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 Uh-huh Coulter said.  How long was he gone?
 Maybe ten seconds tops I said.  Why does that matter? Coulter took the toothpick out of
his mouth and stared at it.
Apparently it even looked awful to him, because after a moment of thinking about it, he
threw it at my waste basket. He missed, of course.  Here's the problem he said.  The
fingerprints on the knife aren't his.
About a year ago I'd had an impacted tooth removed, and the dentist had given me nitrous
oxide. For just a moment I felt the same sense of dizzy silliness whipping through me.  The
 urm fingerprints ...? I finally managed to stutter.
 Yeah he said, swigging briefly from the huge soda bottle.  We took his prints when we
booked him. Naturally He wiped the corner of his mouth with his wrist.  And we compared
them to the ones on the handle of that knife? And hey. They don't match. So I'm thinking,
what the fuck, right?
 Naturally I said.
 So I thought, what if there was two of  em, cuz what else could it be, right? He shrugged
and, sadly for all of us, fumbled another toothpick out of his shirt pocket and began to
munch on it.  Which is why I had to ask you again what you think you saw. He looked at
me with an expression of totally focused stupidity and I had to close my eyes to think at all.
I replayed the scene in my memory one more time: Deborah waiting by the door, the door
opening. Deborah showing her badge and then suddenly falling but all I could see in my
mind was the man's profile with no details.
The door opens, Deborah shows the badge, the profile  no, that was it. There was no more
detail. Dark hair and a light shirt, but that was true of half the world, including the
Doncevic I had kicked in the head a moment later.
I opened my eyes. I think it was the same guy I said, and although for some reason I was
reluctant to give him any more, I did. He was, after all, the representative of Truth, Justice
and the American Way, no matter how unattractive.  But to be honest, I can't really be sure.
It was too quick. Coulter bit down on the toothpick. I watched it bobble around in the
corner of his mouth for a moment while he tried to remember how to speak.  So it coulda
been two of  em he said at last.
I suppose so I said.
 One of  em stabs her, runs inside like, shit, what'd I do he said.
 And the other one goes, shit, and runs out to look, and you pop him one.
 It's possible I said.
 Two of  em he repeated.
I did not see the point of answering the same question twice, so I just sat and watched the
toothpick wiggle. If I had thought I was filled with unpleasant rumblings before, it was
nothing to the whirlpool of unease that was forming in me now. If Doncevic's fingerprints
were not on the knife, he had not stabbed Deborah; that was elementary, Dear Dexter. And
if he had not stabbed Deborah, he was innocent and I had made a very large mistake.
This really should not have bothered me. Dexter does what he must and the only reason he
does it to the well deserving is because of Harry's training. For all the Dark Passenger cares,
it could just as easily be random. The relief would be just as sweet for us. The way I choose
is merely the Harry-imposed icy logic of the knife.
But it was possible that Harry's voice was in me deeper than I had ever thought, because the
idea that Doncevic might be innocent was sending me into a tailspin. And even before I
could get a grip on this nasty uncomfortable sensation, I realized Coulter was staring at me.
 Yes I said, not at all sure what that meant.
Coulter once again threw a mangled toothpick at the trash can.
He missed again.  So where's the other guy? he said.
 I don't know I told him. And I didn't.
But I really wanted to find out.
SIXTEE
I HAVE HEARD CO-WORKERS SPEAK OF HAVING 'THE BLAHS', and always
thought myself blessed that I lacked the ability to provide a host for anything with such an
unattractive name. But the last few hours of my work day could be described in no other
way. Dexter of the Bright Knife, Dexter the Duke of Darkness, Dexter the Hard and Sharp
and Totally Empty, had the blahs. It was uncomfortable, of course, but due to the very
nature of the thing I did not have the energy to do anything about it. I sat at my desk and
pushed paperclips around, wishing I could just as easily push the pictures out of my head:
Deborah falling; my foot connecting to Doncevic's head; the knife going up; the saw coming
down ...
Blah. It was as stupid as it was embarrassing and enervating.
Okay, technically speaking, Doncevic had been sort of innocent.
I had made one lousy little mistake. Big deal. Nobody's perfect. Why should I even pretend
to be? Was I really going to imagine that I felt bad about ending an innocent life?
Preposterous. And anyway, what is innocent, after all? Doncevic had been playing around
with dead bodies, and he had caused millions of dollars in damage to the city budget and
the tourist industry. There were plenty of people in Miami who would gladly have killed
him just to stop the bleeding.
The only problem was that one of those people was not me.
I was not much, I knew that. I never pretended to have any real humanity, and I certainly
didn't tell myself that what I did was all right just because my playmates were cut from the
same cloth. In fact, I was fairly certain that the world would be a much better place without
me. Mind you, I have never been in a very big hurry to make the world a better place in that
regard, either. I wanted to stick around as long as possible, because when you die either
everything stops forever, or else Dexter was in for a very warm surprise. Neither option
seemed like much of a choice.
So, I had no illusions about my worth to the rest of the world.
I did what I did and didn't ask for any thanks. But always, every time since the very first, I
had done it by the rules laid down by Saint Harry, my near-perfect adoptive father. This time
I had broken the rules, and for reasons that were not clear to me, that made me feel like I
deserved to be caught and punished. And I could not convince myself that this was a healthy
feeling.
So I battled the blahs until quitting time and then, without any real increase in energy, I
drove over to the hospital again. The rush hour traffic did nothing to cheer me up.
Everybody seemed to be just going through the motions without any real, genuine homicidal
rage. A woman cut me off and threw half an orange at my windshield, and a man in a van
tried to run me off the road, but they seemed to be doing it mechanically, not really putting
their hearts into it.
When I got to Deborah's room, Chutsky was asleep in his chair, snoring loud enough to
rattle the windows. So I sat for a little while, watching Deborah's eyelids quiver. I thought
that was probably a good thing, indicating she was getting her REM sleep and therefore
getting better. I wondered what she would think of my little mistake when she woke up.
Considering what her attitude had been just before she got stabbed, it didn't seem likely that
she would be terribly understanding about even such a minor slip-up. After all, she was as
much in the grip of Harry's Shadow as I was, and if she could barely tolerate what I did
when it was Harry Approved, she would never go along with something outside his careful
limits.
Debs could never know what I had done. Not a big deal, considering I had always hidden
everything from her until recently. But it didn't make me feel any better this time, for some
reason. After all, I had done this one for her, as much as anything else  the first time I had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]