I very nearly chose Thai—there was a very good place not too far away, just off Miracle Mile. But at the last minute, I had the thought—and I am quite sure it is Politically Incorrect—that Thailand was much too close to Japan, and I’d had sushi for lunch. I turned left instead of right, and headed over to Pepino’s, a cozy Mexican place in Coconut Grove.
Coconut Grove has always moved at a slower pace than the rest of Miami, and so it was no surprise to me that it was apparently still rush hour on Main Highway. The only difference was that most of the rush was centered around finding a parking place. Unfortunately, all the legal spaces were taken. But I was sure I could find one that was
nearly
legal. I grew up here, and I had a few tricks that latecomers to the Grove didn’t know.
I drove down a side street about half a mile from the restaurant. Fifty yards down, I turned into a dark alley that cut between two boutiques. There was a large Dumpster, overflowing with trash, and just beyond it, unlit and invisible to any meter maids with prying eyes, I parked my car.
But apparently there was at least one other Grove native having a night on the town, because as I walked out of the alley feeling just a little smug, another car turned down the alley and went past me, no doubt looking for a place to park. It was another one of those station wagon–style SUVs, dark blue. There were certainly a lot of them on the roads lately. I wondered why. After all, real station wagons were available, and cheaper. Why buy something nearly identical that costs more, just to get the all-wheel drive? There were no muddy mountain roads here, and no treacherous icy highways. What did that leave? Did all these people really spend their weekends racing through mud in the Everglades?
By the time I had hiked back to the restaurant, I was nearly hallucinating enchiladas. The last two blocks had been true torture, as the scent of cumin, hot sauce, and tacos seemed to be everywhere. But I made it safely, without collapsing into a puddle of drool.
Pepino’s was a small place, but it had a little bar with four plush stools, and the one at the end was empty. I sat and quickly found out why the seat was available; every time anyone went into or out of the kitchen, or the restroom, I had to move, and for a large tray filled with steaming food, I actually had to stand up and skitter along the wall like a cockroach when the lights come on. But my food arrived quickly, and it was good, and in a very short time I was full and happy once more.
The walk back to my car after dinner was far more of a contented saunter than the famished stagger my hunger had forced me into on the way in. And the car was right where I’d left it, too. Life can be so easy when the Universe is feeling cooperative, can’t it?
I drove south to my little torture chamber of a motel, through traffic that was a great deal lighter than rush hour had been. Of course, as a native Miami driver I knew very well that this only meant there were new dangers to watch for. Because there was more room to maneuver, there were more drivers weaving in and out of the lanes at two or three times the speed limit. The motorcycles were bad enough, but they were far from the most numerous. Sports cars, of course, and sedans, SUVs, delivery vans, and even a mammoth flatbed tow truck with a minivan on its bed.
Escalades seemed popular tonight. At least three of them roared by me in the first five miles. Maybe there is some special psychotic wrinkle in everyone who decides to buy a Cadillac. It was an intriguing thought; perhaps I should shop for an Escalade. I didn’t really mind the reckless speed seekers. I was used to it. And it’s no real burden at all; all you have to do is maintain a steady speed and keep to your lane and let them move around you freely. And if they get a little overeager and actually crash into someone, move carefully around the wreckage with a wave and a smile and a feeling of satisfaction that it wasn’t you this time.
So I drove south, and as I did my Mexican banquet began to catch up to me—not in any unspeakably rude digestive way. I just began to get sleepy, as I always did after a large dinner. In fact, I started to feel so entirely drowsy that I was actually looking forward to my horribly misshapen, agony-inducing “bed.” I sped up a little—not enough to make the Escalades think I was competing, of course. That would probably have made them kick it up to warp speed and drive the interloper off the road.
But I did go just fast enough to cut a few minutes from the journey, and just when my drowsy eyes beheld the ancient, half-dead neon sign that marked my hotel, my phone began to chirp. I glanced at the screen—not that I needed to. Only one person would be calling me, and that’s who it was.
“Hello, Brian,” I said into the phone.
“Hello, brother,” he said in his favorite fraudulently happy greeting. “Where are you now?”
“I am just pulling into the parking lot of my hotel,” I said. And as I did so, I noticed that the lot was nearly full, which seemed absurd enough to be nearly surreal.
“Can you manage a little face time?” he said. “I have one or two nuggets of importance for you.”
I sighed, looking around for a place to park. Every slot close to my room had a car in it. “I can barely keep my eyes open,” I said. “Can it wait until morning?”
Brian paused, long enough to make me wonder why. “I
suppose
so,” he said at last, a little bit hesitantly. “But…Do be a little extra watchful till then?”
“If I was any more watchful I would need at least four eyes,” I said. I saw an open parking spot at last, all the way down at the far end of the lot, easily forty feet from my room.
“All righty then,” Brian said, back to his synthetic good cheer. “Shall we say eight o’clock tomorrow morning, same place?”
“Fine,” I said, pulling into the very last slot in the parking lot. “See you then.”
“ ’Tis devoutly to be wished,” Brian said, and hung up.
I sat there in astonishment for a moment; had my brother really just quoted
Hamlet
? Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me, but he’d never done anything of the kind before—nothing at all, in fact, that gave even the tiniest hint that he was familiar with Shakespeare, or any other classic work. But Brian was always full of surprises, and this one, at least, was not overtly unpleasant.
I turned the key and shut down my rental car, taking one last moment to reflect with weariness on my long and busy day. But before I got much further than,
You done good, kid,
I felt my eyes begin to flutter shut. I snapped them open; this was no place to fall asleep, even though it was probably more comfy than my bed. I took a deep breath and climbed out of the car, fumbling the keys and my phone until I got both safely into pockets, closing the car door with a hip, and stumbling wearily down the cracked sidewalk toward my room.
Music was blasting out of two adjacent rooms a few doors from mine. They probably had the door between them open to give the party more space. It was loud enough to rattle the windows, and not loud enough to mask the gleeful and drunken shouting, singing, and cries of
Whoo!
coming from within. Probably a bachelor party or some such thing. On the one hand, it was nice to have the crowded parking lot mystery explained. On the other hand, it was going to make sleeping a slightly more difficult problem.
I sighed. Where did it stop? When did all the petty persecutions of Poor Deserving Dexter finally trickle to a halt? Impending death or imprisonment wasn’t bad enough. Now I would be hearing a sound track of drunken revelry all night long, too. I was doing fine with protecting Life and Liberty, but apparently someone else’s Pursuit of Happiness would finally do me in. It’s the little things, after all, that finally break us.
Blow, wind, crack your cheeks,
I thought. Brian wasn’t the only one who could quote Shakespeare.
I made it to my room without thinking of any other suitably apocalyptic line from
Lear,
and I was too tired to start in on
Othello
. I flopped onto the bed facedown—and immediately I was bent into a bow shape, with the soles of my feet facing the back of my head.
I struggled up to my feet and sat on the edge of the bed to remove my shoes. The car keys fell out of my pocket and onto the floor. And as they did, I remembered getting out of the car and fumbling with my phone and the keys, and I couldn’t remember whether I’d locked the car. It didn’t matter; it was easy enough to step to the window, point the car’s clicker down the line, and push the lock button.
I sighed again, more heavily this time. It really is always the little things. Sooner or later, there would be one last niggling little torture flung at my head, something so insignificant that it couldn’t possibly matter to anyone, and it would be the one tiny saddle sore too many that finally sent me screaming and drooling over the edge into red-eyed raving insanity.
But this wasn’t it, not quite. I fought my way up to my feet and trudged over to a spot two feet from the window. I was tired and cranky and didn’t really feel like spending all my precious remaining energy opening the door, stepping outside, and leaning out to watch. And the ancient curtains looked so vile and crusty that I really didn’t want to touch them. But they were also worn thin enough that I could probably see the reflection of the blinking brake lights to show me it had worked. I pointed the clicker and pushed the lock button, watching for the flash of lights.
The flash came right away, but it was far too bright for brake lights, and it was followed by a blast so loud and strong that even as it nearly deafened me, it hurled me back from the window, splinters of glass showering all around me, flinging Dexter together with all that was left of the window into a tattered heap on the floor behind the door.
For a moment I just blinked around me, listening to the sudden cacophony of car alarms from outside. I could feel little spots of sharp pain starting to bloom on my face, and a few more on my chest. I blinked some more; at least my eyes were okay. I looked at my right hand; it had fallen into my lap, bleeding from a couple of cuts. I was still holding the car keys. What I could see of the rest of me seemed fine, but my shirt was torn and spotted with a dozen small blotches of blood. On top of everything else, a brand-new shirt ruined.
I closed my eyes in weary resignation and slid to the floor, completely indifferent to anything that might possibly happen now. Let them take me. And when they did, it would be in a terribly torn shirt, which was the final, crushing indignity.
It really is always the little things.
E
very now and then you have to give the cops credit. Even if you don’t like them, and they don’t like you—even if your relationship with them has become strained to a point that approaches open warfare—even so, they sometimes earn a small nod. Every now and then a cop does something that, in all fairness, requires you to pause, incline your head, and say, “Well done.” Certainly not all cops—maybe not even most of them. But one or two of them, every now and then, come through in a way that really makes you want to give them a hearty handshake and a free doughnut.
Oddly enough, this turned out to be one of those times.
The first squad car was on the scene in less than five minutes. I heard the approaching siren, and a dutiful citizen would certainly have ignored his total weariness and the dozens of tiny puncture wounds that covered the front of his body, and leaped to his feet to greet them. Not Dexter. Not tonight. I had Had Enough.
So I lay on the floor with my eyes closed and listened to the inhuman caterwauling from the partiers. Of course, they had been much closer to the blast, and so presumably might have more serious injuries. But in fairness, they had also clearly consumed a great deal of alcohol, which should have deadened the pain. Instead, it had only loosened their inhibitions, especially those dealing with making truly stupid noises. No injury I could imagine would justify the repulsive clamor coming from the revelers. They sounded like sheep who had been lobotomized and then beaten with heavy clubs festooned with fishhooks.
But I didn’t care; let them bleat. It had nothing to do with me. It didn’t even touch me, not in any way. I was all done. I was so completely Finished with It All that nothing could affect me. I was the New Age guru who had attained a perfect state of Enough Already, and if the world wanted any more from me they could damn well come and get it.
So I just lay there as the siren got close enough to drown out the moaning and wordless mindless hollering, and I didn’t move as the squad car screeched to a halt and the two officers in it jumped out and began to catalog the chaos. I didn’t even sit up when the ER techs arrived in their ambulance and began to treat the blathering ninnies from the party rooms.
It wasn’t until I heard the authoritative pounding on my door, accompanied by a hard-edged woman’s voice calling, “Sir? Sir!” that I managed to stir myself. Opening my eyes was the hard part. After that, it was mere unendurable burdensome drudgery to climb to my feet and open the door.
An African American woman in a blue Miami-Dade police uniform gave me a once-over that was as hard-edged as her voice. “Are you all right, sir?” she said. She sounded concerned but completely without compassion, which I thought was a nice trick, and probably much harder to do than it sounds.
“Some cuts,” I said, holding up my hands and then waving at my shirtfront. “Other than that…” I let my arms drop. The weariness was returning, fed by my realization that whatever else happened here tonight, they were almost certainly going to take me downtown when they found out who I was.
“Right,” the cop said. “Why don’t you come with me, sir,” she said. She put a firm hand on my arm and led me out the door.
My first weary glance at what was left of the little hotel was enough to open my eyes to their widest, and I stumbled and might have fallen if not for the cop’s steadying hand. Of course, I knew a bomb had gone off—but knowing that and seeing what that really meant were two entirely different things.
Down at the far end, where I had parked my poor, ill-fated rental car, the devastation was most impressive. Nothing at all remained of my car, except a plume of smoke and some blackened, twisted metal. A trio of firemen was putting out the last few flickers of flame.
The cars on either side of mine were demolished, almost as totally evaporated as mine. And the front of the hotel where they had been parked was blackened, paint burned off, windows blown out, doors off the hinges, and several more firemen were rushing in and out.
All along the walkway, from the firemen to where I stood, there was destruction, ranging from blistered walls to shattered windows and doors. I had seen bomb damage before in the course of my work, but this was something rather special. And all to get little old me? Somebody obviously thought I was rather special, too. “Wow,” I said.
The cop just nodded. “Come on,” she said, and pushed me gently the other way, toward the hotel’s office. The ER guys had set up a little triage station in front, where the driveway curved under an overhanging roof by the office door.
Like most of their ilk, the emergency medics were cheerful, brisk, and efficient. They saved me a trip to the Dumpster by removing my ruined shirt and tossing it into a large plastic bag. Then one of them, a small and wiry woman with short dark hair, probed all the cuts quickly and thoroughly. She took out three or four small pieces of glass, and then swabbed out all my cuts with antiseptic. “We’re a little short on the tiny Band-Aids tonight, sport,” she told me. “So you might want to keep the shirt off till the cuts scab over.” She smiled. “Lucky for me, you can get away with it. You look like a fireman.” She slapped my shoulder, as if I’d done well, and urged me up and onto my feet. “You’ll be fine,” she said, and she moved away to the next victim of the evening’s tragedy.
The same cop was waiting for me when I turned away from the aid station. “Can you answer a few questions, sir?” she asked me.
Nothing that had happened in the last twenty minutes had made me less tired, and each one of the two dozen small perforations that covered the front of my body was now stinging. But neither of those reasons was an acceptable excuse for dodging a police inquiry, as I well knew. So I just nodded wearily and said, “Yes, of course.”
She went through a standard set of questions, the ones that are always the same. They’re designed for two important purposes: first, so that when the detectives eventually get involved they can be certain that the correct questions, and the same ones, have been asked. The second vital purpose is to make sure that the first-responder cops, usually in a patrol car, don’t come across as vacuous idiots. This is important, because most detectives seem to think that the beat cops actually
are
vacuous idiots. And quite honestly, sometimes they are—but then, the same can be said of the detectives, as my recent experience had so thoroughly proved.
My questioner—her name tag said
P
OUX
, but offered no suggestions on how to say it—seemed very far from vacuous or idiotic. Possibly having a name that was impossible to pronounce correctly had made her smart. She went through the standard questions, recording my answers on a little steno pad, and she did it very briskly and impersonally, until I finally let it slip that it had been my car that exploded. At that point, she glanced around her in a way that I have to call furtive. I assumed she was looking for a superior officer—but none had arrived on the scene yet.
Officer Poux nearly smiled. She licked her lips and returned her attention to me with a look of feverish concentration taking over her face. She was still in charge, and she had a hot one. There were no standard questions for this, and if she screwed up she’d get a tongue-lashing at the very least. But if she did well, it might mean advancement, and clearly Officer Poux did not intend to remain in a plain blue uniform forever. Among other things, it did nothing at all for her figure. So she began to improvise questions.
“You’re certain it was your car?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I said. “Um, rented, actually.”
“You
rented
the car?” she said. “How long ago?”
I tried to think how long ago it had been. Aside from the fact that I was exhausted, too much had happened too fast, and I found it almost impossible to separate the recent past into coherent chunks of days and nights. It all seemed to be wadded up together into a lump and frozen into a bubble of simultaneous time, more like one of those insects captured in a glob of amber than a well-ordered history. But I puzzled through it and found what I thought was the right answer, as impossible as it seemed. “Yesterday?” I said at last. “I think.”
She asked where I had rented the car, who had rented it to me, whether I had left it unattended, where I had been when I did. I answered truthfully, and she wrote it all down. And then she hesitated, licked her lips, and perhaps she thought to herself,
This could help me make detective
. “Is there anybody that, in your opinion, might want to kill you?” she said.
And there it was, the last straw, the final brick in the wall, the one tiny nudge over the line. Was there anybody who wanted to kill me? In all this violent, wicked, sinful world, was there anybody left who
didn’t
? I could think of no way to begin, no possible starting point, and the thought of even attempting a complete list was so ludicrous that I looked at her for just a moment—and I started to laugh.
I do not actually feel real emotions, so laughing was not something that came naturally, or easily, to me. In fact, I had spent a good chunk of my youth learning when and how to laugh properly. I prided myself on the final result, which sounded dignified, restrained, and natural, and it was nothing at all like the sound that came out of me now—a crackly, high-pitched, gasping kind of noise that sounded like an endless cough by a second-rate tenor. Even if you could find somebody who liked me, they would not have said it was an attractive sound.
But it came pouring out, an interminable wheezing cackle, and I couldn’t stop it. Officer Poux just watched, and waited patiently for me to stop laughing for perhaps half a minute, and just as I began to slow down, she hardened her face into a near-perfect imitation of Deborah’s Stone-faced Cop look, and I had to laugh some more.
Officer Poux waited it out only a little longer, and then she turned away. I thought I had offended her, which seemed funny, but she came right back with one of the med techs, not the one who had treated me. This one was an African American man, about thirty-five, who looked like he should be playing linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He walked right up to me, peered into my eyes, grabbed my wrist and felt my pulse, and then turned to Officer Poux. “I don’t know,” he said. “Not really a psych expert.” He shrugged. “Probably just shock. Let him laugh it out.” And he went back to the victims with more interesting injuries.
Officer Poux watched him go, then turned back to me and just stared. She didn’t seem to blink, and she looked like she could wait as long as she had to. That turned out to be not very long, since I was already winding down. After only a few more seconds, I managed to grab the reins away from whatever strange spirit had driven me into paroxysms of cackling glee. I took a deep breath, smiled reassuringly at Officer Poux, and said, “I’m sorry. It’s just…It’s a little hard to explain.”
She kept staring for a few more seconds, and then said, like nothing at all had happened, “Can you think of anyone that, in your opinion, might want to kill you?”
“Yes, I can,” I said, fighting back a tiny tickle of resurgent hilarity. “In fact, it’s a very long list.”
“Can you give me a couple of names, sir?”
“Well, well, well” came a voice from behind me. It was unfortunately a very familiar voice, with a tone that held a perpetual sneer and quite clearly said
brainless bully
to those who know about such things, and it was a voice that I really did not want to hear behind me under any circumstance, much less when my car had just blown up.
“Actually,” I told her, “here comes one of them now.”
Officer Poux glanced over my shoulder and came to a sort of stiff, half-at-attention pose, and the owner of the aforementioned voice stepped into view.
“Detective Anderson,” I said. “Wonderful to see you again. But isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” he said. He looked at me with an expression that can only be described as a gloating glare, and without taking his eyes off mine, he said to Poux, “Cuff him. And it doesn’t have to be gentle.”
“On what charge, sir?” Officer Poux said.
Anderson spun on her. “On a charge of Because I Say So,” he sneered at her. “Do it.”
Poux stood motionless for just a moment longer, and it may be that she would have done what Anderson said eventually, but he didn’t give her the chance. “Fuck it,” he snarled. He leaned over and grabbed her handcuffs. “This goes in my report,” he told her, already turning on me.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Mine too.”
He didn’t hesitate for a second. He just grabbed me by the shoulders, spun me around, and yanked my hands halfway up my back. “I knew you’d pull something,” he growled as he put the cuffs on me, much too tight. “Never should’ve let you back on the street.” He gave a final, brutal tug, and then stepped back to sneer at me where I could see it. “You just can’t keep away from trouble, can you, asshole?”
“Why bother?” I said. “You’d just make something up and tag me with it anyway.” I smiled. “Like now. How many reports will you have to forge to make this stick, Detective? And when are you going to learn to disguise your handwriting?”
He just glared at me for a moment. And then he stepped forward and gave me an openhanded slap to the face, hard. It hurt. It was hard enough to turn the world dim and make me stagger back a step, and I’m pretty sure it loosened a molar, too. But I just straightened up, smiled again, and said, “I notice you didn’t hit me until after the cuffs were on.”
His face turned darker and he clenched his fists and his teeth and I thought I might have gone too far. But before he could do anything more Officer Poux stepped between us. “Sir! That’s enough!” she said.
“It’s not half enough,” Anderson said. “Get outa my way.”
“No, sir,” she said. And then she turned to face him. “And
this
goes in my report, too.” She glared at him for several seconds and then added, “Sir.” It didn’t sound respectful in the least.
“You put this in your report,” Anderson said through clenched teeth, “and you’ll be a meter maid by morning.”