Double Dexter (44 page)

Neither was I. I was just getting started.

He’d had it all his way so far, kept me off balance, stepping in to deliver his nasty little jabs and then dancing away before I could react, and he thought he was winning and I was no more than a dull punching bag, a broad and simple target, easy to find and slow to react, and he had pushed me and slapped me and jabbed me into a corner until he thought he had me on the ropes and I would be easy to finish off.

He was wrong.

He hadn’t faced
me
yet. He had no idea what it meant to try to put me down in person. He had not stood toe-to-toe with the champ, Dexter the Destroyer, facing
me
in the flesh with the certainty of Death in each hand and the dark wind howling around us—that was my home turf, and he had not set foot on it yet, and until he did the fight had not even started.

But Crowley had rung the bell for the final round when he snatched Cody and Astor. He believed I was weakened and he was ready, and he had made his move. And he had not taken the kids to taunt me, to show me he was very clever and I was a helpless fool. No, he had taken them so I would come after them. They were the bait for his trap, and a trap can’t catch anything at all unless the prey knows where it is.

He was waiting for me to find him. And that meant that somehow, some way, he would have to let me know where he was. There would be a broad and obvious hint somewhere, an actual invitation to the dance. He would not want to wait too long, and he would not leave
it to chance. I knew I was right. He had slapped me with a glove, and someplace near and obvious he had dropped it for me to find.

My phone rang, and I glanced at it; it was Rita. I almost answered it out of mere habit—but before I could push the button and speak, I heard a different, interior bell chime softly and I
knew
.

Of course. This whole thing had been centered around computers and Crowley’s conceited belief that he was King of the Internet. He would not just leave a hint somewhere—he would send it to me in an e-mail.

The phone was still ringing insistently, but now I had a much more important use for it than talking to Rita, and I hit the disconnect button. I tapped the icon to get to my e-mail and it seemed to take hours before the screen finally showed my in-box. But it did at last, and there, at the top, was a note from Shadowblog. I opened it.

Very good
, it said.
You finally found my real name and address
.

Something bumped me and I flinched into alertness. A rowdy group of young men that looked like a fraternity party turned bad roiled past me, shouting and slopping beer from plastic cups. I pushed through them and sat down on the edge of a low wall in front of a restaurant, and went back to reading the e-mail.

That was it. I read it again, but there was no more.

My jaw hurt. I wondered why. Nobody had actually hit me. Had I been grinding my teeth a lot lately? It seemed like I had. I was probably wearing all the enamel off. That wasn’t good. I would get cavities. I wondered if I would live long enough to get to the dentist. Or, if things went better than I thought they could possibly go, if the dental program would cover it in Raiford Prison.

Of course, if I stood here any longer thinking about my teeth, it would probably be best if I just pulled them all out myself.

Somewhere Crowley, or Bernie, or whatever name he liked, was waiting for me. But right here, in Key West? Unlikely; you didn’t play this game in Party Central. He would find someplace off the beaten path, even a little isolated—and he would tell me about it in some clever way, so I could figure it out eventually, but not too soon. But in his own way he was just as anxious to get it done as I was, so it had to be someplace that wasn’t too far away. He wouldn’t take them to Zanzibar, or even Cleveland.

I read the e-mail one more time, looking for my clue. It was all relatively straightforward—except at the end, where he said “witty, in a kind of dry way,” and then, “Don’t be a turtle.” That made no sense at all. It was a clunky way to say it, and it wasn’t his style. And how could a location be witty? Even if it was, why didn’t he just say,
I think it’s funny; hurry?
Nothing else in the note stuck out; these lines had to be telling me where to go. Perfect; if I could only think of a funny place and hurry there, I would almost certainly find him.

“Funny.” There were several cabarets in town, and a comedy club, all within walking distance, so I could get there quickly. But funny wasn’t really the same thing as witty—and why was it so important to hurry?

I realized I was grinding my teeth again. I stopped and took a deep breath. I reminded myself that I was really very clever, much smarter than him, and anything he came up with to taunt me I could certainly decode and shove down his throat. I just had to think positive thoughts and concentrate a little.

It made me feel a lot better. I started over from the top:

Witty
. It did nothing for me.

Don’t be a turtle
. Even worse. Nothing at all came to me. It was wonderful to see the power of positive thinking.

All right, I was missing something. Maybe it was the word “witty.” Perhaps some awful pun—there was a White Street only a few blocks away. But that was stretching it too far. Was there a Whitt Key? I’d never heard of it. What about “turtle” then? There was Turtle Kraals down by the water. But he said “
don’t
be a turtle,” so that didn’t make sense. That couldn’t be it, and I was clearly not as clever as I thought I was.

A trio of men walked past, arguing in Spanish. I made out the word
pendejo
, and I thought it was probably appropriate. I was a
pendejo
, a complete dolt, and I deserved to lose everything to an even bigger
pendejo
, whether in Spanish or English. Crowley probably couldn’t even speak Spanish. I could, and it hadn’t helped me find him so far. In fact, it had never helped me do anything except order lunch. It was a useless language, as useless as I was, and I should probably move away someplace where I would never hear it spoken again. Find a small island somewhere and just …

Far, far away, I heard crowd noise and music playing, and the clanging bell of the Conch Train as it rattled through the streets, and all the sounds of drunken, brainless revelry I had found so annoying only moments before. And somewhere up above me the July sun was still beating down without mercy and scorching everything under its glare. But Dexter was no longer hot and bothered; Dexter felt a cool and gentle breeze blowing, and Dexter heard only a soft and soothing melody, the delightful symphony of life as it played its stately and wonderful song. Key West really was an enchanted place, and Spanish was actually the emperor of all languages, and I blessed the day I had decided to learn it. Everything was new and marvelous and I was not a
pendejo
at all, because I had remembered one simple Spanish word and everything made sense.

The Spanish word for “turtle” is
tortuga
.

The cluster of islands sixty miles south of Key West was called the Tortugas—in fact, the
Dry
Tortugas, as in Crowley’s dry wit. There’s a park there, and an old fort, and several ferries every day to take you there, and I knew where Crowley had taken Cody and Astor.

There was a hotel across the street from where I sat. I ran across the street and into the lobby. Right inside the door, just where it should have been, stood a wooden rack stuffed with brochures for all the attractions in Key West. I scanned them rapidly, found one with a bright blue heading that said, CONCH LINE, and plucked it from the rack.

Our superfast, ultramodern fleet of high-tech catamarans
, it read,
make a high-speed run to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas twice a day!

The boats left from a dock about half a mile from where I stood right now, and the second and final boat left at ten a.m. I looked around the lobby and found a clock over the desk; it was nine fifty-six. Four minutes to get there.

I sprinted out of the lobby and down Duval. The crowds were even larger and jollier now; it was always Happy Hour in Key West, and trying to run through the mobs of revelers was nearly impossible. At the corner I turned right on Caroline Street and the flock thinned out immediately. Half a block up, four bearded men sat on the curb with a bottle of something in a paper bag. They were not Hemingways; their beards were long and matted, and they watched me with dead faces and then cheered sloppily as I ran past. I hoped there would be something to cheer about.

Three more blocks. I was sure it had been more than four minutes already. I told myself that nothing ever left on time. I was soaked with sweat, but the water was in sight now on my left, between the buildings, and I picked up my pace as I galloped into the large parking area at the docks. More people now, music coming from the waterfront restaurants, and I had to dodge a couple of slow and wobbly bicycles before I came out on the old wooden pier and pounded out past the dockmaster’s shack, out onto the battered planking of the wharf—

And there it was, the Conch Line’s superfast ultramodern high-speed catamaran, leaning away from the dock and slowly, ponderously, slipping out into the harbor. And as I crashed to a halt on the last eight inches of the dock it was not really very far away across the water, not far at all, only about fifteen feet from me—just far enough to be too far.

Just far enough to see across the widening gap as Cody and Astor stood at the rail, looking anxiously back at me. And right behind them, wearing a floppy-brimmed hat and a triumphant smirk, Crowley. He put one hand on Astor’s shoulder, and he raised the other to wave at me, and I could do nothing but watch as the boat pulled away from the pier, picked up speed, and vanished past Sunset Key and then south into the deep and empty blue of the Atlantic Ocean.

A
LOT OF PEOPLE DO NOTHING IN KEY WEST. IT’S A GOOD
place for that. You can watch everyone moving along Duval Street and wonder what strange alien race they belong to. Or you can go down to the water and look at the pelicans, watch the boats bobbing at anchor or racing past in the harbor, crowded with sunburned partiers, and if you look up you can see the planes flying low overhead towing their banners.

For five minutes, that’s all I did. I slumped right into the national pastime of the Conch Republic and I did nothing. I just stood on the dock and watched the water, the boats, the birds. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot more I could do. The boat with Cody and Astor was gone, speeding away across the ocean. It was already more than a mile away and I couldn’t call it back and I couldn’t run after it across the water.

So I did nothing. And it seems a little bit ironic, but apparently there is actually one place in Key West where you can’t do that, and I had found it. I became aware that people were pushing past me, briskly moving coils of rope and hoses and two-wheeled carts stuffed with baggage, food and ice, and dive gear. And judging by the irritated glances they sent me, I was in their way.

Finally one of them stopped beside me, dropping the handles of a cart filled with scuba tanks and straightening up to face me. “Say there, Captain,” he said in a bluff and friendly voice. “Wonder if you could move off to the side a bit? We got to load the boat for a dive trip.”

I turned away from the water and looked him in the face. It was a friendly and open dark brown face, and just in case I might be a potential customer, he added, “Right out to the reef, it’s absolutely beautiful. Oughta see it sometime, Captain.”

A tiny little gleam of hope flickered deep in the dark corners of my brain. “You don’t go anywhere near Fort Jefferson, do you?”

The man laughed. “Tortugas? No, sir, you just missed the last boat down there. Next one’s tomorrow morning.”

Of course—as always, hope was a stupid waste of time. My one small flicker hissed out and the gray fog rolled back in. And because people always insist on talking to you when you want to be alone with your quiet despair, the man went on babbling at me with his cheerful huckster’s patter.

“Now, Tortugas are worth seeing, too, you know. You can’t believe Fort Jefferson till you
see
it. Maybe the best way to see it, by air? Got a brochure over here …” He trotted five steps to his right and rummaged in a dock locker, then came back and handed me a glossy, brightly colored pamphlet. “Here ya go,” he said. “My girlfriend works for them. They fly down there four times a day? Beautiful, coming in low over the fort, and then you splash down, very cool, very exciting …”

He thrust the brochure into my hand and I took it. It said, A
LBATROSS
A
IRLINES
! across the top—and suddenly it really was exciting, the most exciting thing in the world. “It’s a seaplane?” I said, staring at the pictures.

“Sure, has to be, no landing strip down there,” he said.

“It would be a lot quicker than the boat, wouldn’t it?” I said.

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Conch Lines boat takes a good three hours, maybe a little more. This’ll have you there in like forty minutes. Great trip, too.”