Dexter Is Dead (13 page)

“Well,” I said, looking with quiet satisfaction at the remains of my steady, no-nonsense bear claw, “no accounting for taste.”

“Mmp,” he said agreeably, and shoved half of the doughnut into his mouth. He washed it down with coffee and started on his second doughnut while I finished my bear claw and wondered whether it would be considered greedy if I topped it off with a couple of Bavarian creams. I decided that no one could possibly criticize me for having only one, and I bought one and used it to help the rest of my coffee go down smoothly.

Brian made one more trip to the counter, too, returning with a cake doughnut smeared with maple frosting, leaving me to ponder once again the vast marvels of heredity versus environment.

“Well,” Brian said, as we sipped at the last of our coffees. “Where shall we begin?”

“I suppose with my new address,” I said, and I told him the location of my little Shangri-la. He nodded and took a sip of his coffee.

“And on to new business,” he said happily. “How should we stay alive today?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “But you have to remember that I have my own agenda, too. I want to stay out of jail.”

He arched his eyebrows at me. “Yes, of course, but really,” he said, “isn’t staying alive more important?”

“Give me liberty or give me death,” I told him.

“Death is much easier to arrange, I’m afraid,” he said, shaking his head.

“Maybe,” I said. “But I have to do what I can.”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose you’re not much good if you’re in jail.”

“Exactly my point,” I said.

He waggled a finger at me. “But sooner or later, having two separate agendas is going to cause trouble.”

“Well,” I told him with my customary lighthearted touch, “perhaps I’ll think of a way to merge them.” And I thought happily of sending a troop of
drogas
after Anderson. A happy ending for all—he would even get a hero’s funeral, which was certainly a great deal more than he deserved. “But, Brian—I don’t know how much good I am
out
of jail. I mean—I can’t risk carrying a weapon of any kind. And that’s…Seriously, what’s the plan?”

Brian said nothing, just finished off his coffee, and to my mind he looked a little bit shifty, as if he hoped his ostentatious coffee swallowing would distract me and I wouldn’t remember what I’d asked him.

It didn’t work. He put down the cup, looked vaguely out the window.

“Brian,” I said, a little testy, “you do have some kind of plan, don’t you?”

He looked back at me, hesitated, and then shrugged. “To be perfectly honest,” he said, “I was hoping something might occur to us.”

I noticed that he said
us,
and that was almost as irritating as his notion of winging it when pursued by a horde of assassins. “All this time, nothing has occurred to
you
?” I said.

“One thing did,” he said, trying hard for a tone of injured righteousness. “I got you out.”

I felt myself grinding my teeth together at the realization that, just like Deborah, Brian had decided that when the going gets tough, the tough get Dexter—and then they make him do all the work. “This is
my
problem?” I said with some heat. “I’m supposed to figure out how to keep us both alive?”

“Well,” he said. “I mean, you had a much better education.”

“Yes, but he’s your drug lord,” I said, and I realized that he’d succeeded in knocking away my cool control and I was speaking much too loudly. I lowered my voice. “I don’t know the first thing about these people, Brian,” I said. “Not what they’re likely to do, or how they’ll do it, or—Nothing at all. How am I even supposed to find them?”

“Oh, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Brian said soothingly. “I’m quite sure they’ll find
us
.”

For some reason, I could not find any comfort in that. “Wonderful,” I said. “And I can assume they know what they’re doing, of course.”

“Of course,” he said happily. “Some of them are very good, too.” He smiled, and even though it was the closest to a real smile I’d ever seen from Brian, the effect was spoiled somewhat by the bright pink, blue, and green sprinkles stuck to his teeth. “Let’s just hope we’re a little better,” he said.

I ground my teeth some more. It didn’t actually do any good, but it was probably better than leaping across the tabletop and sinking my canines into Brian’s neck. “All right,” I said. “So your wonderful plan is to wait until they come after us, and then be better than them.”

“A little oversimplified,” he said. “But accurate.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. When I opened my eyes again, Brian was looking at me with a happy little smirk on his face. “How will they do it?” I asked him. “I mean, if it won’t spoil your plan to tell me.”

“Oh, not at all,” he said. “I know how Raul thinks—I mean, I ran so many of these little errands for him, and he got very specific most of the time.” He nodded, and at least he lost the smirk. “He hasn’t found me yet, and he is not a patient man. So his first move will be to try to frighten me so I’ll do something silly and become visible.”

“Frighten you with something like killing Octavio, and dumping him in a room you got with that credit card?” I asked.

“Mmmm, maybe,” Brian said thoughtfully. “Of course, he wanted to kill Octavio anyway, and…You know, I was really looking for something a little splashier.”

“And if we survive the splash?” I asked.

“Then we watch for his men,” he said. “Whatever they do, they’ll be very close, watching for
us
. We find them first.”

I sighed again, wondering whether Brian really believed it would be that simple. “All right, fine, we wait,” I said. At least I could do that without too much effort. And in the meantime…“I can use the time to try to stay out of jail.”

“Oh, certainly,” he said. “You do what you must. When something happens, I’ll call you.” He hesitated slightly, and then, looking a little uneasy, he added, “But do watch your back, brother.”

“I plan to,” I said.

He nodded. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“The whole case against me is pure fiction, made up by Anderson,” I said. “If I can find something to show he tampered with evidence—”

“He did tamper, didn’t he?” Brian asked.

“Only when he didn’t just invent it,” I said. “So I thought I would have a quiet chat with Vince Masuoka.”

Brian nodded. “That would certainly be a good place to start,” he said. “He seemed very…indignant?”

“Perhaps he still is,” I said.

He still was. I called him from my car after Brian left me with a promise to get in touch this evening, and Vince answered right away, speaking in a kind of shocked and reverent whisper. “Dexter, my God,” he said. “I can’t believe—I mean, I really tried to—Shit. I can’t talk now. I’m in the lab, and there’s—”

“Can you meet me for lunch?” I said.

“I think so, if I—Yes. I mean, I’ll do what I can to—I can get away around noon?”

“Good,” I said. “Meet me at Lunar Sushi.”

“I will,” he said in an eager whisper. “I mean, I’ll try. And if—Oh! Somebody’s coming…!”

“See you at noon, Vince,” I said, and broke the connection.

I had three hours to fill before then, and not a great deal to fill them with. I thought about going back to my hotel room, and firmly rejected the idea on humanitarian grounds. If I wasn’t going to rest, then the most natural thing would be to eat. But I had just eaten, and I would be eating more when I met with Vince, so it really seemed like a bit much to kill time between meals by eating. I thought about it anyway. After all, doughnuts are not really
substantial,
are they? Very little protein in the average bear claw, in spite of the name. And since I hadn’t partaken of the garish sprinkles my brother gorged himself on, I’d had nothing green to eat, either.

I remembered a map I’d drawn in my cell, after days of unspeakable swill they laughingly referred to as “food” at the TGK. The map traced a route that wound its way through South Miami, into the Grove, and then over to Miami Beach. At every point along the route where there was a restaurant I liked, I had placed an ornate little star and a small icon of the appropriate kind of food: tiny pizzas, sushi rolls, stone crabs, and so on. It had been my whimsical thought that if I ever saw the clear light of freedom again, I would trace the whole course, stopping at each star to sample their icon.

I could start my trip now, work my way through the first four or five, and end up close to Lunar Sushi just in time for my lunch with Vince. The idea had its charms—but on the whole, I couldn’t make myself believe that gorging myself was the best way to spend my time when both Life and Liberty hung so tenuously in the balance, presumably to be joined at any moment by Pursuit of Happiness. I put the thought away.

What I really needed to do was to keep a low profile, avoid any chance of discovery by either the Good Guys, as played by Anderson, or the Bad Guys, starring Raul and a cast of thousands. Since I had already ruled out returning to my miserable, bone-breaking hotel room, there were very few options left to me. I could always take out my boat; I’d be relatively safe in the middle of Biscayne Bay, and I would see anyone approaching. But the odds were fifty-fifty that Anderson at the least, and maybe Raul’s team as well, knew about the boat, and had it watched. It wasn’t worth the risk.

That didn’t leave too many places—to be perfectly honest, it left exactly none that actually sprang to mind. So I drove north, since that was the direction I was pointed in when I left the doughnut shop. At least it led me farther away from the torture equipment laughingly referred to as a bed that crouched in my hotel room awaiting its prey.

The morning rush hour was dying down at last, and the traffic moved easily enough all the way up to Le Jeune Road. Still with no definite goal in mind, I turned left and headed toward Coconut Grove.

As I drove along through the center of the Grove, I marveled yet again at how much had changed since I grew up here. Most of the shops I had known then were gone, replaced by different, new shops filled with totally different overpriced and pointless items. Of course, there were a few landmarks that hadn’t changed since the dawn of time. The park was still pretty much as it had been, and across from it the library was still there, though it was now partially hidden by the newer buildings that had sprung up around it. I had spent many happy hours in the library, trying to find a book that would explain to me once and for all how to act human—and when I was a little older, a book that might tell me why I should bother.

As I turned onto McFarlane Road and headed down the hill toward the library, I wondered whether it might not be a good place to lay low for a few hours. It was cool, quiet, and had both Internet and reading matter aplenty. And then, right in front of the building, I saw that there was a parking space open. In the memory of living man, this had never happened before, so I took it as a sign from God and made an immediate U-turn. I slid into the spot and parked, and thinking that I might do a little bit of diligent low-profile digging while I waited, I grabbed up the folder of legal papers I had been given at the jail when they returned my stuff.

I locked the car, put an enormous amount of money into the meter, and went into the library. I found a nice, quiet spot over by the back window and sat down to go through my folder. What with finding corpses and so on, I’d been far too busy to open the folder; I hadn’t even glanced at it yet. I’d assumed that it was copies of the great heap of paperwork that is required to do absolutely anything nowadays, especially within the bureaucratic hell that is Official Miami. I knew from experience that the Department of Corrections demanded many pages of mind-numbing trivia even for something as simple as getting a box of paper clips, and I expected that the actual release of a prisoner would generate several reams of stilted prose.

But when I opened the folder, the first clump of papers I saw on top of the heap did not carry the imprint of Corrections. Instead, the letterhead said,
Department of Children and Families.

For a long moment I just stared, and then my very first thought was a rather plaintive,
But I’m an adult!
And then luckily, a couple of gray cells floated up to the surface and suggested that some overworked and underbrained bureaucrat had obviously stuffed somebody else’s papers in my folder by mistake. It was a simple, laughable error, and no doubt I would even laugh at it someday, if I lived. I picked up the offending paperwork, intending to fling it in the nearest receptacle—and my eye caught a single word:
Astor
.

I paused, long enough to see that this word was joined to another,
Morgan,
and right next to it there were more:
Cody Morgan,
and
Lily Anne Morgan
. Since these were the names of my three children, it seemed far too much to write it off as coincidence, so I put the paper back down on the table in front of me and looked it over.

After a quick examination of several pages of baroque legal language, I concluded that the party of the first part, one Dexter Morgan, having acted
contra bonos mores
as well as
cum gladiis et fustubus
was now de facto and de jure a persona non grata in his role as legal guardian of said minor children. Further deponent sayeth that the party of the second part,
hight
Deborah Morgan, acting as
amicus paterna
in
uberrima fides,
did solemnly swear and affirm
cum hoc ergo propter hoc
that she would therefore ipso facto assume completely and totally the role of guardian
ad litem, in loco parentis
. The party of the first part hereby confirms that this
ad idem
agreement shall supersede all others and in witness thereof affixes his signature,
quod erat demonstrandum, et pedicabo te
.

Or words to that effect; there was an awful lot, and not all of it was in such nice Latin, but the gist of it was that I was signing over all my rights and privileges as sole surviving parent of Cody, Astor, and Lily Anne, and naming Deborah as their new mommy, which was probably in the document somewhere as
materfamilias
.