Jeff Lindsay - Double Dexter

And yet, I had to be ready for it every moment of every day, waking and sleeping. It was an impossible task, and it had all my wheels spinning furiously without actually moving me anywhere but deeper into a funk. In my feverish paranoia, every step I heard was Him, sneaking up behind me with bad intentions and a Louisville Slugger.

Even Vince Masuoka noticed; it would have been hard not to, since I jumped like a scalded cat every time he cleared his throat. My boy, he said at last, looking at me across the lab over his laptop screen, you are seriously on edge.

I work too hard, I said.

He shook his head. Then you need to party even harder.

I am a married man with three kids and a demanding job, I said. I don t party.

Listen to the wisdom of age, he said in his Charlie Chan voice. Life is much too short not to get drunk and go naked now and then.

Sage advice, Master, I said. Perhaps I could try that tonight, at Cub Scouts.

He nodded and looked very serious. Excellent. Teach them young, and they will truly learn, he said.

That night actually was our weekly Cub Scout meeting. Cody had been going for a year now, even though he did not like it. Rita and I had agreed that it was good for him and might help to bring him out of his shell. Naturally enough, I knew that the only way to really bring him out of his shell was to give him a knife and some living creature to experiment on, but that was a subject I thought best to avoid with his mother, and Cub Scouts was the best alternative. And I really did think it would be good for him, by helping him to learn how to behave like a real human boy.

So that night I came home from work, rushed through a meal of leftover Pollo Tropical as Rita worked at the kitchen table, and hustled Cody into the car in his blue Scout uniform, which he put on every week with barely controlled hatred. He thought that the whole idea of a uniform involving short pants was not merely terrible fashion but also humiliating to anyone who was forced into wearing them. But I had persuaded him that the scouting experience was a valuable way to learn how to blend in, and I tried to make him understand that this part of his training was every bit as important as learning where to put leftover body parts, and he had gone along with the program for a whole year now without any actual open rebellion.

On this night we arrived at the elementary school where the meetings were held with a few minutes to spare, and we sat in the car quietly. Cody liked to wait until just before the meeting started before he went inside, probably because Blending In was still a very unpleasant strain for him. So most evenings we would sit together and do nothing except exchange a few words. He never said much, but his two- or three-word sentences were always worth hearing, and in spite of my great discomfort with clich s, I would have to say we had Bonded. Tonight, though, I was so busy looking for something sinister lurking in every shadow that I wouldn t have heard Cody if he d recited the entire Kama Sutra.

Luckily, he didn t seem to feel talkative, and he did no more than watch studiously as the other boys climbed out of their cars and went in, some with a parent and some alone. Of course, I was watching them all just as carefully.

Steve Binder, Cody said suddenly, and I jumped a bit reflexively. Cody looked at me with something like amusement, and nodded at a large unibrowed boy stalking past us and into the building. I looked back at Cody and raised an eyebrow; he shrugged.

Bully, he said.

Does he pick on you? I asked, and he shrugged again. But before he could answer in actual words I felt a small strange tickling on the back of my neck and a slight uncomfortable shifting of nonexistent bulk somewhere deep inside; I turned to look behind me. Several cars came into the parking lot and drove to nearby spaces. I could see nothing sinister about any of them, nothing unusual that would have caused the Passenger to stir as it had. Just a short string of minivans, and one battered Cadillac at least fifteen years old.

For one brief moment I wondered whether one of them was Him, my Shadow, somehow already moving closer because something had sent a small electric twinge up from the Basement and into my conscious mind. Impossible but I looked hard at each car as it rolled to a stop. For the most part they were generic suburban vehicles, the same ones we saw here every week. Only the Cadillac was different, and I watched as it parked and a stocky man got out, followed by a round young boy. It was a perfectly normal picture, exactly what you would expect to see. There was nothing odd or threatening about them, nothing at all, and they went inside to the meeting without throwing hand grenades or setting fire to anything. I watched them go, but the stocky man did not look at me or do anything except put a reassuring hand on the boy s shoulder and shepherd him inside.

Not him, not possibly anything at all except what it seemed to be, a man taking a kid in to Scouts. It would be lunacy to think that my Shadow could somehow know I would be here tonight, and then round up a boy on short notice, just to get close to me. I took a deep breath and tried to clear the Stupid out. It wouldn t happen here, whatever it was. Not tonight.

And so I resolutely pushed away the small and nagging warning flag that flapped in my face, and turned back to Cody only to see that he was staring at me.

What? he said.

Nothing, I said. And almost certainly it really was nothing, just a passing twitch of the radar, perhaps caused by sensing someone s anger at their favorite parking spot being taken.

But Cody didn t think so; he turned and stared around the parking lot, just as I had. Something, he said positively. And I looked at him with interest.

Shadow Guy? I asked him. That was his name for his very own small Dark Passenger, planted in him courtesy of the repeated traumas he had received from his now-imprisoned biological father. If Cody and Shadow Guy had heard the same soft alarm bell ringing, it was worth paying attention.

But Cody just shrugged. Not sure, he said, which very closely matched my feelings. We both looked around us at the parking lot for a moment, our heads swiveling in near unison. Neither of us saw anything out of the ordinary. And then the Cub Scout den leader, a large and enthusiastic man named Frank, stuck his head out the door and began to holler that it was time to start, and so Cody and I got out of the car and headed in with the other stragglers. I glanced over my shoulder one last time, noticing with something close to paternal pride that Cody did exactly the same thing at the same time. Neither of us saw anything more alarming than more boys in blue uniform shorts, so I shrugged it off and we went into the meeting.

This evening s den meeting was like most of the others: uneventful and even a little tedious. The only thing that broke the routine was the introduction of a new assistant leader, the stocky man I had seen getting out of the old Cadillac. His name was Doug Crowley. I watched him carefully, still feeling a little twitchy from my false alarm in the parking lot, but there was absolutely nothing about him that was even interesting, let alone threatening. He was about thirty-five years old and seemed dull, bland, and earnest. The round young boy he had brought in was a ten-year-old Dominican kid named Fidel. He wasn t Crowley s child; Crowley was a volunteer for the Big Brothers program, and he had offered to assist Frank. Frank welcomed him, thanked him, and then began some discussion of our upcoming camping trip to the Everglades. There was a report on the ecology of the area from two boys who were working on a badge project on the subject, and then Frank talked about how to practice fire safety when you were camping. Cody endured the whole tedious program with grim patience, and did not quite sprint for the door when it was over. And home we went, to our not-big-enough house with its table full of Rita s papers instead of food, with no sign along the way of anything more threatening than a bright yellow Hummer with a too-loud sound system.