Jeffry Lindsay - Dexter in the Dark

Harry turned left on 17th Avenue, and for a few moments I had the irrational thought that he was taking me to the Orange Bowl. But we passed the turnoff for the stadium and kept going, over the Miami River and then right on North River Drive, and now I knew where we were going but I didn’t know why. Harry still hadn’t said a word or looked in my direction, and I was beginning to feel a certain oppression creeping into the afternoon that had nothing to do with the storm clouds that were beginning to gather on the horizon.

Harry parked the cruiser and at last he spoke. “Come on,” he said. “Inside.” I looked at him, but he was already climbing out of the car, so I got out, too, and followed him meekly into the detention center.

Harry was well known here, as he was everywhere a good cop might be known. He was followed by calls of “Harry!” and “Hey, Sarge!” all the way through the receiving area and down the hall to the cell block. I simply trudged behind him as my sense of grim foreboding grew. Why had Harry brought me to the jail? Why wasn’t he scolding me, telling me how disappointed he was, devising harsh but fair punishment for me?

Nothing he did or refused to say offered me any clues. So I trailed along behind. We were stopped at last by one of the guards. Harry took him to one side and spoke quietly; the guard looked over at me, nodded, and led us to the end of the cell block. “Here he is,” the guard said. “Enjoy yourself.” He nodded at the figure in the cell, glanced at me briefly, and walked away, leaving Harry and me to resume our uncomfortable silence.

Harry did nothing to break the silence at first. He turned and stared into the cell, and the pale shape inside moved, stood up, and came to the bars. “Why it’s Sergeant Harry!” the figure said happily. “How are you, Harry? So nice of you to drop by.”

“Hello, Carl,” Harry said. At last he turned to me and spoke. “This is Carl, Dexter.”

“What a handsome lad you are, Dexter,” Carl said. “Very pleased to meet you.”

The eyes Carl turned on me were bright and empty, but behind them I could almost see a huge dark shadow, and something inside me twitched and tried to slink away from the larger and fiercer thing that lived there beyond the bars. He was not in himself particularly large or fierce-looking-he was even pleasant in a very superficial way, with his neat blond hair and regular features-but there was something about him that made me very uneasy.

“They brought Carl in yesterday,” Harry said. “He’s killed eleven people.”

“Oh, well,” Carl said modestly, “more or less.”

Outside the jail, the thunder crashed and the rain began. I looked at Carl with real interest; now I knew what had unsettled my Dark Passenger. We were just starting out, and here was somebody who had already been there and back, on eleven occasions, more or less. For the first time I understood how my classmates at Ponce might feel when they came face-to-face with an NFL quarterback.

“Carl enjoys killing people,” Harry said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you, Carl?”

“It keeps me busy,” Carl said happily.

“Until we caught you,” Harry said bluntly.

“Well, yes, there is that of course. Still…” he shrugged and gave Harry a very phony-looking smile, “it was fun while it lasted.”

“You got careless,” Harry said.

“Yes,” Carl said. “How could I know the police would be so very thorough?”

“How do you do it?” I blurted out.

“It’s not so hard,” Carl said.

“No, I mean-Um, like how ?”

Carl looked at me searchingly, and I could almost hear a purring coming from the shadow just past his eyes. For a moment our eyes locked and the world was filled with the black sound of two predators meeting over one small, helpless prey. “Well, well,” Carl said at last. “Can it really be?” He turned to Harry just as I was beginning to squirm. “So I’m supposed to be an object lesson, is that it, Sergeant? Frighten your boy onto the straight and narrow path to godliness?”

Harry stared back, showing nothing, saying nothing.

“Well, I’m afraid I have to tell you that there is no way off this particular path, poor dear Harry. When you are on it, you are on it for life, and possibly beyond, and there is nothing you or I or the dear child here can do about it.”

“There’s one thing,” Harry said.

“Really,” Carl said, and now a slow black cloud seemed to be rising up around him, coalescing on the teeth of his smile, spreading its wings out toward Harry, and toward me. “And what might that be, pray tell?”

“Don’t get caught,” Harry said.

For a moment the black cloud froze, and then it drew back and vanished. “Oh my God,” Carl said. “How I wish I knew how to laugh.” He shook his head slowly, from side to side. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Oh my God. What a wonderful dad you are, Sergeant Harry.” And he gave us such a huge smile that it almost looked real.

Harry turned his full ice-blue gaze on me now.

“He got caught,” Harry said to me, “because he didn’t know what he was doing. And now he will go to the electric chair. Because he didn’t know what the police were doing. Because,” Harry said without raising his voice at all and without blinking, “he had no training.”

I looked at Carl, watching us through the thick bars with his too-bright dead empty eyes. Caught. I looked back at Harry. “I understand,” I said.

And I did.

That was the end of my youthful rebellion.

And now, so many years later-wonderful years, filled with slicing and dicing and not getting caught-I truly knew what a remarkable gamble Harry had taken by introducing me to Carl. I could never hope to measure up to his performance-after all, Harry did things because he had feelings and I never would-but I could follow his example and make Cody and Astor toe the line. I would gamble, just as Harry had.

They would follow or not.

T HEY FOLLOWED.

The museum was crowded with groups of curious citizens in search of knowledge-or a bathroom, apparently. Most of them were between the ages of two and ten, and there seemed to be about one adult for every seven children. They moved like a great colorful flock of parrots, swooping back and forth through the exhibits with a loud cawing sound that, in spite of the fact that it was in at least three languages, all sounded the same. The international language of children.

Cody and Astor seemed slightly intimidated by the crowd and stayed close to me. It was a pleasant contrast to the spirit of Dexterless adventure that seemed to rule them the rest of the time, and I tried to take advantage of it by steering them immediately to the piranha exhibit.

“What do they look like?” I asked them.

“Very bad,” Cody said softly, staring unblinking at the many teeth the fish displayed.

“Those are piranha,” Astor said. “They can eat a whole cow.”

“If you were swimming and you saw piranha, what would you do?” I asked them.

“Kill them,” said Cody.

“There’s too many,” Astor said. “You should run away from them, and not go anywhere near.”

“So anytime you see these wicked-looking fish you will either try to kill them or run away from them?” I said. They both nodded. “If the fish were really smart, like people, what would they do?”

“Wear a disguise,” Astor giggled.

“That’s right,” I said, and even Cody smiled. “What kind of disguise would you recommend? A wig and a beard?”

“Dex-ter,” Astor said. “They’re fish. Fish don’t wear beards.”