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“Perhaps he still is,” I said.
He still was. I called him from my car after Brian left me with a promise to get in touch this evening, and Vince answered right away, speaking in a kind of shocked and reverent whisper. “Dexter, my God,” he said. “I can’t believe—I mean, I really tried to—Shit. I can’t talk now. I’m in the lab, and there’s—”
“Can you meet me for lunch?” I said.
“I think so, if I—Yes. I mean, I’ll do what I can to—I can get away around noon?”
“Good,” I said. “Meet me at Lunar Sushi.”
“I will,” he said in an eager whisper. “I mean, I’ll try. And if—Oh! Somebody’s coming…!”
“See you at noon, Vince,” I said, and broke the connection.
I had three hours to fill before then, and not a great deal to fill them with. I thought about going back to my hotel room, and firmly rejected the idea on humanitarian grounds. If I wasn’t going to rest, then the most natural thing would be to eat. But I had just eaten, and I would be eating more when I met with Vince, so it really seemed like a bit much to kill time between meals by eating. I thought about it anyway. After all, doughnuts are not really substantial, are they? Very little protein in the average bear claw, in spite of the name. And since I hadn’t partaken of the garish sprinkles my brother gorged himself on, I’d had nothing green to eat, either.
I remembered a map I’d drawn in my cell, after days of unspeakable swill they laughingly referred to as “food” at the TGK. The map traced a route that wound its way through South Miami, into the Grove, and then over to Miami Beach. At every point along the route where there was a restaurant I liked, I had placed an ornate little star and a small icon of the appropriate kind of food: tiny pizzas, sushi rolls, stone crabs, and so on. It had been my whimsical thought that if I ever saw the clear light of freedom again, I would trace the whole course, stopping at each star to sample their icon.
I could start my trip now, work my way through the first four or five, and end up close to Lunar Sushi just in time for my lunch with Vince. The idea had its charms—but on the whole, I couldn’t make myself believe that gorging myself was the best way to spend my time when both Life and Liberty hung so tenuously in the balance, presumably to be joined at any moment by Pursuit of Happiness. I put the thought away.
What I really needed to do was to keep a low profile, avoid any chance of discovery by either the Good Guys, as played by Anderson, or the Bad Guys, starring Raul and a cast of thousands. Since I had already ruled out returning to my miserable, bone-breaking hotel room, there were very few options left to me. I could always take out my boat; I’d be relatively safe in the middle of Biscayne Bay, and I would see anyone approaching. But the odds were fifty-fifty that Anderson at the least, and maybe Raul’s team as well, knew about the boat, and had it watched. It wasn’t worth the risk.
That didn’t leave too many places—to be perfectly honest, it left exactly none that actually sprang to mind. So I drove north, since that was the direction I was pointed in when I left the doughnut shop. At least it led me farther away from the torture equipment laughingly referred to as a bed that crouched in my hotel room awaiting its prey.
The morning rush hour was dying down at last, and the traffic moved easily enough all the way up to Le Jeune Road. Still with no definite goal in mind, I turned left and headed toward Coconut Grove.
As I drove along through the center of the Grove, I marveled yet again at how much had changed since I grew up here. Most of the shops I had known then were gone, replaced by different, new shops filled with totally different overpriced and pointless items. Of course, there were a few landmarks that hadn’t changed since the dawn of time. The park was still pretty much as it had been, and across from it the library was still there, though it was now partially hidden by the newer buildings that had sprung up around it. I had spent many happy hours in the library, trying to find a book that would explain to me once and for all how to act human—and when I was a little older, a book that might tell me why I should bother.
As I turned onto McFarlane Road and headed down the hill toward the library, I wondered whether it might not be a good place to lay low for a few hours. It was cool, quiet, and had both Internet and reading matter aplenty. And then, right in front of the building, I saw that there was a parking space open. In the memory of living man, this had never happened before, so I took it as a sign from God and made an immediate U-turn. I slid into the spot and parked, and thinking that I might do a little bit of diligent low-profile digging while I waited, I grabbed up the folder of legal papers I had been given at the jail when they returned my stuff.
I locked the car, put an enormous amount of money into the meter, and went into the library. I found a nice, quiet spot over by the back window and sat down to go through my folder. What with finding corpses and so on, I’d been far too busy to open the folder; I hadn’t even glanced at it yet. I’d assumed that it was copies of the great heap of paperwork that is required to do absolutely anything nowadays, especially within the bureaucratic hell that is Official Miami. I knew from experience that the Department of Corrections demanded many pages of mind-numbing trivia even for something as simple as getting a box of paper clips, and I expected that the actual release of a prisoner would generate several reams of stilted prose.
But when I opened the folder, the first clump of papers I saw on top of the heap did not carry the imprint of Corrections. Instead, the letterhead said, Department of Children and Families.
For a long moment I just stared, and then my very first thought was a rather plaintive, But I’m an adult! And then luckily, a couple of gray cells floated up to the surface and suggested that some overworked and underbrained bureaucrat had obviously stuffed somebody else’s papers in my folder by mistake. It was a simple, laughable error, and no doubt I would even laugh at it someday, if I lived. I picked up the offending paperwork, intending to fling it in the nearest receptacle—and my eye caught a single word: Astor.
I paused, long enough to see that this word was joined to another, Morgan, and right next to it there were more: Cody Morgan, and Lily Anne Morgan. Since these were the names of my three children, it seemed far too much to write it off as coincidence, so I put the paper back down on the table in front of me and looked it over.
After a quick examination of several pages of baroque legal language, I concluded that the party of the first part, one Dexter Morgan, having acted contra bonos mores as well as cum gladiis et fustubus was now de facto and de jure a persona non grata in his role as legal guardian of said minor children. Further deponent sayeth that the party of the second part, hight Deborah Morgan, acting as amicus paterna in uberrima fides, did solemnly swear and affirm cum hoc ergo propter hoc that she would therefore ipso facto assume completely and totally the role of guard
ian ad litem, in loco parentis. The party of the first part hereby confirms that this ad idem agreement shall supersede all others and in witness thereof affixes his signature, quod erat demonstrandum, et pedicabo te.
Or words to that effect; there was an awful lot, and not all of it was in such nice Latin, but the gist of it was that I was signing over all my rights and privileges as sole surviving parent of Cody, Astor, and Lily Anne, and naming Deborah as their new mommy, which was probably in the document somewhere as materfamilias.
In my humble opinion, it is a very great credit to me that this time I did not blink or gape, as I had done so much lately. I remembered right away that when Deborah had finally come to see me in jail, she had asked me to sign over custody of the kids. It had been the sole reason that she finally made herself overcome her complete, violent, and totally understandable nausea caused by looking at me.
Of course, things were a little different now—I was no longer in jail. It was true that I would probably return there, unless I was chopped into bits by savage cartel assassins before then. Even so, did I really want to do this? Completely abandon all my paternal rights and privileges?
My first thought was a mean-spirited, No! The kids were mine, and no one was going to take them away from me, not Deborah or anyone else. But when I reflected on that for just a few moments, I realized that this was not a well-thought-out response.
How did I really feel about my kids? Of course, only Lily Anne was truly my child, biologically speaking. But Cody and Astor were Children of Darkness, just like me. I was their spiritual father, as well as legal, and I had promised to set their feet safely onto the Dark Path. I had failed miserably so far—just never got around to it, what with the frantic pace of school and homework and dentist and pediatrician and new sneakers. It was always, Yes, of course, later, and later never came. Why is it that there’s never enough time to do anything, unless it’s so immediate that not doing it results in instant catastrophe?
It was hard to feel guilty about failing to train them to be successful predators, but I did manage a little regret, at least. And Lily Anne—she was untouched by Shadow, a near-perfect creature of burbling pink light. Quite impossible to believe that she carried my DNA, but she did; Lily Anne, alone in all the world, would take the entire genetic wonder that was Dexter and carry it into the future, so that fabulous me would not be lost from the gene pool, and that was a very nice thought.
But she would do that just as well without me—perhaps better. In truth, didn’t she deserve something better than a father like me? Deborah would provide a positive role model, something I could never hope to do. And Cody and Astor would be who they were, who they had to be, whether I was there or not. So the only real question was, Did I really want to be there? Enough to fight it out with Deborah and the courts? Was I really that protective of my rights and privileges?
I thought about that for a good two minutes, and to be perfectly honest, I only thought of one or two rights, and I couldn’t think of any privileges at all. It had been my experience that fatherhood was mostly a matter of suffering the insufferable, tolerating the intolerable, and changing diapers. Where was the joy in the endless screeching, door slamming, and name-calling? Was it a privilege to sacrifice time, money, and sanity to a snarling horde of sticky ingrates?
I tried very hard to come up with a few fondly remembered moments of joy. There didn’t seem to be any. There was once when I got home late and I was just in time to keep Cody from eating the last piece of Rita’s Orange Chicken. I’d been happy then, or at least relieved. And another time Astor threw her shoes at me, and one of them missed. That had been good, too.
