Jeff Lindsay - Darkly Dreaming Dexter

“When? At what time, did you notice?”

“Naw,” she said. “But I'm only there like twenty minutes and then you come out and play with your faggot Barbie doll and then drive over here.”

“Twenty minutes—” So she hadn't been there in time to see who or what had taken Deborah. And quite probably she was telling the truth and had simply followed me to see—to see what?

“But why follow me at all?”

She shrugged. “You're connected to this thing. Maybe you didn't do it, I don't know. But I'm gonna find out. And some of what I find is gonna stick to you. What's in there, in those boxes? You gonna tell me, or we just going to stand here all night?”

In her own way, she had put her finger right on it. We could not stand here all night. We could not, I was sure, stand here much longer at all before terrible things happened to Deborah. If they hadn't already happened. We had to go, right now, go find him and stop him. But how did I do that with LaGuerta along for the ride? I felt like a comet with a tail I didn't want.

I took a deep breath. Rita had once taken me to a New Age Health Awareness Workshop which had stressed the importance of deep cleansing breaths. I took one. I did not feel any cleaner after my breath, but at least it made my brain whirl into brief action, and I realized I would have to do something I had rarely done before—tell the truth. LaGuerta was still staring at me, waiting for an answer.

“I think the killer is in there,” I told LaGuerta. “And I think he has Officer Morgan.”

She watched me for a moment without moving. “Okay,” she said at last. “And so you come stand at the fence and look in? 'Cause you love your sister so much you want to watch?”

“Because I wanted to get in. I was looking for a way in through the fence.”

“Because you forget that you work for the police?”

Well there it was, of course. She had actually jumped right to the real problem spot, and all by herself, too. I had no good answer for that. This whole business of telling the truth just never seems to work without some kind of awkward unpleasantness. “I just—I wanted to be sure, before I made a big fuss.”

She nodded. “Uh-huh. That's really good,” she said. “But I tell you what I think. Either you did something bad, or you know about it. And you're either hiding it, or you wanna find it by yourself.”

“By myself? But why would I want that?”

She shook her head to show how stupid that was. “So you get all the credit. You and that sister of yours. Think I didn't figure that out? I told you I'm not stupid.”

“I'm not your slasher, Detective,” I said, throwing myself on her mercy and now completely confident that she had even less than I did. “But I think he's in there, in one of the storage boxes.”

She licked her lips. “Why do you think that?”

I hesitated, but she kept her unblinking lizard stare on me. As uncomfortable as it made me, I had to tell her one more piece of truth. I nodded at the Allonzo Brothers van parked just inside the fence.

“That's his truck.”

“Ha,” she said, and at last she blinked. Her focus left me for a moment and seemed to wander away into some deep place. Her hair? Her makeup? Her career? I couldn't tell. But there were a lot of awkward questions a good detective might have asked here: How did I know that was his truck? How had I found it here? Why was I so sure he hadn't simply dumped the truck and gone somewhere else?

But in the final analysis LaGuerta was not a good detective; she simply nodded, licked her lips again, and said, “How are we gonna find him in there in all that?”

Clearly, I really had underestimated her. She had gone from “you” to “we” with no visible transition.

“Don't you want to call for backup?” I asked her. “This is a very dangerous man.” I admit I was only needling her. But she took it very seriously.

“If I don't catch this guy by myself, in two weeks I'm a meter maid,” she said. “I got my weapon.

Nobody's gonna get away from me. I'll call for backup when I have him.” She studied me without blinking. “And if he's not in there, I'll give them you.”

It seemed like a good idea to let that go. “Can you get us through the gate?”

She laughed. “'Course I can. I got my badge, get us through anywhere. And then what?”

This was the tricky part. If she went for this, I might well be home free. “Then we split up and search until we find him.”

She studied me. Again I saw in her face the thing I had seen when she first got out of her car—the look of a predator weighing her prey, wondering when and where to strike, and how many claws to use. It was horrible—I actually found myself warming to the woman. “Okay,” she said at last, and tilted her head toward her car. “Get in.”

I got in. She drove us back out onto the road and over to the gate. Even at this hour there was some traffic. Most of it seemed to be people from Ohio looking for their cruise ship, but a few of them wound up at the gate, where the guards sent them back the way they came. Detective LaGuerta cut ahead of them all, bulling her big Chevy to the front of the line. Their Midwest driving skills were no match for a Miami Cuban woman with good medical insurance driving a car she didn't care about.

There was a blare of horns and some muffled shouting and we were at the guard booth.

The guard leaned out, a thin, muscular black man. “Lady, you can't—” She held up her badge. “Police. Open the gate.” She said it with such hard-edged authority that I almost jumped out of the car to open the gate myself.

But the guard froze, took a breath through his mouth, and glanced nervously back into the booth.

“What you want with—”

“Open the fucking gate, Rental,” she told him, jiggling her badge, and he finally unfroze.

“Lemme see the badge,” he said. LaGuerta held it up limply, making him take the extra step over to peer at it. He frowned at it and found nothing to object to. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Can you tell me what you want in there?”

“I can tell you that if you don't open the gate in two seconds I'm gonna put you in the trunk of my car and take you downtown to a holding cell full of gay bikers and then I'm gonna forget where I put you.”

The guard stood up. “Just trying to help,” he said, and called over his shoulder, “Tavio, open the gate!”

The gate went up and LaGuerta gunned her car through. “Sonnova bitch got something going he doesn't want me to know about,” she said. There was amusement in her voice to go with the rising edge of excitement. “But I don't care about smuggling tonight.” She looked at me. “Where we going?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I guess we should start over where he left his truck.”

She nodded, accelerating down the path between stacks of storage boxes. “If he's got a body to carry, he probably parked pretty close to wherever he was going.” As we got closer to the fence she slowed down, nosing the car quietly to within fifty feet of the truck and then stopping. “Let's take a look at the fence,” she said, slamming the transmission into park and sliding out of the car as it rocked to a stop.

I followed. LaGuerta stepped in something she didn't like and lifted her foot to look at her shoe.

“Goddamint,” she said. I moved past her, feeling my pulse hammering loud and fast, and went to the truck. I walked around it, trying the doors. They were locked, and although there were two small back windows, these were painted over from the inside. I stood on the bumper and tried to peek in anyway, but there were no holes in the paint job. There was nothing more to be seen on this side, but I squatted anyway and looked on the ground. I felt rather than heard LaGuerta slither up behind me.