It seemed a bit too obvious to call for comment, so I said nothing, and Chutsky collapsed back into his original shivering position with a weary, "Fuck."
"Take him down with Sergeant Morgan," Alana said, and Cesar and Bobby grabbed Chutsky again and dragged him to his feet and then through the door and into the cabin. "The rest of you, run along to the Steeplechase and make sure the fire is going. Enjoy yourselves," she said to the flock of pirates crowding the gangway, with a nod to Antoine. "Take along the punch bowl." Someone let out a whoop, and two of them grabbed the five-gallon pot by its handles. The figure in the black robe stepped carefully around them, keeping the shotgun pointed toward me while pirates trooped off down the gangway and away into the park. Then they were gone and Alana turned her frosty attention to me once again.
"Well, then," she said, and although I knew that she could not feel any emotions, there was certainly a dark and awful amusement shining out from the scaly thing that lived inside her as she looked at me. "And now we come to my man-piggy." She nodded at the bouncer and he backed away from me to the rail, gun still pointed at me, and Alana stepped forward.
It was a spring night in Miami and the temperature was in the upper seventies-and yet as she approached I felt an icy wind blow over me and through me and whip up from the darkest corners of the deepest parts of me, and the Passenger rose up on its many legs and cried out in helpless fury, and I felt my bones crumble and my veins turn to dust and the world shrank down to the steady and happy madness of Alana's eyes.
"Do you know about cats, love?" she said to me, and she was almost purring herself. It seemed rhetorical; in any case, my mouth was suddenly very dry and I didn't feel like answering. "They do love to play with their food, don't they?" She patted my cheek lovingly and then slapped it, very hard, with no change of expression. "I used to watch for hours. They torture their little mousie, don't they? Do you know why, dearie?" she asked me. She ran a long and very red fingernail down my chest and onto my arm, where she found one of the cuts there, made by the saw palmetto thorns. She frowned at it. "It's not mere cruelty, which seems a shame. Although I'm sure there's some of that, too." She put her fingernail into the cut. "But the torture releases the adrenaline in the little mousie."
Alana dug her fingernail into the tender open flesh of my wounded arm and I jumped as the pain needled in and the blood began to flow. She nodded thoughtfully. "Or in this case, the adrenaline in the piggy. The adrenaline flows out into the wee cowering timorous beastie's whole body. And guess what, love? Adrenaline is a marvelous natural meat tenderizer!" She jabbed her nail into the cut in rhythm with her words, deeper and deeper, twisting the nail to open the wound more, and although it did hurt, the sight of it was worse and I could not take my eyes off the terrible red of the precious Dexter blood running out in ever-increasing gouts as she poked harder and deeper.
"So first we play with our food, and then it actually tastes better! Some terrific, relaxing fun, and it pays off at table. Isn't nature wonderful?"
She held her long sharp nail deep in my arm and looked at me for a very long moment with her awful frozen smile. I heard a few of the revelers laughing madly somewhere in the distance, and Samantha moaned again, much softer now, and I turned my head toward her. She had lost a great deal of blood, and the pot Bobby had put under her arm had overflowed so that it was slopping onto the deck, and as I saw it I got a little bit dizzy and I pictured the blood from my cut pouring out to join it until the two of us covered the deck with a flood of terrible vile red sticky mess like that long-ago mommy time with my brother Biney in the cold box and my head began to spin and I felt myself whirl away from the pain and off into the red darkness And a new and deeper stab of pain brought me back to the deck of the wretched old pretend pirate ship, with the very real and elegant cannibal woman trying to push her fingernail all the way through my arm. I was sure she would soon open an artery, and then my blood would be everywhere. I hoped it would at least ruin Alana's shoes-not much as final curses go, but really just about all I had left.
I felt Alana's grip on my arm tighten, driving her fingernail even deeper into my arm, and for a moment the pain was so bad I thought I would have to yell, and then the cabin door banged open and Bobby and Cesar came back out onto the deck.
"Couple of lovebirds," Bobby sneered. "He's like, 'Debbie, oh, Debbie,' and she's like, nothing, still out cold, and he's like, 'Oh, God, oh, God, Debbie, Debbie.' "
"All very amusing," Alana said, "but is he tucked away safely, dear?"
Cesar nodded. "He's not going nowhere," he said.
"Brilliant," Alana said. "Then why don't you two totter away to the party?" She looked at me through hooded eyes. "I'm going to stay here and unwind for a few more minutes."
I am sure that Bobby answered with something he thought of as clever, and I am equally certain that he and Cesar clattered off down the rickety gangway and into the park to join the other revelers, but in truth none of that registered; my world had shrunk down to the horrible pictures forming in the air between Alana and me. She stood there looking at me, unblinking, with such a clear intensity of purpose that I began to think the force of her stare might actually open a wound on my face.
Unfortunately, she decided not to rely on the power of her eyes to tenderize me. She turned slowly, tauntingly, away from me, and stepped over to the table where the row of gleaming blades lay waiting for her. The black-hooded man stood there near the knives, and the muzzle of his shotgun never wavered from me. Alana looked down at the knives and put a finger to her chin as she regarded them thoughtfully. "So many really good choices," she said. "I do wish there was a little more time to do this properly. Really get to know you." She shook her head sadly. "I didn't have any time at all with that marvelous-looking policeman you sent me. I barely got a taste of him before I had to put him down. Rush, rush, rush. Takes all the joy out, doesn't it?" she said. So she had killed Deke. And I could not help hearing a slight echo of my own familiar playtime musings in her words, which did not seem fair at a time like this.
"But," Alana said, "I think you and I shall get on properly, any road. This one." She lifted up a large and very sharp-looking blade something like a bread knife that would almost certainly provide her with some quality amusement. She turned to me and raised the knife slightly and took one step back toward me and then stopped.
Alana looked at me, her eyes flicking over me as she rehearsed the things she was going to do, and it may be that I have an overactive imagination, or it may be that I recognized her intentions from my own modest experience, but I could feel every move she was thinking of making, every slice and cut she planned to try on me, and the sweat began to soak my shirt and pour off my forehead and I could feel my heart hammering at my ribs as if it was trying to punch through the bones and escape, and we stood there, ten feet apart, sharing a mental pas de deux from the classical ballet of blood. Alana let her moment of enjoyment stretch out for a very long time, until I felt like my sweat glands had run dry and my tongue had swollen to the roof of my mouth. And then she said, "Right," in a soft and throaty voice and took a step forward.
I suppose there may be something to this New Age notion after all, that everything balances out eventually-I mean, aside from the fact that I was now getting a taste of my own medicine, which is really beside the point. What I mean is that this evening I had already lived through a period when time slowed and stopped, and now, just to even things out, as Alana turned toward me and raised her knife, everything seemed to kick into high gear and happen all at once in a kind of jerky high-speed dance.
First, there was a shattering bang and the enormous, ponytailed bouncer exploded; his midsection quite literally vanished in a horrifying red spray and the rest of him went flying away over the railing of the boat with an expression of numb resentment on his face, and he was gone so fast it was as if he had been clipped out of the scene by an omnipotent film editor.
Second, and so quickly it seemed to be almost simultaneous with the bouncer flying over the rail, Alana whipped around with the knife raised and her mouth wide open and she jumped at the man in the black robe, who pumped the shotgun and fired, taking off Alana's upraised arm with the knife. And then he pumped again and swiveled, faster than seemed possible, and shot the last of the guards, who was just bringing his weapon up. And then Alana slid down at Samantha's feet, the guard slammed into the rail and went over, and suddenly it was very still on the deck of the wicked ship Vengeance.
And then that melodramatic, ominous, black-robed figure racked the shotgun one more time and turned until the smoking barrel was pointed directly at me. For just a moment, everything froze again; I looked at that dark mask and the darker gun barrel pointed, naturally enough, right at my midsection-and I wondered: Had I pissed off Somebody Up There? I mean, what had I done to be condemned to this endless smorgasbord of death? Seriously; how many different and equally horrible ends can one relatively innocent man face in one night? Is there no justice in this world? Other than the sort I specialize in, I mean?
It just went on and on-I'd been beaten and slapped and poked and tortured and menaced with knives and threatened with being eaten and stabbed and shot-and I'd had it. Enough was enough. I couldn't even get upset about this ultimate indignity. I was all out of adrenaline; my flesh was as tenderized as it was going to get, and it would almost be a relief to have it all over with. Every worm must turn at last, and Dexter had reached the point where he could take no more.
And so I drew myself up to my full height and I stood there, filled with noble readiness to step up to the plate and meet my final destiny with true courage and manly resolve-and once again life threw me a knuckleball.
"Well," the hooded figure said, "it looks like I'm going to have to pull your fat out of the fire one more time."
And as he raised the gun I thought, I know that voice. I knew it, and I didn't know whether to cheer, cry, or throw up. Before I could do any of those things, he turned around and fired at Alana, who had crawled slowly and painfully toward him, leaving a thick trail of blood. At close range the shot bounced her up off the deck and nearly cut her in half before dropping the two elegant pieces back down in a sadly untidy heap.
"Nasty bitch," he said as he lowered the shotgun, pulled back the hood, and took off his mask. "Still, the pay was excellent, and the work suited me-I'm very good with knives." And I was right. I did know that voice. "And really, anyone would think you would have figured it out," my brother, Brian, said. "I gave you enough hints-the black token in the bag, everything."
"Brian," I said, and even though it was one of the stupidest things I had ever said, I couldn't help adding, "You're here."
"Of course I'm here," he said, with his awful fake smile, and somehow it didn't seem quite so phony right now. "What's family for?"
I thought about the last few days: first Deborah getting me from the trailer in the Everglades, and now this, and I shook my head. "Apparently," I said, "family is for rescuing you from cannibals."
"Well, then," Brian said. "Here I am."
And for once his awful fake smile seemed very real and welcome.