Doug Crowley leaned against my tree, looking a little too casual, as if he was trying to learn this position but wasn’t quite sure he’d gotten it right yet, and his eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses seemed a little too wide to be really nonchalant. He was a man of about my age, with a square, slightly soft-looking body, and the stubble of a trimmed-short beard on his face that was probably supposed to hide a weak chin, but didn’t quite. And somehow, in spite of his size, he had snuck up behind me silently and I had not heard him, and I found that almost as irritating as his chummy good cheer.
“On the walk,” he said hopefully. “You didn’t go on the nature walk. Either.” A poor fake smile flickered on and off his mouth. “Neither did I,” he added, quite unnecessarily.
“Yes, I can see that,” I said. It was probably not very gracious of me, but I was not feeling particularly chummy, and his efforts at being friendly were so clearly artificial that he offended my sense of craft; I had put a great deal of time and work into learning to fake everything. Why couldn’t he?
He stared down at me for a long and awkward moment, forcing me to crane my neck up to stare back. His eyes were very blue and seemed a little too small, and something was going on behind them, but I couldn’t tell what, and frankly, I didn’t really care.
“Well,” he said. “I just wanted to, you know. Say hi. Introduce myself.” He pushed off the tree, and then lurched down at me with his hand held out. “Doug Crowley,” he said, and I reluctantly took his hand.
“Pleased to meet you,” I lied. “Dexter Morgan.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “I mean, Frank said. Nice to meet you, too.” And then he straightened up and just looked at me for what seemed like several long minutes. “Well,” he said at last. “This your first time in the ’Glades?”
“No, I used to go camping a lot,” I said.
“Oh, uh-huh. Camping,” he said, in a very odd tone of voice that seemed to indicate he thought I might be lying.
So I added, “And hunting,” with just a little bit of emphasis.
Crowley shuffled backward a half step and blinked, and then finally nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I guess you would.” He looked at his feet, and then looked uncertainly around, as if he thought someone might be hunting him. “You didn’t bring any … I mean, you weren’t planning to … you know. This trip?” he said. “I mean, with all the kids around.”
It came to me that he was asking if I was planning on hunting right now, in the middle of a flock of wild Cub Scouts, and the thought was so stupid that for a moment I could do no more than cock my head to one side and look at him. “No
ooo,” I said at last. “I wasn’t actually planning on it.” And just because he was being so irritatingly dumb, I shrugged and added, “But you never know when the urge may strike, do you?” And I gave him a happy smile, just so he could see what a really good fake looked like.
Crowley blinked again, nodded slowly, and shifted from one foot to the other. “Riiiight,” he said, and his cheap artificial smile flickered on and off again. “I know what you mean.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said, but I was really only sure that I wanted to see him burst into flames. And after all, putting him out would be a great exercise for the boys.
“Uh-huh,” he said. He shifted his weight back onto his other foot and looked around him again. There was no help coming, so he looked back at me. “Well,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
“Almost certainly,” I said, and he gave me a slightly startled look, freezing where he stood for just a moment. And then he nodded his head, flashed me one more brief and unconvincing smile, and turned away to wander back to the far side of the camp. I watched him go; it had been an incredibly awkward performance, and it made me wonder how he hoped to be assistant den leader without having the Cub Scouts beat him up and take his lunch money. He seemed so awkward and helpless, I couldn’t see how he had reached such an advanced age without being pecked to death by angry pigeons.
I knew very well that there are far more lambs in the world than wolves—but why was I always the one they came bleating to? It seemed terribly unfair that way out here, in the middle of the savage woods, I could still be assailed by twinkies like Crowley. Shouldn’t there be a park regulation against them? Or even an open season? They certainly weren’t an endangered species.
I tried to shake off the irritation at this uncalled-for interruption, but my focus had fled. How could I concentrate on wiggling out of a trap when I was constantly tormented by pointless interruptions? Not that I’d come up with any thoughts on creative wiggling anyway. I’d pounded away at the mental rock pile for two full days and was still totally clueless. I sighed and closed my eyes, and as if to confirm that I really was stupid, the blister on my heel began to throb again.
I tried to think soothing thoughts, picturing the heron spearing a large fish, or pecking at Crowley, but the picture wouldn’t stick. I couldn’t see anything but the painfully happy faces of Hood and Doakes. Dull gray despair curdled in my guts, gurgling a mean and scornful laugh at my blockheaded attempts to get out of the trap. There was no escape, not this time. I was besieged by two very determined and dangerous cops who really and truly wanted to arrest me for something—anything—and they needed only a little fake evidence to put me away forever, and on top of that a completely unknown person with an obscure but probably very dangerous threat was circling closer. And I thought I could fight them all off by sitting in a Cub Scout tent and admiring herons? I was like a little boy playing war, yelling, Bang, bang! Gotcha!, and looking up to see a real Sherman tank rolling right at me.
It was pointless and hopeless, and I was still clueless.
Dexter was Doomed, and sitting barefoot underneath a tree and being rude to a ninny was not going to change that.
I closed my eyes, overwhelmed, and as the full-throated chorus of Pity Me echoed across the emptiness inside me, I apparently fell asleep.
TWENTY-FOUR
I WOKE UP FROM A GRUMPY DOZE TO THE SOUNDS OF THE Nature Hike stomping back into the camp, with two or three boys’ voices calling out to each other, Frank yelling something about lunch, and Mario’s voice rising above it all with a very instructive lecture on what alligators do with their prey and why it was a bad idea to give them anything to eat, even that awful Mystery-Meat stuff they serve in the school cafeteria, which would probably make even an alligator throw up.
It was a very strange way to come back to consciousness from the totally dead and dopey sleep I’d been lying in, and at first the sounds didn’t make sense to me. I blinked my eyes open and tried to force the noise to add up to something approaching consensus reality, but the leaden stupidity of my nap would not leave me, so I just lay there in a blank stupor at the base of my tree, frowning and clearing my throat and trying to rub the sand out of my eyes, until at last a small shadow moved into my line of sight and I looked up to see Cody. He stared down at me very seriously until I finally pulled myself up to a sitting position, cleared my throat one last time, and somehow remembered how to make real words come out of my mouth.
“Well,” I said, and to my heavy-headed ears even that one syllable sounded stupid, but I plowed on. “How was the nature hike?”
Cody frowned and shook his head. “Okay,” he said.
“What kind of nature did you see?”
For a moment I thought he might actually smile, and then he said, “Alligator,” and there was a slight edge in his voice that could almost have been excitement.