But there was no point in arguing anymore. If I refused to break into the club, Deborah would do it, and she was right; as a sworn officer of the law, she could go to prison if they caught her, while I would probably just get community service, picking up trash at a park, or teaching inner-city kids to knit. And Deb’s stay in the ICU with the knife wound was far too recent for me to let her take any kind of risk – which I’m quite sure was part of her calculations. So it was Dexter through the window, and that was that.
Just before dawn, the sign above the club’s door switched off and a lot of people came out at the same time, and then nothing at all happened for half an hour. Out over the far end of the ocean the sky got lighter and somewhere a bird began to sing, which showed how little he knew. The first jogger went by on Ocean Drive, and a delivery truck rumbled past. And finally, the black door swung open and Lurch came out, followed by the two bouncers, then Bobby Acosta, and a couple of other drudges I hadn’t seen before. A few minutes later, Kukarov himself came out, locked the door, and got into a Jaguar parked half a block away. The car started right up, which contradicted all I had ever heard about Jaguars, and Kukarov drove away, off into the dawn to Morticia and a peaceful day of rest in his crypt.
I looked at Deborah, but she just shook her head, so I waited some more. A bright orange finger of light poked up out over the ocean, and then suddenly it was a new day. Three young men in tiny swimsuits walked by speaking German and headed for the beach. I pondered the rising sun and, in a rush of dawn-inspired optimism, decided there was a one-in-three chance that this was not my last day on earth.
“Okay,” Deborah said at last, and I looked at her. “It’s time,” she said.
I looked at the club. It didn’t feel to me like it was time – time for bed, maybe, but not time for sneaking into the dragon’s den, not in all this daylight. Dexter needs shadows, darkness, guttering moonlight. Not bright morning in the Twinkie Capital of the Western World. But as usual, I was not being offered a choice.
“There might be somebody in there. A guard or whatever,” she said. “So be careful.”
I really didn’t feel like dignifying that kind of remark with a response, so I simply took a deep breath and tried to bring up the darkness to prepare myself.
“You got your phone, right?” she went on. “If there’s trouble, or if you see her and she’s, like, got a guard, just call nine-one-one and get out of there. It should be simple.”
“Not as simple as sitting in the car,” I said, and I admit I was irritated. On top of everything else, Debs had suddenly developed motormouth. How can a guy call his Passenger when everyone else wants to chat?
“Fine,” she said. “Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying, all right?”
It was quite clear to me that the small talk was not going to stop, so I put a hand on the door and said, “I’m sure I’ll be fine. What could possibly go wrong, breaking into a nest of vampires and cannibals who have already kidnapped and murdered several people?”
“Jesus, Dexter,” Deborah said, but I felt no mercy.
“After all, I have a cell phone,” I said. “If they catch me, I’ll threaten to text.”
“All right, shit,” she said. I pushed the car door open.
“Pop the trunk,” I said to her.
She blinked. “What?”
“Open up the trunk of the car,” I repeated. She opened her mouth to say something or other, but I was already out of the car and around to the trunk. The release thumped and I opened it, found the tire iron, and slid it into my pocket, pulling my shirt over the protruding handle to hide it. I closed the trunk and stepped around to Deborah’s window. She rolled it down.
“Farewell, sis,” I said. “Tell Mother I died game.”
“For Christ’s sake, Dexter,” she said, and I crossed the street, leaving her muttering a few syllables of worried profanity.
In truth, I was hoping that it was going to be as simple as Deborah wanted to believe it would be. Getting in would certainly be easy enough for someone of my modest abilities – I had broken into many places, in the pursuit of my innocent hobby, that seemed a great deal more formidable than this one, and most of those were inhabited by real monsters, not these playtime Halloween freaks, with their opera capes and fake teeth. In the light of the morning sun that now poured onto South Beach, it seemed very hard to take their adolescent party games at all seriously.
It was also surprisingly hard to bring the Dark Passenger online. I really needed the soft voice of guidance, the invisible cloak of interior darkness, that only the Passenger could provide, but in spite of the brief flutter of alarm in the club, apparently the snit was not over. I paused on the far side of the street and closed my eyes, placing my hand on a telephone pole and thinking, Hello? Anybody home? Somebody was home, but they still didn’t feel like visiting: I felt a slow and silken rustle of wings, as if it were merely recrossing its legs and waiting for something good to happen. Come on, I thought. Still nothing.
I opened my eyes. A truck went by on Ocean Drive, its radio playing salsa music much too loud. But it was the only music I heard. Apparently, I was going to have to do this alone.
All right, then: When the going gets tough and so on. I put my hands in my pockets and started to amble around the building as if I didn’t really have anyplace to go and was just gawking. Gee whiz, look at the palm trees. Nothin’ like that back in Iowa. Golly.
I strolled around the building one time, looking it over without really seeming to do anything but walk and gawk. As far as I could tell, nobody cared enough to be impressed by my wonderful Innocent Act, but it never hurts to be thorough, so I played tourist for five minutes. The building took up the entire block, and I walked along past all four sides. The vulnerable spot was obvious: In a short and narrow alleyway on the far side of the club’s door there was a Dumpster. It stood beside a doorway that obviously led into the club’s kitchen. The door was protected from view unless someone stood right in the mouth of the alley.
I pulled my right hand out of my pocket and “accidentally” scattered half a handful of coins onto the sidewalk and, stooping to pick them up, I looked around me in all directions. Unless there was somebody on a rooftop with binoculars, I was not being watched. I left thirty-seven cents on the sidewalk and slid quickly into the alley.
It was much darker in the narrow alley, but that did not encourage the Passenger to start a conversation, and I hurried to the Dumpster all alone. I reached the back door quickly and examined it. It had two dead-bolt locks on it, which was discouraging. I could have opened them both easily enough given a little time and my own set of very special tools, but I had neither, and the tire iron would just not do: The door was out of the question. I would have to get inside by some other, less genteel entryway.
I looked up at the building: Directly above the doorway was a row of windows, one every five or six feet, that went along the side of the building to the street. The second one to my left was in easy reach from the top of the Dumpster, and an agile person could pull himself up and through the window without too much trouble. No problem: Dexter is deft, and assuming I could slide open the window it would be simple.
The Dumpster had two lids, side by side, and one of them was open. I put both hands on the closed side – and something bolted up and out of the opening with a horrible screech and flew past my ear and I was absolutely paralyzed by sheer terror before I recognized it as a cat. It was tattered and filthy and beat-up, but it landed a few feet away and arched its back and spit at me in the full Halloween pose. I just looked back and for a second I thought the music had started up again in the club, until I realized the thumping was only my heartbeat. The cat turned and stalked away out of the alley, I leaned on the Dumpster and took a deep breath, and the Passenger stirred itself just enough to give me a serves-you-right chuckle.
I took a moment to recover, and then, just to be safe, I looked inside the Dumpster. There didn’t seem to be anything else inside except garbage, which I thought was a very positive development. I hoisted myself up onto the closed side and, looking once more toward the mouth of the alley to make sure nobody was watching, I reached up and touched the window. I pushed at it and it rattled ever so slightly. Good news: That meant it was not nailed shut, or sealed by too many years of sloppy paint jobs.
I could not see the very top of the window frame, but as far as I could tell there was no alarm sensor anywhere on the frame, which was also good news but not too surprising. Most places save a little money by pretending that any break-in will take place on the ground floor. It was nice to know that even vampires can be thrifty.
I reached for the tire iron and almost dropped it as it cleared my pocket. It would have hit the Dumpster’s lid with enough of a clatter to wake up the whole neighborhood, and I realized my hands were slick with sweat. This was a new experience; always before I had been icy cold and calm, but between the Passenger’s sulking and the feral cat’s levitation I seemed to be in something of a stew. Certainly sweat was understandable – this was Miami. But fear sweat? On Dexter the Dark and Dashing, the King of Cool? This was not a good sign, and I paused one more time for a deep breath before I reached up and slid the tire iron between the window and the bottom of the frame.
I pulled down on the tire iron’s handle, gently at first, and then with increasing force as the window refused to budge. I didn’t want to pull too hard, since the frame might well give way, which would shatter the glass and make so much noise that I might as well bounce a dozen tire irons off the Dumpster’s lid. I pulled for about ten seconds, slowly increasing the pressure, and just when I thought I would have to try something else there was a pop! and the window slid upward. I held very still for a moment, listening for any movement or shouting or alarms going off. Nothing: I pulled myself up, slid through the window, and pulled it closed behind me.
I stood up and looked around me. I was in a hallway that dead-ended at the street to my left and led to a corner down to the right. There was one door along the hall, and I went quietly over to it. There was a dead-bolt lock on the door, but no doorknob. I pushed gently and the door opened. The room was completely dark, but there was a faint smell of Lysol and urine, and I suspected it was a restroom. I stepped inside, closed the door, and found a light switch by feeling along the wall. I flipped it on; it was, in fact, a small restroom, with a sink, one toilet, and a cupboard built into the wall. Just to be thorough I opened the cupboard and found nothing more sinister than toilet paper. There was nothing else in the room, no place they could have hidden a body, alive or dead, so I switched off the light and stepped back out into the hallway.
I cat-footed down the hall to the corner, where I paused, and then slowly and carefully peeked around. The hallway was empty, lit by a single security lamp that hung above a door halfway down. There were two other doors along the hall, and what looked like the top of a staircase at the far end.
I stepped around the corner and went to the first door on my left. I turned the knob slowly and carefully, and it gave way. I pushed the door open and went in, once again closing the door behind me and feeling for the light switch on the wall. I found it, flipped it on. The light was dimmer than even that from the security light in the hall, but it was enough to show a private party room. There was a flat-screen TV on the left wall, and a long, low couch along the right with a coffee table in front of it. Behind the couch was a bar topped with greenish marble, with a small refrigerator underneath. Along the back wall, a thick red velvet curtain hung down.
I went to the bar. There were a few bottles, but instead of glasses there was a rack of what looked like laboratory beakers. I picked one up; it was, indeed, a Pyrex beaker. The side was stamped FIRST NATIONAL BLOOD BANK in gold letters.
I pulled the velvet curtain away from the wall. There was a door behind it, and I pulled it open, holding the curtain up and away so I could see inside. It was nothing more than a small closet, empty except for cleaning supplies: broom, mop, and bucket, a bag of rags. I closed the door and dropped the curtain.
The next door along the hall was on the right, underneath the security light. It was locked, and I procrastinated by moving along the hall to the last door down on my left. It was unlocked; I slipped inside and found another private party room, a virtual duplicate of the first one.
That left the locked door. Reason told me that anything worth seeing would be locked away, but it also told me that the lock would be a good one, and I would not get it open without leaving some very obvious hints that I had been there, and possibly even setting off an alarm. Did I want to stay invisible, or just assume that if I found Samantha Aldovar it didn’t matter who knew I had been there? I hadn’t talked about it with Deborah, and it had just become an important question. I thought about it, and after only a moment of really high-order thinking, I decided that I was here to find Samantha, and I had to look everywhere – especially places that they didn’t want anyone to see, like behind this locked door.
And so, with my courage screwed to the sticking place, I went to work on the locked door with the tire iron. I tried to be quiet and leave the fewest possible marks, but I was a little better controlling the noise than the damage to the wooden doorframe, and by the time I had the door pried open it looked like it had been attacked by rabid beavers. Still, the door was open, and I went through it.
As far as carefully hidden secrets went, the room would have been a major disappointment to anyone but an accountant. It was clearly the club’s office, with a large wooden desk, a computer, and a four-drawer filing cabinet. The computer had been left on, and I sat at the desk and quickly scanned the hard drive. There were some Quicken files showing that the club was making a nice profit, some Word documents, standard letters to club members and prospective members. There was a rather large file named Coven.wpd that was password-encrypted with a security program so old I could have broken it in two minutes. But I didn’t have two minutes, so I merely admired their naivete and moved on.
There was nothing else remotely interesting, no file labeled Samantha.jpg or anything similar that might have told me where she was. I went quickly through the drawers of the desk and the filing cabinet, and again found nothing.
All right – I had trashed the doorframe for no reason. I did not feel any real guilt about that, which was a relief, but I had wasted quite a lot of time, and I had to start thinking about finishing my mission and getting out of here; there could well be a cleaning crew coming in, or Kukarov returning to admire his office doorframe.
I left the office and pushed the door closed, and then I headed for the stairs. I was reasonably sure that I didn’t need to look through the main public areas of the club. It was just plain impossible that everybody who came in was in on the cannibalism – there was no way that hundreds of people could keep a secret like that. So if Samantha really was here somewhere, it would be in an area that most people didn’t see.
And so I went down the stairs and across the dance floor without pausing to look around. At the back, behind the raised area that Bobby had stood on with his goblet, there was a short hallway, and I went down it. It led to the kitchen area and the back door I had admired from the outside. It was not an elaborate kitchen, just a small stove, microwave, sink, with a metallic hanging rack holding pots and several very nice-looking knives. At the far side of the room was a large metal door that looked like it led to a walk-in refrigerator. Nothing else, not even a locked pantry.
Out of a compulsion to be thorough more than anything else I went over to the refrigerator. There was a small window at eye level, made of thick plate glass, and to my surprise, it revealed that there was a light on inside the walk-in. Since I had always believed that the light goes out when you close the door, I stuck my nose to the glass and peeked in.
The refrigerator was about six feet wide and stretched back a good eight feet. There were rows of shelves on each side, most of them loaded with a series of large, gallon-size jars, and stuck up against the back wall was something you don’t usually see in a refrigerator: an old folding cot.
And stranger than that, the cot was occupied. Sitting there quietly, huddled up inside a blanket, was a bundle that appeared to be a young human female. Her head was down and she was not moving, but as I watched she raised her head slowly, as if she was exhausted or drugged, and her eyes met mine.
It was Samantha Aldovar.
Without a moment’s thought I grabbed for the handle of the door and pulled. It was not locked from the outside, although I could see that it could not be opened from the inside. “Samantha,” I called to her. “Are you all right?”
She gave me a weary smile. “Really great,” she said. “Is it time?”
I had no idea what that meant, so I just shook it off. “I’m here to rescue you,” I said. “Take you home to your parents.”
“Why?” she said, and I decided that she was indeed doped. It made sense; drugs would keep her calm and reduce the amount of work it took to watch her. But it also meant I would have to carry her out of here.
“All right,” I said. “Just a second.” I looked around me for something to prop the door open, and settled on a large five-gallon cooking pot that hung from the rack above the stove. I grabbed it, stuck it between the refrigerator door and the frame, and went into the refrigerator.
I got just two steps in when I realized what was in all the jars that filled the shelves in the big refrigerator.
Blood.
Jar after jar, gallon after gallon, they were filled with blood, and for a very long moment I looked at the blood and it looked back and I could not move. But I took a deep breath, let it out, and reality slid back into focus. It was just a fluid, nicely locked away where it couldn’t hurt anybody, and the important thing was to get Samantha and get out of here. So I took the last few steps to the cot and looked down at her.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re going home.”
“Don’t want to,” she said.
“I know,” I said soothingly, thinking that this was a clear example of Stockholm syndrome. “Let’s go.” I put an arm around her and lifted her off the cot and she came up without resistance. I slung her arm around my shoulder and walked her toward the door and freedom.
“Wait a sec,” she said, and the words were a little slurred. “Need my purse. On the bed,” she said, nodding toward the cot, and she took her arm off me and held on to the shelf.
“Okay,” I said, and I returned to the cot and looked down. I didn’t see a purse – but I did hear a clatter, and I turned around to see that Samantha had kicked the five-gallon pot out of the way and, as I watched, was pulling the refrigerator door closed.
“Stop!” I said, which felt even stupider than it sounds, and I guess Samantha thought so, too, because she didn’t stop, and before I could get to her she had slammed the door shut and turned to look at me with an expression of half-glazed triumph on her face.
“Told you,” she said. “I don’t want to go home.”
CHAPTER 27
IT WAS COLD INSIDE THE REFRIGERATOR. YOU MIGHT THINK that would be obvious, but obviousness doesn’t provide any warmth, and I had been shivering since the shock of Samantha’s betrayal wore off. It was cold, and the small room was filled with jars of blood, and there was no way out, not even with the help of my tire iron. I had tried to shatter the small glass window in the refrigerator’s door, which shows how low I had descended into panicked unreason. The glass was an inch thick and reinforced with wire, and even if I had managed to break it, the opening was barely big enough for one of my legs.
Naturally enough, I had tried to call Deborah on my cell phone, and of course, more naturally, there was no reception at all inside an insulated box with thick metal walls. I knew they were thick, because after I gave up trying to break the window and then bent the tire iron trying to pry open the door, I had hammered on the walls for a few minutes, which was almost as effective as twiddling my thumbs would have been. The tire iron bent a little more, the rows and rows of blood seemed to close in on me, and I started to breathe hard – and Samantha just sat and smiled.
And Samantha herself – why did she sit there with that Mona Lisa smile of perfect contentment? She had to know that at some point in the not-too-distant future, she would become an entree. And yet when I had arrived on my white horse in perfectly serviceable armor, she had kicked the door shut and trapped us both. Was it the drugs they had obviously fed her? Or was she so delusional that she believed they wouldn’t really do to her what they had already done to her best friend, Tyler Spanos?
Gradually, as the impulse to hammer at the walls faded and the shivering took over, I began to wonder about her more and more. She paid no attention at all to my feeble and comical efforts to break out of a giant steel box with a cheesy piece of iron – it should have been called a “tire tin” in this case – and she just smiled, eyes half-closed, even when I gave up and sat beside her and let the cold get at me and take over.
It really started to annoy me, that smile. It was the kind of expression you might see on someone who had taken too many recreational downers after making a killing in real estate; filled with a relaxed sense of complete satisfaction with herself, all she had done, and the world as she had shaped it, and I began to wish they had eaten her first.
So I sat beside her and shivered and alternated anxiety with thinking terrible thoughts about Samantha. As if she hadn’t behaved badly enough already, she didn’t even offer to share her blanket with me. I tried to shut her out – difficult to do in a small and very cold room when you are sitting right next to the thing you want to forget, but I tried.
I looked at the jars of blood. They still made me faintly queasy, but at least they took my mind off Samantha’s treachery. So much of the awful sticky stuff – I looked away, and finally found a patch of metal wall to stare at that was not filled with either blood or Samantha.
I wondered what Deborah was going to do. It was selfish of me, I know, but I hoped she was starting to get very worried about me. I had been gone just a little bit too long by now, and she would be sitting in the car and grinding her teeth together, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, glaring at her watch, wondering if it was too soon to do something and, if not, what that something ought to be. It cheered me up a little – not just the thought that she was certainly going to do something, but that she was fretting about it, too. It served her right. I hoped she would grind her teeth so hard she needed dental work. Maybe she could see Dr. Lonoff.
For no other reason than because I was anxious and bored, I took out my cell phone and tried to call her again. It still didn’t work.
“That won’t work in here,” Samantha said in her slow and happy voice.
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“Then you should stop trying,” she said.
I know I was new to having human feelings, but I was pretty certain that the one she was inspiring in me was annoyance verging on loathing. “Is that what you’ve done?” I said. “Given up?”
She shook her head slowly with a kind of low-pitched two-syllable chuckle. “No way,” she said. “Not me.”
“Then for God’s sake, why are you doing this? Why did you trap me in here and now you just sit there and smirk?”
She turned her head toward me and I got the feeling that she actually focused on me for the first time. “What’s your name?” she asked.
I saw no reason not to tell her – of course, I also saw no reason not to slap her, but that could wait. “Dexter,” I said. “Dexter Morgan.”
“Whoa,” she said, with another syllable of that annoying laugh. “Weird name.”
“Yes, completely bizarre,” I said.
“Anyway,” she said. “Dexter. Do you have anything in your life that you really, really want?”
“I’d like to get out of here,” I said.
She shook her head. “But something that’s, you know. Like, totally, totally, ahh … forbidden? Like, really wrong? But you want it anyway, so much it’s like – I mean, you can’t even talk about it to anybody, but it’s all you can think about sometimes?”
I thought about the Dark Passenger, and it stirred slightly as I did, as if to remind me that none of this had to happen if only I’d listened. “No, not a thing,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment, her lips parted but still smiling. “Okay,” she said, as if she knew I was lying but it didn’t really matter. “But I have. I mean, there is something. For me.”
“It’s wonderful to have a dream,” I said. “But wouldn’t it be a lot easier to make it come true if we got out of here?”
She shook her head. “Um, no,” she said. “That’s just it. I have to be in here. Or, you know. I don’t get to –” And she bit her lip in a kind of funny way and shook her head again.
“What?” I said, and her coy act was nudging me even closer to an uncontrollable urge to rattle her teeth. “You don’t get to what?”
“It’s really hard to say, even now,” she said. “It’s kind of like …” She frowned, which was a pleasant change. “Don’t you have some kind of secret that, you know … you can’t help it, but it makes you kind of, like, ashamed?”
“Sure,” I said. “I watched a whole season of American Idol.”
“But that’s everybody,” she said, waving a hand dismissively and making a sour-lemon face. “Everybody does that. I mean something that … You know, people want to fit in, be like everybody else. And if there’s something inside you that makes you … You know it’s totally wrong, weird; you’ll never be like everybody else – but you still really want it. And that hurts, and it also makes you maybe more careful? About trying to fit in. Which is maybe more important when you’re my age.”
I looked at her with a little bit of surprise. I had forgotten that she was eighteen, and rumored to be bright. Perhaps whatever drugs they had given her were wearing off, and maybe she was just glad to have somebody to talk to for the first time in quite a while. Whatever the case, she was finally showing a little bit of depth, which at least removed one small layer of torture from durance vile.
“It’s not,” I said. “It stays important your whole life.”
“But it feels so much more hurtful,” she said. “When you’re young, and it’s like there’s a party going on all around you, but you weren’t invited.” She looked away, not at the blood, but at the bare steel wall.
“All right,” I said. “I do know what you mean.” She looked at me encouragingly. “When I was your age, I was different, too. I had to work very hard to pretend to be like everyone else.”
“You’re just saying that,” she said.
“No,” I said. “It’s true. I had to learn to act like the cool kids, and how to pretend I was tough, and even how to laugh.”
“What,” she said with another of her two-syllable chuckles. “You don’t know how to laugh?”
“I do now,” I said.
“Let’s see.”
I made one of my perfect happy faces, and gave her a very realistic that’s-a-good-one chuckle.
“Hey, pretty good,” she said.
“Years of practice,” I said modestly. “It sounded pretty horrible at first.”
“Uh-huh, well,” she said, “I’m still practicing. And for me it’s a whole lot harder than just learning to laugh.”
“That’s just teenaged self-involvement,” I told her. “You think everything is harder for you, because it’s you. But the fact is, being a human being is very hard work and it always has been. Especially if you feel like you’re not one.”
“I think I am,” she said softly. “Just a really, really different kind.”
“Okay,” I said, and I admit that I was starting to feel a little bit intrigued. Who knew she would turn out to be such a person? “But that’s not a bad thing. And if you can just give it some time, it might actually turn out to be a good thing.”
“Yeah, right,” she said.
“And you can’t do that if you don’t get out of here – staying here is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”
“That’s cute,” she said.
She was back to being flippant again, which frayed at my new human temper. She had begun to seem interesting, and I had opened up, started to like her, even felt real, actual empathy for her – and now she was slipping back into her aloof, teenage, you-can’t-know disguise, and it made me just a little bit cranky and filled me with the urge to shake her up. “For God’s sake,” I said. “Don’t you understand why you’re in here? These people are going to cook you and eat you!”
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