Jeffry Lindsay - Dearly devoted Dexter

“Yes, you are,” he said. “And you have to believe that you are. Your heart is pretty much in the right place, Dex,” he said, and with that he collapsed into a truly epic fit of coughing. It lasted for what seemed like several minutes, and then he leaned weakly back onto his pillow. He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again they were steely Harry blue, brighter than ever in the pale green of his dying face. “Patience,” he said. And he made it sound strong, in spite of the terrible pain and weakness he must have felt. “You still have a long way to go, and I don’t have a whole lot of time, Dexter.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. He closed his eyes.

“That’s just what I mean,” he said. “You’re supposed to say no, don’t worry, you have plenty of time.”

“But you don’t,” I said, not sure where this was going.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “But people pretend. To make me feel better about it.”

“Would you feel better?”

“No,” he said, and opened his eyes again. “But you can’t use logic on human behavior. You have to be patient, watch and learn. Otherwise, you screw up. Get caught and… Half my legacy.” He closed his eyes again and I could hear the strain in his voice. “Your sister will be a good cop. You,” he smiled slowly, a little sadly, “you will be something else. Real justice. But only if you’re patient. If your chance isn’t there, Dexter, wait until it is.”

It all seemed so overwhelming to an eighteen-year-old apprentice monster. All I wanted was to do The Thing, very simple really, just go dancing in the moonlight with the bright blade flowing free-such an easy thing, so natural and sweet-to cut through all the nonsense and right down to the heart of things. But I could not. Harry made it complicated.

“I don’t know what I’ll do when you’re dead,” I said.

“You’ll do fine,” he said.

“There’s so much to remember.”

Harry reached a hand out and pushed the button that hung on a cord beside his bed. “You’ll remember it,” he said. He dropped the cord and it was almost as though it pulled the last of the strength from him as it flopped back down by the bedside. “You’ll remember.” He closed his eyes and for a moment I was all alone in the room. Then the nurse bustled in with a syringe and Harry opened one eye. “We can’t always do what we think we have to do. So when there’s nothing else you can do, you wait,” he said, and held out his arm for his shot. “No matter what… pressure… you might feel.”

I watched him as he lay there, taking the needle without flinching and knowing that even the relief it brought was temporary, that his end was coming and he could not stop it-and knowing, too, that he was not afraid, and that he would do this the right way, as he had done everything else in his life the right way. And I knew this, too: Harry understood me. No one else ever had, and no one else ever would, through all time in all the world. Only Harry.

The only reason I ever thought about being human was to be more like him.

AND SO I WAS PATIENT. IT WAS NOT AN EASY THING, but it was the Harry thing. Let the bright steely spring inside stay coiled and quiet and wait, watch, hold the hot sweet release locked tight in its cold box until it was Harry-right to let it skitter out and cartwheel through the night. Sooner or later some small opening would show and we could vault through it. Sooner or later I would find a way to make Doakes blink.

I waited.

Some of us, of course, find that harder to do than others, and it was several days later, a Saturday morning, that my telephone rang.

“Goddamn it,” said Deborah without any preamble. It was almost a relief to hear that she was her recognizable cranky self again.

“Fine, thanks, and you?” I said.

“Kyle is making me nuts,” she said. “He says there’s nothing we can do but wait, but he won’t tell me what we’re waiting for. He disappears for ten or twelve hours and won’t tell me where he was. And then we just wait some more. I am so fucking tired of waiting my teeth hurt.”

“Patience is a virtue,” I said.

“I’m tired of being virtuous, too,” she said. “And I am sick to death of Kyle’s patronizing smile when I ask him what we can do to find this guy.”

“Well, Debs, I don’t know what I can do except offer my sympathy,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I think you can do a whole hell of a lot more than that, Bro,” she said.

I sighed heavily, mostly for her benefit. Sighs register so nicely on the telephone. “This is the trouble with having a reputation as a gunslinger, Debs,” I said. “Everybody thinks I can shoot the eye out of a jack at thirty paces, every single time.”

“I still think it,” she said.

“Your confidence warms my heart, but I don’t understand a thing about this kind of adventure, Deborah. It leaves me completely cold.”

“I have to find this guy, Dexter. And I want to rub Kyle’s nose in it,” she said.

“I thought you liked him.”

She snorted. “Jesus, Dexter. You don’t know anything about women, do you? Of course I like him. That’s why I want to rub his nose in it.”

“Oh, good, now it makes sense,” I said.

She paused, and then very casually said, “Kyle said some interesting things about Doakes.”

I felt my long-fanged friend inside stretch just a little and absolutely purr. “You’re getting very subtle all of a sudden, Deborah,” I said. “All you had to do was ask me.”

“I just asked, and you gave me all that crap about how you can’t help,” she said, suddenly good old plain-speaking Debs again. “So how about it. What have you got?”

“Nothing at the moment,” I said.

“Shit,” said Deborah.

“But I might be able to find something.”

“How soon?”

I admit that I was feeling irked by Kyle’s attitude toward me. What had he said? I would be “in the shit and you will get flushed”? Seriously-who wrote his dialogue? And Deborah’s sudden onset of subtlety, which had been my traditional bailiwick, had done nothing to calm me down. So I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. “How about by lunchtime?” I said. “Let’s say I’ll have something by one o’clock. Baleen, since Kyle can pick up the check.”

“This I gotta see,” she said, and then added, “The stuff about Doakes? It’s pretty good.” She hung up.

Well, well, I said to myself. Suddenly, I did not mind the thought of working a little bit on a Saturday. After all, the only alternative was to hang out at Rita’s and watch moss grow on Sergeant Doakes. But if I found something for Debs, I might at long last have the small opening I had hoped for. I merely had to be the clever boy we all believed I was.

But where to start? There was precious little to go on, since Kyle had pulled the department away from the crime scene before we had done much more than dust for prints. Many times in the past I had earned a few modest brownie points with my police colleagues by helping them track down the sick and twisted demons who lived only to kill. But that was because I understood them, since I am a sick and twisted demon myself. This time, I could not rely on getting any hints from the Dark Passenger, who had been lulled into an uneasy sleep, poor fellow. I had to depend on my own bare-naked native wit, which was also being alarmingly silent at the moment.

Perhaps if I gave my brain some fuel, it would kick into high gear. I went to the kitchen and found a banana. It was very nice, but for some reason it did not launch any mental rockets.

I threw the peel in the garbage and looked at the clock. Well, dear boy, that was five whole minutes gone by. Excellent. And you have already managed to figure out that you can’t figure anything out. Bravo, Dexter.