So think, Dexter: Try really hard to make something new and wonderful happen in that dull unmoving sandbox in your skull. Try for an actual thought, a genuine idea, before it’s too late for Astor, too-if it isn’t already.
Nothing came. That was not a surprise to me, in my current state of overwhelming idiocy. I should just accept the fact that I was mentally deficient and learn to be happy. Maybe buy a banjo. Because I had no clue at all where they might be, and not even the glimmer of a hint of how to find out. I could only hope that somewhere along the way, somehow, somebody would stumble over the two of them and get Astor away from Robert. Clearly it wouldn’t be me. I couldn’t find them if they fell out of a tree and landed on my head. Even Rita had a better chance. At least she’d had a whatchacallit, one of them idea things.…
And maybe that idea had panned out. Maybe her luck was running better than mine. It couldn’t be a lot worse, not unless she’d accidentally set herself on fire. So I pulled out my phone and called Rita, mostly because I was such an unvarnished blockhead that I couldn’t think of anything else.
But Rita’s phone rang and rang and went right to voice mail. Wherever she’d gone, she was still there. Did that mean she’d found them? Or was she just stuck in traffic? And where had she gone, anyway?
I tapped on the message she’d left earlier, and listened to it again. It hadn’t changed at all. The only part of it that gave even a faint whiff of a hint was when she said, “… you said she might come home, and I thought, that’s right, she might, but maybe not-and so anyway, I’ll just be gone for twenty minutes.…”
“Come home but not” was typical Rita-ese, so convoluted and incomplete that it might mean almost anything. But I had been struggling to understand her for many years now, and I thought I could interpret. Of course, thought was proving to be a dangerous and alien activity for me, but I tried it anyway, and I took “home but not” and added it to “gone for twenty minutes,” and there was only one thing it could mean. It was probably the wrong thing, but what I came up with was our new house. Home but not home, a ten-minute drive away, and definitely a place that Astor would want to go.
Of course, I had to assume that Astor had some say in where they went, but I knew how persuasive she was, or, failing that, how very stubborn. And Robert would be desperate to find a place where he could lie low. He was new at all this-except, apparently, for the pedophilia-and he would assume that the whole world was on his trail. So he’d want to find someplace quiet and unexpected, a place nobody would think to look. And ever-helpful Astor could very well suggest a place where she felt secure: the unoccupied, surrounded-by-hedges, complete-with-Her-Own-Room, very quiet New House.
And one last little shard of something that might have been thought clattered onto the floor of the dusty unused Ballroom of Dexter’s Brain: If Robert and Astor had gone there to hide out, and if Rita went there and found them, Robert would not smile, autograph a picture, and send her on her way. He would, in fact, do all he could to keep her from leaving again and giving up his location. He would, very probably, tie or tape her securely. And if he had any sense at all he would gag her, too. Then he would put her in a closet, or in a bathroom, and leave her while he watched his back trail and waited to see who or what might be coming after him.
And taking everything into consideration, there was only one person left who could come after him: Me. This was not good news for the good guys, considering my recent track record, but there was no one else. And if there had been someone else, I wouldn’t want them anyway.
Robert had Astor, and she was mine. She belonged to me the way a gazelle belongs to a lion, and he had snatched her away, taken something of mine, and I could not let him get away with that.
And Robert had killed Jackie, and left me stranded on the shore of a dark and sandy place filled with nothing but epic emptiness. He had taken away the only thing I’d ever had that felt like feeling, my only ever stab at happiness, and for that he could not possibly suffer enough, not if I could tape him under my knife every night for a year, each session longer and more pleasantly inventive. There was no possible payment that could make up for what he had taken from me, but what he could pay, I would take. And I would not stop taking until it was all gone, and all of him, too: every too-white tooth and too-bright smile, every studied gesture and practiced expression, all of it. I would take everything he had, everything he ever was or would be, and I would send him far away forever to the place where only pain is real, never-ending soul-destroying shattering pain. And if I left a mess big enough to lead the cops straight to me, that was fine, too. There was nothing left in this world but dumb suffering, and whether I endured it in prison or on the sofa with Rita, it was all the same to me.
This might be the very last thing I did, but I would do it. I would take Robert out of his smug, pampered, lily-gilded world, and I would drag him straight into mine: the world of Dexter’s Dark Delight. He had no idea what he had unleashed when he pulled my chain. I was coming, and even if he knew it, he would be waiting for meek and mild-mannered Daytime Dexter, Doughnut Dexter, the soft-bellied blood-spatter boy from the office who was no more threat than a swivel chair. But that Dexter was gone, maybe forever, and it was something very different that was coming for Robert, and he would not like that difference, not at all.
I started my car and nosed it out of the lot, past the cop on the perimeter, and into the nighttime traffic, and the dim starless evening bled into me and filled me with the glow of very special purpose and I was ready for Robert.
It was the height of rush hour, and the traffic was snarled beyond repair. I inched along, grinding my teeth and thinking of new and special things to do to Robert. He was good-looking, and far too aware of that; that would be a help; I could use that. I could spend hours just playing with his face, slowly and carefully removing each separate bit of it and holding it up in front of his eyes so he would see Me holding permanently removed pieces of him, and see every step of the way that I was doing it, and it could not be stopped or slowed or repaired. This was happening to him, and this was all there was and all there would ever be, and there was no going back from it. This was the forever show in Dexterland, and tickets were nonrefundable and one-way only.
And I was so very wrapped up in my pleasant daydreams that before I knew it, I was down onto U.S. 1 and headed south to the New House. The traffic sputtered and wheezed and crawled along, but I idled along with it, thinking only of what was about to happen so very thoroughly to someone who deserved it more than anybody else ever had.
I turned left off U.S. 1, and in a few minutes I was there. I drove by once to see any sign that they were inside. A small convertible was pulled up in front of the garage door. Rita’s minivan was parked slapdash behind it. A full house, but the wild card was coming.
I went on by, scanning the area for anyone watching, and saw no one, nothing out of place, no more than the quiet middle-class neighborhood it was supposed to be. All along the street there were modest homes radiating the contented evening stillness of a day well done. Bicycles leaned against trees, Rollerblades lay in the driveways, and the muted aromas of a half-dozen dinnertimes threaded between the houses and dueled for dominance. But nothing was outside, no one was watching, and all was exactly as peaceful and unsuspecting as I wanted it to be.
I parked a block away from the house, under the canopy of a large banyan tree, took the fillet knife from under the seat, and climbed out of my car. It was full night now, and I breathed it in deeply, taking the darkness into my lungs and letting it flow out through my body and up my spine, and as it spread over my face and out to the very tips of my ears I felt the cool slithery calmness take the wheel and slowly, carefully push us forward into sharp and eager action.