Jeff Lindsay - Double Dexter

I could feel my jaw moving, but no words were coming out; there were so many things wrong with what Astor had said that I couldn t seem to pick one to start on and in any case she had walled herself into such a high tower of miserable anger that whatever I said would just set her off again.

But luckily for my reputation as an urbane negotiator, before I could say anything and have it slammed back down my throat, Rita s raised voice came floating down the hall. Dexter? Astor? Come to dinner! And while my mouth was still hanging open, Astor was up and out the door and my little encouraging chat about braces was over.

I woke up again on Monday morning in the middle of an enormous sneeze and feeling like a Turkish weight lifter had spent the entire weekend squeezing every bone in my body. For that one confused moment between waking and sleeping I thought the psycho who had hammered Detective Klein into a limp pudding had somehow gotten into my bedroom and worked me over while I slept. But then I heard the toilet flush, and Rita hurried through the bedroom and down the hall toward the kitchen, and normal life lurched up onto its feet and stumbled on into another day.

I stretched, and the ache in my joints stretched with me. I wondered whether the pain could make me feel empathy for Klein. It didn t seem likely; I d never been cursed with that kind of weak emotion before, and even Lily Anne s transformational magic couldn t turn me into a soft-shelled empathy feeler overnight. It was probably just my subconscious playing connect-the-dots.

Still, I found myself dwelling on Klein s death as I got up and went through my morning routine, which now included sneezing every minute or so. Klein s skin had not been broken; a remarkable amount of force had been used on him, but there had been no blood spilled at all. It was my guess and the Passenger hissed its agreement that Klein had remained conscious as every bone in his body had been shattered. He d been awake and alert for every smash and crunch, every agonizing smack of the hammer, until finally, after a very impressive period of agony, the killer had done enough internal damage to allow Klein to slip away into death. It was much worse than having a cold. It didn t sound like a lot of fun especially not for Klein.

But in spite of my distaste for the method, and the Dark Passenger s contempt, I really did start to feel the limp fingers of empathy tickling at the inside of my skull empathy, yes, but not for Klein. The fellow feeling that sent small tendrils curling into my thoughts was all for Klein s executioner. It was totally stupid, of course but nonetheless I began to hear a niggling little whisper in my inner ear that my only real objection to what had been done to Klein was the use of the wrong tools. After all, hadn t I made sure that Valentine, too, stayed awake to feel every moment of my attention? Of course, Valentine had earned it with his habit of molesting and killing young boys but were any of us truly innocent? Maybe Detective Klein had been a tax cheat, or a wife beater, or perhaps he had chewed food with his mouth open. He might have deserved what the so-called psycho had done to him and really, who was to say that what I did was any better?

I knew very well that there was a great deal wrong with that unpleasant argument, but it stayed with me anyway, a discontented murmur of self-loathing in the background as I ate my breakfast, sneezed, got ready for work, sneezed, and finally took two cold pills and headed out the door, sneezing. I couldn t shake the absurd notion that I was just as guilty perhaps far more so, since Klein was the only victim of this killer so far, and I had fifty-two glass slides tucked away in my rosewood souvenir box, each with its single drop of blood representing a departed playmate. Did that make me fifty-two times as bad?

It was completely ridiculous, of course; what I had done was totally justified, sanctified by the Code of Saint Harry, and beneficial to society, aside from being a great deal of fun. But because I was so wrapped up in navel-gazing, it was not until I crawled off U.S. 1 to merge onto the Palmetto Expressway that the insistent sibilance of self-preservation finally broke through my egotistical fog. It was just a quiet hiss of warning, but it was persistent enough to get my attention, and as I finally listened to it, it solidified into a single, very definite thought.

Someone is watching me.

I don t know why I was certain, but I was. I could feel the gaze in a nearly physical way, almost as if somebody was trickling the razor-sharp point of a knife along the back of my neck. It was a sensation as definite and inarguable as the heat from the sun; someone was watching me, specifically me, and they were watching me for some reason that did not have my best interests at heart.

Reason argued that this was Miami at morning rush hour; almost anyone might stare at me with distaste, even hatred, for any reason at all maybe they didn t like my car, or my profile reminded them of their eighth-grade algebra teacher. But whatever Reason said, Caution argued back: It didn t matter why someone was watching me. It only mattered that they were. Someone was watching me with mischief in mind, and I needed to find out who.

Slowly, oh-so-casually, I looked around me. I was in the middle of an exceptionally normal crush of morning traffic, indistinguishable from what I drove through every morning. To my immediate right there were two lanes of cars: a battered Impala, and beyond it an old Ford van with a camper roof. Behind them was a line of Toyotas, Hummers, and BMWs, none of them appearing to be any more menacing than any of the others.

I looked ahead again, inched forward with the traffic, and then slowly turned to look to my left and before my head had turned more than six inches, there was a screech of tires, a chorus of blaring horns, and an old Honda accelerated off the Palmetto s on-ramp, down the shoulder, and back onto U.S. 1, where it squealed north, slid through a yellow light, and vanished down a side street, and as it went I could see the left taillight dangling at an odd angle, and then the dark birthmark stain on the trunk.

I watched it go until the drivers behind me began to lean on their horns. I tried to tell myself that it was pure coincidence. I knew very well how many old Hondas there were in Miami; I had them all on my list. And I had visited only eight of them so far, and it was very possible that this was one of the others. I told myself that this was just one more idiot changing his mind and deciding to drive to work a different way this morning; probably someone had suddenly remembered that he d left the coffeepot on, or left the disk with the PowerPoint presentation at home.

But no matter how many good and banal reasons I thought up for the Honda s behavior, that other, darker certainty kept talking back, telling me with calm and factual insistence that whoever had been driving that car, they had been staring at me and thinking bad thoughts, and when I had turned to look at them they had rocketed away as if pursued by demons, and we knew very well what that really meant.

My breakfast began to churn in my stomach and I felt my hands turn slick with sweat. Could it be? Was it remotely possible that whoever had seen me that night had found me? Somehow tracked me down and learned my license number, long before I found them and now they were following me? It was wildly, stupidly unlikely the odds against it were monumental; it was ridiculous, impossible, totally beyond the bounds of belief but was it possible?

I thought about it: There was no connection between Dexter Morgan, Boy Forensics Whiz, and the house where I had been seen with Valentine. I had gone to and from the house in Valentine s car, and I had not been followed when I fled. So hunting along my back trail was impossible: There wasn t one.