Only my highly trained nerves of steel prevented me from bumping my head on the ceiling fan; I am nearly impossible to sneak up on, and yet I’d had no idea there was anyone else in the room. But I turned around and there was Cody, looking at me with his large, unblinking eyes. “You too?” I said. “You like to go fishing?”
He nodded; two words at a time was close to his daily limit.
“Well, then,” I said. “I guess it’s settled. How about tomorrow morning?”
“Oh,” Rita said, “I don’t think— I mean, he isn’t— You don’t have to, Dexter.”
Cody looked at me. Naturally enough he didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. It was all there in his eyes. “Rita,”
I said, “sometimes the boys need to get away from the girls.
Cody and I are going fishing in the morning. Bright and early,” I said to Cody.
“Why?”
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“I don’t know why,” I said. “But you’re supposed to go early, so we will.” Cody nodded, looked at his mother, and then turned around and walked down the hall.
“Really, Dexter,” Rita said. “You really don’t have to.”
And, of course, I knew I didn’t have to. But why shouldn’t I? It probably wouldn’t cause me actual physical pain. Besides that, it would be nice to get away for a few hours. Especially from Doakes. And in any case—again, I don’t know why it should be, but kids really do matter to me. I certainly don’t get all gooey-eyed at the sight of training wheels on a bicycle, but on the whole I find children far more interesting than their parents.
The next morning, as the sun was coming up, Cody and I were motoring slowly out of the canal by my apartment in my seventeen-foot Whaler. Cody wore a blue-and-yellow life vest and sat very still on the cooler. He slumped down just a little so that his head almost vanished inside the vest, making him look like a brightly colored turtle.
Inside the cooler was soda and a lunch Rita had made for us, a light snack for ten or twelve people. I had brought frozen shrimp for bait, since this was Cody’s first trip and I didn’t know how he might react to sticking a sharp metal hook into something that was still alive. I rather enjoyed it, of course—the more alive, the better!—but one can’t expect sophisticated tastes from a child.
Out the canal, into Biscayne Bay, and I headed across to Cape Florida, steering for the channel that cut past the light-house. Cody didn’t say anything until we came within sight 8 2
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of Stiltsville, that odd collection of houses built on pilings in the middle of the bay. Then he tugged at my sleeve. I bent down to hear him over the roar of the engine and the wind.
“Houses,” he said.
“Yes,” I yelled. “Sometimes there are even people in them.”
He watched the houses go by and then, when they began to disappear behind us, he sat back down on the cooler. He turned around once more to look at them when they were almost out of sight. After that he just sat until we got to Fowey Rock and I idled down. I put the motor in neutral and slid the anchor over the bow, waiting to make sure it caught before turning the engine off.
“All right, Cody,” I said. “It’s time to kill some fish.”
He smiled, a very rare event. “Okay,” he said.
He watched me with unblinking attention as I showed him how to thread the shrimp onto the hook. Then he tried it himself, very slowly and carefully pushing the hook in until the point came out again. He looked at the hook and then up at me. I nodded, and he looked back at the shrimp, reaching out to touch the place where the hook broke through the shell.
“All right,” I said. “Now drop it in the water.” He looked up at me. “That’s where the fish are,” I said. Cody nodded, pointed his rod tip over the side of the boat, and pushed the release button on his little Zebco reel to drop the bait into the water. I flicked my bait over the side, too, and we sat there rocking slowly on the waves.
I watched Cody fish with his fierce blank concentration.
Perhaps it was the combination of open water and a small boy, but I couldn’t help but think of Reiker. Even though I could not safely investigate him, I was assuming that he was guilty. When would he know that MacGregor was gone, and D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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what would he do about it? It seemed most likely that he would panic and try to disappear—and yet, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered. There is a natural human reluctance to abandon an entire life and start over somewhere else. Perhaps he would just be cautious for a while.
And if so, I could fill my time with the new entry on my rather exclusive social register, whoever had created the Howling Vegetable of N.W. 4th Street, and the fact that this sounded rather like a Sherlock Holmes title made it no less urgent.