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Brian nodded, cheerful again. “Perhaps even more,” he said.
ELEVEN
Brian had two storm anchors in the back of his van. We wired Octavio to one and his new friend to the other, and muscled them both into the water of the quarry. They sank quickly, leaving not even a ripple to show where they had been, and I tried very hard not to see that as a metaphor for my life at the moment. It didn’t work. All I could see was the sad Detritus of Dexter sinking into the dark abyss, cold and murky water closing over my head, leaving no trace at all of the wonder that had been Me.
All the way back to U.S. 1, Brian kept up a polite stream of inconsequential chatter. I responded with monosyllables, for the most part. There didn’t seem to be a single ray of hope for me anywhere. Either I would be yanked off the streets and flung in a cell again or, if I was really lucky, I would merely be chopped and shredded by Raul’s men. The odds against my coming out the far end of this long dark tunnel were so monumental that I was more likely to grow wings and learn to grant wishes. Once again, saddest of all, I found that all my bitter thoughts led to the same place, the tragically mundane refrain of Why Me? It took away any possibility of finding nobility in my suffering. I was just another poor schlub caught up in something he could not control. Dexter’s Dilemma—and the most pathetic part of it all was that it was identical with what is generally known as the Human Condition. Me: reduced to mere Humanity. It wasn’t even worth one of my high-quality synthetic mocking laughs, not even to rub Brian’s nose in the fact that I did it much better than he did.
We drove back to the doughnut shop where I’d left my car, idling past once on U.S. 1 while we looked for any sign of untoward activity, Legal or Otherwise, around my car. There was no sign of anything: no police cruiser or unmarked car, and as far as we could see, there was no conga line of swarthy killers with machine guns, either.
Just to be safe, Brian drove around the block and approached the parking lot from the rear. He pulled up on the street, in the shadow of a large old banyan tree, and put the van in park. For a moment we both sat silently. I don’t know what Brian was thinking, but I was still scrabbling across the rough tundra of my brainscape, looking for a way out of the unfolding unending hopelessness of being Me nowadays. As far as I could see, there wasn’t one.
“Well,” Brian said eventually.
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”
“Cheer up, brother,” he said. “Keep smiling.”
“What on earth for?”
He smiled. “It confuses people?” he said.
I sighed. “I’m afraid it’s beyond me at the moment,” I said. I opened the door. “I’ll find another hotel and let you know where I am.”
“By phone?” he said, sounding rather anxious. “I mean—I suppose the business with the credit card has made me overcautious, but—”
“You’re right,” I said, mentally kicking myself; I should have thought of that. “Let’s meet here, at the doughnut shop, for breakfast.”
“A wonderful thought,” Brian said. “I do like fresh doughnuts.”
“Eight o’clock?” I said, and he nodded. “All right, then.” I jumped down out of the van and Brian put it into gear.
“Good night,” he said as I reached to close the door. It was a wonderful sentiment, but it seemed unlikely, so I just nodded and trudged over to my rental car.
I found a small and anonymous motel just south of Goulds, a little north of Homestead. It was an old-style one-story hotel, clearly built in the fifties to accommodate weary Northerners as they rested from motoring down the old Dixie Highway and exploring the wonders of Florida. The place was run by a mom and pop who really should have retired no later than 1963. They seemed surprised and a little put out that somebody would interrupt their TV viewing by asking for a room, but I showed them cash, and after a certain amount of grumbling, they gave me a key and pointed away toward the left wing.
My room was halfway down a row of identically tatty doors with peeling paint and missing numerals. The inside was no better; it smelled like mothballs and mildew and was nearly as tiny as my cell had been. But I hoped that the place was small enough to be off the grid somewhat. And the proprietors had shown no sign of any technical savvy beyond changing channels on their old TV set—and not even with a remote control—so perhaps they would simply pocket my cash without leaving any trace on the information grid.
I locked the door and secured it with the rusty chain that hung there, and then walked over to the bed and looked it over. A large part of the mothball smell seemed to be coming from the bedspread, and the two pillows were so flat I thought they might just be empty pillowcases. I put one hand on the mattress and felt it. It offered all the firm support of a bag of fresh marshmallows. But it was a bed, and I was suddenly very tired.
I flopped onto the bed—a little too energetically, as it turned out. It was apparently a few years older than my hosts, and it did not merely sag; I actually felt my back touch the floor. Then it moved a few inches upward again, leaving me in a half-folded position that was already starting to give me back pain. The mattress in my other hotel room had been bad enough; this one was far worse, enough to make me nostalgic for the nice hard shelf they’d let me sleep on in jail.
I turned and twisted and finally found a position that was not actually painful, though it was very far from comfy. So much to do, and so many distractions. Was it really only this morning that I woke up in a cell? It seemed impossible—so much had happened since that it seemed like another lifetime. But it was true; mere hours ago I had been blinking in the sunlight, thrilled at my reentry into a world with fewer steel bars. And I spent most of the day convinced that nothing in the world could possibly be worse than going back to jail—until my brother had very thoughtfully provided a couple of new options that were far, far worse.
But I still had to keep myself free. I pushed my brain away from contemplating the hordes of savage drug-crazed assassins who were no doubt sniffing my trail, and I forced myself to think about my real agenda, keeping Dexter out of jail and, if possible, putting Anderson in.
Let’s see; I had just decided on independent action. I needed to find some proof that…what was it again? I was distracted by an enormous yawn that seemed to take over my entire body. Proof—I needed to show that Robert was a pedophile, and Anderson had played games with evidence. I remembered that I had decided my first step was to talk to Vince, ask him to help me gather some stuff that—Another enormous yawn. Something about Anderson being a bad guy or something, that was it. Good old Vince. Bad old Anderson.
I felt a third yawn coming on, and I could tell that this one would leave the other two far behind in the dust. It felt so powerful, overwhelming, gigantic that I was afraid it might actually crack me in half, and I fought against it for a few valiant seconds, and then…
—
The sun was doing its very best to break through the tattered mildew-smelling curtains when I opened my eyes. Somehow it had turned into morning—and an obnoxiously bright and cheerful one, too, just to rub salt in all my psychic wounds. It’s very hard to maintain a properly grumpy perspective when the sun is beaming down from a cloudless sky, and the voice of the turtle is so clearly warming up in the wings. But I tried; I lay there unmoving for a while, wondering if it was even worth getting out of bed. If I did, some new and awful disaster would almost certainly leap out of the closet and wrestle me to the floor. And the floor did not look terribly inviting—yellowed, peeling linoleum that had probably been put down to celebrate Eisenhower’s inauguration.
On the other hand, if I just lay here on my marshmallow mattress, all the other wicked and unwarranted beasties pursuing me would eventually catch up. Not really a terribly enticing choice either way.
So I lay on my back on the horribly soft bed and avoided making the choice. It was nearly comfortable, even though my knees were surprisingly close to my head. Sometime in the night, my body had curved into the shape of the letter “U,” as the bed yielded around me. It wasn’t so bad, almost the same position as lying in a hammock, and I’d never heard a sailor complain about that. Of course, I did not ordinarily hang out with sailors—but surely some word would have trickled out.
I lay there, and I thought grumpy thoughts that were only partly generated by my waking up so recently. I grumbled, and it might even be said that I pouted. But eventually a small but potent voice sounded in the depths of my very being, that tiny nagging whisper that has so often guided me, the righteous glowing arrow that always points my way, lights my footsteps, and sends me down the right path, no matter what. There is no denying this Voice when it speaks, for it is never wrong and never out of order. It spoke to me now, softly but insistently, and what it said was, I’m hungry.
