“You. Goo. Gik.”
It was becoming apparent that he had something on his mind, but it was even clearer that he ought to stick with the silent glaring, since it was nearly impossible to understand the gooey syllables that came from his damaged mouth.
“Wuk. You. Goo,” he hissed, and it was such a clear condemnation of all that was Dexter, I at last understood that he was accusing me of something.
“What do you mean?” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Goy,” he said, pointing again at Cody.
“Why, yes,” I said. “Methodist, actually.” I admit that I deliberately misunderstood him: he was saying “boy” and it came out
“goy” because he had no tongue, but really, one can only take so much. It should have been painfully clear to Doakes that his attempts at vocal communication were having very limited success, and yet he insisted on trying. Didn’t the man have any sense of decorum at all?
Happily for all of us, we were interrupted by a clatter in the hallway and Deborah rushed into the room. “Dexter,” she said. She paused as she took in the wild tableau of Doakes with claw 244
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upraised against me, Astor cringing against the window, and Cody lifting a scalpel off the bench to use against Doakes. “What the hell,” Deborah said. “Doakes?”
He very slowly let his arm drop, but he did not take his eyes off me.
“I’ve been looking for you, Dexter. Where were you?”
I was grateful enough for her timely entry that I did not point out how foolish her question was. “Why, I was right here, educating the children,” I said. “Where were you?”
“On my way to the Dinner Key,” she said. “They found Kurt Wagner’s body.”
T H I R T Y - T H R E E
Deborah hurled us through traffic at Evel
Knievel–over-the-canyon speeds. I tried to think of a polite way to point out that we were going to see a dead body that would probably not escape, so could she please slow down, but I could not come up with any phrase that would not cause her to take her hands off the wheel and put them around my neck.
Cody and Astor were too young to realize that they were in mortal danger, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly in the backseat, even getting into the spirit of things by happily returning the greetings of the other motorists by raising their own middle fingers in unison each time we cut off somebody.
There was a three-car pileup on U.S. 1 at LeJeune which slowed traffic for a few moments and we were forced to cut our pace to a crawl. Since I no longer had to spend all my breath suppressing screams of terror, I tried to find out from Deborah exactly what we were racing to see.
“How was he killed?” I asked her.
“Just like the others,” she said. “Burned. And there’s no head on the body.”
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“You’re sure this is Kurt Wagner?” I asked her.
“Can I prove it? Not yet,” she said. “Am I sure? Shit yes.”
“Why?”
“They found his car nearby,” she said.
I was quite sure that normally I would understand exactly why somebody seemed to have a fetish for the heads, and know where to find them and why. But of course, now that I was all alone on the inside there was no more normal.
“This doesn’t make any sense, you know,” I said.
Deborah snarled and hammered the heel of her hand on the steering wheel. “Tell me about it,” she said.