“It’s itchy,” he said.
“Well, if you scratch it, it’s just going to get worse— Oh, for the love of … Dexter, your hands, too?”
“No,” I said. “That’s mostly poison ivy.”
“Honestly,” she said, with obvious disgust at my bungling. “It’s a wonder you weren’t eaten by a bear.”
There was very little I could say to that, especially since I agreed, and in any case Rita gave me no chance to say anything. She immediately jumped into action and began bustling around us, applying calamine lotion to my face and hands and pushing Cody into a hot bath. Lily Anne started crying, and Astor sat on the couch smirking at me. “What’s so funny?” I asked her.
“Your face,” she said. “You look like you got leprosy.”
I took a step toward her. “Poison ivy is contagious,” I said, raising my hands at her.
Astor flinched away and grabbed at Lily Anne, lifting her up and holding her between us like a protective shield. “Stay away; I’m holding the baby. There, there, Lily Anne,” she said, slinging her sister onto one shoulder and patting her back with a series of rapid thumps. Lily Anne stopped crying almost at once, possibly stunned by the force of Astor’s patting, and I left them there and went to take a shower.
The hot water running over my swollen hands was an amazing sensation, unlike anything I had ever felt before, and truthfully, not something I was eager to experience ever again. It was somewhere between an immensely powerful itch and searing agony, and I almost yelled out loud. I got out of the shower and put more calamine on my hands, and the throbbing died down to a kind of background torment. My hands felt numb and clumsy, and I h
ad some trouble using them to get dressed. But rather than ask for help with the zipper and my shirt’s buttons, I fumbled my clean clothes on all by myself, and soon I was seated at the kitchen table with a very welcome cup of coffee of my very own.
I held the coffee cup between the palms of my swollen and throbbing hands. The backs of my hands pulsed with the warmth of the cup, and I wondered what I could possibly hope to do with two such useless appendages. I felt like I needed all the help I could get, and not just because my hands were out of commission. For some reason, I had been two steps behind the whole way, almost as if Crowley was reading my mind. Knowing what I now knew about him, I couldn’t believe it was because he was so amazingly clever—he wasn’t. It had to be me. I was off my game, sliding into the muck of mediocrity, all the way down the long slope from my usual lofty perch of supreme excellence, and I wondered why that was.
Maybe I was just not as sharp and gleefully wicked as I used to be. It might well be, I realized, that Crowley really was a match for the Me I was nowadays. I had gotten too soft, allowed my new role as Daddy Dexter to make me a bit too human. One little problem had turned me all mushy and helpless. Although to be accurate, it was two problems, and neither of them was all that little, but the point was the same.
I thought of the other Me, the one that matched the picture of myself I had hanging on the back wall of my self-esteem: Dexter the Dominant. Clever, sharp, fit, and ready for anything, eager to be off on the hunt and always alert and able to sniff out the potential perils that might lie along any small fork in the game trail. And comparing that hallowed portrait to what actually stared back at me from the mirror of this present moment, I felt a sense of loss—and of shame. How had I lost this other me, the ideal Dexter of my dreams? Had I let easy living bring me so far down?
Clearly I had. I had even thrown it away cheerfully, eager to become something I could never really be. And now, when I needed to be Me more than ever before, I had gone all squishy at the edges. My own fault—things had been too comfortable for me lately and I had come to like it that way. The placid ease of married life, the softening influence of having Lily Anne to care for, the routine of home and hearth and homicide—it had all become too comfortable. I had turned soft, smug, self-satisfied, lulled to sleep by my cushy lifestyle and the easy availability of the game in these pastures of plenty I had been hunting in for so long. And the first time a real challenge came along I had behaved like all the other sheep in the pen. I had bleated and dithered, unable to believe that any real threat could actually be aimed at me, and I was still simply sitting here, waiting for it to swoop down and get me, and doing no more to stop it than hoping it would go away.
Was this really who I had turned into? Had I truly lost my edge? Had common Humanity snuck into the very fiber of my being and turned me into a marshmallow-souled hobbyist, a part-time monster too bone-idle, sluggish, and dumb to do anything but gawp at the ax as it fell on my neck and cry, Alas, poor Dexter?
I sipped the coffee and felt my hands throb. This was getting me nowhere. I was simply digging myself deeper into the Pit of Despair, and I was in quite far enough already. It was time to claw my way out, stand up straight, and climb back up the mountain to my rightful position as King of the Heap. I was a tiger, but for some reason I had been acting like a house cat. This had to stop, and right now, and I finally had a small handle on how to stop it. I had a name to search and a computer to search it with, and all I had to do was to get busy and do it.
So I finished my coffee, stood up, and went down the hall to the little room that Rita calls Dexter’s Study. I sat and fired up my laptop, and as it started up I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to get back in touch with my Inner Tiger. Almost immediately I felt it stretch and purr and rise up to rub against my hand. Nice kitty, I thought with gratitude, and it showed me its fangs in a happily wicked smile. I smiled back, opened my eyes, and we went to work.
First I checked the credit card records, and to my infinite joy I got immediate results. “Doug Crowley” had used his Visa card to buy gasoline at a station on the Tamiami Trail, between Miami and the Fakahatchee Park, Saturday morning, the day we all drove down there for the camping trip.
If there was a working credit card, there was a billing address. However he had managed it, he had become Doug Crowley, a solid citizen with a good credit record and a home, and if he was using the credit card, he was confident that its owner wouldn’t complain. That probably meant that the house was available, too, since I knew very well now how my Shadow liked to solve his personnel problems. The real Doug Crowley was dead, so his house was available, and my Doug Crowley would almost certainly be there. And wonder of wonders, it was even convenient; the address was on 148th Terrace, only about two miles from where I was sitting.
I stared suspiciously at the computer; could it really be this easy? After everything that had happened, was it really going to be so simple? Just find the address, saunter over, and spend some quality bonding time with my formerly anonymous admirer? It didn’t seem nearly complicated enough, and for a moment or two I glared at the address as if it had done something very wrong.
But the Passenger stirred impatiently, and I nodded; of course it was this simple. I had not known what name Crowley was using before now, and he had tried to keep me from learning it. Now that I knew, there was no reason to doubt that I had found his lair. I was merely being cynical and paranoid—and after all, who had a better right? I absentmindedly rubbed my swollen hands and thought about it, and felt certainty flow slowly back in. This was him; it had to be. And as if to add the Seal of Dread Approval, the Passenger gave a contented purr of agreement.
Splendid: I had found him. Now all I had to do was think of a way to take care of him without using my hands.
But I could muddle through with poison ivy, and in any case I couldn’t wait. The end was in sight, and speed was essential; Crowley had been far too slippery so far, and I couldn’t give him any time to prepare. I would do it tonight, as soon as it was dark, swollen hands or not. The mere thought of it made me feel better than I had for a very long time, and I wallowed in the excited anticipation I felt burbling up in the darkest corners of Dexter’s Basement. I was going to go once more into that good night, and I was not going gentle.
The rest of the day passed pleasantly enough. And why shouldn’t it? Here I was, a man with a plan, nestled in the bosom of my happy family. I sat with Lily Anne on my lap and watched as Cody and Astor slaughtered their animated friends on the Wii.
Rita had vanished into the kitchen; I assumed she was working through another grocery bag full of mind-numbing charts and figures from her job. But gradually I became aware that the aroma seeping out of the kitchen was not ink and calculator tape but something far more succulent. And lo and behold, at six o’clock the kitchen door swung open, releasing an overwhelming gush of delicious steam that had me drooling. I turned to look, and there stood a radiant Rita, clad in apron and oven mitts, face flushed with her righteous efforts. “Dinner,” she told us. Even the children looked up at her, and she blushed just a little more. “I just thought …” she said, looking at me. “I mean, I know that lately it hasn’t really— And you’ve been so …” She shook her head. “Anyway,” she said. “So I made something— And it’s ready now. Mango paella,” she added with a smile, and happier words were never spoken.
Mango paella was one of Rita’s better recipes, and it had been a very long time since Rita had cooked at all. But the time off had not diminished her skill, and she had done it proud. I plowed into the steaming, fragrant mass with a will. For a good twenty minutes I had no thoughts at all more complicated than, Yum!, and to be brutally frank, I ate too much. So did Cody—and even Astor lost her grumpiness as she tucked into her dinner, and when we were all blissfully bloated and pushed our chairs back from the table there were no leftovers.
Rita looked around at her food-numbed family with an expression of true contentment. “Well,” she said, “I hope that was— I mean, it wasn’t as good as usual.…”
Astor rolled her eyes and said, “Mo-om, you always say that. It was o-kay.”
Cody looked at his sister, shook his head, and then turned to Rita. “It was good.”
Rita beamed at him, and, knowing a cue when I heard one, I added my part. “It was a work of art,” I said, stifling a contented belch. “Very great art.”