Jeff Lindsay - Dexter's Final Cut

I came back from letting her out and rechaining the door to find Jackie sipping another cup of coffee. She had eaten one of the toast halves and one bite of another, and about two-thirds of the small serving of yogurt. It didn’t seem like quite enough to sustain human life, and certainly not nearly enough for nonhuman life like me, but she seemed content. I sat in my chair and poured myself another cup of the coffee.

“I don’t think she likes you,” Jackie said, in a throaty voice filled with coffee and dark amusement.

“Inconceivable,” I said.

“I don’t think that word means what you think it means,” she said.

I sipped my coffee. “It may take a little time,” I said. “But someday she will come to appreciate my many virtues.”

“It may take a little longer than usual,” Jackie said. “She really doesn’t like you.”

I was sure she was right, but it didn’t seem terribly important-especially since there were three chunks of perfectly ripe cantaloupe left in my fruit bowl, and a full cup of coffee to go with it, so I shrugged it off and finished my breakfast.

The room’s phone rang a few minutes later to tell us that a Town Car was waiting for us downstairs. We went down in the elevator together, and I went out front first to look around, which was standard bodyguard protocol. I left Jackie in the lobby with a doorman who was all too eager to watch her for as long as possible. I walked out and across the cobblestoned driveway, and looked into the Town Car; it was the same driver we’d had the night before, and he nodded at me. I nodded back and turned to look at the rest of the area around the entrance.

It took only a few moments to search around the hotel’s front door. There were a few people standing around near the door, presumably waiting for their cars. I looked them over carefully, but they seemed to be no more than my fellow hotel guests: wealthy, well-fed people, looking rather pleased with themselves, and I passed them by and stepped out into the courtyard.

The sun was already shining brightly, and I had to blink for a moment, and then squint around me. Down at the far end of the drive, where the island’s only real road led away to the bridge, there were two cars pulled over and parked rather informally. But they were too far away to do any real harm; I was not expecting a sniper attack. So I took a quick circuit around the circular driveway. There were a couple of cars parked ostentatiously along the edge of the pavement: a Ferrari, a Bentley, and a Corniche. I didn’t think our killer would be driving anything that cost more than a new house on the water, but I looked inside anyway. They were empty.

The valet parking attendant watched me skeptically as I came back from looking into the Corniche. “You like it?” he asked me.

“Very nice,” I said. “Is it yours?”

He snorted. “We just park it there. For looks,” he said.

I nodded as if that made sense. “Right,” I said. “A design moment.” He shrugged. I went back inside.

The doorman was enthusiastically telling Jackie about his nephew, a really good-looking kid who could really act and sang like an angel, not like these hip-hop guys nowadays but really sing , and Jackie was smiling and nodding and trying to keep her eyes from crossing with the strain of enduring the doorman’s blather without slapping him.

I took pity on her and interrupted without waiting for the end of the story. “We’re running late, Miss Forrest,” I said, sounding as Official as I could.

Jackie gave me a grateful smile and then nodded at the doorman. “Tell him not to give up,” she told the man. “Always follow the dream.”

He beamed at her like she had knighted him. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll tell him; thank you, Miss Forrest.” And he leaped ahead of us and held the door as I led Jackie out to the waiting car.

As we came out into the sunlight I heard a sort of murmur of excitement from the handful of people waiting there, and I turned to see that they were all looking at me with bright and mindless smiles on their faces. Not actually Me, of course, which became crystal clear when someone called out, “Yo, Jackie!” She smiled and waved and I led her on past the minicrowd to the waiting Town Car. I felt the eyes following us, and I wondered why that didn’t make me nervous. I checked the Dark Passenger; far from being anxious, he actually seemed to be purring . Someone in the throng yelled, “Whoo!” and I felt myself smiling with pleasure. I knew it was for Jackie-but I was with her, part of her entourage, and in a moment of truly bizarre insight, I realized I liked it. I enjoyed having idiot smiles following in my wake. It was totally unthinkable, of course; Dexter must maintain a low profile or cease to be Dexter. Still, I found that I felt larger, more handsome, certain that great wit fell from my lips every time I parted them to speak. It was invigorating, intoxicating, and I enjoyed it so much that I did not hear the rising rattle of warning from the watch-tower of Castle Dexter until I opened the car’s door.

But then I did hear it, loud and insistent, and I put two protective arms around Jackie and turned to survey the area.

“What?” she said, and she pushed up close against me, suddenly as edgy as I felt.

“I don’t know,” I said. I scanned; the people at the hotel’s entrance were doing no more than beaming at us. No danger there. But I felt a sharp tickle of something , a kind of intense focus on Us, over to the right somewhere. I turned to look.

Down at the end of the drive, a man stood beside one of the two cars pulled over and parked at the mouth of the hotel’s driveway. The man raised something up, pointed it at us-and just before I could fling Jackie to the hard uneven bricks of the driveway, I recognized it: a camera, with a large telephoto lens.

Click. Click. Click .

“Paparazzi,” Jackie said. “They’re everywhere.” She looked at me with a strange expression of puzzled concern. “How did you know he was there?”

“Um, I didn’t really,” I said. The thought of describing my Passenger’s Distant Early Warning System was unthinkable. “I just, um, I saw him move out of the corner of my eye.”

She kept looking. “Uh-huh,” she said, sounding very much unconvinced.

I held the back door of the car open for her. “Shall we go?” I said.

She finally nodded, turned away, and climbed into the car, and I turned to look at our audience one last time. The photographer clicked a few more shots, and as I turned away, I heard the sound of a motorcycle starting up.

Around the hotel’s front door, the people were still smiling. Even the doorman was still watching and waving as I put Jackie into the backseat, but to be fair, everybody else in the area was watching her, too, watching with a kind of lustful adoration, as if Jackie was a cross between a pinup and the pope. They did not actually applaud as she slid onto the seat and I closed the door, but I got the idea that they would have if this wasn’t such a classy hotel.

I got in on the other side, feeling another surge of that strange satisfaction at being the center of attention. I pushed it away halfheartedly, but it didn’t want to go, and I was still feeling beautiful and important as the car started down the drive, across the bridge, and into the happy mayhem of morning traffic in Miami.

I tried to lean back and enjoy the ride, but I found it a very odd experience to creep through the havoc in the backseat of the Town Car. For the first time I was a spectator instead of a participant, and although the horns blared and the middle fingers went up just as much as ever, it was almost like it was happening in another time and place as I watched it all go by in a movie.