“Well,” said Rita. “That’s very— Thank you. And I just wanted to— I’ll get the dishes,” she said, blushing again and bouncing up to begin clearing the table.
And wrapped in a cloud of complete contentment, I staggered off to Dexter’s Study and made my modest preparations for dessert: duct tape, filet knife, nylon noose—just a few simple accessories to round off a lovely evening with my favorite confection. When everything was checked and rechecked and then zipped carefully into my gym bag, I rejoined the children in front of the Wii. I sat on the couch and watched the happy mayhem, and I could actually feel some of the tension of recent events seeping out of me. And why not? I had a gym bag full of toys and a friend picked out to share them with; Normal Life was finally returning, and Rita had made it wonderfully official with a memorable meal.
So I sat and waited for it to get dark outside, thinking smugly of the Thing I would do just a little later, and content to do nothing else for the moment except digest the unreasonable amount of paella I had eaten. It was pleasant labor, relatively undemanding, and I believe I was doing a very good job of it when somehow, I fell asleep.
I woke up unsure of where I was and what time it was, blinking stupidly around me in a semidark room. I am not ordinarily given to naps, and this one had snuck up and sandbagged me and left me feeling slow and dopey. It was a full minute before I remembered that I was on the couc
h in my living room and there was a clock beside the TV. Summoning all my superhuman strength, I rolled my eyeballs in the right direction and stared at the clock; it was ten forty-seven. This was more than a nap; it was hibernation.
I blinked and breathed for another minute, trying to climb back into a state of eager readiness for what I had planned for the rest of this night. But the fat-headed feeling stayed with me. I wondered what Rita had put into the paella: some kind of sleep-inducing herb? Kryptonite? Whatever it was, it had knocked me out as efficiently as if it had been roofies. I actually spent a good two minutes thinking that it might be a good idea to go back to sleep and let Crowley wait for tomorrow. It was late, I was tired, and surely there was nothing so urgent that it couldn’t wait one more day.…
Just in time a small dash of common sense trickled in and reminded me that no, in fact, it couldn’t wait, not at all. The danger was immediate; the solution was at hand—and probably even therapeutic. I had to act now, right away, without delay. I repeated that to myself a few times; it was not enough to bring back my complete and eager edge, but at least it got me moving. I stretched and stood up, waiting for full consciousness to return. It didn’t, so I went down the hall anyway and got the gym bag I had packed after dinner.
Before I left, I peeked into my bedroom; Rita was asleep, snoring softly, and Lily Anne was peacefully at rest in her crib. All quiet on the home front, and time for Dexter to steal away into the night.
But as I slipped out the front door of the house, a huge yawn creaked out of me, instead of the icy awareness I was used to. I shook my head in a vain effort to get the blood flowing again. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I seem to get going? I had a pleasant and rewarding chore to take care of, and there was no point in doing it if I was going to sleepwalk through it on automatic pilot. I gave myself a stern pep talk: Focus, Dexter. Get your head back in the game.
By the time I slid behind the wheel of my car and cranked it up, I was starting to feel a little more alert. I put the car in gear and eased out onto the street, thinking that a slow drive through Miami traffic would almost certainly get the adrenaline flowing again. And it worked even better than I had hoped—because before I had gone even a hundred feet my entire allowance of adrenaline for the month came roaring into my system when I glanced casually into the rearview mirror. Behind me, at the vacant lot half a block from my house, a pair of headlights clicked on and another car nosed out into the street to follow me.
I stared into the mirror, trying to make the following headlights into a hallucination. But they kept coming, sliding up the street behind me, and I nearly ran into a tree before I remembered I had to watch the street ahead, too. And I tried to do that, but my eyes kept flicking back to the mirror and the headlights bobbing along in my wake.
This is nothing, a mere coincidence, I told myself firmly, fighting down the alarm that began to clang in my brain. Of course I was not being followed; some neighbor had merely parked randomly at the vacant lot for some reason and was now randomly taking off on a random late-night jaunt. Or perhaps a drunk had pulled over to sleep off too many Cuba Libres. There were many sane and sober explanations, and just because somebody started up their car at the exact time I did and then drove along right behind me, it didn’t mean I was being followed. Reason said it was pure chance and nothing more.
I turned right at the stop sign and motored along slowly, and, a moment later, so did my unwanted companion, and my interior alarm clanged a little louder. I tried to muffle it by thinking logical thoughts: Of course he turned right, too. That was the way out of the neighborhood, the shortest route to Dixie Highway and its convenience marts and the Farm Store for a midnight quart of milk. Everything that might take somebody out onto the streets at this hour was at the end of this road. It was the only way to go, and the fact that somebody was going there right behind me was complete happenstance, and nothing more. Just to prove it, I turned right at the next stop sign, away from brightly lit Dixie Highway and all its commercial pleasures, back into the darker streets lined with houses, and I watched in the mirror for the car behind me to turn left.
It didn’t.
It turned right, the same way I had gone, and it followed along behind me like an unwanted shadow.…
And as that word trickled into my brain, a jolt of near panic jerked me up straight in my seat: shadow? Was it possible? Could Crowley have gotten the drop on me once again?
It took almost no thought at all to figure that out. Of course it was possible; more than possible, it was likely, since he had been outthinking me every step of the way. He knew where I lived. He knew what my car looked like. He knew everything about me. He had already told me that he’d been watching, and he’d said that he was coming for me. And now here he was, snuffling along my trail like a hellhound.
Unconsciously I sped up; the car behind me matched my pace and then began to close the gap between us. I turned right, left, right, on random streets. The other car stayed with me, edging ever closer, while I fought furiously against the impulse to mash down the gas pedal and roar away into the night. But through all my twists and turns he stayed with me, slowly gaining on me until he was only about thirty feet back.
I turned left again, and he followed. It was useless. I had to outrun him or confront him. My battered little car was not going to outrun anything faster than a three-speed bicycle, so clearly confrontation was the option.
But not here, not on these semidark residential streets, where he could do whatever he had in mind with no worry that he would be seen. If there was going to be a face-off, I wanted it to happen under the bright glare of the lights along Dixie Highway, someplace where security cameras and convenience store clerks would see everything.
I turned the car back the way I had come, back toward Dixie Highway, and a moment later the other car swung in behind me, once more moving a little closer. And he edged even nearer as I hurried up to the highway, turned right into traffic, and then pulled into the first open gas station. I parked in the brightest area of light, right in front of the window, clearly in view of the clerk and the security camera. I put the car in park and waited, engine idling. A moment later the car that had followed me all the way from my house slid to a stop next to me.
It was not the battered old Cadillac Crowley had been driving before. Instead, it was a newish Ford Taurus. It looked like a car I had seen before—a car I had seen frequently, even daily, and as its driver opened up his door and stepped out into the bright orange glare of the security lights, I realized why that was.
And so instead of exploding out of my car to bludgeon Crowley with my swollen hands, I simply sat behind the wheel and rolled down the window as the other driver approached. He came right up to my car, looked down at me, and smiled: a beautiful, blissful smile that revealed hundreds of shiny, sharp teeth, and in the face of such complete happiness there was only one thing I could say.
“Sergeant Doakes,” I said, with a very good imitation of mild surprise. “What on earth are you doing here at this hour?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
FOR A LONG AND UNEASY MOMENT, SERGEANT DOAKES DID not answer. He just looked down at me and smiled his bright predator’s smile until I began to feel like the lack of conversation was turning a bit uncomfortable. Even more disquieting than the sergeant’s toothy silence, I remembered the gym bag on the floor of the backseat, right behind me. The contents of that bag would be difficult to explain to someone with a nasty, suspicious mind—someone, in other words, exactly like Doakes—and if he were to open the bag and see my collection of innocent toys it could well make for a few very awkward moments, since I was under Official Suspicion for using just such items.
But Dexter was raised on danger and bred on bluff, and this was exactly the kind of crisis that brought out the very best in me. So I took the initiative and broke the ice.
“This is an amazing coincidence,” I said brightly. “I was just out for some antihistamines.” I showed him my swollen hands, bu
t he didn’t seem interested. “Do you live around here somewhere?” I paused for his reply; he didn’t give me one, and as the silence grew I had to fight down the impulse to ask whether the cat had his tongue, before I realized that he was not carrying his speech synthesizer. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “You don’t have your talking machine, do you? Well, then, I’ll cut this short. Nothing worse than a one-sided conversation.” And, reaching to roll up the window, I added a cheery, “Good night, Sergeant!”
Doakes leaned forward and put both his shiny prosthetic claws on the top of my window and pushed down. He was not smiling now, and the muscles in his cheeks flexed visibly as he leaned down and kept my window from closing. I wondered briefly what would happen if his pressure broke the glass: Was it possible that a shard of broken window would spear up past his silver claws and slice his wrists open? The thought of Doakes bleeding out in the parking lot beside my car was very appealing—but of course, there was also the possibility that the horrible wet blood would spurt out of him, into the car, and cover me in awful sticky red mess, which was an image that made my skin crawl. Not just the nasty appalling blood, but Doakes’s vile blood; it was a thought so revolting that for a moment I couldn’t breathe.