I leaned into the room. The body blocking the door was the second of Raul’s gunmen, the one Brian didn’t know. The large raw hole where his left eye had been was a pretty good sign that he was no longer among the living. And beyond him, over beside the bed, was the rest of our little party.
Cesar, the Very Bad Man, had turned out to be Not Quite Bad Enough. He lay on his back, or most of him did. Several small parts of him were actually displayed on the wall behind him, decorating the two holes in the plasterboard made by the two shots that put them there. There was enough gore lying around him on the floor that there was no need to make sure that Cesar was dead.
Both of Raul’s gunmen. Dead and gone and far beyond the reach of any questioning technique I knew of, unless we got a Ouija board. I was no closer to finding my kids than I’d been two hours ago. Some plan. Nothing to show for it but more dead bodies.
I suppose I should have felt some kind of guilt, but of course, I never have and I hope I never will. And in this case, it would have been the height of hypocrisy, since I had arranged for this to happen. My only regret was that we didn’t have a live gunman. Without that, without someone to tell us where the children were, the whole thing had been pointless.
Or nearly pointless: One very large point had been made.
Directly in front of Cesar was Detective Anderson.
Anderson as I knew him was many things, and most of them were unpleasant, but one thing he was as well was, apparently, a better shot than I would have thought. Two head shots, two kills. And he was also quite a bit tougher than I’d have guessed.
He sat on the floor, his back against the foot of the bed, his legs splayed straight out in front of him. His hands had fallen by his sides, one of them still clutching a Glock pistol.
Beside the other hand the shoe box he’d carried in had fallen to the floor and spilled open, revealing several large plastic baggies filled with some white powdery substance.
Anderson himself wasn’t moving. There were three bright red circles on the front of his cheap white shirt. Any one of them might have killed him. Three of them absolutely had. But as stupid as he was, Anderson apparently didn’t know that he was dead. As I stepped toward him to be certain, I could see that his chest was moving, very faintly, and one eyelid flickered open and slowly, dizzily focused on me.
For one long moment he stared, and I stared back. His lips parted and moved a little; he tried to say, “Help,” and nothing happened, except that one of the chest wounds spouted a tiny bit more blood.
I squatted down beside him. Here was the relentless dumb ass who had tried to ruin my life, and come very close to succeeding, and for once I really wished I had emotions, so I could enjoy this a little more.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him. “Did you say help? You’re really asking me for help?”
He just looked at me out of the one bloodshot eye he could open and moved his lips again, like a fish that had been out of water far too long. The eyelid fluttered and then opened wide, as if he finally realized who he was talking to.
“Yes, it’s me,” I said happily. “Remember you said it isn’t over?” I leaned in as close to his ear as I could get without actually touching him. “Now,” I said to him, “it is over. At least for you.”
I was just in time; Anderson’s eye got wider and wider, still fixed on me, and I saw the old familiar beauty of That Moment, the final second when you realize it is the final second and there will never be any more of them, not for you, not ever again, and all the simple and wonderful things you took for granted, like breathing and sunshine and everything else in the world aboveground, all that starts to recede, pulling away from you slowly as you try to hang on to it, and then whirling away faster and faster and spinning you down into the endless darkness—and then you are gone and it is all over forever.
I watched all this in Anderson’s eye, the awareness that this was It and I was watching It and I followed it, as always, feeling this time like all the others that special sense of quiet bliss that comes from witnessing that moment, and if this time it felt just a little better, I had earned it.
I watched as that last awareness faded away to no awareness. And then Anderson’s legs twitched, and the slow movement of his chest stopped, and he seemed to grow just a little smaller and a little dirtier and then he was all gone, ripped away forever from the world of puppies, rainbows, and torturing Dexter.
It should have been a wonderful moment for me, in at the last minute, in time to see my tormentor yanked out of his mortal coil. But the glow didn’t last. Even in dying Anderson had made himself a nuisance. By fatally shooting both gunmen, he’d made absolutely certain that no one could tell me how to find my kids. My plan had gone perfectly, and he’d still spoiled it.
“Bastard,” I told Anderson. I stood up, and I would have kicked him, except that I’d get blood on my shoes.
“It’s best we go quickly,” Brian said softly.
I turned to go, and then paused. There was no reason to waste an opportunity like this, when the addition of one small touch could make this scene an even more memorable one—one that might even make Anderson look bad enough to cast a large load of doubt on my guilt.
“Brian,” I called, and he looked back to me. “Can you spare some cash?” I asked.
“Dexter, why on earth—Oh, of course,” he said. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a large wad of what seemed to be mostly hundreds. “This will have to do,” he said, and he flung the money through the door.
I took a last look, and liked what I saw. The scene could not have been more obvious with subtitles. A dirty cop tried to sell drugs stolen from the evidence room. An argument over money had resulted in a shoot-out. A quick ID check would certainly reveal that the other two men had ties to organized crime. And Anderson was clearly as guilty as a dead man could be. Good riddance to all three. Case closed.
I followed Brian back to the elevator. We rode it down to the third floor, got out, and took the stairs the rest of the way. I followed my brother out the hotel’s back door, the long way around the block, and to our car.
“Well,” Brian said as he drove slowly away from the Galleon Hotel, “I suppose it’s back to square one.”
“Not quite,” I said. “At least we know for sure about Kraunauer.”
“Yes,” Brian said, and he sighed. “But I wish we’d managed to save Cesar.”
“Really?” I said, somewhat surprised. “He was a friend of yours?”