Just a refrigerated truck, nothing more, now speeding away across Miami Beach with the heavy metal station ripping from the radio speaker. And not my killer, not some mysterious bond pulling me out of bed and across the city in the dead of night. Because that was just too silly for words, and far too silly for level-headed empty-hearted Dexter.
I let my head drop onto the steering wheel. How wonderful to have such an authentic
Behind me an engine started. I glanced back.
From behind the gas station at the foot of the bridge he came out fast in a tight circle. He passed me fishtailing and still accelerating and through the blur of motion in the driver's window a shape spun at me, wild and hard. I ducked. Something thumped into the side of my car, leaving behind it the sound of an expensive dent. I waited for a moment, just to be safe. Then I raised my head and looked. The truck was speeding away, crashing the wooden barrier at the drawbridge and powering through, leaping across the bridge as it started to raise up, and making it easily to the other side as the bridge keeper leaned out and yelled. Then the truck was gone, down the far side of the bridge and back into Miami, far away on the other side of the widening gap as the bridge went up. Gone, hopelessly gone, gone as if he had never been. And I would never know if it had been my killer or just another normal Miami jerk.
I got out of my car to look at the dent. It was a big one. I looked around to see what he had thrown.
It had rolled ten or fifteen feet away and wobbled out into the middle of the street. Even from this distance there was no mistaking it, but just to make sure I was absolutely without any doubt, the headlights from an oncoming car lit it up. The car swerved and smashed into a hedge and over the sound of its now-constant horn I could hear the driver screaming. I walked over to the thing to be sure.
Yes indeed. That's what it was.
A woman's head.
I bent to look. It was a very clean cut, very nice work. There was almost no blood around the lip of the wound.
“Thank God,” I said, and I realized I was smiling—and why not?
Wasn't it nice? I wasn't crazy after all.
CHAPTER 10
AT A LITTLE AFTER 8 AM LAGUERTA CAME OVER TO where I was sitting on the trunk of my car.
She leaned her tailored haunch onto the car and slid over until our thighs were touching. I waited for her to say something, but she didn't seem to have any words for the occasion. Neither did I. So I sat there for several minutes looking back at the bridge, feeling the heat of her leg against mine and wondering where my shy friend had gone with his truck. But I was yanked out of my quiet daydream by a pressure on my thigh.
I looked down at my pants leg. LaGuerta was kneading my thigh as if it were a lump of dough. I looked up at her face. She looked back.
“They found the body,” she said. “You know. The rest of it that goes with the head.”
I stood up. “Where?”
She looked at me the way a cop looks at somebody who finds corpseless heads in the street. But she answered. “Office Depot Center,” she said.
“Where the Panthers play?” I asked, and a little icy-fingered jolt ran through me. “On the ice?”
LaGuerta nodded, still watching me. “The hockey team,” she said. “Is that the Panthers?”
“I think that's what they're called,” I said. I couldn't help myself.
She pursed her lips. “They found it stuffed into the goalie's net.”
“Visitor's or home?” I asked.
She blinked. “Does that make a difference?”
I shook my head. “Just a joke, Detective.”
“Because I don't know how to tell the difference. I should get somebody there who knows about hockey,” she said, her eyes finally drifting away from me and across the crowd, searching for somebody carrying a puck. “I'm glad you can make a joke about it,” she added. “What's a—” she frowned, trying to remember, “—a sam- bolie?”
“A what?”
She shrugged. “Some kind of machine. They use it on the ice?”
“A Zamboni?”
“Whatever. The guy who drives it, he takes it out on the ice to get ready for practice this morning. A couple of the players, they like to get there early? And they like the ice fresh, so this guy, the—” she hesitated slightly “— the sambolie driver? He comes in early on practice days. And so he drives this thing out onto the ice? And he sees these packages stacked up. Down there in the goalie's net? So he gets down and he takes a look.” She shrugged again. “Doakes is over there now. He says they can't get the guy to calm down enough to say any more than that.”
“I know a little about hockey,” I said.
She looked at me again with somewhat heavy eyes. “So much I don't know about you, Dexter. You play hockey?”
“No, I never played,” I said modestly. “I went to a few games.” She didn't say anything and I had to bite my lip to keep from blathering on. In truth, Rita had season tickets for the Florida Panthers, and I had found to my very great surprise that I liked hockey. It was not merely the frantic, cheerfully homicidal mayhem I enjoyed. There was something about sitting in the huge, cool hall that I found relaxing, and I would happily have gone there even to watch golf. In truth, I would have said anything to make LaGuerta take me to the rink. I wanted to go to the arena very badly. I wanted to see this body stacked in the net on the ice more than anything else I could think of, wanted to undo the neat wrapping and see the clean dry flesh. I wanted to see it so much that I felt like a cartoon of a dog on point, wanted to be there with it so much that I felt self-righteous and possessive about the body.
“All right,” LaGuerta finally said, when I was about to vibrate out of my skin. And she showed a small, strange smile that was part official and part—what? Something else altogether, something human, unfortunately, putting it beyond my understanding. “Give us a chance to talk.”
“I'd like that very much,” I said, absolutely oozing charm. LaGuerta didn't respond. Maybe she didn't hear me, not that it mattered. She was totally beyond any sense of sarcasm where her self-image was concerned. It was possible to hit her with the most horrible flattery in the world and she would accept it as her due. I didn't really enjoy flattering her. There's no fun where there's no challenge. But I didn't know what else to say. What did she imagine we would talk about? She had already grilled me mercilessly when she first arrived on the scene.
We had stood beside my poor dented car and watched the sun come up. She had looked out across the causeway and asked me seven times if I had seen the driver of the truck, each time with a slightly different inflection, frowning in between questions. She'd asked me five times if I was sure it had been a refrigerated truck— I'm sure that was subtlety on her part. She wanted to ask about that one a lot more, but held back to avoid being obvious. She even forgot herself once and asked in Spanish. I told her I was
And three times she had looked up the incline of the bridge, shaken her head, and spat “Puta!” under her breath. Clearly, that was a reference to Officer Puta, my dear sister Deborah. In the face of an actual refrigerator truck as predicted by Deborah, a certain amount of spin control was going to be necessary, and I could tell by the way LaGuerta nibbled at her lower lip that she was hard at work on the problem. I was quite sure she would come up with something uncomfortable for Deb—it was what she did best—but for the time being I was hoping for a modest rise in my sister's stock. Not with LaGuerta, of course, but one could hope that others might notice that her brilliant bit of attempted detective work had panned out.
Oddly enough, LaGuerta did not ask me what I had been doing driving around at that hour. Of course, I'm not
