“Dexter,” she called after me, and I sighed and turned back to her. She opened her mouth to say something, and then didn’t say it. For a long moment she didn’t say anything at all, just looked at me, and I wondered what had derailed her frenzy. I was finally about to speak myself when she said, “It’s just that … Do you have clean clothes?”
“Socks and underwear,” I said.
“And a decent shirt to wear to this thing?”
“Yes,” I said, extremely puzzled at the paradigm shift. “A nice guayabera.”
Rita nodded, still looking at me intently. “Because it’s just …” She fluttered one hand, like a small bird with a broken wing, and looked at Cody, then back to me. “I miss you,” she said. “We all do.”
“Me, too,” Cody said in his husky, too-quiet voice.
I blinked at the two of them with surprise bordering on shock. Not merely because the thought of my laundry led Rita directly to saying she missed me. I found it shocking that she missed me at all. And Cody, too? Why? I know exactly what I am—although happily, no one else seems to—and what I am is no great prize, unless we are now awarding medals for inspired vivisection. And so to hear her say they all missed me? What did that mean? Why would anyone miss me? All I did was come home for meals, sit on the couch for an hour or two, and go to bed. Why would anyone miss that?
It was a wonderful conundrum of human behavior, the kind that I had been puzzling over my entire life, and ordinarily it would have been fun to mull it over for a while. But Rita was looking at me expectantly, and years of studying how people act, mostly on daytime dramas, has taught me to recognize a cue when I hear one. So I gave Rita a warm synthetic smile and said, “I miss you, too. But it’s just a few more days. And,” I added when her face stayed locked into that same worried look, “we really do need the money.”
It took her several moments, but Rita finally nodded and said, “Well, yes. But it’s just—you know.” I didn’t know, and she didn’t tell me. She just shrugged and said, “All right then.” She walked the three steps to me, then leaned in, and I gave her a small kiss on the cheek. I looked at Cody, who was watching with his usual alert stoicism. “Relax,” I told him. “I’m not going to kiss you.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“And I’ll see you in a couple of days,” I said. “Remember to Visualize your Procedural Templates.”
Cody made a horrible face and shook his head. “Yuck,” he said, and I have to admit we were in complete agreement.
I turned away again and Rita called after me, “Dexter—just call a few— I mean, if it’s not too much?”
“All right,” I said, seeing the mojito floating in front of me in the air. “I’ll call.”
It was just past four o’clock. Traffic was beginning to slow with the start of rush hour, and the steady lines of cars were squeezing together, coagulating into loud, angry knots and beginning to form a motionless scab on the highways. It took me most of an hour to work my way through the snarls and get back to my office, and along the way I had plenty of time to reflect on what had been, after all, a very full day. Even though the teacher conference had washed away the afterglow of my encounter with Patrick, I felt no worry and no regret. No one would miss him, and it had been far quicker than he deserved.
Jackie’s Town Car was waiting outside headquarters, motor running, when I finally got back. The driver was leaning against the front fender, smoking a cigarette, and he waved to me as I approached. I stepped over to the car, and the rear window slid down.
Jackie looked out at me with a smile that was small, but somehow made me feel like everything was going to be all right. “Hey, sailor,” she said. “Would you like a lift?” And the smile got just a little bit wider as she said, “I think it’s mojito time.”
I thought so, too. I got in the car.
TWENTY-ONE
SATURDAY MORNING JACKIE SLEPT LATE. I AM AN EARLY RISER, and in any case it’s hard to drowse in bed half asleep when you’re on the couch in a luxury hotel. So I was up at seven, and sitting on the balcony with breakfast by seven fifteen. The sun came up right on time, just the way it did on weekdays, but I tried to work through my meal a little slower, in honor of the weekend.
Far out over the water a flock of boats moved by, heading south to the Keys, or east to Bimini, the Gulf Stream, and even beyond. A large sportfisher went roaring right over the deep spot where I had put Patrick, kicking up a high rooster tail in its wake. I wondered whether it would make enough turbulence to rip him free of his anchor; perhaps he would shoot up to the surface like a nightmare cork, and bob along behind the speeding boat, all the way to the Bahamas.
Probably not. And if he did, I doubted that the big cruiser would slow down, not with marlin and sailfish waiting.
I sipped my fresh-squeezed orange juice. It was very good. So were my Belgian waffles, and the bacon was cooked just right: crisp without being dry. And the fruit on the side was excellent, too, maybe the best I’d ever had—except at breakfast yesterday. And the day before. It didn’t taste like the fruit normal people can get in the supermarket, which always seems diluted, like it has been shot full of water to make it bigger and brighter. This stuff actually had real flavor. It tasted just like you always think fruit ought to taste, but never does.
I sipped. It really was wonderful to be me, at least for the time being. I wondered if you ever got used to this kind of thing, jaded enough to call the waiter and send it all back if a pear slice had a blemish. I didn’t think I would, but who knew? Living this way changed people, and perhaps I would eventually turn into a self-centered dolt—like Robert, for instance. He couldn’t possibly have started out in life the way he was now, or his parents would have strangled him in his cradle.
So maybe I would change, too, after a couple of years of penthouse living. Of course, we would never know; this was all ending soon, far too soon, and I would be back to the world of bruised pears and watery-tasting apples. Sad, depressing, and inevitable—but why let the future ruin the present? For the moment, life was good. I was alive, and Patrick wasn’t, and I still had two strips of bacon left, and most of the fruit.
By seven forty-one I had eaten the last piece of perfectly ripe cantaloupe, pushed the plate away, and refilled my coffee cup. I had tried, but I really couldn’t make the meal last any longer without moving in slow motion. So I sipped my coffee and just sat there in the sunshine waiting for Jackie. In spite of the coffee, the size of the meal and the sun on my face made me feel a little drowsy, lazy, like a large and well-fed lizard on a rock.
By eight thirty I was saturated with coffee, and filling up with impatience. There was not even anything to be impatient about; it was Saturday, after all, and I knew of nothing urgent going on anywhere that required my presence.
Even so, it made me nervous to sit there and do nothing. I suppose it seems a bit much to complain about having nothing to do except sit on the penthouse balcony and drink coffee. There are worse fates, after all—I have personally delivered many of them. But the truth is, I felt ignored, even slighted, and I wanted Jackie to spring out of bed and run to me so I could protect her—doubly stupid, since I knew very well that there was nothing left to protect her from.
But it was eight forty-two before she finally made her appearance, and it was not so much a spring-and-run as it was a stumble-and-trudge. She fell into the chair opposite me as heavily as if she had been dropped from the roof, and she stared at me for several seconds before she remembered how to speak.
“Guh mornuh,” she said, in a voice that was somewhere between a croak and a rasp. She cleared her throat, then closed her eyes, swaying slightly. “Coffee,” she said, and if a growl can sound both demanding and plaintive, hers did. I stared at her; her face looked puffy, rumpled, and her hair was scruffy and unbrushed.