Personally, I am not amused. I am startled, confused—and, it must be said, I am also somewhat suspicious. “I don’t know,” I say carefully. “Who retained you?”
He nods patiently, giving the impression of a man who appreciates caution in prospective clients. “The arrangement is a little unusual,” he admits—this from a man who defended wholesale drug dealers, and was probably accustomed to being paid in suitcases full of blood-soaked Krugerands. “But I am instructed to tell you that I have been engaged by a Mr. Herman O. Atwater.” He cocked his head to one side, looking simultaneously amused and yet breathtakingly self-assured and competent. Of course, his suit helped a lot. “You are familiar with Mr. Atwater?” he said, raising a perfectly trimmed eyebrow.
It was a performance well worth taking in and even applauding. But Dexter is not Dazzled; Dexter’s brain is, at last, whirling at its favored rate of nine million revolutions per minute. In the first and most obvious place, I do not know anyone named Herman O. Atwater, and I never have. Second, it defies believability to think that a complete stranger would hire the most brilliant, and consequently expensive attorney in Miami for me. Therefore, the name must be made up for some reason.
But why? The only possible motive for a fake name is to preserve anonymity, which means that Mr. Atwater didn’t want anyone to know he was involved with me—
But wait: He would certainly want me to know who he was. Or, to be fair, she. Only someone close to me would go to the expense of hiring Kraunauer, whose fees were legendary. But nobody actually is close to me, at least among the living. It couldn’t be my friends, since aside from Vince I don’t really have any. And I know only too bitterly well that Deborah didn’t do it. She’d made her position abundantly clear, and I could not believe it had changed so dramatically.
If I eliminate friends, and eliminate family, then who was left? In all the world, there is no one else who really gives a rodent’s rectum whether I lived or died—although it did seem like the list of those who preferred me dead was getting a bit lengthy lately. So, not a stranger, not a friend, not family, which left—
I blink again. A tiny little ray of light peeks into the dark and stormy maelstrom of Dexter’s brain.
I had been trying very hard to come up with something clever. Somebody had just outdone me, neatly and completely. They had, in fact, run several laps around me while I still stood in the blocks, cringing from the starter’s pistol. And in a surge of warm and wonderful relief, I felt my mental powers return to me at last, and I knew who it was. It was all right there in the name.
Herman O. Atwater.
The “O” did not stand for Oscar, nor Oliver, nor even Oliphant. It did not, in fact, stand at all. It connected. With Herman. As in herman-o. Hermano. Which any resident of My Fair City could tell you is the Spanish word for brother.
Atwater was simply the clincher, the final clue, the one hint so completely private and personal that no one else in the world could possibly know what it meant. Not a name either, but a location: at the water, the most significant place of my life. At the water, in a shipping container, where I had been ripped out of normal life and reborn into blood. At the water, where poor, traumatized four-year-old Dexter had been found, after three days of sitting in a pool of his mother’s blood, all alone in the world, except for Mommy’s severed head—and one other, relatively living thing, though just as thoroughly dead inside as I was.
A small, cold shipping container at the water, all snug and abandoned in the dreadful sticky red mess, just the three of us: Mommy, Me, and my hermano. My Blood Relations.
My brother, born anew like me at the water’s edge. Hermano Atwater.
Brian.
I had not been flung onto the dung heap by all my family after all. My True Family had come through. My brother, Brian, had hired the best lawyer in town for me.
If it had taken as long for all these thoughts to whip through my brain as it took to lay them out, I am sure Kraunauer would have had to leave for an important appointment with his mani-pedi practitioner. But when Dexter’s brain is in high gear, such a dazzling train of wit is quicker than the blink of an eye, and in almost no elapsed time at all, I was smiling and nodding at Kraunauer. “Of course,” I said into the phone. “Dear Herman. How thoughtful of him.”
“You are familiar with Mr. Atwater?” he repeated.
“Naturally,” I said.
“And is it your wish to have me represent you in this matter? Rather than Mr. Feldman?” he said with his small, slightly superior smile.
The smile I gave him back was much larger, and a great deal more real. “Absolutely,” I said.
He nodded his head, twice, and opened the beautiful leather folder, all in a way that said, Of course, what else, and now let’s get down to business. He looked down at the pages and shook his head. “I’m afraid there have been some rather…singular…” He paused and looked up at me. “Irregularities?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but recent experience told me it probably wasn’t positive. “Irregular how?” I asked, not altogether sure I wanted to hear the answer. “I mean, in a good way?”
“Good,” he said, as if it was a dirty word. “Not if you care about the law.” He shook his head disapprovingly, but a single tooth gleamed, like a wolf trying and just barely failing to hide his fangs, and he held up the paperwork. “I’m afraid I can’t call any of this good.”
“Oh,” I said, not quite sure how to feel about that. “So, what does it mean? I mean, for me…?”
Kraunauer smiled, and now the wolf fangs were out for all to see. “Let’s just put it this way,” he said. “If you’re still sitting here in TGK tomorrow at this time, it means I’m dead.” He closed the folder and allowed his smile to get much, much broader. “And I don’t plan on dying anytime soon, Mr. Morgan.”
FIVE
It must be that somewhere there truly is a malevolent deity who watches over the Wicked with tender care. Because Kraunauer did not die, and his word was as good as gold—better, really, when you consider the terrible inflation on the gold market lately. In any case, gold would not have sprung Dexter overnight, and Kraunauer did. Bright and early the next morning, well before I had another chance at the epicurean ecstasy of TGK’s lunch, I was blinking in the sunlight of the parking lot at the front of the building and wondering what happened next.
They had given me back my clothing and all else they had taken from me on my arrival—plus a thick folder of paperwork that I assumed gave details of my release and terrible threats dealing with my certain reincarceration. I had bundled it all up and changed gratefully into my own clothes. To be perfectly honest, I had grown a wee bit weary of the cheerful orange jumpsuit, and it was
very nice to wear my own, relatively bland clothing again. On the downside, my pants still had some bloodstains on them from the hectic multivictim evening of carnage that had unfolded just prior to my arrest, and the jumpsuit had at least always been a hundred percent bloodstain free. Still, the successful life is a series of trade-offs, and I shed no tears over the loss of my jumpsuit. I’d also gotten back my wallet, my phone, and even my belt. The belt was the real clincher; it was a truly euphoric feeling to know that I could hang myself now if I wanted to. I didn’t, of course, but I might consider it soon if I couldn’t think of a way to get home. I’d arrived in a police car. Sadly, there were none waiting to give me a ride. And in truth, I’d had quite enough of police for the time being. Walking would be far preferable, and it was good for me, too. A nice, brisk fifteen-mile stroll to my house would get the blood flowing, put a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.
On the other hand, this was Miami—which is to say that it was hot and getting hotter. It would be a terrible shame if I got out of jail only to die of heatstroke. Perhaps if I waited long enough, a cab would turn up. And if I waited only a little longer, they might build a rail line right to the door. It seemed just as likely.