JEFF LINDSAY

“Yeah, that’s right,” Vince said. “The guy that’s won all the awards, and he’s been written up in Gourmet magazine.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, stalling for time in the hope that some brilliant flash of inspiration would hit to help me dodge this terrible fate.

“The award-winning caterer.”

“Dexter, this guy is big. He could make your whole wedding.”

“Well, Vince, I think that’s terrific, but—”

“Listen,” he said, with an air of firm command that I had never heard from him before, “you said you would talk to Rita about this and let her decide.”

“I said that?”

“Yes, you did. And I am not going to let you throw away a wonderful opportunity like this, not when it’s something that I know Rita would really love to have.”

I wasn’t sure how he could be so positive about that. After all, I was actually engaged to the woman, and I had no idea what sort of caterer might fill her with shock and awe. But I didn’t think this was the time to ask him how he knew what Rita would and would not love. Then again, a man who dressed up as Carmen Miranda for Halloween might very well have a keener insight than mine into my fiancée’s innermost culinary desires.

“Well,” I said, at last deciding that procrastinating long enough to escape was the best answer, “in that case, I’ll go home and talk to Rita about it.”

“Do that,” he said. And he did not storm out, but if there had been a door to slam, he might have slammed it.

I finished tidying up and trundled on out into the evening traffic. On the way home a middle-aged man in a Toyota SUV got right behind me and started honking the horn for some reason. After five or six blocks he pulled around me and, as he flipped me off, juked his steering wheel slightly to frighten me into running up on the sidewalk. Although I admired his spirit and would have loved to oblige him, I stayed on the road. There is never any point in trying to make sense of the way Miami drivers go about getting from one place to another. You just have to relax and enjoy the violence—and of course, that part was never a problem for me. So I smiled and DEXTER IN THE DARK

47

waved, and he stomped on his accelerator and disappeared into traffic at about sixty miles per hour over the speed limit.

Normally I find the chaotic mayhem of the evening drive home to be the perfect way to end the day. Seeing all the anger and lust to kill relaxes me, makes me feel at one with my hometown and its spritely inhabitants. But tonight I found it difficult to summon up any good cheer at all. I never for a moment thought it could ever happen, but I was worried.

Worse still, I didn’t know what I was actually worried about, only that the Dark Passenger had used the silent treatment on me at a scene of creative homicide. This had never happened, and I could only believe that something unus

ual and possibly Dexter-threatening had caused it now. But what? And how could I be sure, when I didn’t really know the first thing about the Passenger itself, except that it had always been there to offer happy insight and commentary. We had seen burned bodies before, and pottery aplenty, with never a twitch or a tweet. Was it the combination? Or something specific to these two bodies? Or was it entirely coincidental and had nothing whatever to do with what we had seen?

The more I thought about it, the less I knew, but the traffic swirled around me in its soothing homicidal patterns, and by the time I got to Rita’s house I had almost convinced myself that there was really nothing to worry about.

Rita, Cody, and Astor were already home when I got there. Rita worked much closer to the house than I did, and the kids were in an after-school program at a nearby park, so they had all been waiting for at least half an hour for the opportunity to torment me out of my hard-won peace of mind.

“It was on the news,” Astor whispered as I opened the door, and Cody nodded and said, “Gross,” in his soft, hoarse voice.

“What was on the news?” I said, struggling to get past them and into the house without trampling on them.

“You burned them!” Astor hissed at me, and Cody looked at me with a complete lack of expression that somehow conveyed disapproval.

“I what? Who did I—”

48

JEFF LINDSAY

“Those two people they found at the college,” she said. “We don’t want to learn that,” she added emphatically, and Cody nodded again.

“At the—you mean at the university? I didn’t—”

“A university is a college,” Astor said with the underlined certainty of a ten-year-old girl. “And we think burning is just gross.”

It began to dawn on me what they had seen on the news—a report from the scene where I had spent my morning collecting dry-roasted blood samples from two charred bodies. And somehow, merely because they knew I had been out to play the other night, they had decided that this was how I had spent my time. Even without the Dark Passenger’s strange retreat, I agreed that it was completely gross, and I found it highly annoying that they thought I was capable of something like that. “Listen,” I said sternly, “that was not—”

Tags: Jeff Lindsay Dexter Mystery
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