I was not even into my cubicle when Vince Masuoka met me with a massive fake frown “Where are the doughnuts?” he said accusingly.
“What doughnuts?” I said.
“It was your turn,” he said. “You were supposed to bring doughnuts today.”
“I had a rough night,” I said.
“So now we’re all going to have a rough morning?” he demanded. “Where’s the justice in that?”
“I don’t do justice, Vince,” I said. “Just blood spatter.”
“Hmmph,” he said. “Apparently you don’t do doughnuts, either.” And he stalked away with a nearly convincing imitation of righteous indignation, leaving me to reflect that I could not remember another occasion when Vince had gotten the best of me in any kind of verbal interchange. One more sign that the train had left the station. Could this really be the end of the line for poor Decaying Dexter?
The rest of the workday was long and awful, as we have always heard that workdays are supposed to be. This had never been the case for Dexter; I have always kept busy and artificially cheerful in DEXTER IN THE DARK
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my job, and never watched the clock or complained. Perhaps I had enjoyed work because I was conscious of the fact that it was part of the game, a piece of the Great Joke of Dexter putting one over and passing for human. But a really good joke needs at least one other in on it, and since I was alone now, bereft of my inner audience, the punch line seemed to elude me.
I plodded manfully through the morning, visited a corpse downtown, and then came back for a pointless round of lab work. I finished out the day by ordering some supplies and finishing a report. As I was tidying up my desk to go home, my telephone rang.
“I need your help,” my sister said brusquely.
“Of course you do,” I said. “Very good of you to admit it.”
“I’m on duty until midnight,” she said, ignoring my witty and piquant sally, “and Kyle can’t get the shutters up by himself.”
So often in this life I find myself halfway through a conversation and realizing I don’t know what I’m talking about. Very unsettling, although if everybody else would realize the same thing, particularly those in Washington, it would be a much better world.
“Why does Kyle need to get the shutters up at all?” I asked.
Deborah snorted. “Jesus Christ, Dexter, what do you do all day?
We’ve got a hurricane coming in.”
I might well have said that whatever else I do all day, I don’t have the leisure to sit around and listen to the Weather Channel. Instead, I just said, “A hurricane, really. How exciting. When did this happen?”
“Try to get there around six. Kyle will be waiting,” she said.
“All right,” I said. But she had already hung up.
Since I speak fluent Deborah, I suppose I should have accepted her telephone call as a kind of formal apology for her recent pointless hostility. Quite possibly she had come to accept the Dark Passenger, especially since it was gone. This should have made me happy. But considering the day I had been having, it was just one more splinter under the fingernail for poor Downtrodden Dexter.
O
n top of that, it seemed like sheer effrontery for a hurricane to pick this moment for its pointless harassment. Was there no end to the pain and suffering I would be forced to endure?
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Ah well, to exist is to wallow in misery. I headed out the door for my date with Deborah’s paramour.
Before I started my car, however, I placed a call to Rita, who would be very nearly home now by my calculations.
“Dexter,” she answered breathlessly, “I can’t remember how much bottled water we have and the lines at Publix are all the way out into the parking lot.”
“Well then we’ll just have to drink beer,” I said.