“You saw ten dead bodies, sir? You’re sure?”
“And then somebody took a bite outta one and started to eat it an’ Ah run. Never seen nothin’ so groo-sum in mah life, an’ Ah wuz in Baghdad.”
“They—ate the body, sir?”
“You all best get all them SWAT boys over there pronto,” I said, and I hung up and put the car in gear. They might not round up everybody in the park, but they would get most of them, enough to get a picture of what had happened, and that would be enough to get Bobby Acosta, one way or another. I hoped that it would make Deborah feel a little better about Samantha.
I nosed the car up onto I-95 and began the drive to Jackson. There were several closer hospitals, but if you are a Miami cop, you tend to home in on Jackson, which has one of the best trauma units in the country. And since Chutsky had assured me that the visit was precautionary only, I thought it best to go with the experts.
So I drove south as fast as I dared, quietly for the first ten minutes, and then just before the turnoff for the Dolphin Expressway, I heard sirens, and then more sirens, and a column of emergency vehicles long enough to deal with a major invasion went by in the opposite direction. They were followed closely by a matching column of satellite trucks from the local news departments—all headed north, presumably to Buccaneer Land. Moments after the noise had faded, I heard movement in the backseat and a few seconds later Deborah spoke. “Fuck,” she said, not really a surprising first word, considering the source. “Oh, fuck.”
“You’re all right, Deborah,” I said, craning my neck to see her in the mirror. She lay there with her hands clasped over her middle and a look of numb panic on her face. “We’re on our way to Jackson, but just to check. Nothing to worry about; you’re okay.”
“Samantha Aldovar?” she said.
“Um,” I said. “She didn’t make it.” I glanced again in the mirror; Debs closed her eyes and rubbed her stomach.
“Where’s Chutsky?” she said.
“Well, ah, I don’t really know,” I said. “I mean, he’s okay, you know, not hurt. He said, ‘Tell Deborah I love her,’ and then he drove away, but …” A large truck jerked in front of me, even though I was in the HOV lane, and I had to swerve and brake. When I looked back in the mirror again, her eyes were still closed.
“He’s gone,” she said. “He thinks he let me down, and so he got all noble and left me. Just when I need him most.”
The idea of needing Chutsky at all, letting alone “most,” seemed like stretching credibility to me, but I played along.
“Sis, you’re going to be all right,” I said, searching for the right reassuring words. “We’ll get you checked out at Jackson, but I’m sure you’re fine, and you’ll be back at work tomorrow and everything will seem all right, and—”
“I’m pregnant,” she said, which really left me nothing at all to say.
EPILOGUE
CHUTSKY REALLY WAS GONE—DEBORAH WAS RIGHT ABOUT that. After a few weeks it became clear that he wasn’t coming back, and there was nothing she could do to find him. She tried, of course, with all the single-minded skill of a very stubborn woman who was also a very good cop. But Chutsky had spent a career in black operations, and he swam at a deeper level. We didn’t really even know if Chutsky was his real name. After a lifetime of espionage, he probably didn’t know either, and he vanished as completely as if he had never existed.
Deborah was right about the other thing, too. It soon became very obvious to everyone that all of her pants were suddenly too tight, and her usually bland shirts had changed into loose-fitting, Hawaiian-patterned things, the kind that she would normally never willingly accompany even to the drunk tank. Deborah was pregnant, and she was determined to have the baby, with Chutsky or without him.
I worried at first that her new status as an unmarried mother would hurt her standing at work; cops are generally very conservative people. But I had apparently not kept up with the New Conservatism. Nowadays, Family Values meant that getting pregnant when you were single was fine, as long as you stayed that way, and Deborah’s prestige at work actually went up as her belly got bigger.
You would have thought that a pregnant detective would have been sympathetic enough to convince anyone of a person’s wickedness, but at the bail hearing for Bobby Acosta, the lawyers played up the fact that Joe had just lost his wife—Bobby’s stepmother, who had raised him and meant so much to him, now tragically departed, and they somehow forgot to mention that she had died in the act of torturing and murdering a few sundry people, like wonderful precious me. The judge set bail at five hundred thousand dollars, which was chump change for the Acosta family, and Bobby skipped happily out of the courtroom and into the arms of his ever-loving father, as we had known all along he would do.
Deborah took it better than I thought she would. She did say a bad word or two, but after all, she was Deborah, and all she really said was, “Well, fuck, so the little shit walks,” and then she looked at me.
“Well, yes,” I said, and that was pretty much that. Bobby was free until his trial, which could be years away, considering the caliber of lawyer his father brought to bear. By the time Bobby actually went before a jury, all the lovely headlines about “Cannibal Carnival” and “Buccaneer Bloodbath” would be forgotten, and Joe’s money would get the charges reduced to hunting out of season, with a sentence of twenty hours’ community service. A bitter pill to swallow, perhaps, but that’s life in the service of that old whore Miami Justice, and we had certainly expected it.
And so life settled back into its normal rhythms, measured now by the growth of Deborah’s waist, the fullness of Lily Anne’s diaper pail, and the Friday-night dinners with Uncle Brian, now a highlight of our week. Friday was an ideal night, among other reasons, because that was when Debs had a birthing class, reducing the chance that she would drop in unexpectedly and embarrass my brother; after all, he had, speaking from a purely technical point of view, tried to kill her a few years back, and I knew very well she was not the kind to forgive and forget. But Brian planned to hang around for a while; apparently he truly enjoyed playing uncle and big brother. And, of course, Miami was his home, too, and he was quite certain that even in this economy it was the best place to find a new job that suited his unique skill set, and in any case he had enough money to tide him over for quite a while. Whatever her other faults, Alana had rewarded talent quite generously.
And to my very great surprise and growing unease, one more rhythm had begun to assert itself, even over the slow and steady blooming of my new human self. Gradually, at first so subtly I did not even notice it, I began to feel a tiny tugging at the back of my neck—but not my physical neck, not really my physical anything, just … something slightly behind and …?
And I would turn and look, puzzled, and see nothing, and shrug it off as imagination, no more than a delayed case of nerves from all I had suffered. After all, poor battered Dexter had truly been through the mill. It was perfectly natural that I should be uneasy, even jumpy, for a while after so much physical and mental trauma. Completely understandable, normal in every way, nothing to worry about, don’t think twice. And I would go about my ordinary human business of work time–playtime–TV time–bedtime in its endless unchanging cycle without a care until the next time it happened and I would once again suddenly stop what I was doing and turn around at the call of an unheard voice.
So it went for several months as life got duller and Debs got larger, until she was big enough to set a date for her baby shower. And the night I held that invitation in my hand and wondered what perfect gift I could get her for her Blessed Event I felt the tug of that unvoiced sound again and turned around behind me and this time, framed in the window at my back, I saw it.
Moon.
Full, bright, saucy, lovely moon.
Calling, compelling, shining and beaming, wonderful bright loudmouth moon, whispering sweet nothings in its reptile tones of steel and stealth, saying the two soft syllables of my name in its same old shadow-loving dark-eyed voice, so very well known from so very many times before, so familiar and so comfortable and now so oddly welcome once again.
Hello, old friend.