Dexter's Final Cut (42 page)

But now? I could not raise any real interest in Cody’s grade on a reading test, or Rita’s opinion of my laundry. I felt a very small twinge as I thought of Lily Anne—the only direct biological connection I had to the future, my DNA’s only shot at immortality. But after all, whatever happened I would certainly be allowed to see her every now and then, and in the interim, a little girl really needed her mother, much more than a father with a tendency to slice and dice whoever happened to come under his knife.

So I put the phone down and looked back out at Jackie. She was still staring, her forehead lightly creased by a frown, but at least her lips had stopped moving.

I went back out to the couch and looked down at her. She apparently didn’t notice me, and she didn’t move. I sat beside her. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

She looked at me, still frowning. “What? Oh, no, it’s— Listen, if I said to you, ‘You’re a lightweight piece of crap,’ what would you say?”

“I don’t … I, um,” I stammered. “I mean,
are
you going to say that to me?”

Jackie looked startled, and then gave a small laugh. “Oh, no,” she said. “Not you, just—it’s a line; it’s something Tonio says to me in the next scene.” Tonio was one of the bad guys in our gripping little drama, the one Jackie—as Amber Wayne—suspected of gunning me down.

“Oh,” I said, and I admit I was relieved. “So you don’t think I’m a lightweight piece of crap?” I was fishing, and rather shamelessly, but why not?

“Dexter, don’t be a dope,” she said, and she pulled me close to her. “I think you are the farthest thing you can be from a piece of crap.”

“But still a lightweight?” I said. In spite of the long morning’s work, she smelled very good.

She nuzzled in against my neck. “Heavyweight champ,” she murmured. Then she bit me.

I jumped. “Ow,” I said. I looked at her and, although she was still looking at me, and no longer frowning, she looked very serious.

“The question is,” she said, “what are we going to do about it?”

And there it was, right out in the open.

“Well,” I said, trying to feel my way ahead cautiously, “what would you like to do about it?”

Something flickered across her face—dismay? irritation? I couldn’t say. And then she gave a small snort and shook her head. “One of the things I really like about you is that you are not at
all
like any other guy I’ve ever known,” she said. “But there’s a downside to that.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Dexter—that was your cue. You were supposed to say that you want to run away with me; you can’t live without me; you need me like the air you breathe—”

“All of that,” I said, very uncomfortable. “But I don’t … I mean, I wanted to know. I mean, what
you
think.”

She shook her head again. “I’m the girl; you’re the boy,” she said, poking me with a finger so I would understand which one was me. “You’re supposed to
tell
me what I think, you big dope,” she said. “
Convince
me—don’t you know anything about women?”

“I guess not,” I said. “Is there a book …?”

She punched me in the arm, not nearly as hard as Deborah did. Or used to do, I guess I should say. I rubbed it anyway. “Asshole,” Jackie said. “And you’re still not saying.”

“Well,” I said, feeling very uncomfortable, “I, um … I guess I …” She was watching me steadily, those huge violet eyes fixed unblinkingly on me. I took a deep breath. “I guess I, um … I need you like the air I breathe. And, um, I want to run away … with you?”

Jackie kept watching me for what seemed like a very long moment. And then at last she smiled and reached her hands around and clasped them behind my neck.

“Better,” she purred. “Much better.” And she pulled my face down to hers.

Our call to return to work came about forty minutes later. As it turned out, I had to eat my sandwich on the way back to the set.

It was another two hours before I was finally dead enough to satisfy Victor. We had moved the reflectors eight times, the cameras three, and changed one of Jackie’s lines to fit more closely the excellent imitation of Deborah she was doing. By the time I was released from my corpsehood, my left leg had fallen asleep, and I had a headache, a backache, and a neck ache from lying on the pavement in such an uncomfortable contortion for so long—and it must be said that I was also thoroughly sick of lounging about in a shirt soaked with blood, fake or not. Altogether, it was enough to make me rethink my decision to become an award-winning star of the screen. Still, great art comes with a price, and today was Dexter’s day to pick up the check.

It was with no reluctance at all that I yielded my spot in front of the camera. I stood and stretched and tried to get a little bit of feeling back into my leg as Jackie conferred with Victor. By the time I could walk again without looking like Long John Silver, they were already setting up for a series of close-ups of Jackie as she reacted to things that weren’t really happening. As fascinating as this kind of self-induced psychosis usually is, I’d had enough after about five minutes, and so I bade a fond farewell to the hypnotic lure of the cameras and headed back to the trailer to change clothes and relax.

I could hear my phone ringing as I climbed the three steps to the trailer’s door, and it did not take a rocket scientist to figure out that it was Rita calling again. I trudged through the living-dining room and in to the dresser, stepping carefully around the box of Kathy’s stuff this time, and glanced down at the screen: Yes, indeed. It was Rita—and she had called seven more times while I lay dead in the street. Really, the woman was obsessed with me, and I wasn’t even a star yet.

I put the phone down and started toward the kitchenette for a soda—and I paused. Nineteen phone calls seemed excessive, even for Rita, unless she was calling about something very important. The only real question was, important to whom? At first I had suspected
that Deborah had told Rita everything in a fit of Dexter Hatred, and Rita was calling to screech clichés at me about my utter depravity. This was a conversation she could have quite well without me, and I preferred that she would.

And if Rita had won the lottery, wonderful; it would cushion the blow as she started her new and Dexter-less existence.

But if, on the other hand, she was calling to report a calamity of some kind …

It could not be something drastic enough to require an ambulance or police intervention, or I would have heard about it from one of the cops here on the set, or from Vince, or perhaps even from Deborah. And that left—

What?

It is true that I am not actually human, and I do not have the reckless illogical feelings of that wild, windblown race. But I do, unfortunately, share one or two human failings, and one of the deadliest of these is curiosity. Nineteen phone calls to report something that was incredibly significant, but neither too good nor too bad; it was a true riddle, and I do not like riddles. They are an affront to my hard-won and well-polished self-esteem, and the more impossible they seem the more I hate them—and yet, I still feel compelled to find the answer.

And so finally, after several minutes of fruitless conjecture, when I had reached the teeth-grinding stage, I surrendered, picked up my phone, and called Rita.

“Oh, Dexter, thank God,” she said, instead of a more traditional “Hello,” and her voice told me right away that I could safely rule out the Winning-the-Lottery option. “I have been calling and calling and— Oh, my God, where have you been? I don’t know what to do, because— Why didn’t you answer?”

In the present case, I didn’t answer because I could not squeeze a single syllable into the spaces between Rita’s words. But that wasn’t really the question. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m working with the movie people this week.”

“Television,” she said irritably. “Dexter, it’s just a pilot—and you don’t call, and you don’t
answer
—and I am going right out of my mind!”

It didn’t seem like that would be a long trip, but I wanted to know what was wrong, so I just said, “Well, I am sorry, but we’ve been working long days—and I have a speaking part now, Rita. I mean, as an actor.”

“Yes, I know, Astor said you— But that’s just it!”

“What is?”

“Astor!” she wailed. “I don’t know where she—she hasn’t even—Oh God, I should have let her have her own phone.”

I knew Rita and her conversational patterns well enough to know that, at last, we were approaching the answer. Our problem had something to do with Astor—but could it really be about Astor not having a phone? “Rita, calm down,” I said. “What about Astor?”

“Calm
down
?!” she said. “When I have searched high and low and called you two dozen times and— Dexter, I don’t have any idea where she went!”

“She’s
missing
?” I guessed. “Astor is missing?”

“Yes, of course, that’s what I’ve been— Dexter, what do we do?”

“Did she stay after school?” I asked hopefully.

“She didn’t
go
to school!” Rita bellowed, sounding like she was tired of telling me the same thing. “She never even
got
there this morning! And then the school called to say she was absent and it was just that awful recorded message and I couldn’t get through to anybody in the main office and she hasn’t gone anywhere that I can find because none of her friends know oh Dexter, she’s
gone
!” It was a remarkable sentence, delivered at high speed and top volume without a single breath, and I spent a moment marveling before the actual words sank in.

“Rita, are you saying she’s been gone since this morning?”

“And I caught her last night; she snuck out of the house! And didn’t even come home until— I heard the door, or I wouldn’t even know—and now she’s completely gone!”

“Last night?” I said, trying to grab onto some small chunk of floating logic. “She snuck out last night, but she came back and went to school this morning?”

“I dropped her off in front of the school like always, and Cody, and then I took Lily Anne to day care. And by the time I got to work, the school is calling and— Dexter I’m going out of my mind; I don’t
know what to do!” she yowled, which I took for a yes. “Please, you have to— I don’t know what to do!”

“All right,” I said, and because there was really nothing else I could possibly do, I added, “I’m on my way.”

“Hurry!” she said, and I disconnected.

And having said that I was on my way, I realized that I was; I had to be; I could really do nothing else. Even though I had mentally cut myself away from Rita and her brood, and in spite of the fact that I do not ever really feel obligated to perform any of the painful tasks of human fatherhood, I really did not see what else I could do. I told myself that I just wanted to make sure my breakaway was unencumbered by guilt, accusations, recriminations, and anything else that might clutter up a clean escape, and to some extent that was true. But I also found myself wondering what Jackie would think of me if I ignored this kind of duty.

And finally, if I was perfectly honest, and I seldom am, I had to admit that I still felt a certain amount of … 
ownership
for Astor. If she was missing, the odds were good that some predator had corralled her, and if that was true, he had taken her from
me
—not merely a fellow predator, and one who was much higher up on the food chain, but me. For someone to come onto my turf and take one of my things—it was intolerable, and I felt myself growing cold and angry and anxious for a few quiet words with this noxious creature. To prey on children—
my
children—was not just beneath contempt; it was a personal affront. They had taken something of mine; I would get it back and help them see the error of their ways.

So I didn’t think about it a whole lot longer. I stuck my phone in my pocket and headed back out to where Jackie was shooting her pickups.

Luckily for me, Jackie had just finished when I got there, and she was heading back toward her trailer for a break. “Hey!” she called when she saw me. “I thought you’d be buried in a cup of coffee and a Danish.”

“Something’s come up,” I said. “Astor is missing.”

“Astor?” she said. “Your little girl?”

“Rita’s girl,” I said. For some reason it seemed like an important distinction. “I have to go find her.”

“Oh, my God, of course you do,” she said.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said, although I wasn’t sure at all.

“Go,” she said. And then she frowned and plucked at my shirt. “But maybe you should change first?”

I looked down and saw that I was still wearing my bloody Ben Webster shirt. It probably would be better not to wander around on a rescue looking like I was the victim. “Oh,” I said. “I think you’re right.”

I went back to the trailer with Jackie and began to change into my own clothes. Jackie settled onto the couch and watched me. “Do you have another scene to shoot?” I asked her.

“Not for a while,” she said. “And then it’s the big scene. The ultimate horror.”

“What do you mean?” I said, pulling up my pants. “I already died—what could be worse?”

She made a truly appalled face, and she actually shuddered. “A love scene with Robert,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. I sat beside her to put on my shoes. “Can you do it?”

“Somehow,” she said, and she shuddered again. “But he wants to run the lines with me, and … I probably should; it’s a big scene.” She sighed, and then shook her head. “Or I could go through Kathy’s stuff, like I promised Detective Anderson,” she said. “I’ve been putting it off and putting it off, and I really don’t want to think about Kathy being …” She looked away from me, into the bedroom, where the box was crouching beside the bed. “Suddenly the thought of having to kiss Robert makes it bearable.”

“Well, then,” I said, and I stood up. “That’s what you should do.”

“Yeah,” Jackie said, still looking at the box. And then she shook herself and stood up. “Look at me, such an actress, totally self-centered,” she said. She put her arms around me. “Your little girl is missing,” she said, and she hugged me with her head on my chest, and then looked up at me, those wonderful violet eyes turning suddenly moist. “Go find her, Dexter,” she said. “And quickly. And …” She gave me a long and searching look, and quite clearly there was something else she wanted to say, but after a long moment she simply buried her head in my chest. “And then come back to me,” she said.