“Blanton,” I said, rather proud of myself for remembering her name. “Where are my children?”
She put the folder down, sighed, and came over to the doorway. “They’ve gone to be with their mother,” she said.
“Oh, all right,” I said. “Did they get to ride over in a patrol car?”
“No, we could get in trouble for that,” she said. “We got budget problems, you know.”
“Well, you didn’t just stick them in a taxicab all alone, did you?” I said, and I admit I was getting irritated with her, and the entire Key West Police Department.
“No, of course not,” she said, with a little more spirit than she’d shown so far. “They left with an authorized adult.”
I could think of only one or two people who might be considered authorized, and for a moment I felt a brief glimmer of hope; perhaps Deborah had arrived and things were looking up at last. “Oh, good,” I said. “Was it their aunt, Sergeant Deborah Morgan?”
Blanton blinked at me and shook her head. “No,” she said. “But it’s okay; your son knew him. It was his Cub Scout leader.”
THIRTY-TWO
I HAD SPENT FAR TOO MUCH TIME LATELY BEMOANING THE decline of my once-stunning mental powers, and so it was a great relief to realize that the gray cells were coming back online, because I did not think, even for a second, that “Cub Scout leader” meant Frank, the big-bellied, ghost story–telling real leader of the pack. I knew instantly who had taken Cody and Astor.
It was Crowley.
He had come right into the station, a building filled with policemen who were looking for him, even though they didn’t know it, and he had bluffed his way into possession of my children and walked out with them, and while a very small part of me admired the absolute brazen nerve of it, the rest of me was in no mood to hand out compliments.
He had taken my kids. Cody and Astor were mine, and he had snatched them from under my nose. It was a special, personal affront, and it filled me with a rage larger and brighter and more blinding than anything I had ever felt before. A red mist came down and covered over everything I saw, starting with Detective Blanton. She was goggling at me like some kind of awful, stupid, droopy fish, just gawking and mocking me for getting caught and for losing the children—and it was all her fault. All of it—she had listened to Doakes and brought me here and taken my kids away, only to give them to the one person on earth I didn’t want anywhere near them—and she was standing right there in front of me making stupid faces and I wanted very badly to grab her around her saggy little neck and shake her until the crepe-paper wrinkles on her neck rattled and then squeeze until her eyes popped and her tongue flopped out and her face turned purple and all the small and delicate bones in her throat crunched and splintered in my hands—
Blanton must have noticed that my reaction was a little more than a polite thank-you and a carefree nod of the head. She took a step away from me, back into the interrogation room, and said, “Uh, that was okay, wasn’t it, Mr. Morgan?” And even though it was a step up from being called by my first name, it did not pacify me, not at all. Without realizing what I was doing I took a step toward her and flexed my fingers. “Your boy knew him,” she said, starting to sound a little desperate. “It was … I mean, the Cub Scouts? They all have to pass a background check—”
Just before I got my hands on her throat, something very hard and metallic grabbed my elbow and jerked me back a half step. I turned toward it, ready to rip it into small pieces, too—but of course, it was Sergeant Doakes, and he did not look at all rippable, even through the red mist. He had latched onto my arm with one of his prosthetic claws, and he was looking at me with an expression of amused interest, as if hoping I would really try something. The red mist dropped away from my vision.
I pried his claw from my arm, which was harder than it sounds, and I looked one more time at Detective Blanton. “If anything has happened to my children,” I told her, “you will regret it for the rest of your short, stupid, miserable little life.”
And before she could think of anything to say to that, I turned away, pushed past Doakes, and walked away down the hall.
It was not really a very long walk back to the center of town. There aren’t any long walks in Key West. Everything you read about the place tells you it is a small island, no more than a few square miles tucked snugly away at the end of the Florida Keys. It’s supposed to be a comfy little town stuffed full of sun and fun and relentless good times that never end. But when you step into the smothering heat of Duval Street trying to locate one specific man and two children, there is nothing small about it. And as I finally hit the center of town and stared around me in my angry panic, that came home to me with a force that nearly took the wind out of me. I was looking for the tip of a needle in a field full of haystacks. It was far past futile, beyond hopeless; there was not even a place to begin that made any sense.
Everything seemed to be stacked against me. The streets were overflowing with people of all sizes and shapes, and I couldn’t even see half a block in any direction. A trio of Hemingways walked past me, and it rubbed my nose in the fact that even looking for Crowley was ridiculous. He was a stocky guy with a beard, and the streets of Key West were crammed full of stocky guys with beards. I stared wildly around, but it was useless, pointless, hopeless; they were everywhere. Several more stocky bearded men pushed past; two of them held children by the hand, kids about the size and shape of Cody and Astor, and each time I felt a sharp stab of hope, and each time the faces were wrong and the crowd closed around them and surged along Duval and left me stewing in a dark gray cloud of despair. I would never find them. Crowley had won and I might as well go home and wait for the end of all things.
The hopelessness came flooding in like a spring tide and I slumped against a building and closed my eyes. It was easier to do nothing while resting in one place than to do the same nothing galloping around with no idea where to go or what to look for. I could just stay here, leaning in the shade and wrapped in defeat. And I might have stayed there placidly for a much longer time—except that one very small bright idea swam upstream through the gray tide and wiggled its tail at me.
I watched it swim in its lazy slow circles for a moment, and when at last I understood what it was saying I grabbed it by the fins and held it up to look at it. I turned it over and looked at all sides, and the more I did, the more right it seemed. I opened my eyes and stood up slowly and deliberately and looked at the wiggly little thing one more time, and I knew it was right.
Crowley had not won—not yet.
I don’t mean that my thought brought some flicker of idiot hope, or that it had told me where Crowley had gone with Cody and Astor. It had told me a much simpler, more compelling truth:
The game was not over.
Crowley had not yet done what he needed to do. Taking Cody and Astor was not the Endgame, because we were not playing Capture the Kids. We were playing Let’s Demolish Dexter. He didn’t want to hurt them—his overdeveloped sense of right and wrong wouldn’t let him hurt innocent children. No, he wanted to hurt me, to punish me for the wicked things I had done. So until I was dead or at the very least in leg irons, Crowley was not done playing.
Neither was I. I was just getting started.
He’d had it all his way so far, kept me off balance, stepping in to deliver his nasty little jabs and then dancing away before I could react, and he thought he was winning and I was no more than a dull punching bag, a broad and simple target, easy to find and slow to react, and he had pushed me and slapped me and jabbed me into a corner until he thought he had me on the ropes and I would be easy to finish off.
He was wrong.
He hadn’t faced me yet. He had no idea what it meant to try to put me down in person. He had not stood toe-to-toe with the champ, Dexter the Destroyer, facing me in the flesh with the certainty of Death in each hand and the dark wind howling around us—that was my home turf, and he had not set foot on it yet, and until he did the fight had not even started.
But Crowley had rung the bell for the final round when he snatched Cody and Astor. He believed I was weakened and he was ready, and he had made his move. And he had not taken the kids to taunt me, to show me he was very clever and I was a helpless fool. No, he had taken them so I would come after them. They were the bait for his trap, and a trap can’t catch anything at all unless the prey knows where it is.