Dexter's Final Cut (21 page)

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” I said, trying to inject a note of finality into my voice. “But I’ll try to call again tomorrow, okay?”

“Tomorrow is the conference with Cody’s teacher,” she said. “At three o’clock, and you said—
Damn
it, Astor, just let me talk for a minute!”

I was fairly sure I’d said nothing of the kind, but I did remember saying I would be at Cody’s parent-teacher conference. “I’ll try to be there,” I said. “But I am pretty busy.”

“Well, you did promise,” Rita said. “And it’s important to him, so— Oh lord, the baby. I have to go.”

“All right,” I said. “Good-bye.”

I put my phone down and turned back toward Jackie. She was watching me with a very strange expression on her face, part amusement and part—what? Something else I couldn’t quite define. “What?” I asked her, but she just shook her head and took another sip of her drink.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just … nothing.” She looked at me over the rim of her glass, her eyes filled with liquid amusement, among other things. “Your wife seems like a very nice person.”

“Yes, she is,” I said.

“
And
a good cook, too …”

I just nodded.

She cocked her head to one side and stared at me very seriously. “So it’s worth it. The whole”—she waved a hand to indicate almost everything—“this
marriage
thing? It works for you?” she said.

It seemed like a strange question, which made it just right for the way this evening was going. “I guess so,” I said.

“You guess so,” she said, still staring, and I shrugged and nodded. “That’s not really an overwhelming endorsement.”

“Well, I mean,” I said, trying to think of an appropriate response, “it has its ups and downs.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “What are the ups?”

“Oh, the, um … We’re moving into a new house,” I said. “It, ah … There’s a pool?” It sounded pretty lame, even to me, and Jackie let it hang there for a few seconds, the silence making it sound even lamer.

“Uh-huh,” she said at last. “The pool that needs a new cage.”

“That’s right—and it has a much bigger kitchen,” I just blurted out; I don’t know why, except I felt I had to say something.

“Right,” Jackie said. “So Rita can cook even more.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I said. I grabbed for my mojito, mostly because I was floundering through very boggy ground and really needed the security of having something to do with my hands.

“Uh-huh,” she said. She sipped her drink and studied me with one eyebrow raised. “So does marriage make you happy?”

“It’s … it’s, um,” I said with my usual eloquence. “I mean, you know.”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “Never had it.” She tilted her head and shrugged. “But it doesn’t sound like it’s exactly thrilling you.” And
although I have to admit that I was starting to think so, too, it didn’t seem like something I should say out loud.

“You still haven’t said what Rita looks like,” Jackie said with a frown.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, um—I mean, she was very good-looking, when—”

“
Was
good-looking?” Jackie interrupted. She took a big slug from her glass. I watched her throat muscles glide as she swallowed. “Jesus, I’d cut your heart out if you said that about me.”

“Oh, but that’s …” I said, wondering how this had all gotten so far out of hand. “I mean, I would never say that about you.…”

She eyed me for a moment. “You’d better not,” she said.

She drained the last two inches of mojito from her glass and set it on the table with a loud
takk
. “What about dinner?”

After wrestling with philosophy, the phone call from Rita, and Jackie’s merciless grilling, it was nice that there was finally something real and rewarding to latch onto. “Absolutely,” I said, with the very best hearty good cheer I could simulate under the circumstances. Jackie gave me a somewhat cynical smile, and nodded toward the house phone.

I called in our order.

I
WAS SITTING ON THE BALCONY EARLY THE NEXT MORNING
, nursing my second cup of coffee, when Jackie came out and sat across from me. “Good morning,” she said brightly, brushing back a strand of still-wet hair that flopped over her forehead. She reached for the coffeepot and poured herself a cup. “Um,” she said. “I’m sorry if last night was a little …” She fluttered one hand. “I don’t know. I just got thinking that, you know.” She shrugged. “I really don’t know what to do with you.”

I must have given her a look that showed how strange her statement sounded, because she blushed, looked away, and waved a hand in the air.

“I mean,” she said, “I’ve never had a bodyguard before.”

“To be honest, I’ve never been one before, either,” I said.

“Right,” she said. She sipped the coffee. “But seeing you there all the time I forget why you’re here and I kind of … you know. There aren’t that many people I can just sort of
hang
with.” She made a wry face. “Especially men.” She gave me a half smile. “But I feel very … 
comfortable
with you.”

I might have told her that this was not really a strong endorsement of her good sense, but she sipped her coffee and went on.

“You treat me like a human being,” she said. “Not like I’m a rare piece of china, or the Second Coming or something, and that’s … Do you know how unusual that is, for me? To be treated like … normal?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I think I’m starting to get an idea.”

“It’s very unusual,” she said. “I mean, I know it goes with the territory, and there are even some people who like it.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of Robert. “I
have
noticed that.”

Jackie looked at me, and then smirked. “Yeah, he really does, doesn’t he?” she said, to show she knew what I was thinking.

“He certainly seems to.”

She shrugged and sipped a little more coffee. “Well, I don’t. I mean, it’s nice to have everyone think you’re wonderful, but sometimes I just want to feel like … you know.” She threw both hands up, almost as if she was indicating half a touchdown, and then quickly dropped them again. “Stupid, huh?”

“Not at all,” I said politely, only a little bit baffled.

“So to have you around, talking to me like we’re just a couple of ordinary people, it makes me … I start to relax, and really
feel
normal, and it’s really nice.”

She sipped again, looking down at the table. “And then I remember why you’re here, and … Oh, I don’t know.” She sipped again and then put the cup down. “I guess, you know. How things might have been different. If …” She stuck out her lower lip and blew out a breath. “Forget it,” she said, and she picked up the coffee cup again. “It’s stupid.”

“Not at all,” I said, and it really wasn’t stupid. Incomprehensible, yes, but not stupid.

“Anyway,” she said, with a strange forced smile. “Just a couple more days, and you can get back to your normal life.”

“Oh, but …” I said. “I mean, I really don’t mind.”

Jackie raised one eyebrow at me over the rim of her cup. “Really,” she said.

“Yes, really,” I said. I waved a hand at the suite, the balcony, the view. “All this is new to me. I don’t get to live like this very often.” I smiled my best Bumpkin in the Big City smile and said, “I mean really, this is fun.”

She looked at me for a long moment, then snorted. “Well, good,” she said. “Glad I can provide some entertainment.”

Jackie stared into her cup, and I wondered what I had said wrong. I had clearly hit a sour note somewhere, and I didn’t want to. I have always found it dangerous to flounder into unknown conversational waters, especially involving human feelings, but I didn’t want Jackie to slump back into her moodiness—especially if she would blame me for it. So I gave it my best shot, and said, “Jackie, really. I am having fun. I like being around you.” She looked up at me without changing her expression, so I added, “I like you.”

She looked at me over the rim of her cup with no expression. Her eyes flicked left and then right across my face. Finally, she sipped her coffee and then smiled. “Well, good,” she said. “I was beginning to think it was just the room service.”

“To be perfectly honest,” I said, “that’s pretty good, too.”

Jackie laughed, a short and musical sound, and her face lost its worry lines and changed back to perfection. “All right,” she said.

We finished our breakfast with scattered bursts of lighthearted chat and a brief infestation of Kathy—more paperwork and reminders of impending phoners—and in no time at all we were down in the lobby and hoping to get past Benny, the doorman, without hearing another hundred pages of his life story.

“Hey, Miss Forrest!” he called out cheerfully as we stepped out of the elevator. He completely ignored me, and although I couldn’t really blame him for preferring to look at Jackie, I still felt the snub.

Jackie, of course, took it right in stride. She gave him a big smile and said, “Benny! Don’t you ever sleep?”

“I can sleep when I’m dead,” he said. “But right now I got the world’s most beautiful star at my hotel.”

Jackie put a hand on Benny’s arm. “Very sweet,” she said, and the man actually blushed.

“No, listen, I mean it,” Benny said.

“Well, thank you,” Jackie said, patting his arm, and attempting to move past.

“Lemme get the door,” Benny said, rushing past us to hold the front door open and then waving Jackie through with a huge smile.

Jackie looked at me inquiringly. “Wait here while I check,” I said, and she nodded.

I stepped through the front door and nodded at Benny. “Thank you, my good man,” I told him, but I think his smile had stretched too wide and sealed his ears shut, because he kept looking toward Jackie and didn’t seem to hear me.

I went outside and went through my little security ritual. The Corniche was still parked ostentatiously in front, and our shiny new Town Car was pulled in behind it. Next to the Corniche, it looked like a wino crouching there and begging for spare change.

But the driver was the same, and all else seemed good, and so I went back in and pried Jackie away from Benny’s eager paws and handed her into the backseat of the Town Car. Just like yesterday, a small gaggle of onlookers clustered at the hotel’s front door and loudly wished us well. The car was already moving down the driveway as I buckled my seat belt, and as the driver turned onto the causeway leading to the mainland I heard the same popping backfire sound I’d heard last night. I remembered hearing a cycle starting yesterday morning, too, and I wondered whether they were everywhere now. Maybe there was a Harley convention in town. Or maybe the price of gas was forcing more people out of their SUVs and onto two wheels.

Or maybe it was more than that.

I felt a dry rustle of interior bat wings as the Dark Passenger stirred in its sleep and muttered,
It’s only coincidence when you’re not paying attention
, and I thought about that.

What if it wasn’t coincidence? What if it was not many motorcycles, but only one very persistent motorcycle, and it was following us?

Of course, even if that were true, it might be no more than a paparazzo hoping to snap a picture of Jackie without a bra, or picking her nose, or dancing drunkenly in a South Beach club. People like that were drawn to celebrities like moths to a flame. There were bound to be a few hanging around, and that was probably all it was: just somebody looking for a photo op.

On the other hand …

I have an extremely healthy natural sense of paranoia, and Jackie was, after all, paying me to exercise it. Our stalker might very well choose to follow on a motorcycle—it was an ideal vehicle for slipping
in and out of traffic easily, and for escaping pursuit if you were spotted. And three encounters with a motorcycle seemed a little bit suspicious.

I turned in my seat to look out the back window, hoping for a glimpse of the cyclist, but my seat belt jammed, nearly strangling me, and I could get only halfway around. I reached for the release—but before I could snap the belt open, Jackie’s cell phone began to chime.

“Shit,” Jackie said urgently. “I think it’s the
Times
. Could you please get that, Dexter?”

I answered the phone; it was, in fact, the
Times
—the Los Angeles one. Jackie took the call, and by the time I could get unhooked from my homicidal seat belt and turned around to look, there was nothing to see except the usual mad, gleaming pack of angry, overpowered vehicles. I scanned in all directions a couple of times, but I saw no cycles, and I heard no more popping backfire sounds. So I shrugged it off before we were even halfway to work, and thought no more about motorcycles.

There was no real pause for contemplation when we got in to work, either. I delivered Jackie into Deborah’s care, and trudged down to my lab and the weary drudgery of another day as Robert’s shepherd.

I had expected Renny to be there, too, but I found Robert all by himself, feet up on my desk, staring intensely and raptly at a folded-back newspaper. As I came in, he looked up with a startled and oddly guilty look on his face, and immediately dropped the newspaper on the desk. I stopped in the doorway, and he looked up and remembered to smile. “Oh! Hey!” he said. Then he looked very guilty and whipped his feet off the desk and onto the floor. “I mean, good morning!”

“Isn’t Renny coming in today?” I asked him.

Robert shrugged. “He’ll be here later,” he said. “He’s never on time.”

It seemed to me like a strange habit for someone in show business, and I grew up in Miami, where Cuban time is a universal standard, and showing up early means you’re only twenty minutes late. “Why not?” I said.

Robert made a sort of what’d-you-expect face. “He’s a
comedian
,” he said, like that explained everything.

“Well,” I said. “As long as he’s here for lunch.”

“Oh, he won’t miss lunch,” Robert said. He snorted, adding, “He won’t pay for it, either.”

That was fine with me, as long as Robert paid for it. And I was just as happy not to have Renny there, since I still couldn’t decide what he was. So Robert and I spent the next ninety minutes going over gas chromatography, and then, just as advertised, Renny wandered in, wearing the same Metallica T-shirt, but a different pair of faded, low-slung madras shorts.