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“Great!” we call with gleeful relief—because we have him now. We have hooked our fish, set the barb unshakably into the soft flesh of his drooling gape, and so we reel him in, pulling him close and up to the side of the boat. And we haul our catch upward to where he can slap both hands onto the gunwale and let go of the pole, and we drop the boat hook to kneel on the deck and apparently offer him our left hand to help him onward, upward, into the boat.
Our left hand only, but he takes it and we pull him slightly higher. And still all unaware and dizzy and dripping wet, he dangles there half in the water and half out, just as he is now, in this perfect, wonderful, hurried, unplanned moment, already dangling half out of life.
He holds our left hand, balanced there between everything and nothing, and we hold him right there, our faces close together. Our left hand only, and he looks for our right hand to lift him out completely and he does not see it, and he looks back at us with a confusion that is tinged with anger, alarm, and desperation.
“What the fuck?” he says.
And the moment is here—the moment we have waited for, and planned for far too briefly, and we hesitate because it is not right. We have not proved his guilt, not Harry-sure, and we have not truly planned, and for just a moment we pause, bobbing in an uncertain boat on a sea of doubt.
And Patrick sees this, too, and sees that whatever might be happening, it is not what he thinks should be happening, and with his face so close to ours we can see that he is gathering himself for some purposeful thing, some sudden lunge or leap, and as ever-grateful always, just in the nick, we know exactly what to do.
“Jackie Forrest,” we say.
And it works, as it always does. Patrick freezes. For a moment he forgets to breathe, and that is a shame, because his breaths are numbered now and it is a very small number. And he stares back at us, so very near, and we watch his eyes—watch and truly feel a fond and warm regard for this savage bumbler. Because we always need the Harry Proof to earn these moments of wonder and bliss, and we have nothing like that proof this time—and Patrick has come to our rescue.
We watch him, and the look that climbs up into his bright and stupid eyes is everything we need. Just from the four syllables of that name, Jackie Forrest, everything he has done and planned to do is there in his eyes, a parade of pictures as full of guilt as a twenty-page confession. He did it, beyond question; this look could not lie. It is certainly and doubtlessly him, and without waiting for any kind of no-I-didn’t we bring up our right hand, the hand that has waited so patiently just out of sight, and we slide in the knife that has hovered there hoping for just this moment, slip in the blade once and carefully into just the right spot, and Patrick stiffens, gasps, and stares at us as he feels the knife go in and suddenly, terribly knows what is happening. And we watch the slow and fragile beauty of that moment as it flickers across the tiny twin screens of his pale blue eyes: the moment of indignant denial that this could ever happen to special precious me, then the bright bloom of world-ending agony as he knows that yes, it can and then yes, it has as the careful beat of the bioclock ticks one more time and then suddenly, unthinkably, stops.…
And then the most beautiful moment of all, as that thought swims away forever, that thought and all others, paddling off with every single trace of all that is Me; they swim away in a whirl of dark water, away from the small and pointless lump of meat and purpose that was Patrick and into the surging tide of blank and thoughtless night that has no end, away from everything he ever thought or ever was or ever wanted to be, away from the tiny bright shore that was life and into the rapid endless whirlpool of Nevermore.
And we watch and marvel as even that final flicker fades into the dim distance and the ever-same film of emptiness slides over the now-empty eyes. And the thing we are holding, the thing that was Patrick, lady-killer, alive with bright and boundless energy—that thing is now no more than an empty box, an unlovely container that will rot and fall apart faster than cheap cardboard in the rain, and as we see those eyes go dull we are truly moved, as we always are: moved, transported, lifted up for such a bright and rapid moment—and then dropped down again, drained, emptied of everything that matters, and as close to happy as we can ever be.
It is done. We have done it and it is over.
And now the colors of the day wash upward, into the brighter end of the spectrum where they belong, and the hard dark blade of doing it melts back once more into snug and tired satisfaction of a job well done, and I pull the clumsy, empty thing the rest of the way up, over the gunwale, and onto the deck. I leave it lying there and take the boat’s controls, motoring slowly away from the shore in the suddenly too-bright, too-empty afternoon.
TWENTY
IT WAS ANOTHER HALF AN HOUR BEFORE I GOT PATRICK TUCKED snugly away in the nearest deep hole, with a large anchor securely wired to his legs. I always have an extra anchor; they come in so handy, in so many common boating situations. I like to pick them up at garage sales whenever I can, because you never know when you might need to set out an extra anchor, or give aid to a distressed fellow mariner, or hide a freshly killed body. It was a good heavy Danforth storm anchor, and I was confident it would hold him down there until the crabs had eaten him away to the bare bones. And if he did somehow bob up to the surface, it would be at some time in the future when Dexter was far away and completely innocent, and they could never trace the anchor, nor connect me to the unrecognizable fish-nibbled body, to whom I had never, after all, been formally introduced.
And it may well be that I should not have felt so very good about my strange sunlit interlude. It had been done much too quickly, and it had been done with a terribly clumsy tool, and worse, it had been done without any of my So Very Important rituals—but it had been done, and Jackie was safe, and I was now free to reap the bounty of my diligent labors. I could relax in luxury without a care, enjoying mojitos, tournedos, and sunsets over the bay, with never a care. Patrick was gone for good.
And I did not worry about anyone finding his body. It was well hidden, I could never be connected to it, and all was roses and rainbows in Dexterville. I was so wrapped up in my afterglow of complete contentment that I did not worry about anything at all
, in fact, until I had cruised back up the canal to the dock—very slowly this time, earning me a grumpy nod from the shirtless old man. It was not until I had tied off the boat and started to trudge across the lawn toward my car that I glanced at my watch—and then, at last, I began to worry.
The short hand was pointing to the three and the long one to eleven, and it took only a moment of brilliant detective work to realize that it meant the time was five minutes of three, and I was going to be late to my alibi.
I hurried to my car and drove away down the little street in a way that no self-respecting shirtless old man could ever approve. Happily, no one was out on the street to see me, and in only a few minutes I was out onto Main Highway, over to Douglas, and then turning left on Dixie Highway.
Traffic was not heavy, but it was still another twenty minutes before I pulled into a space in the school parking lot. I went as quickly as I could without running, up the sidewalk and into the main office, where I signed the guest register, slapped a VISITOR sticker on my shirt, and hurried away down the hall to Cody’s classroom.
Cody’s teacher this year was a relentlessly cheerful middle-aged woman named Mrs. Hornberger. She was sitting at her desk when I came in, with Cody and Rita sitting in front of her, like two bad children called up before the class. The three of them looked up at me when I walked in; Cody very nearly smiled, Mrs. Hornberger raised an inquiring eyebrow, and Rita, without even taking a breath, immediately opened fire.
“Oh, Dexter, for the love of— It’s twenty minutes past, and you didn’t even call—really, this is just—”
“Sorry I’m late,” I said. No one offered me a chair, so I dragged one of the student desks over next to Cody and squeezed into it. “How bad is it?” I whispered to Cody, and he shrugged at me.
“Okay,” he said softly. Of course, he would have said exactly the same thing if the teacher had set them both on fire. I had to admit, Cody did have a slight problem in the area of communication. The trauma caused by his biological father, a mean crackhead who used to beat him and Astor until he was finally tucked away in prison, had made Cody exceptionally silent. What his father’s savagery had done to Astor was not quite as clear, unless severe crabbiness is trauma-induced.
But Bio Dad’s beatings had also slammed Cody out of the world of sunshine forever, into the cool dusk where the predators live. It had made him into my true heir, the Crown Prince of the Dexter Dark, eagerly awaiting my training so he could take his rightful place on the Shadow Throne. I was fairly sure the meeting today would not touch on that part of Cody’s education.
“Mr. Morgan,” Mrs. Hornberger said sternly. All eyes automatically swiveled to her, and even Rita stopped talking. Mrs. Hornberger looked at us each individually, to make sure we were all paying attention. Then the smile came back to her face, and everyone breathed again. “We were discussing Cody’s … conceptual difficulties … with socialization.”
“Oh,” I said, and because I had no idea what else to say, I added, “Yes, of course,” and she nodded at me approvingly.
And then we were off in search of Arriving at Meaningful Accommodation in a Context of Achieving Appropriate and Symmetrical Social and Educational Goals, stopping along the way to fondle every New Age–Feel Good buzzword ever coined. It was every bit as torturous as I had feared it would be, and it was clearly much worse for Cody. He could understand only one word in every four, and he squirmed and squeezed his hands together and moved his legs back and forth, and after only ten minutes he had taken fidgeting to dizzying new heights.
Rita followed every word that fell from Mrs. Hornberger’s lips with breathless concentration, her brow furrowed with worry. She would interrupt now and then with one of her fragmented sentences, ending with a question mark. Mrs. Hornberger would nod as if she actually understood, and slide another cliché out of the arsenal, and Rita would nod eagerly and go back to scrunching her face into a mask of concern.
