CHAPTER 25. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN VERY GOOD AT AWKWARD social situations, but I must admit that this one had me stumped

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN VERY GOOD AT AWKWARD social situations, but I must admit that this one had me stumped. I just didn't know what to say, and for a moment I stared at LaGuerta and she looked back at me with her eyes unblinking and her fangs slightly exposed, like a predatory feline trying to decide whether to play with you or eat you. I could think of no remark that did not begin with a stammer, and she seemed interested only in watching me. So we simply stood there for a long moment. At last she broke the ice with a light quip.

“What's in there?” she asked, nodding toward the fence, some one hundred yards away.

“Why, Detective!” I gushed, hoping that she wouldn't notice what she had said, I suppose. “What are you doing here?”

“I followed you. What's in there?”

“In there?” I said. I know, a really dumb remark, but honestly, I had just about run out of the smart ones and I can't be expected to come up with something good under such circumstances.

She cocked her head to one side and poked her tongue out, letting it run along her bottom lip; slowly to the left, right, left, and back into her mouth again. Then she nodded. “You must think I'm stupid,” she said. And of course that thought had crossed my mind fleetingly once or twice, but it didn't seem politic to say so. “But you got to remember,” she went on, “I'm a full detective, and this is Miami. How do you think I got that, huh?”

“Your looks?” I asked, giving her a dashing smile. It never hurts to compliment a woman.

She showed me her lovely set of teeth, even brighter in the high crime lights that lit up the parking area. “That's good,” she said, and she moved her lips into a strange half smile that hollowed her cheeks and made her look old. “That's the kind of shit I used to fall for when I thought you liked me.”

“I do like you, Detective,” I told her, perhaps a little too eagerly. She didn't seem to hear me.

“But then you push me on the floor like I'm some kind of pig, and I wonder what's wrong with me? I got bad breath? And it hits me. It's not me. It's you. There's something wrong about you.”

Of course she was right, but it still hurt to hear her say so. “I don't— What do you mean?”

She shook her head again. “Sergeant Doakes wants to kill you and he doesn't even know why. I should've listened to him. Something is wrong about you. And you're connected to this hooker stuff some way.”

“Connected— What do you mean?”

This time there was an edge of savage glee to the smile she showed me and the trace of accent snuck back into her voice. “You can save the cute acting for your lawyer. And maybe a judge. 'Cause I think I got you now.” She looked at me for a long hard moment and her dark eyes glittered. She looked as inhuman as I am and it made a small shiver run across the back of my neck. Had I truly underestimated her? Was she really this good?

“And so you followed me?”

More teeth. “That's right, yeah,” she said. “Why are you looking around at the fence? What's in there?”

I am sure that under ordinary circumstances I would have thought of this before, but I plead duress. It truly didn't occur to me until that very moment. But when it did, it was like a small and painful light flashing on. “When did you pick me up? At my house? At what time?”

“Why do you keep changing the subject? Something's in there, huh?”

“Detective, please—this could be very important. When and where did you start to follow me?”

She studied me for a minute, and I began to realize that I had, in fact, underestimated her. There was a great deal more to this woman than political instinct. She really did seem to have something extra. I was still not convinced that any of it was intelligence, but she did have patience, and sometimes that was more important than smarts in her line of work. She was willing to simply wait and watch me and keep repeating her question until she got an answer. And then she would probably ask the same question a few more times, wait and watch some more, to see what I would do. Ordinarily I could outwit her, but I could not possibly outwait her, not tonight. So I put on my best humble face and repeated myself. “Please, Detective . . .”

She stuck her tongue out again, and then finally put it away. “Okay,” she said. “When your sister was gone for a few hours and no word where, I started to think maybe she's up to something. And I know she can't do anything herself, so where would she go?” She arched an eyebrow at me, then continued in a triumphant tone. “To your place, that's where! To talk with you!” She bobbed her head, pleased with her deductive logic. “And so I think about you for a while. How you're always showing up and looking, even when you don't have to. How you figure out those serial killers sometimes, except this one? And then how you fuck me over with that stupid list, make me look stupid, push me on the fucking floor—” Her face looked harder, a little older again for a moment. Then she smiled and went on. “I said something out loud, in my office, and Sergeant Doakes says, ‘I told you about him but you don't listen.' And all of a sudden it's your big handsome face all over the place and it shouldn't be.” She shrugged. “So I went to your place, too.”

“When? At what time, did you notice?”

“Naw,” she said. “But I'm only there like twenty minutes and then you come out and play with your faggot Barbie doll and then drive over here.”

“Twenty minutes—” So she hadn't been there in time to see who or what had taken Deborah. And quite probably she was telling the truth and had simply followed me to see—to see what?

“But why follow me at all?”

She shrugged. “You're connected to this thing. Maybe you didn't do it, I don't know. But I'm gonna find out. And some of what I find is gonna stick to you. What's in there, in those boxes? You gonna tell me, or we just going to stand here all night?”

In her own way, she had put her finger right on it. We could not stand here all night. We could not, I was sure, stand here much longer at all before terrible things happened to Deborah. If they hadn't already happened. We had to go, right now, go find him and stop him. But how did I do that with LaGuerta along for the ride? I felt like a comet with a tail I didn't want.

I took a deep breath. Rita had once taken me to a New Age Health Awareness Workshop which had stressed the importance of deep cleansing breaths. I took one. I did not feel any cleaner after my breath, but at least it made my brain whirl into brief action, and I realized I would have to do something I had rarely done before—tell the truth. LaGuerta was still staring at me, waiting for an answer.

“I think the killer is in there,” I told LaGuerta. “And I think he has Officer Morgan.”

She watched me for a moment without moving. “Okay,” she said at last. “And so you come stand at the fence and look in? 'Cause you love your sister so much you want to watch?”

“Because I wanted to get in. I was looking for a way in through the fence.”

“Because you forget that you work for the police?”

Well there it was, of course. She had actually jumped right to the real problem spot, and all by herself, too. I had no good answer for that. This whole business of telling the truth just never seems to work without some kind of awkward unpleasantness. “I just—I wanted to be sure, before I made a big fuss.”

She nodded. “Uh-huh. That's really good,” she said. “But I tell you what I think. Either you did something bad, or you know about it. And you're either hiding it, or you wanna find it by yourself.”

“By myself? But why would I want that?”

She shook her head to show how stupid that was. “So you get all the credit. You and that sister of yours. Think I didn't figure that out? I told you I'm not stupid.”

“I'm not your slasher, Detective,” I said, throwing myself on her mercy and now completely confident that she had even less than I did. “But I think he's in there, in one of the storage boxes.”

She licked her lips. “Why do you think that?”

I hesitated, but she kept her unblinking lizard stare on me. As uncomfortable as it made me, I had to tell her one more piece of truth. I nodded at the Allonzo Brothers van parked just inside the fence. “That's his truck.”

“Ha,” she said, and at last she blinked. Her focus left me for a moment and seemed to wander away into some deep place. Her hair? Her makeup? Her career? I couldn't tell. But there were a lot of awkward questions a good detective might have asked here: How did I know that was his truck? How had I found it here? Why was I so sure he hadn't simply dumped the truck and gone somewhere else? But in the final analysis LaGuerta was not a good detective; she simply nodded, licked her lips again, and said, “How are we gonna find him in there in all that?”

Clearly, I really had underestimated her. She had gone from “you” to “we” with no visible transition. “Don't you want to call for backup?” I asked her. “This is a very dangerous man.” I admit I was only needling her. But she took it very seriously.

“If I don't catch this guy by myself, in two weeks I'm a meter maid,” she said. “I got my weapon. Nobody's gonna get away from me. I'll call for backup when I have him.” She studied me without blinking. “And if he's not in there, I'll give them you.”

It seemed like a good idea to let that go. “Can you get us through the gate?”

She laughed. “'Course I can. I got my badge, get us through anywhere. And then what?”

This was the tricky part. If she went for this, I might well be home free. “Then we split up and search until we find him.”

She studied me. Again I saw in her face the thing I had seen when she first got out of her car—the look of a predator weighing her prey, wondering when and where to strike, and how many claws to use. It was horrible—I actually found myself warming to the woman. “Okay,” she said at last, and tilted her head toward her car. “Get in.”

I got in. She drove us back out onto the road and over to the gate. Even at this hour there was some traffic. Most of it seemed to be people from Ohio looking for their cruise ship, but a few of them wound up at the gate, where the guards sent them back the way they came. Detective LaGuerta cut ahead of them all, bulling her big Chevy to the front of the line. Their Midwest driving skills were no match for a Miami Cuban woman with good medical insurance driving a car she didn't care about. There was a blare of horns and some muffled shouting and we were at the guard booth.

The guard leaned out, a thin, muscular black man. “Lady, you can't—”

She held up her badge. “Police. Open the gate.” She said it with such hard-edged authority that I almost jumped out of the car to open the gate myself.

But the guard froze, took a breath through his mouth, and glanced nervously back into the booth. “What you want with—”

“Open the fucking gate, Rental,” she told him, jiggling her badge, and he finally unfroze.

“Lemme see the badge,” he said. LaGuerta held it up limply, making him take the extra step over to peer at it. He frowned at it and found nothing to object to. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Can you tell me what you want in there?”

“I can tell you that if you don't open the gate in two seconds I'm gonna put you in the trunk of my car and take you downtown to a holding cell full of gay bikers and then I'm gonna forget where I put you.”

The guard stood up. “Just trying to help,” he said, and called over his shoulder, “Tavio, open the gate!”

The gate went up and LaGuerta gunned her car through. “Sonnova bitch got something going he doesn't want me to know about,” she said. There was amusement in her voice to go with the rising edge of excitement. “But I don't care about smuggling tonight.” She looked at me. “Where we going?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I guess we should start over where he left his truck.”

She nodded, accelerating down the path between stacks of storage boxes. “If he's got a body to carry, he probably parked pretty close to wherever he was going.” As we got closer to the fence she slowed down, nosing the car quietly to within fifty feet of the truck and then stopping. “Let's take a look at the fence,” she said, slamming the transmission into park and sliding out of the car as it rocked to a stop.

I followed. LaGuerta stepped in something she didn't like and lifted her foot to look at her shoe. “Goddamint,” she said. I moved past her, feeling my pulse hammering loud and fast, and went to the truck. I walked around it, trying the doors. They were locked, and although there were two small back windows, these were painted over from the inside. I stood on the bumper and tried to peek in anyway, but there were no holes in the paint job. There was nothing more to be seen on this side, but I squatted anyway and looked on the ground. I felt rather than heard LaGuerta slither up behind me.

“What you got?” she asked, and I stood.

“Nothing,” I said. “The back windows are painted over on the inside.”

“Can you see in the front?”

I went around to the front of the truck. It was bare of any hint as well. Inside the windshield, a pair of the sunscreens so popular in Florida had been unfolded across the dashboard, blocking out any possible view into the cab. I climbed on the front bumper and up onto the hood, crawled along it from right to left, but there were no gaps in the sunscreen. “Nothing,” I said and climbed down.

“Okay,” LaGuerta said, looking at me with lidded eyes and just the smallest tip of her tongue protruding. “Which way you wanna go?”

This way, someone whispered deep inside my brain. Over here. I glanced to the right, where the chuckling mental fingers had pointed and then back to LaGuerta, who was staring at me with her unblinking hungry tiger stare. “I'll go left and circle around,” I said. “Meet you halfway.”

“Okay,” LaGuerta said with a feral smile. “But I go left.”

I tried to look surprised and unhappy, and I suppose I managed a reasonable facsimile, because she watched me and then nodded. “Okay,” she repeated, and turned down the first row of stacked shipping containers.

Then I was alone with my shy interior friend. And now what? Now that I had tricked LaGuerta into leaving me the right-hand path, what did I do with it? After all, I had no reason to think it was any better than the left-hand, or for that matter, better than standing by the fence and juggling coconuts. There was only my sibilant internal clamor to direct me, and was that really enough? When you are an icy tower of pure reason as I have always been, you naturally look for logical hints to direct your course of action. Just as naturally, you ignore the nonobjective irrational screeching of loud musical voices from the bottom floor of your brain that try to send you reeling along the path, no matter how urgent they have become in the rippling light of the moon.

And as to the rest, the particulars of where I should go now—I looked around, down the long irregular rows of containers. Off to the side where LaGuerta had gone spike-heeling along, there were several rows of brightly colored truck trailers. And in front of me, stretching off to the right, were the shipping containers.

Suddenly, I was very uncertain. I didn't like the feeling. I closed my eyes. The moment I did, the whispering became a cloud of sound and without knowing why I found myself moving toward a clutter of shipping containers down near the water. I had no conscious notion that these particular containers were any different or better or that this direction was more proper or rewarding. My feet simply jerked into motion and I followed them. It was as if they were tracing some path only the toes could see, or as if some compelling pattern was being sung by the whisper-wail of my internal chorus, and my feet translated and dragged me along.

As they moved the sound grew inside me, a muted hilarious roar, pulling me faster than my feet, yanking me clumsily down the crooked path between boxes with powerful invisible jerks. And yet at the same time a new voice, small and reasonable, was pushing me backward, telling me I did not want to be here of all places, yammering at me to run, go home, get away from this place, and it made no more sense than any of the other voices. I was pulled forward and pushed back at the same time so powerfully that I could not make my legs work properly and I stumbled and fell flat-faced onto the hard rocky ground. I rose to my knees, mouth dry and heart pounding, and paused to finger a rip in my beautiful Dacron bowling shirt. I pushed my fingertip through the hole and wiggled it at myself. Hello, Dexter, where are you going? Hello, Mr. Finger. I don't know, but I'm almost there. I hear my friends calling.

And so I climbed to suddenly unsteady feet and listened. I heard it clearly now, even with my eyes open, and felt it so strongly I could not even walk. I stood for a moment, leaning against one of the containers. A very sobering thought, as if I needed one. Something nameless was born in this place, something that lived in the darkest hidey-hole of the thing that was Dexter, and for the first time that I could remember I was scared. I did not want to be here where horrible things lurked. Yet I had to be here to find Deborah. I was being ripped in half by an invisible tug-of-war. I felt like Sigmund Freud's poster child, and I wanted to go home and go to bed.

But the moon roared in the dark sky above me, the water howled along Government Cut, and the mild night breeze shrieked over me like a convention of banshees, forcing my feet forward. And the singing swelled within me like some kind of gigantic mechanical choir, urging me on, reminding me of how to move my feet, pushing me lock-kneed down the rows of boxes. My heart hammered and yammered, my short gasps of breath were much too loud, and for the first time I could remember I felt weak, woozy, and stupid—like a human being, like a very small and helpless human being.

I staggered along the strangely familiar path on borrowed feet until I could stagger no more and once again I put an arm out to lean against a box, a box with an air-conditioning compressor attached, pounding away at the back and mixing with the shriek of the night, all thumping in my head so loudly now that I could hardly see. And as I leaned against the box the door swung open.

The inside of the box was lit by a pair of battery-powered hurricane lamps. Against the back wall there was a temporary operating table made of packing crates.

And held unmoving in place on the table was my dear sister Deborah.