Jeff Lindsay - Double Dexter

The boy who had been last to arrive said, What s that? Like a flower that s a ghost?

The boy next to him shoved him and murmured, Idiot, and Frank shook his head.

It s one of the rarest flowers in the world, Frank said. And if we see one you have to be very careful not to touch it. Don t even breathe on it. It is so delicate, and so rare, that hurting one would be a true crime. Frank let this sink in, and then gave them a small smile and went on. Now remember. Besides the orchids. We are going into an area that has been kept just the way the Calusas left it.

He lowered his eyes to the boys level and nodded at them.

We talked about this, guys. This is a primitive area, and we need to respect its purity. Leave nothing behind except footprints, right? He glanced at each boy to make sure they were properly serious; they were, so he nodded and smiled again. Okay. We re gonna have a great time. Let s get going.

Frank assigned each boy to one of the cars. Along with me and Cody, I had room for two; one of them turned out to be Steve Binder, the boy Cody had said was a bully. He was a big kid with a single eyebrow and a low hairline he might have been Detective Hood s child, if you could only believe that any woman alive would have the poor taste to submit to Hood, and then keep the result.

My other passenger was a cheerful kid named Mario, who seemed to know every scouting song ever written, and by the time we got halfway to the park he had sung all of them at least twice. Because I had to keep both hands on the steering wheel, I couldn t really turn around and strangle him, but I didn t interfere when Steve Binder, at the point in the song when there were still eighty-two bottles of pop left on the wall, finally gave Mario a hard elbow and said, Cut it out, stoopit.

Mario sulked for a full three minutes, and then started babbling happily about Calusa shell mounds and how you could make watertight shelters with palmetto palm fronds and the best way to start a fire in the swamp. Cody stared straight ahead through the windshield from his place of honor in the front seat, and Steve Binder glowered and twitched in the backseat and every now and then glared at Mario. But Mario babbled on, apparently without noticing that everyone else in the car wanted him dead. He was bright and cheerful and well-informed and almost everything a Cub Scout should be, and I would not have objected too much if Steve Binder threw him out the window of the car.

By the time we got to the ranger station at the park I was gritting my teeth and clutching at the steering wheel so hard my knuckles showed white. I pulled in and parked next to one of the other dads who had gotten there first, and we all got out and released Mario into the unsuspecting wild. Steve Binder stomped away to find something to break, and once again Cody and I found ourselves standing in a parking lot and waiting for people to show up.

Since I no longer had any coffee to sip while I waited, I used the time to pull our gear out of the trunk and make sure it was all carefully packed into our backpacks. My pack held our tent and most of our food, and it was already starting to look much bigger and heavier than it had when I first packed it at home.

It was a good half hour before the last car arrived at the ranger station the battered old Cadillac filled with Doug Crowley and his group. They had stopped for a pee break and to buy some MoonPies. But ten minutes after that we were all on the trail and hiking off to our Wonderful Adventure in the Wild.

We didn t see a ghost orchid along the trail. Most of the boys were able to hide their bitter disappointment, and I kept my mind off my shattered hopes of seeing the rare flower by adjusting Cody s pack straps until he could stand up straight enough to walk. The trick, as we had learned in one of our den meetings, was to get the weight onto the hip strap, and then keep the shoulder straps tight, but not so tight that they cut off circulation and made your arms go numb. It took a couple of tries to get it just right as we hiked along the trail, and by the time Cody nodded at me that he was comfortable, I realized that my arms had gone numb, and we had to start all over again. Once the feeling came back into my arms and we could walk normally, I began to feel a burning pain on my heel, and before we were even halfway to the campsite I had a wonderful new blister on my left heel.

Still, we staggered in to the campsite in good shape and relatively high spirits, and in no time at all Cody and I had our tent set up under a shady tree all snug and comfy. Frank organized the boys for a nature walk, and I made Cody tag along. He wanted me to go, too, but I refused. After all, the whole purpose of getting him involved in scouting was to help him learn how to act like a real boy, and he could not study that hanging out with me. He had to get out there on his own and figure out how to cope, and this was as good a time as any to start. Besides, my blister hurt, and I wanted to take off my shoes and sit in the shade for a while, doing nothing more than rubbing my feet and exercising my self-pity.

And so I sat there, back against a tree trunk and bare feet stretched out in front of me, as the voices faded into the distance; Frank s eager baritone calling out fascinating nature facts over the higher-pitched sound of the boys joking around, and the overriding noise of Mario singing There s a Hole in the Bucket. I wondered whether anyone would think to feed him to an alligator.

It got very quiet, and for a few minutes I sat there and enjoyed it. A cool breeze blew through the trees and over my face. A lizard ran by me and up the tree at my back; halfway up he turned to face me and puffed out his throat, the crimson skin rolling out as if he was daring me to stand and fight. Overhead a large heron flew past, muttering to himself. He was a little awkward-looking, but perhaps that was deliberate, a kind of camouflage to lull his prey into underestimating him. I had seen his kind on the job in the water, and they were lethal and lightning-fast when they went to work on the fish. They would stand very still, looking cute and fluffy, and then slash down into the water and come up with a fish impaled on their beak. It was a great routine, and I felt a certain kinship with herons. Like me, they were predators in disguise.

The heron disappeared into the swamp, and a flock of cattle egrets went by in its place, wings rattling. Almost as if it was caused by the birds passage, the wind riffled through the trees and blew over me again, and it felt very good on my face and my feet. The blister on my heel stopped throbbing, I started to relax, and even all my troubles with Hood and Doakes and my Shadow faded into the background just a little. After all, it was a beautiful day in the primeval forest, in the middle of wonderful, eternal nature, complete with birds. This had not changed in thousands of years, and it might very well stay just like this for another five or six years, until somebody wanted to build condos. Beautiful wild things were killing each other all around me, and there was something soothing about sitting here and feeling like I was a part of a process that went on practically forever. Maybe there really was something to this whole Nature business after all.

It was relaxing and wonderful and lasted almost five whole minutes, and then the nagging worries began to seep back in and batter at me until all the lush feathered scenery might as well have been painted on a ratty old postcard. What did it matter if the forest was timeless? Dexter was not. My time was ticking away, draining off forever into the Long Dark Night what good was a tree if it grew in a world with no Dexter? Even as I sat here admiring birds in the wild, my Goose was being Cooked back in the real world. With luck and skill, I might just survive the attack by Hood and Doakes but without luck and some inspired cleverness, it was all over for me. So unless I could find a way to defuse them, I was going to end my days in a cell.