Jeff Lindsay - Double Dexter

Mom! Astor shrilled in a tone of angry panic.

Lily Anne threw up on my controller!

Shit, Rita said, a very uncharacteristic word for her. She gulped the rest of her wine and lurched up out of her chair, grabbing a handful of paper towels as she hurried away to clean up. I heard her telling Astor in a scolding voice that Lily Anne should not have had the controller in the first place, and Astor saying firmly that her sister was more than a year old and they wanted to see if she could kill the dragon yet, and anyway they were sharing and what was wrong with that? Cody said, Yuck, quite distinctly, Rita began muttering short and jerky instructions mixed with, Oh, for God s sake, and, Really, Astor, how can you even? and Astor s voice slid up the scale into a rising whine of excuses combined with blame for everyone else.

And as the whole thing climbed the conversational stairs into absurd and pointless confrontation I let out my cool and careful breath and felt a new one rush in, hot and tight and full of dim red highlights; this was my alternative to exposure and prison? Squealing, squabbling, screaming, and the sour-milk vomit of endless emotional violence? This was the good side of life? The part that I was supposed to miss when the end came, at any minute now, to trundle me off into the dark forever? It was beyond endurance; just listening to it in the next room made me want to bellow, spit fire, crush heads but, of course, that kind of honest expression of real emotion would only guarantee my reservation in prison. And so rather than steaming into the living room and laying about me with a club, as I so desperately wanted to do, I took a deep breath, stalked out through the turmoil of the living room, and went into my office.

My Honda list lay in its folder, practically growing cobwebs from the last few days of neglect. There was still time tonight to see a couple of addresses; I copied the next two entries from the list onto a Post-it and closed the folder. I went to the bedroom, changed into my running clothes, and headed for the front door. Once again I had to pass through the hideous bedlam at the front of the house, which had devolved into Astor and Rita grumbling at each other as they wiped almost everything around them with paper towels.

I had thought I might slip past them and out into the night without comment, but like all my other thoughts lately, that one was wrong, too. Rita s head snapped up as I hurried by, and even out of the corner of my eye I could see her face grow tighter, meaner-looking, and she stood up as I put a hand on the front door.

Where are you going? she said, and the tone of her voice still carried the edge she had used on Astor.

Out, I said. I need exercise.

Is that what you call it now? she said, and although her words might as well have been in Estonian, for all the sense they made, her tone was very clear, and it did not hold even the memory of anything pleasant.

I turned all the way around and looked at Rita. She stood beside the couch with her fists knotted at her sides one of them held a clutch of soiled paper towel and her face was so pale it was almost green, except for matching bright red patches on her cheeks. The sight of her was so odd, so completely different from the Rita I knew, that I just looked at her for a long moment. Apparently, that didn t soothe her; she narrowed her eyes at me even more and began to tap her toe, and I realized that I had not answered her question.

What should I call it? I said.

Rita hissed at me. It was so startling that I could do nothing but gawp, and then she threw the balled-up paper towels at me. They opened up in midair and fluttered to the floor a few feet away from me, and Rita said, I don t give a damn what you call it. And she turned around and stomped into the kitchen, returning a moment later with more paper towels, and very pointedly ignoring me.

I watched a little longer, hoping for some clue, but Rita only ignored me even more thoroughly. I like a good puzzle as much as anybody else, but this one seemed much too abstract for me, and in any case I had more important answers to find. So I decided it was just one more thing I didn t understand about human behavior, and I opened the door and trotted out into the late afternoon heat.

I turned to the left at the end of my front walk and started jogging. The first name I had copied from the list was Alissa Elan: a strange name, but I took it as a good omen. Elan, as in zest, zeal, panache. It was exactly what I had been missing lately: Dexter s Deadly Dash. Perhaps I would rekindle it tonight when I saw Ms. Alissa s Honda. And as if there really was some kind of magic in that first name, Alissa, I suddenly felt like I had been smacked on the head with something large, heavy, and wet, and I stopped dead in the middle of the

street, and if there had been any traffic at all I wouldn t have noticed if it ran right over me because I had just realized that Alissa began with the letter A.

My Shadow had blogged endlessly about the Evil Bitch known only as A, and yet until now I had not checked the list for A s. I had obviously been watching too much TV far too many gray cells had gone off-line and my once-mighty brain was in a sad state of decrepitude. But I did not linger and indulge myself in an appreciation of my own stupidity. Better late than never, and I had found it. This was it, I was sure of it, the one I had been looking for, and I let that surge of unreasonable glee push me into a trot, down the street and away into late-afternoon certainty.

The house was a little more than a mile away, but on the far side of U.S. 1. So far I had seen only the houses on my side of the highway, since crossing on foot in the evening was hazardous. But if I could get across safely, I could loop past it, turn north to see the second entry, and be home in less than an hour.

I ran for about fifteen minutes on the west side of U.S. 1, jogging slowly through an area that had never quite recovered from Hurricane Andrew. The houses were small and looked neglected, even the ones that were occupied, and on most of them it was very hard to see the address. The numbers were worn off, or covered with vegetation, or missing altogether. There were a number of older, battered cars lining the street, and many of them were abandoned wrecks. A dozen dirty kids were playing in and around them. More kids were kicking a soccer ball back and forth in the parking lot of a battered two-story apartment building. I watched the children as I jogged, wondering whether they might hurt themselves climbing all over the old and rusty cars, and I almost missed it.

I had just heard the thump of a well-kicked ball and turned my head to look as the soccer ball soared through the parking lot to the cries of, Julio! Aqu! But as I mentally applauded Julio s skill, the ball sailed past the front of the building and I saw the address above the door: 8834. The number I was looking for was 8837; I had let myself get distracted and almost gone right past.

I slowed my jog to a walk and then came to a stop in front of the apartment building, putting my foot up on a crumbling concrete block wall as if I was tying my shoelace. As I fiddled with the lace I glanced across the street and there it was. Wedged in beside a huge and untrimmed hedge in front of the house across the street, there it really was.

The house itself was small, almost a cottage, and so overgrown that I couldn t even see the windows. A huge, knotted vine spread over the top of the house, as if it was holding the roof down so it wouldn t crumble and fall off. There was barely enough yard in front to park the Honda, and a rusted chain-link fence closed off the backyard. The nearest streetlight was half a block away, and with the row of untended trees along the street, anything that happened at the little house after dark would be almost invisible, which made me truly hope this really was it. The car was pulled in behind a large bougainvillea that took up half the yard and poured down across the roof of the house, and I could see only one small chunk of the rear section that stuck out from the shrubbery. But the certainty grew as I looked at the car.