“Don’t talk to anybody in the media; that’s vital,” he said.
“I won’t,” I said, and I actually did intend to avoid that.
“All right, then,” he said. He pushed a small button and my door unlocked. It was a clear signal for me to go, and I opened the door.
“Thanks, Mr. Kraunauer,” I said. “For everything.”
“Oh, don’t thank me yet,” he said with an airy wave. I got out of his luxurious rolling pleasure palace, and he vanished, silently, before I was even in the hotel’s door.
T
he clock in my hotel room said it was only four-thirty-eight, which didn’t seem possible. I certainly seemed to be packing an awful lot of excitement into a very little time. It had made me hungry, too, but there was nothing close to the hotel except a franchise fast-food place, and it was even lower on the evolutionary scale than the one that had given me agita the day before.
So I gave a heavy sigh, pushed away hunger and fatigue, and sat instead at the horribly uncomfortable desk chair, and I pondered. The day had not been a total loss so far; it was at least possible that Anderson might be held in check for a while. It was far too much to hope that the feds would investigate or prosecute him, of course, but they were aware that something was not quite right in Smallville—“Small” referring, of course, to Anderson’s IQ. That knowledge should restrain him, at least temporarily. Of course, it was almost as likely to prompt him to try something even more outrageous.
His last words to me,
It ain’t over,
certainly made preemptive action seem more likely. And the fact that the FBI now had good reason to believe he’d been playing hokeypokey with evidence and forged signatures would probably make him even more desperate to prove I was a True Naughty Boy of epic proportions. It seemed logical to assume that his best stratagem was framing me for drug possession. He already had that on the record, and if he could “prove” he’d been right, that would not only take Me off to jail, but it would also restore his reputation.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that this would be Anderson’s plan. He would take some of the “missing” drugs and slip them into my meager possessions. It was simple, which was de rigueur for him, and it would probably work. Even if everybody was certain he’d planted the drugs himself, they’d go along with it. I nodded; that’s what he would do—
if
he found out where I was. He hadn’t so far, and as long as I made sure he never did, his plot couldn’t get off the ground.
I slid that worry onto the back burner. Anderson was not on the same level of threat as the bombers. There was no wiggle room with someone who wants to kill you badly enough that they are willing to take out half your hotel as long as they might get you, too. They’d missed once, but there was no doubt that they’d make another try as soon as they could. How? I didn’t have enough raw data even to guess their next move. I had no clue at all what they might do, or how many of them there might be—I knew nothing about them except that the size of their bomb revealed a reckless joie de vivre that I might have admired, except that it also indicated an unsettling seriousness about getting rid of me.
Brian, on the other hand,
did
know them. And as a special bonus, he had a car, a vehicle well known for its ability to take people to places where food was available. That sealed it; I called Brian, and he agreed to come get me.
Half an hour later we were sitting together in a nice, quiet diner over in Homestead. “I believe the meat loaf is quite good here,” Brian told me. “If you like that sort of thing.”
“I do,” I said, and in truth, the mere mention of it had made my stomach groan audibly.
A brisk and efficient waitress took our order: two meat loafs, garlic mashed, green beans. Coffee, sweet tea (for Brian). She swished away, and I leaned back in the red plastic booth. “The thing is,” I said to Brian, “it all comes down to what we were talking about this morning.”
“Early afternoon, actually,” Brian said politely.
I waved it off. “The point is,” I said, “Raul’s little buddies found me. There are two things wrong with that.”
My brother was already nodding, proving once again that he was no slouch. “First, it’s
you,
” he said. “Instead of me.”
“And second,” I went on, “it happened much too quickly to be coincidence or luck. So the question is—”
“How,” Brian said. “And without knowing
that,
it’s really much harder to put an end to it, isn’t it?”
“ ‘The most difficult part to invent is the end,’ ” I said. He blinked at me inquiringly, and I tried to look modest. “De Tocqueville,” I said.
Brian just nodded, and looked down at the table. He frowned very thoughtfully, and I realized my face was wearing an exact duplicate of his expression. How odd it was, after all my years of thinking I was alone and unique, finally to find somebody who was so very similar, even down to appearance. Of course, my handwriting was much better. And Shakespeare or not, I was positive Brian couldn’t quote de Tocqueville like I could. Even so, it was rather strange—but nice, in truth. Brian was
real
family—not a fair-weather sibling who turned her back at the merest hint of trouble. Brian had instead arrived, unasked, when my problems began, and he was helping me solve them. Except, of course, for the small detail of dropping me into the middle of a lethally violent drug war. But I could forgive that; I had to, because he was family. Permanent, undeniable family, and as much like me as he could be. Not like some I could think of.
And that thought might as well have been a cue in a well-rehearsed theatrical performance, because as the words formed in my brain, my phone rang. I glanced at the screen and saw, to my irritated astonishment, that the call came, by all that is unholy, from a certain fair-weather sibling: It was Deborah, and that made absolutely no sense. Did she need instructions on how to change Lily Anne’s diaper? Or perhaps permission for Cody to play with sharp objects? Well, too bad—she was on her own, and it was all her doing. As far as I could tell from our last two conversations, we had nothing at all to say to one another. Not now, not ever again. She’d made it quite clear that our family ties were untied, and she preferred it that way.
I felt a small surge of annoyance bordering on resentment, and decided that Mr. Dexter Morgan was not available. I pushed decline and put the phone back in my pocket.
I turned my powerful brain right back to the problem at hand with not even a small thought of my ex-sister. How
had
they found me so quickly? Because there was really no reason for Deborah to call.
My phone chirruped again. Either I had suddenly become Mr. Popular, or some other unthinkable event had just occurred. I looked at the screen, and unthinkable won. It was Deborah again.
Once more I pushed decline and my irritation ratcheted up a few notches. Would she never give me any peace? Was the woman going to hound me to my grave? Assuming no one else got me there first by more conventional means?
Again: How had Raul’s men found me so quickly and easily? They had to have picked me up after I’d already left the first hotel, the one where I found Octavio dead on my bed. Otherwise, they would have been onto Brian first, not me. But they could easily have gotten my name from that hotel room. So they knew that something called a “Dexter Morgan” was somehow connected to Brian. Had I used my credit card since my precipitous departure from that hotel? I didn’t think so.
So how had they found me? I couldn’t believe that they had simply roamed around the city looking for a Dexter until they found the right one. If nothing else, you didn’t waste a lovely big bomb like that one on an uncertain target. They had
known
it was me when they planted the bomb. But how? Where had I been that they could latch onto me like that? It could not have been at any time or place when Brian and I were together, either, for the same reason—that they would have hit Brian first.
So: I had been to several restaurants—and that sent one quick bright surge of adrenaline up my spine, because I remembered that one of those restaurants had been
Mexican
—just like Raul! But of course, it didn’t hold up. Aside from the fact that it was politically terribly incorrect, it made no real sense. Pepino’s restaurant had no more connection to a drug lord than the sushi place where I’d had lunch with Vince had with bombing Pearl Harbor. And that sushi place was just as certainly ruled out—I had sat there in my car for half an hour, a perfect and stationary target. Even a mad bomber would have said,
What the hell,
and taken a whack at me by some more direct method.
Not the restaurants. Where else? I had been out of jail a very short time, and I hadn’t been very many places, and was my phone really ringing
again
?!
It was. And once again it was Deborah calling. A great number of things ran lightly across the surface of my brain. Most of them were biting things I could say to her. Unfortunately, the best of them would involve raising my voice and saying things that might even affect the service of my meat loaf.
But one other thing slowly worked its way to the front of the line, gently shoving aside all the salty, profane, and entertaining words and phrases. Deborah, after making it quite clear that she never wanted even to say my name again, had just called me
three times
in two minutes.
Why?
It would be fun to think that after such a short time with my children she wanted to give them back—and more fun still if she’d had an incredibly illuminating insight into the error of her ways and she wanted to beg my forgiveness and make up. But as stubborn as I knew her to be, it would have to be an epiphany on the order of Saul on the road to Damascus—and Debs in the fast lane of I-95 didn’t sound like it even belonged in the same league. So ruling out the ridiculous, that she had suddenly forgiven me, I could think of absolutely no reason in the world why she would call. And therefore no reason I should answer.
Except…
Curiosity, as the saying goes, killed the cat. And it has frequently proved lethal to nonfelines as well. And yet a tiny but powerful tendril of curiosity was tugging relentlessly at my concentration, demanding all my attention. On top of that, it may even be that some small shred of family loyalty as instilled by Harry might still be lodged in a crack somewhere. Whatever the reason, I did the unthinkable, the unwise, the unresistible.
I answered.
“Yes?” I said smoothly, so she could see that her call—and, by extension, she herself—meant nothing.
“I need your help,” Deborah said between her teeth.
“Reeealllllyyy,” I said, and I think I sounded as surprised as I felt. The possibility that she would even dare to ask such a thing had never occurred to me. “What on earth could you believe I would ever help
you
with?” And I put as much dry scorn into it as I could, knowing there was absolutely no possible satisfactory answer she could make.
“The children are gone,” she said. “They’ve been kidnapped.”
Except that, of course.
B
rian very agreeably drove me north on U.S. 1 and then turned left into the Gables, over to Deborah’s little house. He said nothing, except to ask for directions, and I was grateful. Nearly anyone else in the world would have chattered away the entire time, filling the silence with sentimental expressions of sympathy and compassion—or worse, declarations of total support for me in my hour of need.
Brian did no such thing, proving once again that he knew me better than anyone else in the world. He understood that the very first dewy-eyed gasp of empathetic blather from him, the very first manly compassionate
I’m here for you, buddy,
would result in my leaning over and clawing his eyes out. Of course, it could also be that he knew I was aware that any such thing he might utter was completely artificial and meaningless, since he could not feel sympathy any more than he could feel anything else.
And I was supposed to be just the same—vacant, unoccupied, null and void in terms of inner content. No emotions, no feelings, no compassion or empathy or any of the other gooey human shortcomings. So it must have been hunger, caused by missing breakfast, that made my stomach churn and roil and my pulse thump at my temples like two small pointy fists.
Kidnapped.
My kids.
The more I thought about it, the less I could actually
think
about. A powerful rising tide of anger mixed with anxiety flooded through me and I could only grit my teeth, clench my fists, and fantasize about what I would do to whoever had taken them. It was counterproductive, even debilitating, since the only result was a return of this morning’s headache, and a couple of new cuts in the palms of my hands, where I had unconsciously shoved a fingernail in too far while clenching my fists.
Stupid, useless, sickening anger—and yet it did pass the time, and before I knew it Brian was pulling up on the street outside Deborah’s house. “If you don’t mind,” he said with great polite reserve, “I don’t think I’ll go in.”
“No, of course not,” I said. It was obviously unthinkable for him to go in, or to go anywhere near Deborah, and he was wasting my time even mentioning it. I reached for the door handle and his voice stopped me.
“Dexter,” he said.
I turned and looked at him, angry at the delay.
“I will help all I can,” he said, without artifice of any kind, just a clean simplicity that said he really would. It meant more to me than all the crocodile tears in the world, and I unclenched my jaw for the first time since Deborah’s call.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll call you when I know more. When I can.”
He just nodded, and I opened the door and climbed out of his car.
Brian’s car was well out of sight before I even got to Deborah’s front door. That was just as well, because she opened it when I was still on the front walk, ten feet away. She stood there, framed by the doorway, her fists clenched tightly at her sides, and as I looked at her face I saw with utter astonishment that she had been crying. Deborah did not cry. Ever. The last time I had seen her tears was when she was eight years old and fell from a tree, breaking her wrist. Since then she had been icy control, tougher than nails, practically bionic. I knew she
felt
things—she just never, ever
showed
them. I had often thought it was funny; she felt everything and showed nothing, and I was just the opposite. The Legacy of Harry.
I stopped on the stoop, several feet away, unsure what happened next. Clearly she was just as unsure, because she looked at me, looked away, looked at me again, and then simply turned away and went inside, leaving the door open as an unspoken invitation to follow. I did, locking the door behind me.
Deborah was already seated at her rickety kitchen table when I joined her. She slumped over a cup half-filled with coffee, staring down into the mug like she thought she could find an answer in it. I stood watching her for a moment, but she didn’t look up, so I pulled out a chair and sat opposite her. Some paperwork sat in the middle of the table, and I recognized it—the custody agreement I had signed.
Yesterday’s news—what mattered now was the kids. “How did it happen,” I said. Even to me, it sounded like,
How could you
let
it happen.
But Debs just nodded like she deserved it. “I dropped them at day care, like always,” she said. “I went to work. Half hour later they came. Three men with guns. They said, ‘Bring us the Morgan kids.’ And nobody did anything, so they shot one of the teachers.” She looked up quickly, and then down again. “They got the kids. All four of them. Threw them into a car and drove away.” She slumped down even farther. “They have our kids.”
She sounded half-dead, nearly empty, like she’d already surrendered. I’d never heard her like this, and it made me very uncomfortable. “Who were they?” I said. She frowned, but kept staring down. “The men with the guns,” I said. “Who were they? Any hint at all?”
She shrugged. “Hispanic,” she said. “Thick accent. Two of ’em short and dark, one taller, lighter hair. That’s all I got.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Hispanic accent. Shouldn’t be hard to find in Miami.”
“The car was an SUV, dark blue. Nobody saw the plates,” she added in the same dull voice.
I opened my mouth to say something sarcastic, and then snapped it shut again as a gigantic alarm gong began to ring in the back of my brain. Something Debs had said had raised the hairs on my neck and sent the troops to the parapet. I didn’t get it at first. I rewound her last few sentences. Three men with guns—check. Hispanic—check. Two short, one taller—check. Dark blue SUV—
Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.
I had naturally assumed that Raul’s men had taken the kids. The only question had been, as it was with everything else at the moment, How? How had they found me? Having found me, how did they make the connection and find the children?
Suddenly a very large part of the answer had come clear.
A dark blue SUV. I had seen one recently—in fact, I had seen it more than once. When I parked my car in the alley at Pepino’s—and then later right here, outside Deborah’s house, a dark blue SUV had gone crawling by. And hadn’t there been one other time recently?
“Dexter,” Deborah said, interrupting my train of thought. “I can’t do this. I have to…They put me on administrative leave. And I’m supposed to sit here and let
them
find
my
kids?!” She looked up at me with a pleading expression, something else I had never seen from her. “I can’t do that. Jesus fuck, we have to do something!”
“What do you suggest?” I said.
For a second it looked like she was going to lose her temper and snarl at me. But then she wilted, just slumped back over the coffee again. “I don’t know,” she said, barely over a whisper. “They won’t let me near it. I can’t even…They sent me home, and I just…” She shook her head slowly, as if she barely had the energy.
“So you called me?” I said. “Because you think I can find these guys?”
“No,” she said. And then she raised her head and looked at me and she was Debs again. More—she was Über-Deb, the Dragon Slayer. The fire that showed in her eyes would have melted a Buick’s fender. “I called you because when I find them I want them dead.”
I nodded as if that was the most natural thing in the world, for her to ask me to tag along and do the finish work. And actually, for a moment or two, it really did seem quite natural. She would find them, and I would take it from there. Each of us doing what we did best, working together in harmony, world without end. A proper display of Harry’s
real
legacy.
But on a moment’s reflection, it didn’t seem that natural at all. Mere hours ago I was as good as dead in Deborah’s eyes, lower than pond scum—and for the very same reason that she now found my company desirable. It was such a cold and utilitarian about-face, so completely reptilian, that I should have admired it. I didn’t. I needed more.
Because I have no real human feelings, Harry had molded me to look on family bonds as
rules
. I’ve always been quite good with rules. They help keep things neat and orderly, and it would be a much better world if everybody paid more attention to them—or even if we all agreed on the same set.
Deborah had broken a very important rule, one that Harry had pounded into me over and over again:
Family comes first.
Everything else in life will come and go, and things that seem important now will melt away like snowflakes in a summer rain. Not this. Family is forever. I had believed it, even relied on it. And Deborah had violated it. I had needed her as I’d never needed anyone else in my life—needed her help and comfort and support, the things only family can really provide. And she had swept me out of her life like a dust bunny on the living room rug. The only reason she was letting me back in now was because suddenly
she
needed
me
.
Of course, it’s always nice to have your talents appreciated, especially by a family member, but at this point in our present nonrelationship, I thought she should give me just a little bit more than a temporary come-kill-things-for-me pass.
So I met her gaze with a steely one of my own. “I think that’s absolutely wonderful,” I said. “But why should I do that for you? Why,” I went on as she gaped angrily at me, “should I do anything at all for you? And don’t,” I cautioned her, showing her the palm of one hand, “
please
don’t say because I’m your brother and they’re my kids. You burned those bridges, and very thoroughly, too.”
“For fuck’s sake, Dexter,” she said, and it was nice to see some color returning to her cheeks, “don’t you care about anything but yourself?!”
“I’ve got nothing else left to care about,” I said. “You let Anderson take away my job, my reputation, and my freedom—and then
you
took away my family.” I nudged the custody papers toward her and raised an eyebrow. “Remember? It wasn’t that long ago.”
“I did what I thought was best for the kids,” she said, and it may be that now she had just a little too much color in her cheeks. “That’s what I always do.” She tapped the tabletop with a finger, hard, once for each word. “It’s What I’m Doing Now.”
“Really? It’s best for them if I stay in jail until I come sneaking in to kill a few bad guys for you? And then I disappear conveniently again, is that the plan?” I shook my head. “That’s something only my sister could ask for—and I no longer have one.”
“Well,
fuck,
” she snarled. “What do you want, an apology? Fine, I’m sorry, okay?”
“Nope. Not okay. Not enough.”
Debs leaned across the table as far as she could go and still stay seated. “You miserable shit,” she said. “They’re your kids, too!”
“Not anymore,” I said, and I glanced meaningfully at the custody papers.
For a second she just showed me her teeth, anger building up in her eyes and looking for somewhere to go and something to burn. And then she lashed out with a hand—I flinched, but it wasn’t my face she was going for. Instead, she snatched up the custody papers, ripped them in half, and flung the pieces at my head. Since I had already used up my flinch, most of the pieces hit me. Considering what I’d already been through in the last few hours it didn’t hurt that much. In fact, in an odd way, it felt kind of good.
Apparently I had a family again.
“Apology accepted,” I said. “How do we find them?”
She glared a few seconds longer; after all, she had to go from rage back to plotting revenge, and it’s much harder to shift gears that quickly when you have emotions. Debs leaned back into a more normal sitting posture and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I told you everything I’ve got.”
“Three Hispanic males,” I said. “And one dark blue SUV.”
“That’s it,” she said, and she slumped back over her coffee cup again. “That’s all of it.” She picked up her coffee cup, looked at the contents, and put it back down again without drinking. “I don’t even know
why
they snatched the kids. Revenge, somebody I busted?” She shook her head. “If only I knew why…”
Deborah has always had a fairly healthy ego, and I was glad that the present crisis had not beaten it down; she believed that someone had taken the kids to get at
her
. I hadn’t even considered that idea; I had just naturally assumed that it was Raul’s men getting leverage on me. But I thought about the possibility that it was an attack on Debs instead, and right off the bat the notion had several very appealing elements. For starters, it let me off the hook—I didn’t have to tell her that it was my fault, which might have put a damper on what was turning into a rather heartwarming reunion. I also didn’t have to tell her about Brian, which would almost certainly dampen his life even more severely.
But it wouldn’t do, of course. I had seen the blue SUV, and was now certain it had trailed me to Deb’s house. From there, it was a simple matter for them to watch her, see the kids, follow to day care, and grab them. The only real question remained the same: How had they found
me
in the first place? I had seen them at dinner, and so they had picked me up before that—and if I could remember where I had seen the blue SUV earlier—
“Are you out for good now?” Deborah said abruptly.
“Out?” I said, still with one foot in my thoughts. “You mean out of jail?” She nodded. “Well, it’s not certain. The state attorney really wants me for this.”
She snorted. “Well, shit,” she said. “If Frank Kraunauer can’t get you out—Jesus, Dex, what’s the matter?”
The matter was simple: My head was spinning like a carousel. Or possibly I was motionless and the room itself was spinning—maybe even the entire Universe, suddenly whirling around like an enormous insane dervish. It must have shown on my face, because the whole natural order as I knew it had suddenly flipped over on its axis. East was now up, and West was tomorrow, and nothing was what it should be, and yet because of that everything suddenly made sense. It was sickening, maddening, dreadful, gut-lurching sense, but it added up perfectly.
I knew where I had seen the blue SUV earlier.