It was quite clear to me that the small talk was not going to stop, so I put a hand on the door and said, “I’m sure I’ll be fine. What could possibly go wrong, breaking into a nest of vampires and cannibals who have already kidnapped and murdered several people?”
“Jesus, Dexter,” Deborah said, but I felt no mercy.
“After all, I have a cell phone,” I said. “If they catch me, I’ll threaten to text.”
“All right, shit,” she said. I pushed the car door open.
“Pop the trunk,” I said to her.
She blinked. “What?”
“Open up the trunk of the car,” I repeated. She opened her mouth to say something or other, but I was already out of the car and around to the trunk. The release thumped and I opened it, found the tire iron, and slid it into my pocket, pulling my shirt over the protruding handle to hide it. I closed the trunk and stepped around to Deborah’s window. She rolled it down.
“Farewell, sis,” I said. “Tell Mother I died game.”
“For Christ’s sake, Dexter,” she said, and I crossed the street, leaving her muttering a few syllables of worried profanity.
In truth, I was hoping that it was going to be as simple as Deborah wanted to believe it would be. Getting in would certainly be easy enough for someone of my modest abilities—I had broken into many places, in the pursuit of my innocent hobby, that seemed a great deal more formidable than this one, and most of those were inhabited by real monsters, not these playtime Halloween freaks, with their opera capes and fake teeth. In the light of the morning sun that now poured onto South Beach, it seemed very hard to take their adolescent party games at all seriously.
It was also surprisingly hard to bring the Dark Passenger online. I really needed the soft voice of guidance, the invisible cloak of interior darkness, that only the Passenger could provide, but in spite of the brief flutter of alarm in the club, apparently the snit was not over. I paused on the far side of the street and closed my eyes, placing my hand on a telephone pole and thinking, Hello? Anybody home? Somebody was home, but they still didn’t feel like visiting: I felt a slow and silken rustle of wings, as if it were merely recrossing its legs and waiting for something good to happen. Come on, I thought. Still nothing.
I opened my eyes. A truck went by on Ocean Drive, its radio playing salsa music much too loud. But it was the only music I heard. Apparently, I was going to have to do this alone.
All right, then: When the going gets tough and so on. I put my hands in my pockets and started to amble around the building as if I didn’t really have anyplace to go and was just gawking. Gee whiz, look at the palm trees. Nothin’ like that back in Iowa. Golly.
I strolled around the building one time, looking it over without really seeming to do anything but walk and gawk. As far as I could tell, nobody cared enough to be impressed by my wonderful Innocent Act, but it never hurts to be thorough, so I played tourist for five minutes. The building took up the entire block, and I walked along past all four sides. The vulnerable spot was obvious: In a short and narrow alleyway on the far side of the club’s door there was a Dumpster. It stood beside a doorway that obviously led into the club’s kitchen. The door was protected from view unless someone stood right in the mouth of the alley.
I pulled my right hand out of my pocket and “accidentally” scattered half a handful of coins onto the sidewalk and, stooping to pick them up, I looked around me in all directions. Unless there was somebody on a rooftop with binoculars, I was not being watched. I left thirty-seven cents on the sidewalk and slid quickly into the alley.
It was much darker in the narrow alley, but that did not encourage the Passenger to start a conversat
ion, and I hurried to the Dumpster all alone. I reached the back door quickly and examined it. It had two dead-bolt locks on it, which was discouraging. I could have opened them both easily enough given a little time and my own set of very special tools, but I had neither, and the tire iron would just not do: The door was out of the question. I would have to get inside by some other, less genteel entryway.
I looked up at the building: Directly above the doorway was a row of windows, one every five or six feet, that went along the side of the building to the street. The second one to my left was in easy reach from the top of the Dumpster, and an agile person could pull himself up and through the window without too much trouble. No problem: Dexter is deft, and assuming I could slide open the window it would be simple.
The Dumpster had two lids, side by side, and one of them was open. I put both hands on the closed side—and something bolted up and out of the opening with a horrible screech and flew past my ear and I was absolutely paralyzed by sheer terror before I recognized it as a cat. It was tattered and filthy and beat-up, but it landed a few feet away and arched its back and spit at me in the full Halloween pose. I just looked back and for a second I thought the music had started up again in the club, until I realized the thumping was only my heartbeat. The cat turned and stalked away out of the alley, I leaned on the Dumpster and took a deep breath, and the Passenger stirred itself just enough to give me a serves-you-right chuckle.
I took a moment to recover, and then, just to be safe, I looked inside the Dumpster. There didn’t seem to be anything else inside except garbage, which I thought was a very positive development. I hoisted myself up onto the closed side and, looking once more toward the mouth of the alley to make sure nobody was watching, I reached up and touched the window. I pushed at it and it rattled ever so slightly. Good news: That meant it was not nailed shut, or sealed by too many years of sloppy paint jobs.
I could not see the very top of the window frame, but as far as I could tell there was no alarm sensor anywhere on the frame, which was also good news but not too surprising. Most places save a little money by pretending that any break-in will take place on the ground floor. It was nice to know that even vampires can be thrifty.
I reached for the tire iron and almost dropped it as it cleared my pocket. It would have hit the Dumpster’s lid with enough of a clatter to wake up the whole neighborhood, and I realized my hands were slick with sweat. This was a new experience; always before I had been icy cold and calm, but between the Passenger’s sulking and the feral cat’s levitation I seemed to be in something of a stew. Certainly sweat was understandable—this was Miami. But fear sweat? On Dexter the Dark and Dashing, the King of Cool? This was not a good sign, and I paused one more time for a deep breath before I reached up and slid the tire iron between the window and the bottom of the frame.
I pulled down on the tire iron’s handle, gently at first, and then with increasing force as the window refused to budge. I didn’t want to pull too hard, since the frame might well give way, which would shatter the glass and make so much noise that I might as well bounce a dozen tire irons off the Dumpster’s lid. I pulled for about ten seconds, slowly increasing the pressure, and just when I thought I would have to try something else there was a pop! and the window slid upward. I held very still for a moment, listening for any movement or shouting or alarms going off. Nothing: I pulled myself up, slid through the window, and pulled it closed behind me.
I stood up and looked around me. I was in a hallway that dead-ended at the street to my left and led to a corner down to the right. There was one door along the hall, and I went quietly over to it. There was a dead-bolt lock on the door, but no doorknob. I pushed gently and the door opened. The room was completely dark, but there was a faint smell of Lysol and urine, and I suspected it was a restroom. I stepped inside, closed the door, and found a light switch by feeling along the wall. I flipped it on; it was, in fact, a small restroom, with a sink, one toilet, and a cupboard built into the wall. Just to be thorough I opened the cupboard and found nothing more sinister than toilet paper. There was nothing else in the room, no place they could have hidden a body, alive or dead, so I switched off the light and stepped back out into the hallway.
I cat-footed down the hall to the corner, where I paused, and then slowly and carefully peeked around. The hallway was empty, lit by a single security lamp that hung above a door halfway down. There were two other doors along the hall, and what looked like the top of a staircase at the far end.
I stepped around the corner and went to the first door on my left. I turned the knob slowly and carefully, and it gave way. I pushed the door open and went in, once again closing the door behind me and feeling for the light switch on the wall. I found it, flipped it on. The light was dimmer than even that from the security light in the hall, but it was enough to show a private party room. There was a flat-screen TV on the left wall, and a long, low couch along the right with a coffee table in front of it. Behind the couch was a bar topped with greenish marble, with a small refrigerator underneath. Along the back wall, a thick red velvet curtain hung down.
I went to the bar. There were a few bottles, but instead of glasses there was a rack of what looked like laboratory beakers. I picked one up; it was, indeed, a Pyrex beaker. The side was stamped FIRST NATIONAL BLOOD BANK in gold letters.
I pulled the velvet curtain away from the wall. There was a door behind it, and I pulled it open, holding the curtain up and away so I could see inside. It was nothing more than a small closet, empty except for cleaning supplies: broom, mop, and bucket, a bag of rags. I closed the door and dropped the curtain.
The next door along the hall was on the right, underneath the security light. It was locked, and I procrastinated by moving along the hall to the last door down on my left. It was unlocked; I slipped inside and found another private party room, a virtual duplicate of the first one.
That left the locked door. Reason told me that anything worth seeing would be locked away, but it also told me that the lock would be a good one, and I would not get it open without leaving some very obvious hints that I had been there, and possibly even setting off an alarm. Did I want to stay invisible, or just assume that if I found Samantha Aldovar it didn’t matter who knew I had been there? I hadn’t talked about it with Deborah, and it had just become an important question. I thought about it, and after only a moment of really high-order thinking, I decided that I was here to find Samantha, and I had to look everywhere—especially places that they didn’t want anyone to see, like behind this locked door.