Jeffry Lindsay - Dearly devoted Dexter

I could see him thinking it over. He knew I was baiting him, but there was just enough truth to what I had said, and enough pride or anger in him that he didn’t care.

“Let’s have it,” he said at last.

“Oscar got away,” I said.

“Looks like it.”

“That only leaves one person we can be sure Dr. Danco might be interested in,” I said, and I pointed right at his chest. “You.”

He didn’t actually flinch, but something twitched on his forehead and he forgot to breathe for a few seconds. Then he nodded slowly and took a deep breath. “Slick motherfucker,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” I admitted. “But I’m right, too.”

Doakes picked up the scanner radio and moved it to one side so he could sit on the open back gate of the van. “All right,” he said. “Keep talking.”

“First, I’m betting he’ll get another scanner,” I said, nodding at the one beside Doakes.

“Uh-huh.”

“So if we know he’s listening, we can let him hear what we want him to hear. Which is,” I said with my very best smile, “who you are, and where you are.”

“And who am I?” he said, and he didn’t seem impressed by my smile.

“You are the guy who set him up to get taken by the Cubans,” I said.

He studied me for a moment, then shook his head. “You really putting my pecker on the chopping block, huh?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “But you’re not worried, are you?”

“He got Kyle, no trouble.”

“You’ll know he’s coming,” I said. “Kyle didn’t. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be just a little bit better than Kyle at this kind of thing?”

It was shameless, totally transparent, but he went for it. “Yes, I am,” he said. “You’re a good ass-kisser, too.”

“No ass-kissing at all,” I said. “Just the plain, simple truth.”

Doakes looked at the scanner beside him. Then he looked up and away over the freeway. The streetlights made an orange flare off a drop of sweat that rolled across his forehead and down into one eye. He wiped at it unconsciously, still staring away over I-95. He had been staring at me without blinking for so long that it was a little bit unsettling to be in his presence and have him look somewhere else. It was almost like being invisible.

“All right,” he said as he looked back at me at last, and now the orange light was in his eyes. “Let’s do it.”

SERGEANT DOAKES DROVE ME BACK TO HEADQUARTERS. It was a strange and unsettling experience to sit so close to him, and we found very little to say to each other. I caught myself studying his profile out of the corner of my eye. What went on in there? How could he be what I knew he was without actually doing something about it? Holding back from one of my playdates was setting my teeth on edge, and yet Doakes apparently didn’t have any such trouble. Perhaps he had gotten it all out of his system in El Salvador. Did it feel any different to do it with the official blessings of the government? Or was it simply easier, not having to worry about being caught?

I could not know, and I certainly could not see myself asking him. Just to underline the point, he came to a halt at a red light and turned to look at me. I pretended not to notice, staring straight ahead through the windshield, and he faced back around when the light changed to green.

We drove right to the motor pool and Doakes put me in the front seat of another Ford Taurus. “Gimme fifteen minutes,” he said, nodding at the radio. “Then call me.” Without another word, he got back into his car and drove away.

Left to my own devices, I pondered the last few surprise-filled hours. Deborah in the hospital, me in league with Doakes-and my revelation about Cody during my near-death experience. Of course, I could be totally wrong about the boy. There might be some other explanation for his behavior at the mention of the missing pet, and the way he shoved the knife so eagerly into his fish could have been perfectly normal childish cruelty. But oddly enough, I found myself wanting it to be true. I wanted him to grow up to be like me-mostly, I realized, because I wanted to shape him and place his tiny feet onto the Harry Path.

Was this what the human reproductive urge was like, a pointless and powerful desire to replicate wonderful, irreplaceable me, even when the me in question was a monster who truly had no right to live among humans? That would certainly explain how a great many of the monumentally unpleasant cretins I encountered every day came to be. Unlike them, however, I was perfectly aware that the world would be a better place without me in it-I simply cared more about my own feelings in the matter than whatever the world might think. But now here I was eager to spawn more of me, like Dracula creating a new vampire to stand beside him in the dark. I knew it was wrong-but what fun it would be!

And what a total muttonhead I was being! Had my interval on Rita’s sofa really turned my once-mighty intellect into such a quivering heap of sentimental mush? How could I be thinking such absurdities? Why wasn’t I trying to devise a plan to escape marriage instead? No wonder I couldn’t get away from Doakes’s cloying surveillance-I had used up all my brain cells and was now running on empty.

I glanced at my watch. Fourteen minutes of time wasted on absurd mental blather. It was close enough: I lifted the radio and called Doakes.

“Sergeant Doakes, what’s your twenty?”

There was a pause, then a crackle. “Uh, I’d rather not say just now.”

“Say again, Sergeant?”

“I have been tracking a perp, and I’m afraid he made me.”

“What kind of perp?”

There was a pause, as though Doakes was expecting me to do all the work and hadn’t figured out what to say. “Guy from my army days. He got captured in El Salvador, and he might think it was my fault.” Pause. “The guy is dangerous,” he said.

“Do you want backup?”

“Not yet. I’m going to try to dodge him for now.”

“Ten-four,” I said, feeling a little thrill at getting to say it at last.

We repeated the basic message a few times more, just to be sure it would get through to Dr. Danco, and I got to say “ten-four” each time. When we called it a night around 1:00 AM, I was exhilarated and fulfilled. Perhaps tomorrow I would try to work in “That’s a copy” and even “Roger that.” At last, something to look forward to.

I found a squad car headed south and persuaded the cop driving to drop me at Rita’s. I tiptoed over to my car, got in, and drove home.

When I got back to my little bunk and saw it in a state of terrible disarray, I remembered that Debs should have been here but was, instead, in the hospital. I would go see her tomorrow. In the meantime, I’d had a memorable but exhausting day; chased into a pond by a serial limb-barber, surviving a car crash only to be nearly drowned, losing a perfectly good shoe, and on top of all that, as if that wasn’t bad enough, forced to buddy up with Sergeant Doakes. Poor Drained Dexter. No wonder I was so tired. I fell into bed and went to sleep at once.

Early the next day Doakes pulled his car in beside mine in the parking lot at headquarters. He got out carrying a nylon gym bag, which he set down on the hood of my car. “You brought your laundry?” I asked politely. Once again my lighthearted good cheer went right by him.

“If this works at all, either he gets me or I get him,” he said. He zipped open the bag. “If I get him, it’s over. If he gets me…” He took out a GPS receiver and placed it on the hood. “If he gets me, you’re my backup.” He showed me a few dazzling teeth. “Think how good that makes me feel.” He took out a cell phone and placed it next to the GPS unit. “This is my insurance.”