“And how many cabins?” I asked him.
Brian shrugged. “You have to understand, I didn’t go down there,” he said. “I just glanced down when Raul came up. His cabin—the main one—it’s all the way up at the front.” He frowned. “I saw four or five doors along the hall. One’s the kitchen….I’d guess three more cabins.”
“The kids will be together in one of the cabins,” Deborah said.
“You’d better hope so,” I said. Personally, I would have put kids in the bilge—especially mine.
“They will be in a cabin,” Debs said positively. “But as far from Raul as possible.”
I thought that part made sense, and I glanced at Brian. He nodded. “That’s probably right,” he said. “Raul does like children. But he also likes his privacy, especially when he’s with his mujeres.”
“Good,” I said, trying to sound dynamic, forceful, and optimistic, as if we’d actually accomplished something. “So how do we do this?”
The two of them looked up at me, and I had to suppress a snort, because their faces wore identical expressions of blank befuddlement. They were both equally surprised at the question; neither of them had a clue how to go about our little quest, and it was the only thing they’d agreed on yet. Once again, the one thing that can always be relied upon to unite absolutely anybody and everybody is Ignorance.
Deborah broke the spell by standing up abruptly. “We got about four hours until dawn,” she said. “Let’s just go, and take it as it comes. Whatever it takes.”
I opened my mouth to object and point out that careful planning is the mother of success—but Brian was already nodding his head and standing up. “We’ll take my car,” he said, looking at me. “Over to your boat? After that, we’ll just have to wing it.” He turned and walked out of the room, and with no more than a nod at me, Deborah followed, and I could only shrug and trail along behind.
As I said, Ignorance unites us all.
TWENTY-FOUR
Biscayne Bay at night can be a very beautiful place. A warm wind usually blows across the surface, and the water glows with a slight luminescence, and if there is some moonlight and the waves are behaving, it can remind you that every now and then, being alive and on a boat here on the bay is a very good thing.
I steered my boat south from my rented dock in Coconut Grove, and I was reminded of exactly that: I was glad to be alive and on the water on a beautiful moonlit night. And I really did appreciate the charms of a predawn boat trip on the waters of my beloved home. But I also thought I would like to stay alive, and I would have a much better chance of that if the moon was not quite so bright.
There was no way in the world we could hope to approach Raul’s yacht unseen, not with this three-quarter moon beaming down in rancid glee. I had always felt a cool and welcome comfort from the moonlight. It had been my friend and ally, my strength and my refuge. Tonight it was no such thing. Like everything else I held dear it had turned against me. The cold light of this traitorous moon would get me killed, and I took no joy from the sight of it. And it shone mercilessly down from a sky that was almost completely clear. Far off on the horizon, over toward Bimini, there was a dark line of clouds scudding along, low and fast, but where we were there was only a lethally bright sky above.
Because of a very light chop, we traveled at a good speed, just over twenty-five knots. Even south of Cape Florida, where the swells can pick up from the roll of the open ocean, the water was calm enough to let us maintain the pace. We would be there in about half an hour—and perhaps that made me enjoy the ride even more. Because if the visibility was this good when we arrived, I was quite sure that this would be the last boat ride I ever took. Raul would have sentries, and they could not avoid seeing us, and that would be just about the end of it. And of us.
We had talked about this, of course. The car ride from Deborah’s house to my boat had been full of talk. I had listed what might happen, what we might do about it, and how to maximize what was truly a very slim chance of success. And even though Debs and Brian remained united in shrugging off all the certain dangers I could think of, I have to admit that at least things were going much better than I could have hoped in the personal relations department. Debs had somehow kept herself from shooting Brian, and he had not slashed her throat and bounded away for the high ground.
Before climbing into Brian’s car we had maximized our firepower—Debs took a pump-action shotgun from the trunk of her car, as well as her first-aid kit, which I thought was rather pessimistic. And she brought her Glock pistol, which made me glad. She had a sentimental attachment to Harry’s old .38 revolver and I’d been afraid she’d bring it, even though it had half the number of shots and half the firepower of the Glock. Brian and I had our pistols, reloaded and ready to go, each of us with a spare clip.
It was only a ten-minute drive from Deb’s house to my rented dock space in a quiet residential area of the Grove. The house was owned by an elderly couple who lived in New Jersey most of the year, for some reason. They were very glad to have someone stopping by their Southern manse from time to time, which might discourage burglars, and they gave me a very good rate. And my boat, in spite of sitting unused for several months, was in excellent shape and needed only a few moments of chug and spew from the bilge pump before it was ready to go.
As we motored out the short canal to the bay I opened the dry locker on my boat, and grabbed some very good fillet knives, which were a lot quieter than guns, and might preserve our element of surprise a few extra minutes. The fact that they were also a great deal more fun than guns was not really a factor. Brian was delighted with the one I gave him, of course. Debs refused to take one and that, too, really wasn’t much of a surprise.
In addition to all that lethal hardware, my brother had insisted on bringing along the canvas bag he’d taken from Ivan. It was full of sinister-looking things Brian insisted on calling “toys” and which he was convinced we might need. “If nothing else,” he’d said brightly, “it can cover our tracks afterward.” And again, astonishingly, Debs had agreed.
“If one of those things can destroy the evidence,” she said, “we bring it.”
So we were lugging along a couple of very ugly bombs, unknown and probably unstable explosive devices, merely because we might get a chance to use them. And maybe we would. But first we had to get on board Raul’s yacht silently and alive, and to do that we had to approach it without being seen. So far, we had come up with no way to do that, other than go-take-a-look-and-see-what’s-what. If it had been up to me, this casual plan of attack would not have been plan B—not even C. I don’t like to improvise. When I slide out into the night for the purpose of making Mischief, I need to have a plan, and I need to stick with it. Beginning, middle, and end, all thought out ahead of time, and all executed in good order. Far too much could go wrong, even when it’s just me and one carefully selected playmate, one who suspects nothing until it is too late for suspicions to do any good.
In this case we were approaching perhaps a dozen men who were expecting trouble and were paid handsomely to prevent surprises—and we were improvising. I hated it, and I hated having no choice but to go through with it, and even on a beautiful night like this one I could not shake the feeling that things could not possibly go well. There was only one likely outcome, and that was a violent finish to the Saga of Dexter—and just when things were looking up for me, too. With Anderson killed in such a toxic setting, I was reasonably sure the case against me would go away, even without Kraunauer, and I would be free once more to live a happy life of perfectly balanced wage slavery and Wicked Fun. But unless a true miracle occurred, all that was about to end.
I was left alone with my dark thoughts—there was no point in trying to have an encouraging conversation over the noise of the engine and wind—but from what I could see of Debs and Brian, they were not thinking of sunlit rose gardens full of kittens and ice cream eith
er. Deborah simply sat and scowled at her feet, and Brian stood in the bow, holding the bowline and staring anxiously ahead. It did not cheer me up at all to see them; none of us looked like something a dozen well-armed mercenaries would find terribly threatening.
My thoughts, left to themselves, turned even darker. This was a hopeless errand, doomed to failure, and failure meant certain death, and death was something I have always tried to avoid—at least, my own. And why, after all, did we really need to go to all this bother? To save the children? Why? When you come right down to it, who really needs children? And especially these children. The only thing special about them was that Lily Anne and Nicholas carried DNA from me and Debs—and if either of us truly felt the need to replicate that, there was a lot more where that came from. As for Cody and Astor, they were Dark Yearlings, waiting to grow into something like me. Surely no reasonable person could want more Passenger-infested night stalkers in the world.
And in any case, didn’t all the child-rearing experts agree that it was actually a bad thing to do too much for your kids? It was well known that if you hover protectively around them, they never learn to fend for themselves. They would grow up to be wards of the state, permanently on food stamps and welfare, knocking over gas stations on the weekends. Weren’t we really just enabling these kids, shoving them into a life of crime and servile dependency on others?
And if we went home now and the worst happened to the children—so what? They were easily replaced—if not by breeding, then why not by adoption? There are millions of homeless children in the world—which proved again that kids were a low-value commodity, didn’t it? I mean, there are very few homeless Bentleys in the world. Probably near to zero, except for Kraunauer’s, and it wouldn’t be homeless for very long. People would line up around the block to claim it—but on that same block there might be a dozen children nobody wanted, and no one would lift a finger for them. Didn’t that prove something? Wouldn’t a reasonable being conclude that the only logical, fair, and healthy thing to do was turn around, head for home, and give the children a chance to develop by taking care of themselves?
It was pure and unassailable logic. But, of course, there was no point in trying to get anybody else to see it. Human beings have never really been influenced by logic, whatever they tell themselves. And I was fairly sure that Deborah, at least, would not see things in this rational and sensible light. And Brian, for all his laudable lack of emotion, seemed quite determined to put an end to Raul. If he had to rescue a few kids to do that, he didn’t appear to mind very much, as long as taking out Raul was part of the deal.