“Oh, well,” Carl said modestly, “more or less.”
Outside the jail, the thunder crashed and the rain began. I looked at Carl with real interest; now I knew what had unsettled DEXTER IN THE DARK
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my Dark Passenger. We were just starting out, and here was somebody who had already been there and back, on eleven occasions, more or less. For the first time I understood how my classmates at Ponce might feel when they came face-to-face with an NFL quarter-back.
“Carl enjoys killing people,” Harry said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you, Carl?”
“It keeps me busy,” Carl said happily.
“Until we caught you,” Harry said bluntly.
“Well, yes, there is that of course. Still . . .” he shrugged and gave Harry a very phony-looking smile, “it was fun while it lasted.”
“You got careless,” Harry said.
“Yes,” Carl said. “How could I know the police would be so very thorough?”
“How do you do it?” I blurted out.
“It’s not so hard,” Carl said.
“No, I mean— Um, like how?”
Carl looked at me searchingly, and I could almost hear a purring coming from the shadow just past his eyes. For a moment our eyes locked and the world was filled with the black sound of two predators meeting over one small, helpless prey. “Well, well,” Carl said at last. “Can it really be?” He turned to Harry just as I was beginning to squirm. “So I’m supposed to be an object lesson, is that it, Sergeant? Frighten your boy onto the straight and narrow path to godliness?”
Harry stared back, showing nothing, saying nothing.
“Well, I’m afraid I have to tell you that there is no way off this particular path, poor dear Harry. When you are on it, you are on it for life, and possibly beyond, and there is nothing you or I or the dear child here can do about it.”
“There’s one thing,” Harry said.
“Really,” Carl said, and now a slow black cloud seemed to be rising up around him, coalescing on the teeth of his smile, spreading its wings out toward Harry, and toward me. “And what might that be, pray tell?”
“Don’t get caught,” Harry said.
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For a moment the black cloud froze, and then it drew back and vanished. “Oh my God,” Carl said. “How I wish I knew how to laugh.” He shook his head slowly, from side to side. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Oh my God. What a wonderful dad you are, Sergeant Harry.” And he gave us such a huge smile that it almost looked real.
Harry turned his full ice-blue gaze on me now.
“He got caught,” Harry said to me, “because he didn’t know what he was doing. And now he will go to the electric chair. Because he didn’t know what the police were doing. Because,” Harry said without raising his voice at all and without blinking, “he had no training.”
I looked at Carl, watching us through the thick bars with his too-bright dead empty eyes. Caught. I looked back at Harry. “I understand,” I said.
And I did.
That was the end of my youthful rebellion.
And now, so many years later—wonderful years, filled with slicing and dicing and not getting caught—I truly knew what a remarkable gamble Harry had taken by introducing me to Carl. I could never hope to measure up to his performance—after all, Harry did things because he had feelings and I never would—but I could follow his example and make Cody and Astor toe the line. I would gamble, just as Harry had.
They would follow or not.
S I X T E E N