Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

Deborah shook her head with frustration, then blew out a short, explosive breath. “Fuck,” she said. “Let’s go. Plug him in.” And she turned and walked off the porch, leaving me the dangerous and thankless job of plugging Meza’s power cord back in to the battery. It just goes to show what selfish and thoughtless creatures humans are, even when they’re family. After all, she was the one with the gun—shouldn’t she be the one to plug him in?

Meza seemed to agree. He began running though a new list of graphically vulgar surrealism, all directed at Deborah’s back. All I rated was a quick, muttered, “Hurry up, faggot,” as he paused to catch his breath.

I hurried. Not out of any desire to please Meza, but because I did not want to be standing around when he got power back to his chair. It was far too dangerous—and in any case, I felt that I had spent enough of my precious and irreplaceable daylight listening to him complain. It was time to get back out into the world, where there were monsters to catch, even a monster to be, and with luck, there was also at some point a lunch to eat. None of this could happen if I remained trapped on this porch dodging a motorized chair with mouth to match.

So I pushed the power connection back on the battery and vaulted off the porch before Meza realized he was plugged in again. I hurried to the car and climbed in. Deborah slammed the car into gear and accelerated away even before I got the door closed, apparently worried that Meza might disable the car by ramming it with his chair, and we were very quickly back in the warm and fuzzy cocoon of Miami’s homicidal traffic.

“Fuck,” she said at last, an

d the word seemed like a soft summer breeze after listening to Meza, “I was sure he was going to be it.”

“Look at the bright side,” I said. “At least you learned some wonderful new words.”

“Go shit up a rope,” Debs said. After all, she wasn’t exactly new to this herself.

TEN

THERE WAS TIME TO CHECK TWO MORE NAMES ON THE list before we broke for lunch. The address for the first one was over in Coconut Grove, and it took us only about ten minutes to get there from Meza’s house. Deborah drove just slightly faster than she should have, which in Miami is slow, and therefore a lot like wearing a “Kick Me” sign on your back. And so even though the traffic was light, we had our own sound track along the way, of horns and hollering and gracefully extended middle fingers, as the other drivers swooped past us like a school of ravenous piranha darting around a rock in the river.

Debs didn’t seem to notice. She was thinking hard, which meant that her brow was furrowed into such a deep frown that I felt like warning her that the lines would become permanent if she didn’t unclench. But past experience had taught me that interrupting her thought process with that kind of caring remark would invariably result in one of her blistering arm punches, so I sat silently. I did not really see what there was to think about so thoroughly: we had four very decorative bodies and no clue who had arranged them. But of course, Debs was the trained investigator, not me. Perhaps there was something from one of her courses at the academy that applied here and called for massive forehead wrinkling.

In any case, we were soon at the address on our list. It was a modest old cottage off Tigertail Avenue, with a small and overgrown yard and a FOR SALE sign stuck in front of a large mango tree. There were a half-dozen old newspapers scattered across the yard, still in their wrappers, and only half visible through the tall and untended grass of the lawn.

“Shit,” said Deborah as she parked in front of the place. It seemed like a very sharp and succinct summary. The house looked like it had not been lived in for months.

“What did this guy do?” I asked her, watching a brightly colored sheet of newsprint blow across the yard.

Debs glanced at the list. “Alice Bronson,” she said. “She was stealing money from an office account. When they called her on it, she threatened them with battery and murder.”

“One at a time, or together?” I asked, but Debs just glared at me and shook her head.

“This won’t be anything,” she said, and I tended to agree. But of course, police work is composed mostly of doing the obvious and hoping you get lucky, so we unbuckled our seat belts and kicked through the leaves and other lawn trash to the front door. Debs pounded on the door mechanically and we could hear it echo through the house. It was clearly as empty as my conscience.

Deborah looked down at the list in her hand and found the name of the suspect who was supposed to live here. “Ms. Bronson!” she called out, but there was even less response, since her voice did not boom through the house like her knocking did.

“Shit,” Debs said again. She pounded one more time with the same result—nothing.

Just to be absolutely sure, we walked around the house one time and peered in the windows, but there was nothing to see except some very ugly green-and-maroon curtains left hanging in the otherwise bare living room. When we circled back around to the front again, there was a boy beside our car, sitting on a bicycle and staring at us. He was about eleven or twelve years old and had long hair plaited into dreadlocks and then pulled back into a ponytail.

“They been gone since April,” he said. “Did they owe you guys money, too?”

“Did you know the Bronsons?” Deborah asked the boy.

He cocked his head to one side and stared at us, looking a lot like a parrot trying to decide whether to take the cracker or bite your finger. “You guys cops?” he said.

Deborah held up her badge and the boy rolled forward on his bike to take a closer look. “Did you know these people?” Debs said again.

The boy nodded. “I just wanted to be sure,” he said. “Lots of people have fake badges.”

“We really are cops,” I said. “Do you know where the Bronsons went?”

“Naw,” he said. “My dad says they owed everybody money and they prolly changed their name or went to South America or something.”

“And when was that?” Deborah asked him.

“Back in April,” he said. “I already said.”

Deborah looked at him with restrained irritation and then glanced at me. “He did,” I told her. “He said April.”