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The clock in my hotel room said it was only four-thirty-eight, which didn’t seem possible. I certainly seemed to be packing an awful lot of excitement into a very little time. It had made me hungry, too, but there was nothing close to the hotel except a franchise fast-food place, and it was even lower on the evolutionary scale than the one that had given me agita the day before.
So I gave a heavy sigh, pushed away hunger and fatigue, and sat instead at the horribly uncomfortable desk chair, and I pondered. The day had not been a total loss so far; it was at least possible that Anderson might be held in check for a while. It was far too much to hope that the feds would investigate or prosecute him, of course, but they were aware that something was not quite right in Smallville—“Small” referring, of course, to Anderson’s IQ. That knowledge should restrain him, at least temporarily. Of course, it was almost as likely to prompt him to try something even more outrageous.
His last words to me, It ain’t over, certainly made preemptive action seem more likely. And the fact that the FBI now had good reason to believe he’d been playing hokeypokey with evidence and forged signatures would probably make him even more desperate to prove I was a True Naughty Boy of epic proportions. It seemed logical to assume that his best stratagem was framing me for drug possession. He already had that on the record, and if he could “prove” he’d been right, that would not only take Me off to jail, but it would also restore his reputation.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that this would be Anderson’s plan. He would take some of the “missing” drugs and slip them into my meager possessions. It was simple, which was de rigueur for him, and it would probably work. Even if everybody was certain he’d planted the drugs himself, they’d go along with it. I nodded; that’s what he would do—if he found out where I was. He hadn’t so far, and as long as I made sure he never did, his plot couldn’t get off the ground.
I slid that worry onto the back burner. Anderson was not on the same level of threat as the bombers. There was no wiggle room with someone who wants to kill you badly enough that they are willing to take out half your hotel as long as they might get you, too. They’d missed once, but there was no doubt that they’d make another try as soon as they could. How? I didn’t have enough raw data even to guess their next move. I had no clue at all what they might do, or how many of them there might be—I knew nothing about them except that the size of their bomb revealed a reckless joie de vivre that I might have admired, except that it also indicated an unsettling seriousness about getting rid of me.
Brian, on the other hand, did know them. And as a special bonus, he had a car, a vehicle well known for its ability to take people to places where food was available. That sealed it; I called Brian, and he agreed to come get me.
Half an hour later we were sitting together in a nice, quiet diner over in Homestead. “I believe the meat loaf is quite good here,” Brian told me. “If you like that sort of thing.”
“I do,” I said, and in truth, the mere mention of it had made my stomach groan audibly.
A brisk and efficient waitress took our order: two meat loafs, garlic mashed, green beans. Coffee, sweet tea (for Brian). She swished away, and I leaned back in the red plastic booth. “The thing is,” I said to Brian, “it all comes down to what we were talking about this morning.”
“Early afternoon, actually,” Brian said politely.
I waved it off. “The point is,” I said, “Raul’s little buddies found me. There are two things wrong with that.”
My brother was already nodding, proving once again that he was no slouch. “First, it’s you,” he said. “Instead of me.”
“And second,” I went on, “it happened much too quickly to be coincidence or luck. So the question is—”
“How,” Brian said. “And without knowing that, it’s really much harder to put an end to it, isn’t it?”
“?‘The most difficult part to invent is the end,’?” I said. He blinked at me inquiringly, and I tried to look modest. “De Tocqueville,” I said.
Brian just nodded, and looked down at the table. He frowned very thoughtfully, and I realized my face was wearing an exact duplicate of his expression. How odd it was, after all my years of thinking I was alone and unique, finally to find somebody who was so very similar, even down to appearance. Of course, my handwriting was much better. And Shakespeare or not, I was positive Brian couldn’t quote de Tocqueville like I could. Even so, it was rather strange—but nice, in truth. Brian was real family—not a fair-weather sibling who turned her back at the merest hint of trouble. Brian had instead arrived, unasked, when my problems began, and he was helping me solve them. Except, of course, for the small detail of dropping me into the middle of a lethally violent drug war. But I could forgive that; I had to, because he was family. Permanent, undeniable family, and as much like me as he could be. Not like some I could think of.
And that thought might as well have been a cue in a well-rehearsed theatrical performance, because as the words formed in my brain, my phone rang. I glanced at the screen and saw, to my irritated astonishment, that the call came, by all that is unholy, from a certain fair-weather sib
ling: It was Deborah, and that made absolutely no sense. Did she need instructions on how to change Lily Anne’s diaper? Or perhaps permission for Cody to play with sharp objects? Well, too bad—she was on her own, and it was all her doing. As far as I could tell from our last two conversations, we had nothing at all to say to one another. Not now, not ever again. She’d made it quite clear that our family ties were untied, and she preferred it that way.
I felt a small surge of annoyance bordering on resentment, and decided that Mr. Dexter Morgan was not available. I pushed decline and put the phone back in my pocket.
I turned my powerful brain right back to the problem at hand with not even a small thought of my ex-sister. How had they found me so quickly? Because there was really no reason for Deborah to call.
My phone chirruped again. Either I had suddenly become Mr. Popular, or some other unthinkable event had just occurred. I looked at the screen, and unthinkable won. It was Deborah again.
Once more I pushed decline and my irritation ratcheted up a few notches. Would she never give me any peace? Was the woman going to hound me to my grave? Assuming no one else got me there first by more conventional means?
Again: How had Raul’s men found me so quickly and easily? They had to have picked me up after I’d already left the first hotel, the one where I found Octavio dead on my bed. Otherwise, they would have been onto Brian first, not me. But they could easily have gotten my name from that hotel room. So they knew that something called a “Dexter Morgan” was somehow connected to Brian. Had I used my credit card since my precipitous departure from that hotel? I didn’t think so.
So how had they found me? I couldn’t believe that they had simply roamed around the city looking for a Dexter until they found the right one. If nothing else, you didn’t waste a lovely big bomb like that one on an uncertain target. They had known it was me when they planted the bomb. But how? Where had I been that they could latch onto me like that? It could not have been at any time or place when Brian and I were together, either, for the same reason—that they would have hit Brian first.
So: I had been to several restaurants—and that sent one quick bright surge of adrenaline up my spine, because I remembered that one of those restaurants had been Mexican—just like Raul! But of course, it didn’t hold up. Aside from the fact that it was politically terribly incorrect, it made no real sense. Pepino’s restaurant had no more connection to a drug lord than the sushi place where I’d had lunch with Vince had with bombing Pearl Harbor. And that sushi place was just as certainly ruled out—I had sat there in my car for half an hour, a perfect and stationary target. Even a mad bomber would have said, What the hell, and taken a whack at me by some more direct method.
Not the restaurants. Where else? I had been out of jail a very short time, and I hadn’t been very many places, and was my phone really ringing again?!
It was. And once again it was Deborah calling. A great number of things ran lightly across the surface of my brain. Most of them were biting things I could say to her. Unfortunately, the best of them would involve raising my voice and saying things that might even affect the service of my meat loaf.
But one other thing slowly worked its way to the front of the line, gently shoving aside all the salty, profane, and entertaining words and phrases. Deborah, after making it quite clear that she never wanted even to say my name again, had just called me three times in two minutes.
Why?
It would be fun to think that after such a short time with my children she wanted to give them back—and more fun still if she’d had an incredibly illuminating insight into the error of her ways and she wanted to beg my forgiveness and make up. But as stubborn as I knew her to be, it would have to be an epiphany on the order of Saul on the road to Damascus—and Debs in the fast lane of I-95 didn’t sound like it even belonged in the same league. So ruling out the ridiculous, that she had suddenly forgiven me, I could think of absolutely no reason in the world why she would call. And therefore no reason I should answer.
