Dearly Devoted Dexter (Dexter 2)

“Sure. Maybe we’ll catch him at a comedy club.”

“We will catch him, Deb,” I said, although neither one of us believed me. She just grunted; the light changed and she stomped on the gas as if she was killing a poisonous snake.

We moved through the traffic back to Deb’s house. The morning rush hour was coming to an end. At the corner of Flagler and 34th a car had run up onto the sidewalk and smacked into a light pole in front of a church. A cop stood beside the car between two men who were screaming at each other. A little girl sat on the curb crying. Ah, the enchanting rhythms of another magical day in paradise.

A few moments later we turned down Medina and Deborah parked her car beside mine in the driveway. She switched off the engine and for a moment we both just sat there listening to the ticking of the cooling motor. “Shit,” she said.

“I agree.”

“What do we do now?” she said.

“Sleep,” I said. “I’m too tired to think.”

She pounded both hands on the steering wheel. “How can I sleep, Dexter? Knowing that Kyle is . . .” She hit the wheel again. “Shit,” she said.

“The van will turn up, Deb. You know that. The database will spit out every white van with a choose life tag, and with an APB out it’s just a matter of time.”

“Kyle doesn’t have time,” she said.

“Human beings need sleep, Debs,” I said. “And so do I.”

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A courier’s van squealed around the corner and clunked to a halt in front of Deborah’s house. The driver jumped out with a small package and approached Deb’s front door. She said, “Shit,” one last time and got out of the car to collect the package.

I closed my eyes and sat for just a moment longer, pondering, which is what I do instead of thinking when I am very tired. It really seemed like wasted effort; nothing came to me except to wonder where I’d left my running shoes. With my new sense of humor apparently still idling, that seemed funny to me and, to my great surprise I heard a very faint echo from the Dark Passenger. Why is that funny? I asked. Is it because I left the shoes at Rita’s? Of course it didn’t answer. The poor thing was probably still sulking. And yet it had chuckled. Is it something else altogether that seems funny? I asked. But again there was no answer; just a faint sense of anticipation and hunger.

The courier rattled and roared away. Just as I was about to yawn, stretch, and admit that my finely tuned cerebral powers were on hiatus, I heard a kind of retching moan. I opened my eyes and looked up to see Deborah stagger forward a step and then sit down hard on her front walk. I got out of the car and hurried over to her.

“Deb?” I said. “What is it?”

She dropped the package and hid her face in her hands, making more unlikely noises. I squatted beside her and picked up the package. It was a small box, about the right size to hold a wristwatch. I pried the end up. Inside was a ziplock bag. And inside the bag was a human finger.

A finger with a big, flashy pinkie ring.

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It took a very great deal more than patting deborah on the shoulder and saying “There there” to get her calmed down this time. In fact I had to force-feed her a large glass of peppermint schnapps. I knew that she needed some kind of chemical help to relax and even sleep if possible, but Debs had nothing in her medicine chest stronger than Tylenol, and she was not a drinker. I finally found the schnapps bottle under her kitchen sink, and after making sure it wasn’t actually drain cleaner I made her chug down a glass of it. From the apparent taste, it might as well have been drain cleaner.

She shuddered and gagged but she drank it, too bone weary and brain numb to fight.

While she slumped in her chair I threw a few changes of her clothing into a grocery bag and dropped it by the front door. She stared at the bags and then at me. “What are you doing,” she said. Her voice was slurred and she sounded uninterested in the answer.

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“You’re staying at my place for a few days,” I said.

“Don’t want to,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “You have to.”

She shifted her gaze to the bag of clothing by the door.

“Why.”