And IT waited for the others.
T H I R T Y - S E V E N
As I know very well, the world is not a nice place.
There are numberless awful things that can happen, especially to children: they can be taken by a stranger or a family friend or a divorced dad; they can wander away and vanish, fall in a sinkhole, drown in a neighbor’s pool—and with a hurricane coming there were even more possibilities. The list is limited only by their imaginations, and Cody and Astor were quite well supplied with imagination.
But when Rita told me they were gone, I did not even consider sinkholes or traffic accidents or motorcycle gangs. I knew what had happened to Cody and Astor, knew it with a cold, hard certainty that was more clear and positive than anything the Passenger had ever whispered to me. One thought burst in my head, and I never questioned it.
In the half a second it took to register Rita’s words my brain flooded with small pictures: the cars following me, the night visi-tors knocking on the doors and windows, the scary guy leaving his calling card with the kids, and, most convincingly, the searing statement uttered by Professor Keller: “Moloch liked human sacrifice.
Especially children.”
DEXTER IN THE DARK
279
I did not know why Moloch wanted my children in particular, but I knew without the slightest doubt that he, she, or it had them. And I knew that this was not a good thing for Cody and Astor.
I lost no time getting home, swerving through the traffic like the Miami native I am, and in just a few minutes I was out of the car.
Rita stood in the rain at the end of the driveway, looking like a small, desolate mouse.
“Dexter,” Rita said, with a world of emptiness in her voice.
“Please, oh God, Dexter, find them.”
“Lock the house,” I said, “and come with me.”
She looked at me for a moment as if I had said to leave the kids and go bowling. “Now,” I said. “I know where they are, but we need help.”
Rita turned and ran to the house and I pulled out my cell phone and dialed.
“What,” Deborah answered.
“I need your help,” I said.
There was a short silence and then a hard bark of not-amused laughter. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “There’s a hurricane coming in, the bad guys are lined up five deep all over town waiting for the power to go out, and you need my help.”
“Cody and Astor are gone,” I said. “Moloch has them.”
“Dexter,” she said.
“I have to find them fast, and I need your help.”
“Get over here,” she said.
As I put my phone away Rita came splattering down the sidewalk through the puddles that were already forming. “I locked up,”
she said. “But Dexter, what if they come back and we’re gone?”
“They won’t come back,” I said. “Not unless we bring them back.” Apparently that was not the reassuring remark she was hoping for. She stuffed a fist into her mouth and looked like she was trying very hard not to scream. “Get in the car, Rita,” I said. I opened the door for her and she looked at me over her half-digested knuckles. “Come on,” I said, and she finally climbed in. I got behind the wheel, started up, and nosed the car out of the driveway.
“You said,” Rita stammered, and I was relieved to notice that 280
JEFF LINDSAY
she had removed the fist from her mouth, “you said you know where they are.”