Somehow I had to neutralize Doakes. Somehow someway sometime soon I had to—
“Are you going to be my dad?” Cody asked suddenly.
Luckily I had nothing in my mouth which might choke me, but for a moment it felt like there was something in my throat, something the approximate size of a Thanksgiving turkey.
When I could breathe again, I managed to stammer out, “Why do you ask?”
He was still watching his rod tip. “Mom says maybe,” he said.
“Did she?” I said, and he nodded without looking up.
My head whirled. What was Rita thinking? I had been so wrapped up in the hard work of ramming my disguise down Doakes’s throat that I had never really thought about what was going on in Rita’s head. Apparently, I should have. Could she truly be thinking that, that—it was unthinkable. But I suppose in a strange way it might make sense if one was a human being. Fortunately I am not, and the thought seemed completely bizarre to me. Mom says maybe? Maybe I would be Cody’s dad? Meaning, um—
“Well,” I said, which was a very good start considering I had absolutely no idea what I might say next. Happily for me, 8 4
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just as I realized nothing resembling a coherent answer was going to come out of my mouth, Cody’s rod tip jerked savagely. “You have a fish!” I said, and for the next few minutes it was all he could do to hang on as the line whirred off his reel. The fish made repeated ferocious, slashing zigzags to the right, the left, under the boat, and then straight for the horizon. But slowly, in spite of several long runs away from the boat, Cody worked the fish closer. I coached him to keep the rod tip up, wind in the line, work the fish in to where I could get a hand on the leader and bring it into the boat. Cody watched it flop on the deck, its forked tail still flipping wildly.
“A blue runner,” I said. “That is one wild fish.” I bent to release it, but it was bucking too much for me to get a hand on it. A thin stream of blood came from its mouth and onto my clean white deck, which was a bit upsetting. “Ick,” I said. “I think he swallowed the hook. We’ll have to cut it out.” I pulled my fillet knife from its black plastic sheath and laid it on the deck. “There’s going to be a lot of blood,” I warned Cody. I do not like blood, and I did not want it in my boat, not even fish blood. I took the two steps forward to open the dry locker and get an old towel I kept for cleaning up.
“Ha,” I heard behind me, softly. I turned around.
Cody had taken the knife and stuck it into the fish, watching it struggle away from the blade, and then carefully sticking the point in again. This second time he pushed the blade deep into the fish’s gills, and a gout of blood ran out onto the deck.
“Cody,” I said.
He looked up at me and, wonder of wonders, he smiled. “I like fishing, Dexter,” he said.
C H A P T E R 1 0
By monday morning i still had not gotten in touch with Deborah. I called repeatedly, and although I became so familiar with the sound of the tone that I could hum it, Deborah did not re
spond. It was increasingly frustrating; here I was with a possible way out of the stranglehold Doakes had put me in, and I could get no further with it than the telephone. It’s terrible to have to depend on someone else.
But I am persistent and patient, among my many other Boy Scout virtues. I left dozens of messages, all of them cheerful and clever, and that positive attitude must have done the trick, because I finally got an answer.
I had just settled into my desk chair to finish a report on a double homicide, nothing exciting. A single weapon, probably a machete, and a few moments of wild abandon. The initial wounds on both victims had been delivered in bed, where they had apparently been caught in flagrante delicto. The man had managed to raise one arm, but a little too late to save 8 6
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his neck. The woman made it all the way to the door before a blow to the upper spine sent a spurt of blood onto the wall beside the door frame. Routine stuff, the kind of thing that makes up most of my work, and extremely unpleasant. There is just so very much blood in two human beings, and when somebody decides to let it all out at once it makes a terrible and unattractive mess, which I find deeply offensive. Organizing and analyzing it makes me feel a great deal better, and my job can be deeply satisfying on occasion.
But this one was a real mess. I had found spatter on the ceiling fan, most likely from the machete blade as the killer raised his arm between strokes. And because the fan was on, it flung more spatter to the far corners of the room.
It had been a busy day for Dexter. I was just trying to word a paragraph in the report properly to indicate that it had been what we like to call a “crime of passion” when my phone rang.
“Hey, Dex,” the voice said, and it sounded so relaxed, even sleepy, that it took me a moment to realize it was Deborah.
“Well,” I said. “The rumors of your death were exaggerated.”
She laughed, and again the sound of it was downright mellow, unlike her usual hard-edged chuckle. “Yeah,” she said.
“I’m alive. But Kyle has kept me pretty busy.”
“Remind him of the labor laws, Sis. Even sergeants need their rest.”
“Mm, I don’t know about that,” she said. “I feel pretty good without it.” And she gave a throaty, two-syllable chuckle that sounded as unlike Debs as if she had asked me to show her the best way to cut through living human bone.