Jeff Lindsay - Double Dexter

I m sorry if the yellow rice is a little but the dentist said? Astor is going to need braces, and she s completely She fluttered one hand in the air and started to sit. She said that she would rather Damn, I forgot the fork, just a minute, she said, and raced back into the kitchen.

Lily Anne watched her go, and then turned to look at me. I shook my head. She always talks like that, I told her.

You get used to it.

Lily Anne looked a little unsure. Da da da, she told me.

I kissed the top of her head. It smelled wonderful, a combination of baby shampoo and whatever intoxicating pheromone it is that babies rub into their scalps. You re probably right, I said, and then Rita was back in the room, putting a fork and a napkin down beside the plate, lifting Lily Anne up out of my arms, and settling down beside me to continue the saga of Astor and the Dentist.

Anyway, she said. I told her it s just for a year, and a lot of other girls But she has this Has she told you about Anthony?

Anthony the asshole? I said.

Oh, Rita said. He s not really an I mean, she says that and she shouldn t. But it s different for a girl, and Astor is at the age It s not too dry, is it? she said, frowning at my plate.

It s perfect, I said.

It is dry; I m sorry. So I thought maybe if you would talk to her, Rita finished. I truly hoped she meant talk to Astor and not the pork chop.

What do you want me to say? I asked her around a mouthful of very tasty but slightly dry pork chop.

That it s perfectly all right, Rita said.

What, braces?

Yes, of course, she said. What did you think we were talking about?

Truthfully, I was often not quite sure what we were talking about, since Rita usually managed to combine at least three simultaneous subjects when she spoke. Perhaps it came from her job; even after several years with her, I only knew that it involved juggling large numbers, converting them to different foreign currencies, and applying the results to the real estate market. It was one of life s wonderful puzzles that a woman smart enough to do that could be so completely stupid when it came to men, because first she had married a man addicted to drugs who beat her savagely, beat Cody and Astor just as badly, and finally committed enough unpleasant and illegal acts that he had been tucked away in prison. And Rita, free at last from the long nightmare of marriage to a drug-addled demon, had danced happily into marriage with an even worse monster: Me.

Of course, Rita would never know what I really was, not if I could help it. I had worked very hard to keep her blissfully ignorant of the true me, Dexter the Dark, the cheerful vivisectionist who lived for the purr of duct tape, the gleam of the knife, and the smell of fear rising up from a truly deserving playmate who had earned his ticket to Dexterland by slaughtering the innocent and somehow slipping through the gaping cracks in the justice system.

Rita would never know that side of me, and neither would Lily Anne. My moments with new friends like Valentine were private or they had been, until the terrible accident of the Witness. For a moment I thought about that, and the remaining names on my Honda list. One of those names would be the right one, had to be, and when I knew which one I could almost taste the excitement of taking and taping him, almost hear the muffled squeals of pain and fear.

And because my mind had wandered onto my hobby, I committed the dreadful felony of chewing Rita s pork chop without tasting it. But happily for my taste buds, as I pictured the Witness thrashing against his binds, I bit down on the fork, which jolted me out of my pleasant reverie and back to dinner. I scooped the last mouthful of yellow rice and one caper onto my fork and put it in my mouth as Rita said, And anyway, it isn t covered by the insurance, so But I should have a nice bonus this year, and braces are very Astor doesn t smile very much, does she? But maybe if her teeth She paused suddenly, waved a hand, and made a face. Oh, Lily Anne, she said.

You really do need a diaper change. Rita got up and took the baby away down the hall to the changing table, trailing an aroma that was definitely not pork chop, and I put down my empty plate and settled back onto the couch with a sigh: Dexter Digesting.

For some strange and very irritating reason, instead of letting the cares of the day slip away into a fog of well-fed contentment, I slid headfirst back into work and thought about Marty Klein and the dreadful mess that was his corpse. I hadn t really known him well, and even if I had I am not capable of any kind of emotional bonding, not even the rough and manly kind so popular at my job. And dead bodies don t bother me; even if I had not been occasionally involved in producing them, looking at them and touching them is part of my job. And although I would rather not have my coworkers know it, a dead cop is no more disturbing to me than a dead lawyer. But a corpse like this one, so completely hammered out of human shape it was very different, almost supernatural.

The fury of the pounding that had killed Klein was completely psychotic, of course but the fact that it had been so thorough, and had taken such a very long time, was far beyond normal, comfortable, homicidal insanity, and I found it very disturbing. It had required remarkable strength, endurance, and, most frightening by far, a cool control during the whole wild process so as not to go too far and cause death too soon, before all the bones were broken.

And for some reason, I had the very strong conviction that it was not a simple and relatively harmless single episode in which somebody had slipped over the line and gone postal for a few hours. This seemed like a pattern, a way of being, a state that was permanent. Insane strength and fury, combined with a clinical control I could not imagine what kind of creature was capable of that, and I didn t really want to. But once again I had the feeling we would find more squashed cops in the near future.

Dexter? Rita called softly from the bedroom.

Aren t you coming to bed?

I glanced at the clock by the TV: almost midnight. Just seeing the numbers made me realize how tired I was. Coming, I said. I got up from the couch and stretched, feeling a very welcome drowsiness come over me. It was clearly sleepy time, and I would worry about Marty Klein and his awful end tomorrow. Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof; at least, on the very good days. I put my plate in the sink and went to bed.

From far away in the dim, wool-packed world of sleep I felt an uneasy sensation elbowing its way into my head and, as if in answer to a vague but demanding question, I heard a loud and explosive roaring sound and I was awake, my nose dripping from a powerful sneeze. Oh, lord, Rita said, sitting up beside me.

You caught a cold from all that I knew you were going to Here, here s a tissue.

Tanks, I said, and I sat up in bed and took the tissue from her hand and applied it to my nose. I sneezed again, this time into the tissue, and felt it disintegrate in my hand. Ohggg, I said, as the slime dripped onto my fingers and a dull ache rolled into my bones.

Oh, for heaven s Here, take another tissue, Rita said. And go wash your hands, because Look at the time, it s time to get up anyway. And before I could do more than raise the new tissue to my face, she was up and out of the bed, leaving me to sit there dripping and wondering why wicked fate had inflicted this misery on poor undeserving me. My head hurt, and I felt like it was stuffed with wet sand, and it was leaking all over my hand and on top of everything else, I had to get up and go to work, and with the way my head was rolling sluggishly through the fog I wasn t sure I could even figure out how.

But one of the things Dexter is truly good at is learning and following patterns of behavior. I have lived my life among humans, and they all think and feel and act in ways that are completely alien to me but my survival depends on presenting a perfect imitation of the way they behave. Happily for me, ninety-nine percent of all human life is spent simply repeating the same old actions, speaking the same tired clich s, moving like a zombie through the same steps of the dance we plodded through yesterday and the day before and the day before. It seems horribly dull and pointless but it really makes a great deal of sense. After all, if you only have to follow the same path every day, you don t need to think at all. Considering how good humans are at any mental process more complicated than chewing, isn t that best for everybody?