Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay Page B

would hit to help me dodge this terrible fate.
“The award-winning caterer.”
    “Dexter, this guy is big. He could make your
whole wedding.”
    “Well, Vince, I think that's terrific, but-”
    “Listen,” he said, with an air of firm command that I had
never heard from him before, “you said you would talk to Rita about this
and let her decide.”
    “I said that?”
    “Yes, you did. And I am not going to let you throw away a
wonderful opportunity like this, not when it's something that I know Rita would
really love to have.”
    I wasn't sure how he could be so positive about that.
After all, I was actually engaged to the woman, and I had no idea what sort of
caterer might fill her with shock and awe. But I didn't think this was the time
to ask him how he knew what Rita would and would not love. Then again, a man
who dressed up as Carmen Miranda for Halloween might very well have a keener
insight than mine into my fiancée's innermost culinary desires.
    “Well,” I said, at last deciding that procrastinating long
enough to escape was the best answer, “in that case, I'll go home and talk
to Rita about it.”
    “Do that,” he said. And he did not storm
out, but if there had been a door to slam, he might have slammed it.
    I finished tidying up and trundled on out into the
evening traffic. On the way home a middle-aged man in a Toyota SUV got right
behind me and started honking the horn for some reason. After five or six
blocks he pulled around me and, as he flipped me off, juked his steering wheel
slightly to frighten me into running up on the sidewalk. Although I admired his
spirit and would have loved to oblige him, I stayed on the road. There is never
any point in trying to make sense of the way Miami drivers go about getting
from one place to another. You just have to relax and enjoy the violence-and of
course, that part was never a problem for me. So I smiled and waved, and he
stomped on his accelerator and disappeared into traffic at about sixty miles
per hour over the speed limit.
    Normally I find the chaotic mayhem of the evening drive home to be the
perfect way to end the day. Seeing all the anger and lust to kill relaxes me,
makes me feel at one with my hometown and its spritely inhabitants. But tonight
I found it difficult to summon up any good cheer at all. I never for a moment
thought it could ever happen, but I was worried.
    Worse still, I didn't know
what I was actually worried about, only that the Dark Passenger had used the
silent treatment on me at a scene of creative homicide. This had never
happened, and I could only believe
     
    that something unusual and possibly Dexter-threatening
had caused it now. But what? And how could I be sure, when I didn't really know
the first thing about the Passenger itself, except that it had always been
there to offer happy insight and commentary. We had seen burned bodies before,
and pottery aplenty, with never a twitch or a tweet. Was it the combination? Or
something specific to these two bodies? Or was it entirely coincidental and had
nothing whatever to do with what we had seen?
    The more I thought about it, the less I knew, but the
traffic swirled around me in its soothing homicidal patterns, and by the time I
got to Rita's house I had almost convinced myself that there was really nothing
to worry about.
    Rita, Cody, and Astor were already home when I got there. Rita worked
much closer to the house than I did, and the kids were in an after-school
program at a nearby park, so they had all been waiting for at least half an
hour for the opportunity to torment me out of my hard-won peace of mind.
    “It was on the news,” Astor whispered as I opened the door,
and Cody nodded and said, “Gross,” in his soft, hoarse voice.
    “What was on the news?” I said, struggling to get past them
and into the house without trampling on them.
    “You burned them!” Astor hissed at me, and Cody looked at me
with a complete lack of expression that somehow conveyed