Double Dexter (33 page)

And even if I dodged their bullet, my Shadow was still lurking with unknown menace. I tried to recapture the sense of quiet confidence I’d woken up with the other day. So much had happened since, and instead of handling it with the sure-footed competence I used to display routinely, I was sitting under a tree in the swamp and watching birds, without a single thought about what to do. I didn’t have a plan. To be honest, I didn’t even have a glimmer of real thought that might turn into a plan. But there should have been some small comfort in knowing I was out here in Nature, where predators are respected, which really ought to count for something.

Sadly, there wasn’t any comfort, none at all. I could see nothing ahead of me except pain and suffering, and far too much of it was going to be mine.

“Hey, you didn’t go either, huh?” said a cheerful voice behind me, and it startled me so badly I almost threw a shoe. Instead, I merely turned around to see who had so rudely interrupted my reverie.

Doug Crowley leaned against my tree, looking a little too casual, as if he was trying to learn this position but wasn’t quite sure he’d
gotten it right yet, and his eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses seemed a little too wide to be really nonchalant. He was a man of about my age, with a square, slightly soft-looking body, and the stubble of a trimmed-short beard on his face that was probably supposed to hide a weak chin, but didn’t quite. And somehow, in spite of his size, he had snuck up behind me silently and I had not heard him, and I found that almost as irritating as his chummy good cheer.

“On the walk,” he said hopefully. “You didn’t go on the nature walk. Either.” A poor fake smile flickered on and off his mouth. “Neither did I,” he added, quite unnecessarily.

“Yes, I can see that,” I said. It was probably not very gracious of me, but I was not feeling particularly chummy, and his efforts at being friendly were so clearly artificial that he offended my sense of craft; I had put a great deal of time and work into learning to fake everything. Why couldn’t he?

He stared down at me for a long and awkward moment, forcing me to crane my neck up to stare back. His eyes were very blue and seemed a little too small, and something was going on behind them, but I couldn’t tell what, and frankly, I didn’t really care.

“Well,” he said. “I just wanted to, you know. Say hi. Introduce myself.” He pushed off the tree, and then lurched down at me with his hand held out. “Doug Crowley,” he said, and I reluctantly took his hand.

“Pleased to meet you,” I lied. “Dexter Morgan.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “I mean, Frank said. Nice to meet you, too.” And then he straightened up and just looked at me for what seemed like several long minutes. “Well,” he said at last. “This your first time in the ’Glades?”

“No, I used to go camping a lot,” I said.

“Oh, uh-huh. Camping,” he said, in a very odd tone of voice that seemed to indicate he thought I might be lying.

So I added, “And
hunting,
” with just a little bit of emphasis.

Crowley shuffled backward a half step and blinked, and then finally nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I guess you would.” He looked at his feet, and then looked uncertainly around, as if he thought someone might be hunting him. “You didn’t bring any … I mean, you weren’t
planning to … you know. This trip?” he said. “I mean, with all the kids around.”

It came to me that he was asking if I was planning on hunting right now, in the middle of a flock of wild Cub Scouts, and the thought was so stupid that for a moment I could do no more than cock my head to one side and look at him. “Noooo,” I said at last. “I wasn’t actually
planning
on it.” And just because he was being so irritatingly dumb, I shrugged and added, “But you never know when the urge may strike, do you?” And I gave him a happy smile, just so he could see what a really
good
fake looked like.

Crowley blinked again, nodded slowly, and shifted from one foot to the other. “Riiiight,” he said, and his cheap artificial smile flickered on and off again. “I know what you mean.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said, but I was really only sure that I wanted to see him burst into flames. And after all, putting him out would be a great exercise for the boys.

“Uh-huh,” he said. He shifted his weight back onto his other foot and looked around him again. There was no help coming, so he looked back at me. “Well,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

“Almost certainly,” I said, and he gave me a slightly startled look, freezing where he stood for just a moment. And then he nodded his head, flashed me one more brief and unconvincing smile, and turned away to wander back to the far side of the camp. I watched him go; it had been an incredibly awkward performance, and it made me wonder how he hoped to be assistant den leader without having the Cub Scouts beat him up and take his lunch money. He seemed so awkward and helpless, I couldn’t see how he had reached such an advanced age without being pecked to death by angry pigeons.

I knew very well that there are far more lambs in the world than wolves—but why was I always the one they came bleating to? It seemed terribly unfair that way out here, in the middle of the savage woods, I could still be assailed by twinkies like Crowley. Shouldn’t there be a park regulation against them? Or even an open season? They certainly weren’t an endangered species.

I tried to shake off the irritation at this uncalled-for interruption, but my focus had fled. How could I concentrate on wiggling out of
a trap when I was constantly tormented by pointless interruptions? Not that I’d come up with any thoughts on creative wiggling anyway. I’d pounded away at the mental rock pile for two full days and was still totally clueless. I sighed and closed my eyes, and as if to confirm that I really was stupid, the blister on my heel began to throb again.

I tried to think soothing thoughts, picturing the heron spearing a large fish, or pecking at Crowley, but the picture wouldn’t stick. I couldn’t see anything but the painfully happy faces of Hood and Doakes. Dull gray despair curdled in my guts, gurgling a mean and scornful laugh at my blockheaded attempts to get out of the trap. There was no escape, not this time. I was besieged by two very determined and dangerous cops who really and truly wanted to arrest me for something—anything—and they needed only a little fake evidence to put me away forever, and on top of that a completely unknown person with an obscure but probably very dangerous threat was circling closer. And I thought I could fight them all off by sitting in a Cub Scout tent and admiring herons? I was like a little boy playing war, yelling,
Bang, bang! Gotcha!
, and looking up to see a real Sherman tank rolling right at me.

It was pointless and hopeless, and I was still clueless.

Dexter was Doomed, and sitting barefoot underneath a tree and being rude to a ninny was not going to change that.

I closed my eyes, overwhelmed, and as the full-throated chorus of
Pity Me
echoed across the emptiness inside me, I apparently fell asleep.

I
WOKE UP FROM A GRUMPY DOZE TO THE SOUNDS OF THE
Nature Hike stomping back into the camp, with two or three boys’ voices calling out to each other, Frank yelling something about lunch, and Mario’s voice rising above it all with a very instructive lecture on what alligators do with their prey and why it was a bad idea to give them anything to eat, even that awful Mystery-Meat stuff they serve in the school cafeteria, which would probably make even an alligator throw up.

It was a very strange way to come back to consciousness from the totally dead and dopey sleep I’d been lying in, and at first the sounds didn’t make sense to me. I blinked my eyes open and tried to force the noise to add up to something approaching consensus reality, but the leaden stupidity of my nap would not leave me, so I just lay there in a blank stupor at the base of my tree, frowning and clearing my throat and trying to rub the sand out of my eyes, until at last a small shadow moved into my line of sight and I looked up to see Cody. He stared down at me very seriously until I finally pulled myself up to a sitting position, cleared my throat one last time, and somehow remembered how to make real words come out of my mouth.

“Well,” I said, and to my heavy-headed ears even that one syllable sounded stupid, but I plowed on. “How was the nature hike?”

Cody frowned and shook his head. “Okay,” he said.

“What kind of nature did you see?”

For a moment I thought he might actually smile, and then he said, “Alligator,” and there was a slight edge in his voice that could almost have been excitement.

“You saw an alligator?” I asked, and he nodded. “What did it do?”

“
Looked
at me,” he said. Something about the way he said it added up to a whole lot more than three small words.

“And what happened then?” I asked him.

Cody glanced around and then lowered his already soft voice to make sure no one else could hear him. “Shadow Guy
laughed,
” he said. “At the alligator.” It was a very long speech for him, and to make it even more notable, he really did smile then, just a brief flicker across his small and serious face, but there was no mistaking it. Shadow Guy, Cody’s Dark Passenger, had made an emotional connection with the honest and savage spirit of a real live predator, and Cody was delighted.

So was I. “Isn’t nature wonderful?” I said, and he nodded happily. “Well, what now?”

“Hungry,” he said, which actually made sense, so I unzipped the fly of our tent and got our lunch. It was in Cody’s pack, because I had wanted him to carry less weight coming home, in case the ordeal of camping made him tired.

We did not have to do a great deal of preparation for this meal; Rita had packed us a premade lunch consisting of bologna salad sandwiches and a baggie full of carrot spears and grapes, followed by a final course of a medley of cookies from the grocery store’s bakery. Hiking and fresh air are said to make food taste better, and it may be true. In any case, there were no leftovers.

After lunch, Frank called everybody together again, and then organized us into teams, each with an Important Job. Cody and I were assigned to the firewood-collecting group, and we stood by the fire circle and listened dutifully as Frank lectured us thoroughly about making sure we gathered only deadwood, and remember that sometimes it could
look
dead but it wasn’t, and that to injure a living
tree in this area was not only bad for the planet but an actual
crime;
and don’t forget to be very careful about poison oak, poison ivy, and something called manchineel.

I realized that it was very hard to be careful about something if you had no idea what it was, so I made the mistake of asking about manchineel. Unfortunately, this was just the excuse Frank needed to launch himself into a full-blown Nature Lecture. He gave me a very happy nod. “You
have
to watch out for that one,” he said brightly. “Because it is
deadly
. Even just touching it will burn your skin. I mean, blisters and everything, and you will definitely require medical attention. So watch for it—it’s a tree, and the leaves are kind of oval and waxy, and it’s got, um—the fruit looks kinda like apples? But Do Not Eat It! It will absolutely
kill
you, and even
touching
it is dangerous, so—”

This was obviously a subject close to Frank’s heart, and I wondered if I had misjudged him. Anyone with such a passion for lethal vegetation couldn’t be all bad. He had a lecture five full minutes long just on the manchineel tree, and that was only the start.

It was very instructive: Manchineel, apparently, had been used by the Aboriginal Peoples of the Caribbean for poison, torture, and several other worthwhile purposes. Even sitting under the tree during a rainstorm could be deadly. In fact, the Carib Indians had actually tied their prisoners to the trunk of the tree when it rained, because the water dripping off the leaves made an acid bath strong enough to eat through human flesh. And arrows dipped in the sap could cause painful death; clearly it was wonderful stuff. But Frank’s main point—avoid the manchineel!—was very plain long before he wound up his lecture with a few halfhearted warnings about poison oak. And then, just when I thought we could make our getaway, one of the boys said, “What about snakes?”

Frank smiled happily; on to lethal animals! He took a deep breath, and he was off again. “Oh, it’s not just snakes,” he said. “I mean, we talked about the rattlesnakes—diamondback and pygmy—and coral snakes! They are Absolute Killers! Don’t confuse them with the corn snake— Remember? ‘Red touches yellow’?”

He raised his eyebrows, and the whole group dutifully finished the rhyme, chanting, “You’re a dead fellow.” Frank smiled and nodded at them.

“That’s right,” he said. “Only coral snakes have red bands that touch their yellow bands. So keep clear of those. And don’t forget the cottonmouth, too, by the water. Not as deadly as coral snakes, but they’ll come after you. One bite probably wouldn’t kill you, but there’s usually a whole bunch of them all together, and they come at you like bees, and you get five or
six
bites, that’s more than enough to kill you. Okay?”

I really thought that might be it, and I actually had one foot raised to make my getaway when Mario cheerfully called out, “Hey, the guidebook says there’s bears, too!”

Frank nodded and pointed a finger at him and we were off again. “That’s right, Mario. Good point. We have black bears in Florida, which are not as aggressive as the brown ones, and they’re not as big, either. Kind of puny next to a grizzly, only around four hundred pounds.”

If he was hoping we would all heave a sigh of relief at the petite size of the black bear, he was disappointed; a four-hundred-pound bear seemed plenty big enough to play jai alai with my head, and judging by the wide eyes of the boys all around me, I was not the only one who thought so.

“Just remember, they may be small, but they can be very cranky if they have a cub? They run
very
fast, and they can climb trees. Oh! So can panthers—which are very rare, an endangered species. So we probably won’t see one, but if we do—remember this, guys: They are basically like lions, and … you know. We talk about how cool they are, and how we need to help protect panthers and their habitat—but they are still very dangerous animals. I mean,
most
of the animals out here. Let’s remember they are
wild
. So give them room; respect their habitat, because you are in their space, and it’s— Even raccoons, okay? I mean, they get into everything, and they look awful cute. They might even come right up to you. But they can have rabies, which you can get from them just from a little scratch, so stay away.”