“She didn’t mean ‘play’ like you play kick the can,” I said. “It’s more like he’s daring us to try to catch him.”
“Then how is that different from kick the can?” she said.
“Nobody gets killed playing kick the can,” I told her. “What did this man look like?”
She shrugged. “He was old.”
“You mean, really old? White hair and wrinkles?”
“No, you know. Old like you,” she said.
“Ah, you mean old,” I said, feeling the icy hand of mortality brush its fingers across my forehead and leave feebleness and shaky 258
JEFF LINDSAY
hands in its wake. It was not a promising start toward getting a real description, but after all, she was ten years old and all grown-ups are equally uninteresting. It was clear that Deborah had made the smart move by choosing to speak to Officer Dim instead. This was hopeless. Still, I had to try.
A sudden inspiration hit me—or at any rate, considering my current lack of brain power, something that would have to stand in for inspiration. It would at least make sense if the scary guy had been Starzak, coming back after me. “Anything else about him you remember? Did he have an accent when he spoke?”
She shook her head. “You mean like French or something? No, he just talked regular. Who’s Kurt?”
It would be an exaggeration to say that my little heart went flip-flop at her words, but I certainly felt some kind of internal quiver.
“Kurt is the dead guy I just looked at. Why do you want to know?”
“The man said,” Astor said. “He said someday Cody would be a much better helper than Kurt.”
A sudden, very cold chill rolled through Dexter’s interior cli-mate. “Really,” I said. “What a nice man.”
“He wasn’t nice at all, Dexter, we told you. He was scary.”
“But what did he look like, Astor?” I said without any real hope.
“How can we find him if we don’t know what he looks like?”
“You don’t have to catch him, Dexter,” she said, with the same mildly irritated tone of voice. “He said you’ll find him when the time is right.”
The world stopped for a moment, just long enough for me to feel drops of ice water shoot out of all my pores as if they were spring-loaded. “What exactly did he say?” I asked her when things started up again.
“He said to tell you you’ll find him when the time is right,” she said. “I just said.”
“How did he say it?” I said. “ ‘Tell Daddy?’ ‘Tell that man?’
What?”
She sighed again. “Tell Dexter,” she said, slowly so I would understand. “That’s you. He said, ‘Tell Dexter he’ll find me when the time is right.’ ”
DEXTER IN THE DARK
259
I suppose I should have been even more scared. But strangely enough, I wasn’t. Instead, I felt better. Now I knew for sure—someone really was stalking me. Whether a god or a mortal, it didn’t matter anymore, and he would come get me when the time was right, whatever that meant.
Unless I got him first.
It was a silly thought, straight out of a high-school locker room.
I had so far shown absolutely no ability to stay even half a step ahead of whoever this was, let alone find him. I’d done nothing but watch as he stalked me, scared me, chased me, and drove me into a state of dark dithering unlike anything I had ever experienced before.