Jeffrey Lindsay - Dexter is delicious

And as I pulled into the lot at work and slowed to nose into my parking spot, the smell built up again and I thought about it. The last time I had driven my car had been right before the whole mess with Samantha that started at Fang, and before that —

Chapin.

I had taken the car to my playdate with Victor Chapin, and I had carried away the leftovers in garbage bags when I was done — was it possible that some small piece had fallen out and was still there, slowly rotting in the heat of a car closed up all day, and now making this hideous smell? Unthinkable, I was always so careful — but what else could it be? The odor was far beyond dreadful, and now it seemed to get worse, fumes fanned by my near-panic. I stepped on the brake and turned all the way around to look —

A garbage bag. I had missed one somehow — but that was impossible, I could never be so stupid, so careless —

Except I had hurried that night, rushed through the whole thing to get it done and get back to bed. Laziness — stupid, selfish sloth, and now here I was at police headquarters with a bag of body parts in my car. I shoved the gear lever into park and climbed out, and the panic sweat was already soaking my back and rolling off my face as I opened the back door and knelt down to look.

Yes, a garbage bag. But how? How did it get here, on the floor in the backseat, when all the others had gone carefully into the trunk, and then —

And then a car pulled into the slot next to mine and after a bright stab of total panic I took a deep and calming breath. This was not a problem, not for me. Whoever it was, I would simply give them a cheerful hello and they would be off and into the building, and I would drive this bag of Chapin away. No big deal, I was just good old Dexter, the blood-spatter guy, and there was no one on the entire force who had any reason to think otherwise.

No one, except for the man who climbed out of the car and glared down at me. Or to be precise, the two-thirds of a man. His hands and feet were gone, of course, as well as his tongue, and he carried a small notebook computer to help him speak, and as I struggled for breath, he flipped it open and, without taking his eyes off me, he punched buttons to make an electronic sentence.

"What-is-in-bag?" Sergeant Doakes said through his computer.

"Bag?" I said, and I admit it was not my very best moment.

Doakes glared at me, and whether it was just the fact that he hated me and suspected me of being what I really was, or whether I actually looked guilty squatting there and fingering a bag of leftovers, I don't know. Whatever the case, I saw a bright gleam of something horrible flash into his eyes and before I could do anything except gape, Doakes jerked forward, whipped his metallic claw of a hand down, and grabbed the bag out of my car.

And as I watched with horror and dread and a growing sense of my own very imminent mortality, he placed his artificial voice box on the roof of the car, opened the bag, reached inside with a triumphant show of teeth at me — and pulled out a truly filthy, rotting, and horrible diaper.

And as I watched Doakes's face run the entire spectrum from victory to utter disgust, I remembered. As I had left for my impromptu session with Chapin, Rita had thrust the bag of dirty diapers at me. In my haste, I had left it for later. Then the whole business of Deke's death, my abduction, the dreadful episode with Samantha — it had all driven that tiny unimportant diaper bag out of my mind. But as the memory flooded back, I felt a rising happiness wash back in with it, made even tastier by the realization that Lily Anne, that wonderful, magical child — Lily Anne, the diaper queen, the paragon of poop — my own sweet Lily Anne had saved me with her dirty diapers. And even better, she had humiliated Doakes at the same time.

Life was good; fatherhood was once more a wonderful adventure.

I stood up and faced Doakes with great good cheer. "I know it's toxic," I said. "And it probably breaks several city ordinances, too." I held out my hand for the bag. "But I beg you, Sergeant, don't arrest me. I promise to throw it away properly."

Doakes turned his eyes away from the diaper and onto me, and he looked at me with an expression of loathing and rage so powerful that for just a moment it overpowered the open diaper bag. Then he very carefully said, "Nguggermukker," and opened the claw holding the bag. It dropped to the pavement, and a moment later the diaper he held in the other claw flopped down beside it.

"Nguggermukker?" I said brightly. "Is that Dutch?" But Doakes just grabbed his silver voice box from the roof of the car, turned away from me and the dirty diapers, and stomped away across the parking lot on his two artificial feet.

I felt utter and complete relief as I watched him go, and when he vanished at the far end of the parking lot I took a deep, relaxing breath — which was a very big mistake, considering what lay at my feet. Coughing slightly, and blinking away the tears, I bent down and pushed the diaper back into the bag, twisted the bag closed, and carried it to the Dumpster.

It was one-thirty in the afternoon by the time I finally got to my desk. I fiddled with a few lab reports, ran a routine test on the spectrometer, and suffered through a cup of truly despicable coffee while the hands on the clock trudged 'round the dial to four-thirty. And just when I thought I had made it safely all the way through my first day back from bondage, Deborah walked in with a horrible expression on her face. I could not read it, but I knew that something had gone terribly wrong, and it seemed to be something she was taking rather personally. And because I have known Deborah my whole life and I knew how her mind worked, I assumed it meant trouble for Dexter.

"Good afternoon," I said brightly, in the hope that if I was cheerful enough the problem would go away, whatever it was. It didn't, of course.

"Samantha Aldovar," my sister said, looking straight through me, and all my anxiety from the night before washed over me, and I knew that Samantha had talked already and Deborah was here to arrest me. My irritation with the girl went up several notches; she couldn't even wait a decent interval for me to come up with some kind of airtight excuse. It was as if her tongue was spring-loaded and had to burst out into furious activity the moment she took her first free breath. She had probably been babbling about me before the front door of her house even swung shut, and now it was all over for me. I was finished, washed up, completely — and with no pun intended — screwed. I was immediately filled with apprehension, alarm, and bitterness. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned discretion?

Still, it was done, and there was nothing left for Dexter except to face the music and pay the piper. So taking a deep breath, I looked it square in the face and did so. "It wasn't my fault," I said to Deborah, and I began to gather my soggy wits for Stage One of Dexter's Defense.

But Deborah blinked, and a small frown of confusion crept into the bleakness on her face. "What the fuck do you mean, it's not your fault?" she said. "Who said anything about — How could it possibly be your fault?"

Once again, I had the sensation that everyone else was working off a fully rehearsed script, and I was being asked to improvise. "I just meant — nothing," I said, hoping for a clue on what my line was supposed to be.

"Jesus fuck," she said. "Why is everything always about you?"

I suppose I could have said, Because somehow I am always in the middle of it, usually unwilling, and usually because you have pushed me there, but cooler heads prevailed. "I'm sorry," I said. "What's wrong, Debs?"

She stared at me a little longer, and then shook her head and slumped down in the chair beside my desk. "Samantha Aldovar," she repeated. "She's gone again."