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up in canals, torched for the insurance money. Nobody pushes too hard to find
them. So nobody's been pushing on these, and nobody's going to.
Welcome toMiami , I said.
Deborah sighed and took the list back from me, slouching into my extra chair
like she'd just lost all her bones. There's no way I can check them all, not
by myself. It would take months. Goddamn it,Dex , she said. Now what do we
do?
I shook my head. I'm sorry, Deb, I said. But now we have to wait.
That's it? Just wait?
That's it, I said.
And it was. For two more weeks, that was it. We waited.
And then . . .
CHAPTER 9
IWOKE UP COVERED WITH SWEAT, NOT SURE WHEREI was, and absolutely certain that
another murder was about to happen. Somewhere not so far awayhe was searching
for his next victim, sliding through the city like a shark around the reef. I
was so certain I could almost hear the purr of the duct tape. He was out
there, feeding his Dark Passenger, and it was talking to mine. And in my sleep
I had been riding with him, a phantom remora in his great slow circles.
I sat up in my own little bed and peeled away the twisted sheets. The bedside
clock said it was 3:14. Four hours since I'd gone to bed, and I felt like I'd
been slogging through the jungle the entire time with a piano on my back. I
was sweaty, stiff, and stupid, unable to form any thoughts at all beyond the
certainty that it was happening out there without me.
Sleep was gone for the night, no question. I turned on the light. My hands
were clammy and trembling. I wiped them on the sheet, but that didn't help.
The sheets were just as wet. I stumbled into the bathroom to wash my hands. I
held them under the running water. The tap let out a stream that was warm,
room temperature, and for a moment I was washing my hands in blood and the
water turned red; just for a second, in the half-light of the bathroom, the
sink ranbloodred .
I closed my eyes.
The world shifted.
I had meant to get rid of this trick of light and my half-sleeping brain.
Close the eyes, open them, the illusion would be over and it would be simple
clean water in my sink. Instead, it was like closing my eyes had opened a
second set of eyes into another world.
I was back in my dream, floating like a knife blade above the lights of
Biscayne Boulevard, flying cold and sharp and homing in on my target and
I opened my eyes again. The water was just water.
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But what was I?
I shook my head violently. Steady, old boy; no Dexter off the deep end,
please. I took a long breath and peeked at myself. In the mirror I looked the
way I was supposed to look.Carefully composed features.Calm and mocking blue
eyes, a perfect imitation of human life. Except that my hair stuck up like
Stan Laurel's, there was no sign of whatever it was that had just zipped
through my half-sleeping brain and rattled me out of my slumber.
I carefully closed my eyes again.
Darkness.
Plain, simple, darkness.No flying, no blood, no city lights. Just good old
Dexter with his eyes closed in front of the mirror.
I opened them again. Hello, dear boy, so good to have you back. But where on
earth have you been?
That, of course, was the question. I have spent most of my life untroubled by
dreams and, for that matter, hallucinations. No visions of the Apocalypse for
me; no troubling Jungian icons burbling up from my subconscious, no mysterious
recurring images drifting through the history of my unconsciousness. Nothing
ever goes bump in Dexter's night. When I go to sleep, all of mesleeps .
So what had just happened? Why were these pictures appearing to me?
I splashed water on my face and pushed my hair down. That did not, of course,
answer the question, but it made me feel a little better. How bad could things
be if my hair was neat?
In truth, I did not know. Things could be plenty bad. I might be losing all,
or many, of my marbles. What if I had been slipping into insanity a piece at a
time for years, and this new killer had simply triggered the final headlong
fall into complete craziness? How could I hope to measure the relative sanity
of somebody like me?
The images had looked and felt so real. But they couldn't be; I had been
right here in my bed. Yet I had almost been able to smell the tang of salt
water, exhaust, and cheap perfume floating overBiscayne Boulevard . Completely
real and wasn't that one of the signs of insanity, that the delusions were
indistinguishable from reality? I had no answers, and no way to find any.
Talking to a shrink was out of the question, of course; I would frighten the
poor thing to death, and he might feel honor bound to have me locked away
somewhere. Certainly I could not argue with the wisdom of that idea. But if I
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