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“Sergeant Debbie is in bed, asleep,” I said. The siren was near now, and with a squeal of tires it came to a stop in front of our house and wound its way down through the scale to a grumbling halt.
“They’re here,” I told them, and Rita lunged up off the bed and grabbed the children by the hand.
The three of them followed me out of the bedroom, and by the time we got to the front door there
was already a knock sounding on the wood, polite but firm. Still, life teaches us caution, so I called out, “Who is it?”
“This is the police,” a stern masculine voice said. “We have a 212
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report of a possible break-in.” It sounded authentic, but just to be sure, I left the chain on as I opened the door and looked out. Sure enough, there were two uniformed cops standing there, one looking at the door and one turned away, looking out into the yard and the street.
I closed the door, took the chain off, and reopened it. “Come in, Officer,” I said. His name tag said Ramirez, and I realized I knew him slightly. But he made no move to enter the house; he simply stared down at my hand.
“What kind of emergency is this, chief?” he said, nodding at my hand. I looked and realized I was still holding the toilet plunger.
“Oh,” I said. I put the plunger behind the door in the umbrella stand. “Sorry. That was for self-defense.”
“Uh-huh,” Ramirez said. “Guess it would depend what the other guy had.” He stepped forward into the house, calling over his shoulder to his partner, “Take a look around the yard, Williams.”
“Yo,” said Williams, a wiry black man of about forty. He walked down into the yard and disappeared around the corner of the house.
Ramirez stood in the center of the room, looking at Rita and the kids. “So, what’s the story here?” he asked, and before I could answer he squinted at me. “I know you from somewhere?” he said.
“Dexter Morgan,” I said. “I work in forensics.”
“Right,” he said. “So what happened here, Dexter?”
I told him.
T W E N T Y - E I G H T
The cops stayed with us for about forty minutes.
They looked around the yard and the surrounding neighborhood and found nothing, which did not seem to surprise them, and which truthfully was not a great shock to me, either.
When they were done looking Rita made them coffee and fed them some oatmeal cookies she had made.
Ramirez was certain it had been a couple of kids trying to get some kind of reaction from us, and if so they had certainly succeeded. Williams tried very hard to be reassuring, telling us it was just a prank and now it was over, and as they were leaving Ramirez added that they would drive by a few times the rest of the night.
But even with these soothing words still fresh, Rita sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee for the rest of the night, unable to get back to sleep. For my part, I tossed and turned for more than three minutes before I drifted back to slumberland.
And as I flew down the long black mountain into sleep, the music started up again. And there was a great feeling of gladness and then heat on my face . . .
And somehow I was in the hallway, with Rita shaking me and calling my name. “Dexter, wake up,” she said. “Dexter.”
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“What happened?” I said.
“You were sleepwalking,” she said. “And singing. Singing in your sleep.”
And so rosy-fingered dawn found both of us sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. When the alarm finally went off in the bedroom, she got up to turn it off and came back and looked at me. I looked back, but there didn’t seem to be anything to say, and then Cody and Astor came into the kitchen, and there was nothing more we could do except stumble through the morning routine and head for work, automatically pretending that everything was exactly the way it should be.
But of course it wasn’t. Someone was trying to get into my head, and they were succeeding far too well. And now they were trying to get into my house, and I didn’t even know who it was, or what they wanted. I had to assume that somehow it was all connected to Moloch, and the absence of my Presence.
