“Shut up, dickless,” Deborah said. “Come on, Dexter.”
Apparently there was nothing for it, so I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and listened.…
And almost immediately got a very amused answer from the Passenger. “Punch bowl,” I said, snapping my eyes open.
“What?” Deborah said.
“It’s the punch bowl,” I said. “For the party.”
“With human blood in it?” she said.
“Punch?” Vince said. “Jesus’ tits, Dex, you’re a sick fuck.”
“Hey,” I said innocently, “I didn’t drink any of it.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Deborah added helpfully.
“Debs, look,” I said. “It’s away from the fire, and we got this dent in the ground.” I knelt next to Vince and pointed to the depression in the dirt. “Something heavy, stuff spilled out to the sides, lots of footprints around it—you don’t have to call it punch if that makes you nervous. But it’s the beverage.”
Deborah stared at the spot I pointed to, looked across the clearing at the fire pit, and then back to the ground at her feet. She shook her head slowly, dropped into a squat beside me, and said, “Punch bowl. Fuck.”
“You’re a sick fuck,” Vince repeated.
“Yeah,” Debs said. “But I think he’s right.” She stood up. “I bet you a dozen doughnuts you find some kind of drug traces in there, too,” she said with a very noticeable note of satisfaction.
“I’ll check it,” Vince said. “I got a good test for ecstasy.” He gave her his hideous sex leer and added, “Would you like to take the ecstasy test with me?”
“No, thanks,” she said. “You don’t have the pencil for it.” She turned away before he could try one of his awful comebacks, and I followed. It took me only three steps to realize that something about her was very wrong, and when it registered I stopped dead and turned her to face me.
I looked at my sister with surprise. “Debs,” I said. “You’re actually smiling.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Because we just proved that this is my case.”
“What do you mean?”
She punched me, hard. It may have been a happy punch for her, but it still hurt me. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Who drinks blood?”
“Ouch,” I said. “Bela Lugosi?”
“Him and all the other vampires,” she said. “You want me to spell ‘vampire’ for you?”
“So what—Oh,” I said.
“Yeah, oh,” she said. “We turn up a vampire wannabe, Bobby Acosta. And now we got a whole fucking vampire frat party. You think that’s a coincidence?”
I didn’t think so, but my arm hurt too much to say so. “We’ll see,” I said.
“Yes, we will,” she said. “Get your stuff; I’ll drive you back.”
It was definitely lunchtime when we got back to civilization, but none of the subtle hints I threw out to Debs seemed to register, and she drove straight back to headquarters without pausing, in spite of the fact that Route 41 turns into Calle Ocho, and we could easily have pulled over at a number of excellent Cuban restaurants. Just thinking about them made my stomach growl, and I imagined I could smell the plátanos sizzling in the frying pan. But as far as Deborah was concerned, the wheels of justice were already in motion, grinding their inexorable way toward a guilty verdict and a safer world, which apparently meant that Dexter could very well do without lunch for society’s sake.
And so it was a very hungry Dexter who made his weary way back to the forensics lab, chivvied every step of the way by his sister’s demands for rapid identification of the victim from the Everglades scene. I unpacked my samples and flung myself into my chair, searching for answers to the burning question: Should I drive all the way back to Calle Ocho? Or simply head to Café Relampago, which was much closer and had excellent sandwiches?
Like most important questions in life, this one had no easy answer, and I thought hard about the implications. Was it better to eat quickly, or well? If I chose instant gratification, did that make me a weaker person? And why did it have to be Cuban food today? Why not, for example, barbecue?
The moment that thought popped into my head, I began to lose my appetite. The girl in the Everglades had been barbecued, and for some reason that troubled me a great deal. I could not get the pictures out of my mind: the poor girl lashed in place, slowly bleeding out as the flames reached higher, the crowd howling, and the chef dabbing on barbecue sauce. I could almost smell the cooking flesh, and that drove all thoughts of ropa vieja and lunch completely out of my head.
Was this the way life was going to be from now on? How could I do my job if I felt actual human empathy for the victims I saw every day? Worse, how could I stay in a job that came between me and lunch?