Double Dexter (Dexter 6)

I had no better luck with the taco crumb. There was simply nothing there to find, except that it was made of processed corn and contained several inorganic chemicals, probably preservatives. We did every test we could do on-site without destroying the wrapper and found nothing significant. Vince’s verbal wit did not leap magically to a higher level, either, and so by quitting time my mood had not really burbled up into steady good cheer. If anything, I felt even meaner than I had that morning. I fended off one last telephone attack from Deborah, locked up the evidence, and headed for the door.

“Don’t you want to go for tacos?” Vince called as I hit the door.

“Go jump up your ass,” I said. After all, if there really was a prize for saying “ass,” I deserved a shot at it.

SIX

I DROVE HOME THROUGH THE USUAL RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC, A nerve-jangling crawl of aggressive lane jumping and near collisions. A pickup truck was on fire on the shoulder of the Palmetto Expressway. A shirtless man in jeans and a battered cowboy hat stood beside it, looking almost bored. He had a large tattoo of an eagle on his back and a cigarette in one hand. Everyone slowed to look at the smoldering pickup, and behind me I could hear a fire truck, siren shrieking and horn blasting as it tried to get through the dawdling gawkers. As I edged past the burning truck my nose began to drip again, and by the time I got home some twenty minutes later, I was sneezing, one good skull-splitting blast every minute or so.

“I’b hobe!” I called out as I walked through the door, and a roar of something that sounded like rocket fire answered me; Cody was already at the Wii, working dutifully to destroy all the evil in the world with a massive artillery attack. He glanced up at me, and then quickly back to the TV screen; for him, it was a warm greeting. “Where’s your mom?” I asked him.

He jerked his head toward the kitchen. “Kitchen,” he said.

That was always good news; Rita in the kitchen meant something wonderful was on the way. Purely out of habit, I tried to sniff the aroma, which turned out to be a very bad idea, since it tickled my sinuses and launched me into a debilitating multiple sneeze that nearly brought me to my knees.

“Dexter?” Rita called from the kitchen.

“Ah-choo,” I answered.

“Oh,” she said, appearing in the doorway wearing rubber gloves and holding a large knife in her hand. “You sound awful.”

“Thag you,” I said. “Why glubs?”

“Glubs? Oh, gloves. I’m making you some soup,” she said, and she waved the knife. “With those Scotch-bonnet peppers, so I have to— Just in your soup, because Cody and Astor won’t eat it that way.”

“I hate spicy food,” Astor said, coming down the hall from her room and plopping down on the couch next to Cody. “Why do we have to have soup?”

“You can have a hot dog instead,” Rita said.

“I hate hot dogs,” Astor said.

Rita frowned and shook her head. A small lock of hair flopped down onto her forehead. “Well,” she said, rather forcefully, “you can just go hungry then.” And she pushed the hair off her forehead with her wrist and went back into the kitchen.

I watched Rita go, mildly surprised. She almost never lost her temper, and I could not remember the last time she had said something like that to Astor. I sneezed, and then went and stood behind the couch. “You could try a little harder not to upset your mom,” I said.

Astor looked up and then hunched away from me. “You’d better not give me your cold,” she said, with very convincing menace.

I looked at the top of Astor’s head. Part of me wanted to smack her on the head with a carpentry tool. But the other part of me realized that disciplining a child in such a forthright and vigorous manner was generally not encouraged in our society, a society I was trying to fit into at the moment. And in any case, I could hardly blame Astor for showing the same kind of cranky meanness I was feeling myself. Even Rita seemed to be feeling it. Perhaps some toxic chemical was falling with the summer rain and infecting all of us with a sour attitude.

So I simply took a deep breath and walked away from Astor and her towering sulk, heading into the kitchen to see if my nose might be working well enough to smell the soup brewing. I paused in the doorway; Rita was standing at the stove with her back to me. A cloud of fragrant-looking steam rose up around her. I took one step closer and sniffed experimentally.

And, of course, that made me sneeze. It was a wonderful sneeze, very loud and vigorous, with a full, beautiful tone. It apparently startled Rita, because she jumped several inches straight up and dropped a wineglass she had been holding, which shattered on the floor beside her. “Damn it!” she said, another surprising outburst. She looked at the puddle of wine spreading toward her shoe, and then looked at me. To my very great surprise, she blushed. “It was only …” she said. “I just thought, while I was cooking. And then you scared me,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to smell the soup.”

“Well, but really,” she said, and then she lurched toward the hallway and raced back clutching a broom and dustpan. “Go check on the baby,” she told me as she bent to clean up the broken glass. “She might need a diaper change.”

I watched Rita for a moment as she swept up the mess. Her cheeks were bright red and she avoided looking at me. I had the very strong impression that something was not right, but no matter how hard I gawked and blinked I got no clue to what it was. I suppose I was hoping that by staring long enough I might get some indication of what had just happened—perhaps subtitles would appear, or a man in a lab coat would hand me a pamphlet explaining things in eight languages, possibly with diagrams. But no such luck; Rita remained hunched over, blushing and sweeping shards of glass through the puddle of wine and into the dustpan, and I still had no idea why she, and everyone else, was acting so strangely today.

So I left the kitchen and went to the bedroom, where Lily Anne was lying in her crib. She was not quite awake, but she was fussing, kicking one leg and frowning, as if she, too, had caught whatever it was that had made everyone else peevish. I leaned over and felt her diaper; it was very full, pushing outward against the fabric of her little sleepy suit. I picked her up and moved her to the changing table, and she woke up almost immediately. It made changing the diaper a bit harder, but it was nice to have the company of somebody who wasn’t snarling at me.

When she was changed I took her into my little study, away from the sulking and the video violence of the Wii in the living room, and I sat at my desk with Lily Anne on my lap. She played with a ballpoint pen, tapping it on the desk with commendable concentration and an excellent sense of rhythm. I pulled a tissue from a box on the desk and blotted at my nose. I told myself that my cold would go away in a day or two, and there was no reason to blow it up into anything more than a minor inconvenience. Besides, everything else was fine, lovely, happy, with metaphorical birds flocking around me and singing twenty-four/seven. My home life was close to perfect, and I was keeping it in a very nice balance with my job. Very soon I would track down the one small cloud on my horizon, and then I would get a free, extra playdate, which would be pure bonus bliss.

I took out my Honda list and laid it on the desk. Three names crossed off. At my present deliberate pace, several more weeks of searching. I wanted to get it all done immediately, cut right to the cutting, and I bent closer to study the list, as if some telltale clue might be hidden between the lines. As I leaned in Lily Anne tipped over and tapped at the paper with her pen. “Na na na!” she said, and of course she was right. I had to be patient, deliberate, careful, and I would find him and flense him and everything would be fine—

I sneezed. Lily Anne flinched, and then picked up the paper, waved it at my face, and threw it jerkily onto the floor. She turned to me and beamed, very proud of herself, and I nodded at her wisdom. It was a very clear statement: No more daydreaming. You and I have work to do.

But before we could begin to restructure the tax code, a beautiful sound floated down the hall to us.