, with a row of houses on the right and a high yellow-cement embankment on the left with I-95 on top. We ran along for several blocks, picking up speed.

  A tiny old couple holding hands paused on the sidewalk to watch our strange parade rocket past. It may have been my imagination, but they seemed to flutter in the wind from Oscar’s car and the van going by.

  We closed the gap just a little, and the white van closed on the 4Runner, too. But Oscar picked up the pace; he ran a stop sign, leaving us to veer around a pickup truck that was spinning in a circle in its attempt to avoid the 4Runner and the van. The truck wobbled through a clumsy doughnut turn and slammed into a fire hydrant. But Debs just clamped her jaw tight and squealed around the truck and through the intersection, ignoring the horns and the fountain of water from the ruptured hydrant, and closing the gap again in the next block.

  Several blocks ahead of Oscar I could see the red light of a major cross street. Even from this far I could see a steady stream of traffic moving through the intersection. Of course nobody lives forever, but this was really not the way I would choose to die if given a vote. Watching TV with Rita suddenly seemed a lot more attractive. I tried to think of a polite but very convincing way to persuade Deborah to stop and smell the roses for a moment, but just when I needed it the most my powerful brain seemed to shut down, and before I could get it going again Oscar was approaching the traffic light.

  Quite possibly Oscar had been to church this week, because the light turned green as he rocketed through the intersection. The white van followed close behind, braking hard to 1 8 0

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  avoid a small blue car trying to beat the light, and then it was our turn, with the light fully green now. We swerved around the van and almost made it through—but this was Miami, after all, and a cement truck ran the red light behind the blue car, right in front of us. I swallowed hard as Deborah stood on the brake pedal and spun around the truck. We thumped hard against the curb, running the two left wheels up onto the sidewalk for just a moment before bouncing down onto the road again. “Very nice,” I said as Deborah accelerated once again.

  And quite possibly, she might have taken the time to thank me for my compliment, if only the white van had not chosen that moment to take advantage of our slow-down to drop back beside our car and swerve into us. The rear end of our car slewed around to the left, but Deborah fought it back around again.

  The van popped us again, harder, right behind my door, and as I lurched away from the blow the door sprung open.

  Our car swerved and Deborah braked—perhaps not the best strategy, since the van accelerated at the same moment and this time clipped my door so hard that it came loose and bounced away, hitting the van a solid smack near the rear wheel before spinning off like a deformed wheel, spitting sparks.

  I saw the van wobble slightly, and heard the slack rattling sound of a blown tire. Then the wall of white slammed into us one more time. Our car bucked violently, lurched to the left, hopped the curb and burst through a chain-link fence separating the side road from the ramp leading down off I-95. We twirled around as if the tires were made of butter. Deborah fought the wheel with her teeth showing, and we very nearly made it across the off-ramp. But of course, I had not been to D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R

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  church this week, and as our two front wheels hit the curb on the far side of the off-ramp, a large red SUV banged into our rear fender. We spun up onto the grassy area of the freeway intersection that surrounded a large pond. I had only a moment to notice that the cropped grass seemed to be switching places with the night sky. Then the car bounced hard and the passenger air bag exploded into my face. It felt like I had been in a pillow fight with Mike Tyson; I was still stunned as the car flipped onto its roof, hit the pond, and began to fill with water.

  C H A P T E R 2 0

  Iam not shy about admitting my modest talents.

  For example, I am happy to admit that I am better than average at clever remarks, and I also have a flair for getting people to like me. But to be perfectly fair to myself, I am ever-ready to confess my shortcomings, too, and a quick round of soul-searching forced me to admit that I had never been any good at all at breathing water. As I hung there from the seat belt, dazed and watching the water pour in and swirl around my head, this began to seem l
ike a very large character flaw.

  The last look I had at Deborah before the water closed over her head was not encouraging, either. She was hanging from her seat belt unmoving, with her eyes closed and her mouth open, just the opposite of her usual state, which was probably not a good sign. And then the water flooded up around my eyes, and I could see nothing at all.

  I also like to think that I react well to the occasional unexpected emergency, so I’m quite sure my sudden stunned apa-thy was the result of being rattled around and then smacked D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R

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  with an air bag. In any case, I hung there upside down in the water for what seemed like quite a long time, and I am ashamed to admit that for the most part, I simply mourned my own passing. Dear Departed Dexter, so much potential, so many dark fellow travelers still to dissect, and now so tragi-cally cut short in his prime. Alas, Dark Passenger, I knew him well. And the poor boy was finally just about to get married, too. How more than sad—I pictured Rita in white, weeping at the altar, two small children wailing at her feet. Sweet little Astor, her hair done up in a bouffant bubble, a pale green bridesmaid dress now soaked with tears. And quiet Cody in his tiny tuxedo, staring at the back of the church and waiting, thinking of our last fishing trip and wondering when he would ever get to push the knife in again and twist it so slowly, watching the bright red blood burble out onto the blade and smiling, and then—

  Slow down, Dexter. Where did that thought come from?

  Rhetorical question, of course, and I did not need the low rumble of amusement from my old interior friend to give me the answer. But with his prompting I put together a few scattered pieces into half a puzzle and realized that Cody—

  Isn’t it odd what we think about when we’re dying? The car had settled onto its flattened roof, moving with no more than a gentle rocking now and completely filled with water so thick and mucky that I could not have seen a flare gun firing from the end of my nose. And yet I could see Cody perfectly clearly, more clearly now than the last time we had been in the same room together; and standing behind this sharp image of his small form towered a gigantic dark shadow, a black shape with no features that somehow seemed to be laughing.