I got in. She drove us back out onto the road and over to the gate. Even at this hour there was some traffic. Most of it seemed to be people from Ohio looking for their cruise ship, but a few of them wound up at the gate, where the guards sent them back the way they came. Detective LaGuerta cut ahead of them all, bulling her big Chevy to the front of the line. Their Midwest driving skills were no match for a Miami Cuban woman with good medical insurance driving a car she didn't care about.
There was a blare of horns and some muffled shouting and we were at the guard booth.
The guard leaned out, a thin, muscular black man. “Lady, you can't—” She held up her badge. “Police. Open the gate.” She said it with such hard-edged authority that I almost jumped out of the car to open the gate myself.
But the guard froze, took a breath through his mouth, and glanced nervously back into the booth.
“What you want with—”
“Open the fucking gate, Rental,” she told him, jiggling her badge, and he finally unfroze.
“Lemme see the badge,” he said. LaGuerta held it up limply, making him take the extra step over to peer at it. He frowned at it and found nothing to object to. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Can you tell me what you want in there?”
“I can tell you that if you don't open the gate in two seconds I'm gonna put you in the trunk of my car and take you downtown to a holding cell full of gay bikers and then I'm gonna forget where I put you.”
The guard stood up. “Just trying to help,” he said, and called over his shoulder, “Tavio, open the gate!”
The gate went up and LaGuerta gunned her car through. “Sonnova bitch got something going he doesn't want me to know about,” she said. There was amusement in her voice to go with the rising edge of excitement. “But I don't care about smuggling tonight.” She looked at me. “Where we going?”
“I don't know,” I said. “I guess we should start over where he left his truck.”
She nodded, accelerating down the path between stacks of storage boxes. “If he's got a body to carry, he probably parked pretty close to wherever he was going.” As we got closer to the fence she slowed down, nosing the car quietly to within fifty feet of the truck and then stopping. “Let's take a look at the fence,” she said, slamming the transmission into park and sliding out of the car as it rocked to a stop.
I followed. LaGuerta stepped in something she didn't like and lifted her foot to look at her shoe.
“Goddamint,” she said. I moved past her, feeling my pulse hammering loud and fast, and went to the truck. I walked around it, trying the doors. They were locked, and although there were two small back windows, these were painted over from the inside. I stood on the bumper and tried to peek in anyway, but there were no holes in the paint job. There was nothing more to be seen on this side, but I squatted anyway and looked on the ground. I felt rather than heard LaGuerta slither up behind me.
“What you got?” she asked, and I stood.
“Nothing,” I said. “The back windows are painted over on the inside.”
“Can you see in the front?”
I went around to the front of the truck. It was bare of any hint as well. Inside the windshield, a pair of the sunscreens so popular in Florida had been unfolded across the dashboard, blocking out any possible view into the cab. I climbed on the front bumper and up onto the hood, crawled along it from right to left, but there were no gaps in the sunscreen. “Nothing,” I said and climbed down.
“Okay,” LaGuerta said, looking at me with lidded eyes and just the smallest tip of her tongue protruding. “Which way you wanna go?”
“Okay,” LaGuerta said with a feral smile. “But I go left.”
I tried to look surprised and unhappy, and I suppose I managed a reasonable facsimile, because she watched me and then nodded. “Okay,” she repeated, and turned down the first row of stacked shipping containers.
Then I was alone with my shy interior friend. And now what? Now that I had tricked LaGuerta into leaving me the right-hand path, what did I do with it? After all, I had no reason to think it was any better than the left-hand, or for that matter, better than standing by the fence and juggling coconuts.
There was only my sibilant internal clamor to direct me, and was that really enough? When you are an icy tower of pure reason as I have always been, you naturally look for logical hints to direct your course of action. Just as naturally, you ignore the nonobjective irrational screeching of loud musical voices from the bottom floor of your brain that try to send you reeling along the path, no matter how urgent they have become in the rippling light of the moon.
And as to the rest, the particulars of where I should go now—I looked around, down the long irregular rows of containers. Off to the side where LaGuerta had gone spike-heeling along, there were several rows of brightly colored truck trailers. And in front of me, stretching off to the right, were the shipping containers.
Suddenly, I was very uncertain. I didn't like the feeling. I closed my eyes. The moment I did, the whispering became a cloud of sound and without knowing why I found myself moving toward a clutter of shipping containers down near the water. I had no conscious notion that these particular containers were any different or better or that this direction was more proper or rewarding. My feet simply jerked into motion and I followed them. It was as if they were tracing some path only the toes could see, or as if some compelling pattern was being sung by the whisper-wail of my internal chorus, and my feet translated and dragged me along.
As they moved the sound grew inside me, a muted hilarious roar, pulling me faster than my feet, yanking me clumsily down the crooked path between boxes with powerful invisible jerks. And yet at the same time a new voice, small and reasonable, was pushing me backward, telling me I did not want to be here of all places, yammering at me to run, go home, get away from this place, and it made no more sense than any of the other voices. I was pulled forward and pushed back at the same time so powerfully that I could not make my legs work properly and I stumbled and fell flat-faced onto the hard rocky ground. I rose to my knees, mouth dry and heart pounding, and paused to finger a rip in my beautiful Dacron bowling shirt. I pushed my fingertip through the hole and wiggled it at myself. Hello, Dexter, where are you going? Hello, Mr. Finger. I don't know, but I'm almost there. I hear my friends calling.
And so I climbed to suddenly unsteady feet and listened. I heard it clearly now, even with my eyes open, and felt it so strongly I could not even walk. I stood for a moment, leaning against one of the containers. A very sobering thought, as if I needed one. Something nameless was born in this place, something that lived in the darkest hidey-hole of the thing that was Dexter, and for the first time that I could remember I was scared. I did not want to be here where horrible things lurked. Yet I had to be here to find Deborah. I was being ripped in half by an invisible tug-of-war. I felt like Sigmund Freud's poster child, and I wanted to go home and go to bed.
But the moon roared in the dark sky above me, the water howled along Government Cut, and the mild night breeze shrieked over me like a convention of banshees, forcing my feet forward. And the singing swelled within me like some kind of gigantic mechanical choir, urging me on, reminding me of how to move my feet, pushing me lock- kneed down the rows of boxes. My heart hammered and yammered, my short gasps of breath were much too loud, and for the first time I could remember I felt weak, woozy, and stupid—like a human being, like a very small and helpless human being.
I staggered along the strangely familiar path on borrowed feet until I could stagger no more and once again I put an arm out to lean against a box, a box with an air-conditioning compressor attached, pounding away at the back and mixing with the shriek of the night, all thumping in my head so loudly now that I could hardly see. And as I leaned against the box the door swung open.
The inside of the box was lit by a pair of battery-powered hurricane lamps. Against the back wall there was a temporary operating table made of packing crates.
And held unmoving in place on the table was my dear sister Deborah.
CHAPTER 26
