by Jeff Lindsay
Of course, I knew that Deborah and Chutsky were on their way, but I found that more worrisome than anything else.
Chutsky would insist on restoring his damaged manhood by charging in on his crutch waving a gun in his only hand, and 2 8 6
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even if he allowed Deborah to back him up, she was wearing a large cast that made movement difficult. Hardly a rescue team to inspire confidence. No, I had to believe that my little corner of the kitchen was simply going to become crowded, and with all three of us taped and doped there would be no help coming for any of us.
And truthfully, in spite of my brief spatter of heroic dialogue, I was still somewhat woozy from whatever had been in Danco’s sleepy dart. So I was doped, tightly bound, and all alone. But there’s always some positive to every situation, if you just look hard enough, and after trying to think of one for a moment, I realized that I had to admit that so far I had not been attacked by rabid rats.
Tito Puente swung into a new tune, something a bit softer, and I grew more philosophical. We all have to go sometime.
Even so, this would not make my list of top ten preferred ways to perish. Falling asleep and not waking up was number one on my list, and it got rapidly more distasteful after that.
What would I see when I died? I can’t really bring myself to believe in the soul, or Heaven and Hell, or any of that solemn nonsense. After all, if human beings have souls, wouldn’t I have one, too? And I can assure you, I don’t. Being what I am, how could I? Unthinkable. It’s hard enough just to be me. To be me with a soul and a conscience and the threat of some kind of afterlife would be impossible.
But to think of wonderful, one-of-a-kind me going away forever and never coming back—very sad. Tragic, really. Perhaps I should consider reincarnation. No control there, of course. I could come back as a dung beetle, or even worse, come back as another monster like me. There was certainly D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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nobody who would grieve over me, especially if Debs went out at the same time. Selfishly, I hoped I would go first. Just get it over with. This whole charade had gone on long enough. Time to end it. Perhaps it was just as well.
Tito started a new song, very romantic, singing something about “Te amo,” and now that I thought of it, it might very well be that Rita would grieve over me, the idiot. And Cody and Astor, in their damaged way, would surely miss me.
Somehow I had been picking up an entire train of emotional attachments lately. How could this keep happening to me?
And hadn’t I been thinking much the same thoughts far too recently, as I hung upside down underwater in Deborah’s flipped car? Why was I spending so much time dying lately, and not getting it right? As I knew only too well, there really wasn’t much to it.
I heard Danco rattling around on a tray of tools and turned my head to look. It was still very difficult to move, but it seemed to be getting a little easier and I managed to get him into focus. He had a large syringe in his hand and approached Sergeant Doakes with the instrument held up as if he wanted it to be seen and admired. “Time to wake up, Albert,” he said cheerfully and jammed the needle into Doakes’s arm. For a moment, nothing happened; then Doakes twitched awake and gave out a gratifying series of groans and yammers, and Dr. Danco stood there watching him and enjoying the moment, syringe once again held aloft.
There was a thud of some kind from the front of the house and Danco spun around and grabbed for his paintball gun just as the large and bald form of Kyle Chutsky filled the door to the room. As I had feared, he was leaning on his crutch and holding a gun in what even I could tell was a sweaty and un-
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steady hand. “Son of a bitch,” he said, and Dr. Danco shot him with the paintball gun once, twice. Chutsky stared at him, slack-jawed, and Danco lowered his weapon as Chutsky began to slide to the floor.
And right behind Chutsky, invisible until he slumped to the floor, was my dear sister, Deborah, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, next to the Glock pistol she held in her steady right fist. She did not pause to sweat or call Danco names. She simply tightened down her jaw muscles and fired two quick shots that took Dr. Danco in the middle of the chest and lifted him off his feet to spill backward over the frantically squealing Doakes.
Everything was very quiet and motionless for a long moment, except for the relentless Tito Puente. Then Danco slipped off the table, and Debs knelt beside Chutsky and felt for a pulse. She eased him down to a more comfy position, kissed his forehead, and finally turned to me. “Dex,” she said.
“Are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine, Sis,” I said, feeling somewhat light-headed, “if you’ll just turn off that horrible music.”
She crossed to the battered boom box and yanked the plug from the wall, looking down at Sergeant Doakes in the sudden huge silence and trying not to show too much on her face.
“We’ll get you out of here now, Doakes,” she said. “It’s going to be all right.” She put a hand on his shoulder as he blubbered, and then turned suddenly away and came over to me with the tears starting down her face. “Jesus,” she whispered as she cut me loose. “Doakes is a mess.”
But as she ripped the last of the tape off my wrists it was hard for me to feel any distress about Doakes, because I was free at last, all the way free, of the tape and the Doctor and do-
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ing favors and yes, it looked like I might finally be free of Sergeant Doakes, too.
I stood up, which was not as easy as it sounds. I stretched my poor cramped limbs as Debs pulled out her radio to summon our friends on the Miami Beach police force. I walked over to the operating table. It was a little thing, but my curiosity had gotten the best of me. I reached down and grabbed the piece of paper taped to the edge of the table.
In those familiar, spidery block letters, Danco had written,
“TREACHERY.” Five of the letters were crossed out.
I looked at Doakes. He looked back at me, wide-eyed and broadcasting a hate that he would never be able to speak.
So you see, sometimes there really are happy endings.
E P I L O G U E
It is a very beautiful thing to watch the sun come up over the water in the stillness of South Florida’s sub-tropical morning. It is far more beautiful when that great yellow full moon hangs so low on the opposite horizon, slowly paling to silver before it slides below the waves of the open ocean and lets the sun take over the sky. And it is even more beautiful still to watch all this out of sight of land, from the deck of a twenty-six-foot cabin cruiser as you stretch the last knots from your neck and arms, tired but fulfilled and oh-so-very happy at last, from a night of work that had waited just a bit too long.
Soon I would step into my own little boat, towing behind us now, and I would throw off the tow line and head back in the direction the moon had gone, motoring sleepily home to a brand-new life as a soon-to-be-married man. And the Osprey, the twenty-six-foot borrowed cabin cruiser, would motor slowly in the opposite direction, toward Bimini, out into the D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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Gulf Stream, the great blue bottomless river that runs through the ocean so conveniently near Miami. The Osprey would not make it to Bimini, would not even make it across the Gulf Stream. Long before I closed my happy eyes in my little bed, its engines would stall, flooded with water, and then the boat would slowly fill with water, too, rocking sluggishly in the waves before it slid under, down into the endless crystal clear depths of the Gulf Stream.
And perhaps somewhere far below the surface it would finally settle onto the bottom among the rocks and giant fish and sunken ships, and it was whimsically wonderful to think that somewhere nearby was a neatly bound package swaying gently in the current as the crabs nibbled it down to the bones. I had used four anchors on Reiker after wrapping the pieces with rope and chain, a
nd the neat, bloodless bundle with two awful red boots firmly chained to the bottom had sunk quickly out of sight, all of it except one tiny drop of rapidly drying blood on the glass slide in my pocket. The slide would go in the box on my shelf, right behind MacGregor’s, and Reiker would feed the crabs and life would at last go on again, with its happy rhythms of pretending and then pouncing.
And a few years from now I would bring Cody along and show him all the wonders that unfold in a Night of the Knife.
He was far too young now, but he would start small, learn to plan, and move slowly upward. Harry had taught me that, and now I would teach it to Cody. And someday, perhaps he would follow in my shadowy footsteps and become a new Dark Avenger, carrying the Harry Plan forward against a new generation of monsters. Life, as I said, goes on.
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I sighed, happy and content and ready for all of it. So beautiful. The moon was gone now and the sun had begun to burn away the cool of the morning. It was time to go home.
I stepped into my own boat, started the engine, and cast off the tow line. Then I turned my boat around and followed the moon home to bed.