Jeff Lindsay - Darkly Dreaming Dexter

They know you down there.”

My God, she was good. She had deflected anyone from possibly thinking about Deb's idea, put Deb in her place, and brought the team back together behind her with the joke about our rivalry with Broward County. All in a few simple words. I felt like applauding.

Except, of course, that I was on poor Deborah's team, and she had just been flattened. Her mouth opened for a moment, then closed, and I watched her jaw muscles knot as she carefully pushed her face back into Cop Neutral. In its own way, a fine performance, but truly, not even in the same league as LaGuerta's.

The rest of the meeting was uneventful. There was really nothing to talk about beyond what had been said. So very shortly after LaGuerta's masterful putdown, the meeting broke up and we were in the hall again.

“Damn her,” Deborah muttered under her breath. “Damn, damn, damn her!”

“Absolutely,” I agreed.

She glared at me. “Thanks, bro. Some help you were.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “But we agreed I would stay out of it. So you would get the credit.”

She snarled. “Some credit. She made me look like an idiot.”

“With absolute respect, sister dear, you met her halfway.”

Deborah looked at me, looked away, threw up her hands with disgust. “What was I supposed to say?

I'm not even on the team. I'm just there because the captain said they had to let me in.”

“And he didn't say they had to listen to you,” I said.

“And they don't. And they won't,” Deborah said bitterly. “Instead of getting me into homicide, this is going to kill my career. I'll die a meter maid, Dexter.”

“There is a way out, Deb,” I said, and the look she turned on me now was only about one-third hope.

“What,” she said.

I smiled at her, my most comforting, challenging, I'm-not-really-a-shark smile. “Find the truck,” I said.

It was three days before I heard from my dear foster sister again, a longish period for her to go without talking to me. She came into my office just after lunch on Thursday, looking sour. “I found it,” she said, and I didn't know what she meant.

“Found what, Deb?” I asked. “The Fountain of Grumpiness?”

“The truck,” she said. “The refrigerated truck.”

“But that's great news,” I said. “Why do you look like you're searching for somebody to slap?”

“Because I am,” she said, and flung four or five stapled pages onto my desk. “Look at this.”

I picked it up and glanced at the top page. “Oh,” I said. “How many altogether?”

“Twenty-three,” she said. “In the last month, twenty-three refrigerator trucks have been reported stolen. The guys over on traffic say most of 'em turn up in canals, torched for the insurance money.

Nobody pushes too hard to find them. So nobody's been pushing on these, and nobody's going to.”

“Welcome to Miami,” I said.

Deborah sighed and took the list back from me, slouching into my extra chair like she'd just lost all her bones. “There's no way I can check them all, not by myself. It would take months. Goddamn it, Dex,” she said. “Now what do we do?”

I shook my head. “I'm sorry, Deb,” I said. “But now we have to wait.”

“That's it? Just wait?”

“That's it,” I said.

And it was. For two more weeks, that was it. We waited.

And then . . .

I WOKE UP COVERED WITH SWEAT, NOT SURE WHERE I was, and absolutely certain that another murder was about to happen. Somewhere not so far away he was searching for his next victim, sliding through the city like a shark around the reef. I was so certain I could almost hear the purr of the duct tape. He was out there, feeding his Dark Passenger, and it was talking to mine. And in my sleep I had been riding with him, a phantom remora in his great slow circles.

I sat up in my own little bed and peeled away the twisted sheets. The bedside clock said it was 3:14.

Four hours since I'd gone to bed, and I felt like I'd been slogging through the jungle the entire time with a piano on my back. I was sweaty, stiff, and stupid, unable to form any thoughts at all beyond the certainty that it was happening out there without me.

Sleep was gone for the night, no question. I turned on the light. My hands were clammy and trembling.

I wiped them on the sheet, but that didn't help. The sheets were just as wet. I stumbled into the bathroom to wash my hands. I held them under the running water. The tap let out a stream that was warm, room temperature, and for a moment I was washing my hands in blood and the water turned red; just for a second, in the half-light of the bathroom, the sink ran bloodred.

I closed my eyes.

The world shifted .

I had meant to get rid of this trick of light and my half-sleeping brain. Close the eyes, open them, the illusion would be over and it would be simple clean water in my sink. Instead, it was like closing my eyes had opened a second set of eyes into another world.

I was back in my dream, floating like a knife blade above the lights of Biscayne Boulevard, flying cold and sharp and homing in on my target and -I opened my eyes again. The water was just water.

But what was I?

I shook my head violently. Steady, old boy; no Dexter off the deep end, please. I took a long breath and peeked at myself. In the mirror I looked the way I was supposed to look. Carefully composed features. Calm and mocking blue eyes, a perfect imitation of human life. Except that my hair stuck up like Stan Laurel's, there was no sign of whatever it was that had just zipped through my half-sleeping brain and rattled me out of my slumber.

I carefully closed my eyes again.

Darkness.

Plain, simple, darkness. No flying, no blood, no city lights. Just good old Dexter with his eyes closed in front of the mirror.

I opened them again. Hello, dear boy, so good to have you back. But where on earth have you been?

That, of course, was the question. I have spent most of my life untroubled by dreams and, for that matter, hallucinations. No visions of the Apocalypse for me; no troubling Jungian icons burbling up from my subconscious, no mysterious recurring images drifting through the history of my unconsciousness. Nothing ever goes bump in Dexter's night. When I go to sleep, all of me sleeps.

So what had just happened? Why were these pictures appearing to me?

I splashed water on my face and pushed my hair down. That did not, of course, answer the question, but it made me feel a little better. How bad could things be if my hair was neat?

In truth, I did not know. Things could be plenty bad. I might be losing all, or many, of my marbles.

What if I had been slipping into insanity a piece at a time for years, and this new killer had simply triggered the final headlong fall into complete craziness? How could I hope to measure the relative sanity of somebody like me?

The images had looked and felt so real. But they couldn't be; I had been right here in my bed. Yet I had almost been able to smell the tang of salt water, exhaust, and cheap perfume floating over Biscayne Boulevard. Completely real—and wasn't that one of the signs of insanity, that the delusions were indistinguishable from reality? I had no answers, and no way to find any. Talking to a shrink was out of the question, of course; I would frighten the poor thing to death, and he might feel honor bound to have me locked away somewhere. Certainly I could not argue with the wisdom of that idea. But if I was losing my hold on sanity as I had built it, it was all my problem, and the first part of the problem was that there was no way to know for sure.

Although, come to think of it, there was one way.