“I’m taking you down to the station to answer a few questions, that’s all,” she said reassuringly.
“Oh my God,” he said. “You’re arresting me. That’s—no. No.”
“Let’s do this the easy way, Professor,” Deborah said. “We don’t need the handcuffs, do we?”
He looked at her for a long moment and then suddenly jumped up to his feet and ran for the door. But unfortunately for him and his masterful escape plan, he had to get past me, and Dexter is 90
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widely and justly praised for his lightning reflexes. I stuck a foot in the professor’s way, and he went down onto his face and slid headfirst into the door.
“Ow,” he said.
I smiled at Deborah. “I guess you do need the cuffs,” I said.
T H I R T E E N
Iam not really paranoid. I don’t believe that I am surrounded by mysterious enemies who seek to trap me, torture me, kill me. Of course, I know very well that if I allow my disguise to slip and reveal me for what I am, then this entire society will join together in calling for my slow and painful death, but this is not paranoia—this is a calm, clearheaded view of consensus reality, and I am not frightened by it. I simply try to be careful so it doesn’t happen.
But a very large piece of my carefulness had always been listening to the subtle whisperings of the Dark Passenger, and it was still being strangely shy about sharing its thoughts. And so I faced a new and unsettling inner silence, and that made me very edgy, sending out a little ripple of uneasiness. It had started with that feeling of being watched, even stalked, at the kilns. And then, as we drove back to headquarters, I could not shake the idea that a car seemed to be following us. Was it really? Did it have sinister intent?
And if so, was it toward me or Deborah, or was it just random Miami driver spookiness?
I watched the car, a white Toyota Avalon, in the side mirror. It 92
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stayed with us all the way until Deborah turned into the parking lot, and then it simply drove by without slowing or the driver appearing to stare, but I could not lose my ridiculous notion that it had indeed been following us. Still, I could not be sure unless the Passenger told me, which it did not—it merely gave a sort of sibilant throat-clearing, and so it seemed beyond stupid for me to say anything to Deborah about it.
And then later, when I came out of the building to my own car to go home for the night, I had the same feeling once again, that someone or something was watching—but it was a feeling. Not a warning, not an interior whisper from the shadows, not a get-ready flutter of invisible black wings—a feeling. And that made me nervous. When the Passenger speaks, I listen. I act. But it was not speaking now, merely squirming, and I had no idea what to do given that message. So in the absence of any more definite idea, I kept my eyes on my rearview mirror as I headed south for home.
Was this what it was like to be human? To walk through life with the perpetual feeling that you were meat on the hoof, stumbling down the game trail with tigers sniffing at your heels? If so, it would certainly go a long way toward explaining human behavior.
As a pr
edator myself, I knew very well the powerful feeling of strolling in disguise through the herds of potential prey, knowing that I could at any moment cut one of them from the herd. But without any word from the Passenger I did not merely blend in; I was actually part of the herd, vulnerable. I was prey, and I did not like it. It made me a great deal more watchful.
And when I came down off the expressway, my watching revealed a white Toyota Avalon following me.
Of course there are lots of white Toyota Avalons in the world.
After all, the Japanese lost the war and that gives them the right to dominate our car market. And certainly many of these Avalons could reasonably be heading for home along the same crowded route I took. Logically speaking, there are only so many directions in which to go, and it made perfect sense for a white Avalon to go in any one of them. And it was not logical to assume that anyone would want to follow me. What had I done? I mean, that anybody could prove?
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And so it was perfectly illogical of me to feel that I was being followed, which does not explain why I made a sudden right turn off U.S. 1 and down a side street.
It also does not explain why the white Avalon followed.
The car kept well back, as any predator would do to avoid spooking its chosen prey—or as any normal person might do if they just happened to take the same turn by coincidence. And so with the same uncharacteristic lack of logic, I zigged again, this time to the left, down a small residential street.
A moment later the other car followed.
As mentioned, Dashing Dexter does not know the meaning of fear. That would have to mean that the roaring thump of my heart, the parching of my mouth, and the sweat pouring out of my hands was no more than massive uneasiness.
I did not enjoy the feeling. I was no longer the Knight of the Knife. My blade and my armor were in some subbasement of the castle, and I was on the field of battle without them, a suddenly soft and tasty victim, and for no reason I could name I was sure that something had my scent in its ravening nostrils.