It's a dark night but in my head the lights are on. I can almost feel the synapses firing as I walk carefully back to the motel. Initial elation has subsided now and I cannot help but wonder why she hasn't contacted me already. Her actions in the motel, killing Daniels, I correct my euphemism and smile, seem to indicate that her Dark Passenger is back for good. And the other thing, the reaction she had to the killing? The calling my name as she comes over her hands? I feel my heart pounding but my brain doesn't even try to give me an answer. I'm out of my depth; this is not my field of expertise.
The moon scuds behind clouds as I try to unknot the tangle of my sex life. First there was Rita, gentle, damaged Rita. That first time was a shock to us both I think. For her, shock that she wanted to do that again with a man after the way Paul had treated her, for me shock that it wasn't so bad after all. I had urges, we're all animals after all, but satisfying those urges had just seemed like an easy way to get caught out. Too many slippery permutations, what you're supposed to say, what you're supposed to think, fantasise about. Too complicated, messy.
The perfect word for Lila, messy. I stop on the street, look up at the moon. For the briefest of moments Lila set me free. I have a sudden flash of pushing her forward onto the bed, not sure if I was going to kill her or fuck her. Angry, in too deep, hands on her rear, tugging at her panties, her voice as she whispers for me to succumb to my dark impulses, to 'fuck her like that'. I shudder, close my eyes. Yes, the animal was definitely out of its cage for those few days, weeks.
"And look where that got you." Harry keeps pace with me along the road. I glance at him and nod. He's right, look where it took me. Paris and killing the woman with whom I had shared this extraordinary bodily relationship. Can this ever go right for me? Should I just turn back now?
"She's not Rita, or Lila." Harry stops to look at me and I stop too. I close my eyes and my life seems a terrible confusion, what happened to the neat compartments, parts of me boxed up, separate? I know the answer. Life happened, Dexter. "It's what people do Dex, they evolve, develop. It's a good sign." I open my eyes but Harry is gone and I wonder again, do I want to be normal when it hurts so much, is so tormenting? My feet move me forwards so I guess there's my answer.
As I approach the motel I have a more pressing question than the development of my character, after all isn't this always what I wanted? To be a real boy? The real question I should be asking is how is she going to get rid of the body? She doesn't have a boat and I've tried to ponder this predicament before, when my old playmates started to surface and the 'Bay Harbour Butcher' fiasco started.
I slow my steps as I see her struggling out of the motel with a bag, a heavy black garbage bag. She drags it to a beat up old station wagon which she seems to have chosen for its impressive storage rather than its aesthetic appeal. I flatten back against the wall and, when she goes back inside, I slip around a corner, sheltered from her sight by the thick trunk of a palm.
She comes back with two, much smaller bags, leaving me to surmise that she realised too late that she needs to cut him up into smaller pieces to make him manoeuvrable. I appreciate the problem. Less bags means less clean up, more time to tidy away evidence and reduces the chance of being noticed. Smaller bags are more manageable, more easily stowed in the trunk of your car. Ah, Serial Killing 101.
In a remarkably quick time she cleans up. I see her heft the heavy plastic sheeting, neatly folded, into the trunk and pack it securely around the black bags. She goes back into the motel room with a spray bottle and a torch. Not Luminol? But then I hear the tell tale, familiar swoosh of the bottle and the reflection of the black light in the doorway. I'm impressed. She's thorough.
When she is satisfied she comes outside and stands for a moment, looking up at the moon. I realise that, if I'm going to follow her I'll have to act quickly, she has a car and I am on foot. There's only one way out of the motel complex so she can't be going by any other route. I leave her still staring at the moon, tempting though it is to watch her, drink her in, and I wait by the exit of the parking lot. This part of town is mainly industrial; it'd be my choice of dump spot if I didn't have 'Slice of Life'.
Sure enough it's only about five minutes until she drives slowly by, her window is down a little and through it I can hear the radio. Her elbow is on the window edge and she looks relaxed, calm. She glances briefly in my direction before indicating left and driving down a side road which leads to a nasty part of town. Nothing down here but a car wrecker's yard, a meat packing company, a slaughterhouse and a glue factory. Suddenly I begin to see her thinking.
I jog down the alley, carefully keeping to the walls though I doubt she will be looking to be followed. If she's going to make a slip it will be now, when the adrenaline is high and the rush of getting away with it is in her veins. I watch her pile the plastic sheeting up with the other clear folded sheets outside the slaughterhouse. She shoves them under the new discarded packing, inconspicuous from the rest of the stuff they use to pack up the bodies of the horses, cows and pigs they slaughter. Unless someone comes looking, armed with a forensic team to separate the blood types then she's safe with that. But what about the body parts?
She goes back to the car and comes back with a scarf around her lower face. She looks like a vigilante and the word brings back to me Deb's romantic description of what we were doing when we killed Jordan Chase. What did she call us? Beautiful. I close my eyes briefly and hope that this is a new beginning for us. Watching her heaving those bags to a large metal container in the yard I am tempted to break from my hiding place and help her but I remind myself that, if she wanted help, she could have contacted me before. And I have to admit that, watching her work like this, methodical, precise, is fascinating.
She tries to open the lid of the vat but she's not tall enough. She scans the moonlit yard; the silver light makes everything seem magical, even in this grim part of town. Eventually I see her sigh and she drives the car over to the side of the huge metal bucket. She climbs onto the roof and flips the heavy cover. She pulls her head back and covers her hand with her mouth. What's in there? She takes the bags and empties them into the vat. It's not a clean job; she throws the empty bags down as the slippery contents drop into the bucket with a sickening squelch. Eventually, all the bags are empty and she carefully reseals the vat.
She jumps down and carries the bags to a metal brazier, fallen on its side, firewood spilling from its innards and not used since the winter. She rights the canister and pushes it out of sight of the road. I watch as she tips lighter fluid onto the wood, lights a match and crams the bags inside it. Then she takes off her clothes.
The apron is with the bags already but now the shoes, the tiny shorts, her vest top, bra and panties all go into the fire. She stands in its faint glow, the moonlight silver and the flames golden on her skin and she stretches tall, clasping her hands and pulling at her arms to alleviate the stiffness of her joints or just to revel in her release, I cannot tell. For what seems like an age I watch her, taking in the smooth curves of her figure, the dark shadows and silver scars which have healed so much more than when I last saw them. The thought makes me feel something, something I recognise as sadness. She is healing, without me.
Eventually she looks to see the fire dimming, the plastic melted and the clothes reduced to ash which starts to spill out of the holes of the brazier. When there are no more flames, only red smouldering, she tips a litre bottle of water over the ashes, sluicing the remains onto the yard floor where they follow the camber of the concrete down the massive blood and fluid drainage outlet.
She goes back to the car and puts back on the hooded sweatshirt, the dark trousers, the sneakers she was wearing at the club. Then she drives away. She drives east, into the city but I can't follow her now. I hastily note the license plate of the station wagon. As I am about to leave, the sound of her engine dying in the distance fills me with sorrow, I notice something on the ground where she was parked. It is a glove, a black leather glove. I push it in my pocket.
I wander back to the road, enthralled by what I have just seen. It's like being in a trance as I walk back to the club, I'm floating on air. This is how first dates are supposed to feel, the first time you kiss, not the first time you see her kill a man without your help. What can I say? I am wrong on the inside.
As I approach the noise and bustle of the club I decide to go home instead of finding Masuka and Batista. Let them think I took that girl home, let them think they helped me, got me laid and drunk or whatever it was that they thought would sort me out. It might keep them off my back for a while.
I take a cab most of the way home and then tell the driver to pull over, I need to think and the Miami moonlight seems too beautiful to miss tonight. Adrenaline is still tickling at my nerves and my brain is full of questions. The driver tells me in Spanish to go safely and I nod, knowing I am more than a match for the monsters out there in the soft night.
The roads are nearly empty but for the occasional cab or truck, sweeping its way along the roads as I saunter the last mile home. Everywhere seems luminous, lit from the inside by some magic and I wonder if this is the light or the things I have seen this evening. I play it all back in my head, slowing down and relishing the best parts. The knife going in, her legs across his body, the plastic sticking to her abdomen, the sounds coming from the bathroom, her saying my name. I want to record that sound, play it to myself over and over. Dexter, oh god, Dexter. I feel my stomach muscles clench.
I take the glove out of my pocket and, even though I know it is a cliché, a scene from a romantic movie in which I will never star, I hold it to my face and breathe in. It smells of leather, Lumen and blood. The perfume seems almost tailored to my own peculiar vices and I feel its reaction on the blood in my veins.
Why hasn't she contacted me? If it has been her watching me at the beach, my apartment, then why hasn't she comes forward, called me? Why is she watching me if she doesn't care? A slow chill falls over me. Am I being hunted? After all, I fit my own code.
The thought stops me in my tracks. Involuntarily I turn around and check the sidewalk. Nothing. She could have had me by now, if she'd wanted me. The words go around my head and I can't avoid the double meaning.
Back at my apartment I log on to the site I use to track license plates, it's more anonymous than the police records or any of the other state resources which can do the same job. I tap the numbers and letters into the search box and press 'go'. While it's working I grab a beer from the fridge and find myself checking the window, prising the blinds apart, peering into the pale moonlight. Nothing.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. It's a text from Masuka.
"Hey dude, give her one for me." I shake my head; at least I don't have to come up with an alibi for where I went tonight, Vince has one already fleshed out in his head. Great. The next beep is a text from Angel.
"Hope you're ok, amigo. Let me know when you're coming to pick up the kids. See you for breakfast?" They're good men, in their own ways. What would they think if they knew I had spent the evening watching my old girlfriend kill a man and cut him up? The idea makes me smile; I'm so used to this double life now it seems like normality.
The laptop makes a noise to tell me that the search is up. The car was sold two weeks ago to an Elle Wright, her address is listed as being in the local area, a block of apartments made up from the shell of an old Art Deco cinema they converted back in the 80s. I write the address on a notepad even though I know I will remember it. It's too important to forget.
I go out onto the balcony and lean on my elbows on the railing, sipping my beer and listening to the pool water sloshing in the silver light. I take a deep breath, trying to find some cohesion in what I have witnessed tonight. More than ever a war is waging inside me, the petty skirmishes of infighting I have felt over the last few weeks has now given way to a full scale assault. On one side the new Dexter, a man, not a monster. A man shaped by extraordinary circumstances into something new, something almost normal if it wasn't for the urge to kill. But even that urge has some justification now. What I am is what I have been forced to become, Lumen showed me this.
The other army is populated with the old me, shuffling ranks of monsters in gloves, carrying donuts as a disguise. Their creed is that I am not like anyone else, not human, incapable of genuine, authentic emotion. Their ranks have dwindled, picked off by Rita, Cody, Astor, Deb and Harrison. And now Lumen. But they're still fighting and their new secret weapon, wheeled out from under its tarpaulin of darkness, is my insecurity, the opposing army's weakest spot.
It's like the new me isn't strong enough yet, hasn't had that nurturing, the support and guidance that the old me got from Harry. There's no outside help for the new me, Rita's gone, Deb doesn't know, Lumen left. It's demoralising, destructive, to the embryonic Dexter, growing into the light out of the darkness I've always known. Who can help him?
Maybe this is one of those times I can use a metaphor, try to get some help by talking around my subject, playing an 'as if' game with my conversation partner to try to glean some nugget of truth from the subterfuge. I get out my phone and call Deb. She's going to love it that I'm asking for relationship help.
"What? Do you know what fucking time it is, retard?" Ah, I didn't think about the time. Deb's at Quinn's and I figure it's his voice I can hear complaining in the back ground.
"Hi Deb," I say brightly. "It's three thirty in the morning, but I needed to talk." That gets her; I can almost see her sitting up in bed, brushing away Quinn's hand as she focuses on the phenomenon that is her older brother wanting to have a conversation. Bizarre as the early morning/late night phone call seems it appears this is the most normal thing I could have done. I'll never get it right, I shake my head.
"Talk? Dex, you ok? What's going on? You never fucking talk! You're like one big silent motherfucker. What's happened?" I let the anguish, the confusion show in my voice and it's a relief not to be hiding.
"It's Lumen, me, god. I don't know, can I come over?" she mumbles something to Quinn and then she's back.
"Meet you at the all night coffee place near the station? It's between your place and m... here." She was going to say 'mine', admitting she's living with Quinn. She stopped herself; I'm not the only Morgan with insecurity issues about relationships.
"Ok, how long? A half hour?"
"Yeah, and Dexter, this better be a fucking catastrophe. If this is about bowling... you're dead, fucker." I hear the smile in her voice even though she's still cursing at me. I grin, a small light in the darkness.
"I'll see you there." I fold the phone, grab my wallet and leave.
So, what can Dexter actually tell Deb?
Thanks so much to VB for beta skills not skewed to the Darkside! And thanks for all the reviews you've written, it really makes this more fun when it's interactive! Let me know what you think so far! Cx