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to these today and let me know what you think? Thanks, Dex,” she went on relentlessly, leaning to plant a kiss on my cheek and then heading for the door, already moving on to the next item on her checklist. “Cody?” she called. “It’s time to go, sweetie. Come on.”
There was another three minutes of commotion, the highlights of which were Cody and Astor sticking their heads in the kitchen door to say good-bye, and then the front door slammed and all was si
lent.
And in the silence I thought I could almost hear, as I had heard in the night, the faint echo of the music. I knew I should leap from my chair and charge out the door with my saber clamped firmly between my teeth—charge into the bright light of day and find this thing, whatever it was, beard it in its den and slay it—but I could not.
The Moloch Web site had stuck its fear into me, and even though I knew it was foolish, wrong, counterproductive, totally non-Dexter in every way, I could not fight it. Moloch. Just a silly ancient name. An old myth that had disappeared thousands of years ago, torn down with Solomon’s temple. It was nothing, a figment from prehistoric imaginations, less than nothing—except that I was afraid of it.
There seemed nothing else to do except to stumble through the day with my head down and hope that it didn’t get me, whatever it was. I was bone tired, and maybe that was adding to my sense of helplessness. But I didn’t think so. I had the feeling that a very bad thing was circling closer with its nose full of my scent, and I could already feel its sharp teeth in my neck. All I could hope for was to make its sport last a little longer, but sooner or later I would feel its claws on me and then I, too, would bleat, beat my heels in the dust, and die. There was no fight left in me; there was, in fact, almost nothing at all left in me, except a kind of reflex humanity that said it was time to go to work.
I picked up Rita’s stack of CDs and slogged out the door. And as I stood in the doorway of the house, turning the key to lock the front door, a white Avalon very slowly pulled away from the curb and drove off with a lazy insolence that cut through all my fatigue DEXTER IN THE DARK
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and despair and sliced right into me with a jolt of sheer terror that rocked me back against the door as the CDs slipped from my fingers and crashed onto the walk.
The car motored slowly up the street to the stop sign. I watched, nerveless and numb. And as its brake lights flicked off and it started up and through the intersection, a small piece of Dexter woke up, and it was very angry.
It might have been the absolute bold uncaring disrespect of the Avalon’s behavior, and it might have been that all I really needed was the jolt of adrenaline to supplement my morning coffee. Whatever it was, it filled me with a sense of righteous indignation, and before I could even decide what to do I was already doing it, running down the driveway to my car and leaping into the driver’s seat. I jammed the key into the ignition, fired up the engine, and raced after the Avalon.
I ignored the stop sign, accelerated through the intersection, and caught sight of the car as it turned right a few blocks ahead. I went much faster than I should have and saw him turn left toward U.S. 1. I closed the gap and sped up, frantic to catch him before he got lost in the rush-hour traffic.
I was only a block or so back when he turned north on U.S. 1
and I followed, ignoring the squealing brakes and the deafening chord of horn music from the other motorists. The Avalon was about ten cars ahead of me now, and I used all my Miami driving skills to get closer, concentrating only on the road and ignoring the lines that separated the lanes, even failing to enjoy the wonderful creativity of the language that followed me from the surrounding cars. The worm had turned, and although it might not have all its teeth, it was ready for battle, however it was that worms fought. I was angry—another novelty for me. I had been drained of all my darkness and pushed into a bright drab corner where all the walls were closing in, but enough was enough. It was time for Dexter to fight back. And although I did not really know what I planned to do when I caught up with the other car, I was absolutely going to do it.
I was half a block back when the Avalon’s driver became aware of me and sped up immediately, slipping into the far left lane into a 156
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space so tight that the car behind him slammed on its brakes and spun sideways. The two cars behind it smashed into its exposed side and a great roar of horns and brakes hammered at my ears. I found just enough room to my right to squeak through around the crash and then over to the left again in the now-open far lane. The Avalon was a block ahead and picking up speed, but I put the pedal down and followed.
For several blocks the gap between us stayed about the same.
Then the Avalon caught up with the traffic that was ahead of the accident and I got a bit closer, until I was only two cars behind, close enough to see a pair of large sunglasses looking back at me in the side mirror. And as I surged up to within one car length of his bumper, he suddenly yanked his steering wheel hard to the left, bouncing his car up onto the median strip and sliding sideways down into traffic on the other side. I was past him before I could even react. I could almost hear mocking laughter drifting back at me as he trundled off toward Homestead.
But I refused to let him go. It was not that catching the other car might give me some answers, although that was probably true. And I was not thinking of justice or any other abstract concept. No, this was pure indignant anger, rising from some unused interior corner and flowing straight out of my lizard brain and down to my knuckles. What I really wanted to do was pull this guy out of his rotten little car and smack him in the face. It was an entirely new sensation, this idea of inflicting bodily harm in the heat of anger, and it was intoxicating, strong enough to shut down any logical impulses that might be left in me and it sent me across the median in pursuit.
My car made a terrible crunching noise as it bounced up onto the median and then down on the other side, and a large cement truck missed flattening me by only about four inches, but I was off again, heading after the Avalon in the lighter southbound traffic.
Far ahead of me there were several spots of moving white color, any one of which might have been my target. I stomped down on the gas and followed.
The gods of traffic were kind to me, and I zipped through the steadily moving cars for almost half a mile before I hit my first red DEXTER IN THE DARK
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light. There were several cars in each lane halted obediently at the intersection and no way around them—except to repeat my car-crunching trick of banging up onto the median strip. I did. I came down off the narrow end of the median and into the intersection just in time to cause severe inconvenience to a bright yellow Hummer that was foolishly trying to use the roads in a rational way. It gave a manic lurch to avoid me, and very nearly succeeded; there was only the lightest of thuds as I bounced neatly off its front bumper, through the intersection, and onward, followed by yet another blast of horn music and yelling.
The Avalon would be a quarter of a mile ahead if it was still on U.S. 1, and I did not wait for the distance to grow. I chugged on in my trusty, banged-up little car, and after only half a minute I was in sight of two white cars directly ahead of me—one of them a Chevy SUV and the other a minivan. My Avalon was nowhere to be seen.
I slowed just for a moment—and out of the corner of my eye I saw it again, edging around behind a grocery store in a strip mall parking lot off to the right. I slammed my foot down onto the gas pedal and slewed across two lanes of traffic and into the parking lot. The driver of the other car saw me coming; he sped up and pulled out onto the street running perpendicular to U.S. 1, racing away to the east as fast as he could go. I hurried through the parking lot and followed.
He led me through a residential area for a mile or so, then around another corner and past a park where a day-care program was in full swing. I got a little closer—just in time to see a woman holding a baby and leading two other children step into the road in front of us.
The Avalon accelerated up and onto the sidewalk and the woman continued to move slowly across the road looking at me as if I was a billboard she couldn’t read. I swerved to go behind her, but one of her children suddenly darted backward right in front of me and I stood on the brake. My car went into a skid, and for a moment it looked as if I would slide right into the whole slow, stupid cluster of them as they stood there in the road, watching me with no sign of interest. But my tires bit at last, and I managed to spin the 158