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She looked at me, and I looked back, and the moment seemed to stretch past what was comfortable, but I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, and since she didn’t appear to feel uneasy with the silence, I decided not to, either. Behind us the sun was just starting to sink into the horizon, and the water in front of us had that golden glow it gets at sunset, and that reflected up onto Jackie’s face, and I suppose onto mine, too. Finally, the corners of her mouth went up into a smile, and she said, “Anyway. We should probably think about dinner. Are you hungry?”
I might have said that of course I was hungry; the mighty engine that is Dexter’s body runs perpetually at a very high level, and requires regular fuel. But I settled for a polite, “Actually, I am a bit,” and Jackie nodded, suddenly looking very serious.
“All right,” she said. “Is there a really good place nearby? The network is paying, so don’t be stingy.”
Truthfully, my taste in food tends to be more robust than refined, but in any case, there were other considerations at the moment that were more important than what might be on the menu. “Um,” I said. “How about room service?”
Jackie raised an eyebrow at me and started to say something, then seemed to catch herself. “Oh,” she said. “You mean because …” She frowned and shook her head. “You think it might be dangerous to go out,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s getting dark, and I have to assume he’s figured out where you’re staying by now.”
“Oh,” she said again, and she seemed to deflate a bit, slumping down into her chair and letting her chin sink onto her chest. “I keep forgetting,” she said. “I was just enjoying …” She sighed heavily, which seemed like a strange reaction, unless she really wanted a fancy high-priced dinner. “Anyway, room service is fine. Since you are”—she waved one hand vaguely—“looking after my safety.”
“That is why I’m here,” I said.
She looked at me just a moment too long. “I’ll try to remember that,” she said. And before I could figure out what that meant, I heard a kind of scrabbling noise coming from the direction of the suite’s door.
“That’s—” she started to say, but I held up a hand and cut her off, listening hard for a second. There was no doubt; somebody was trying to open the door and get in.
We had not ordered anything yet, and since Jackie had been here almost a week I didn’t think the management would be sending up a fruit basket. That left one very obvious and unpleasant possibility.
I got carefully to my feet and pulled the Glock from its holster. “Dexter,” Jackie said. “I think it’s—”
“Lock yourself into the bathroom,” I said. “Take your phone, just in case.”
“But I just—”
“Quickly!” I hissed at her, and I moved rapidly and silently toward the door, making sure the pistol’s safety was off and holding it in the ready position, just the way my adoptive father, Harry, had taught me so long ago. I don’t like guns—they’re noisy and impersonal and really leave very little room for true artistic expression. But they are effective, and Harry had taught me how to use them as only a combat veteran and career cop could teach, and with a weapon as good as this one I could put holes in things at a very good distance.
In this case, however, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to shoot. So I hurried across the floor to one side of the door, holding myself and my Glock in readiness.
As I got there the door began to ease open slowly, almost shyly; whoever it was, they were being very careful not to alert anyone that they were coming in. Unfortunately for them, I was already alerted. With my left hand I grabbed the edge of the door and yanked it open. I stepped quickly around, snatched at the arm holding the doorknob, and jerked hard, and as a head of short brown hair followed the arm into the room I slid behind and pressed the barrel of the Glock into the right ear.
A clatter of papers, keys, cell phone, and a Starbucks cup fell to the floor, and as they hit I heard a soft moan of terror, and I looked at what I was holding at gunpoint.
She was a square, plain-looking woman in her mid-thirties, wearing large Elton John-style glasses and a lightweight tropical sundress, not at all what I had pictured as our killer, and she was trembling violently. “Please,” she croaked. “Please don’t kill me.” There was an unpleasant smell, and I looked down at the floor by my feet. Coffee was puddling out of the Starbucks cup, and a pool of urine around the woman’s feet was growing to meet it—and spreading now toward my shoes, too, a very nice pair of New Balance running shoes, practically brand-new.
“Please,” the woman whispered again, and she was shaking so hard now I could barely keep the gun in her ear.
“Ahem,” said Jackie, and I looked up. She was standing about ten feet away, looking at us with an expression of real concern. “That was very impressive,” she said. “I mean, it’s nice to see you really know what you’re doing, but …” She bit her lip. “I, uh, I tried to tell you,” she said, and nodded at the woman I had captured.
“Um …” Jackie said with a kind of appalled flutter of her hands. She gave an embarrassed half smile and waved one hand at my prisoner. “Can I introduce my assistant, Kathy?”
I looked at the woman I was holding. She was still trembling, and she looked back at me with wide and terrified eyes. “Pleased to meet you,” I said.
TEN
IF YOU ARE JACKIE FORREST AND YOU ARE STAYING AT THE Grove Isle Hotel, you do not get the kind of room service normal people must put up with, even very rich normal people. I have stayed in some very nice hotels, but it always takes somewhere between one hour and three days to get a response to a call for service. And when help finally arrives, it is usually one surly man with a bad back who only speaks Urdu and refuses to understand the simplest request unless he sees dollar bills of a large denomination.
But for Jackie, the hotel had apparently hired a team of Olympic sprinters with a pathological need to please. Within thirty seconds of Jackie’s call for a mop, a trio of young women arrived, eager and smiling. They wore hotel name tags that sa
id NADIA, MARIA, and AMILA, and they fell on the puddle as if they were starving and it was manna rather than urine, while poor Kathy was still staggering away from the door and collapsing into a chair.
One of the maids, Amila, looked strangely familiar, and I stared longer than one really should look at a hotel maid mopping up pee. She looked up and smiled at me and then tossed her head, flinging her golden hair to one side. “I make my hair as Chackie,” she said shyly, with a very thick accent from some Central European country. “Very important star, yes?” She glanced over to the chair where Jackie was soothing Kathy’s nerves.
And sure enough, it was true. Amila had styled her hair just the way Jackie did, which explained why she had looked familiar. “It’s very nice,” I said, and Amila blushed and returned her attention to her mop. She and her business associates had our little accident cleaned up in no time. They put the Starbucks cup, keys, and the cell phone on a side table, and they vanished, still smiling and leaving behind no more than a pleasant lemon smell, before Kathy managed to say, “Oh, God,” more than two times. Amila paused at the door, briefly, and looked hungrily at Jackie. She touched her own hair, sighed, and disappeared into the hall.
Kathy said, “Oh, God,” another twenty or thirty times while Jackie cooed at her in an attempt to soothe her jangled nerves. I am sure it is very unsettling to have a gun jammed into your ear, even a gun as nice as the Glock, but after five or six minutes of monotone monosyllabic misery, I began to wonder whether Kathy might be overdoing it a bit. I hadn’t actually shot her; I’d done no more than grab her and point the pistol. But the way she carried on you would have thought I’d taken out her liver and offered her a bite.
