Darkly dreaming Dexter

But you can learn to control that difference and use it constructively.

All right, Harry. If you think I should. How?

And he told me.

There is no starry sky anywhere like the starry sky in South Florida when you are fourteen and camping out with Dad. Even if he's only your foster dad. And even if the sight of all those stars merely fills you with a kind of satisfaction, emotion being out of the question. You don't feel it. That's part of the reason you're here.

The fire has died down and the stars are exceedingly bright and foster dear old dad has been quiet for some time, taking small sips on the old-fashioned hip flask he has pulled from the outside flap of his pack. And he's not very good at this, not like so many other cops, not really a drinker. But it's empty now, and it's time for him to say his piece if he's ever going to say it.

“You're different, Dexter,” he says.

I look away from the brightness of the stars. Around the small and sandy clearing the last glow of the fire is making shadows. Some of them trickle across Harry's face. He looks strange to me, like I've never seen him before. Determined, unhappy, a little dazed. “What do you mean, Dad?”

He won't look at me. “The Billups say Buddy has disappeared,” he says.

“Noisy little creep. He was barking all night. Mom couldn't sleep.”

Mom needed her sleep, of course. Dying of cancer requires plenty of rest, and she wasn't getting it with that awful little dog across the street yapping at every leaf that blew down the sidewalk.

“I found the grave,” Harry says. “There were a lot of bones in there, Dexter. Not just Buddy's.”

There's very little to say here. I carefully pull at a handful of pine needles and wait for Harry.

“How long have you been doing this?”

I search Harry's face, then look out across the clearing to the beach. Our boat is there, moving gently with the surge of the water. The lights of Miami are off to the right, a soft white glow. I can't figure out where Harry is going, what he wants to hear. But he is my straight-arrow foster dad; the truth is usually a good idea with Harry. He always knows, or he finds out.

“A year and a half,” I say.

Harry nods. “Why did you start?”

A very good question, and certainly beyond me at fourteen. “It just—I kind of . . . had to,” I tell him.

Even then, so young but so smooth.

“Do you hear a voice?” he wants to know. “Something or somebody telling you what to do, and you had to do it?”

“Uh,” I say with fourteen-year-old eloquence, “not exactly.”

“Tell me,” Harry says.

Oh for a moon, a good fat moon, something bigger to look at. I clutch another fistful of pine needles.

My face is hot, as if Dad has asked me to talk about sex dreams. Which, in a way— “It, uh . . . I kind of, you know, feel something,” I say. “Inside. Watching me. Maybe, um. Laughing? But not really a voice, just—” An eloquent teenaged shrug. But it seems to make sense to Harry.

“And this something. It makes you kill things.”

High overhead a slow fat jet crawls by. “Not, um, doesn't make me,” I say. “Just —makes it seem like a good idea?”

“Have you ever wanted to kill something else? Something bigger than a dog?”

I try to answer but there is something in my throat. I clear it. “Yes,” I say.

“A person?”

“Nobody in particular, Dad. Just—” I shrug again.

“Why didn't you?”

“It's—I thought you wouldn't like it. You and Mom.”

“That's all that stopped you?”

“I, uh—I didn't want you, um, mad at me. Uh . . . you know. Disappointed.”

I steal a glance at Harry. He is looking at me, not blinking. “Is that why we took this trip, Dad? To talk about this?”

“Yes,” Harry says. “We need to get you squared away.”

Squared away, oh yes, a completely Harry idea of how life is lived, with hospital corners and polished shoes. And even then I knew; needing to kill something every now and then would pretty much sooner or later get in the way of being squared away.

“How?” I say, and he looks at me long and hard, and then he nods when he sees that I am with him step for step.

“Good boy,” he says. “Now.” And in spite of saying now, it is a very long time before he speaks again.

I watch the lights on a boat as it goes past, maybe two hundred yards out from our little beach. Over the sound of their motor a radio is blasting Cuban music. “Now,” Harry says again, and I look at him.

But he is looking away, across the dying fire, off into the future over there somewhere. “It's like this,” he says. I listen carefully. This is what Harry says when he is giving you a higher-order truth. When he showed me how to throw a curve ball, and how to throw a left hook. It's like this, he would say, and it always was, just like that.

“I'm getting old, Dexter.” He waited for me to object, but I didn't, and he nodded. “I think people understand things different when they get older,” he says. “It's not a question of getting soft, or seeing things in the gray areas instead of black and white. I really believe I'm just understanding things different. Better.” He looks at me, Harry's look, Tough Love with blue eyes.

“Okay,” I say.

“Ten years ago I would have wanted you in an institution somewhere,” he says, and I blink. That almost hurts, except I've thought of it myself. “Now,” he says, “I think I know better. I know what you are, and I know you're a good kid.”

“No,” I say, and it comes out very soft and weak, but Harry hears.

“Yes,” he says firmly. “You're a good kid, Dex, I know that. I know it,” almost to himself now, for effect maybe, and then his eyes lock onto mine. “Otherwise, you wouldn't care what I thought, or what Mom thought. You'd just do it. You can't help it, I know that. Because—” He stops and just looks at me for a moment. It's very uncomfortable for me. “What do you remember from before?” he asked.

“You know. Before we took you in.”

That still hurts, but I really don't know why. I was only three. “Nothing.”

“Good,” he says. “Nobody should remember that.” And as long as he lives that will be the most he ever says about it. “But even though you don't remember, Dex, it did things to you. Those things make you what you are. I've talked to some people about this.” And strangest of strange, he gives me a very small, almost shy, Harry smile. “I've been expecting this. What happened to you when you were a little kid has shaped you. I've tried to straighten that out, but—” He shrugs. “It was too strong, too much. It got into you too early and it's going to stay there. It's going to make you want to kill. And you can't help that. You can't change that. But,” he says, and he looks away again, to see what I can't tell. “But you can channel it. Control it. Choose—” his words come so carefully now, more careful than I've ever heard him talk “—choose what . . . or who . . . you kill . . .” And he gave me a smile unlike any I had ever seen before, a smile as bleak and dry as the ashes of our dying fire. “There are plenty of people who deserve it, Dex . . .”

And with those few little words he gave a shape to my whole life, my everything, my who and what I am. The wonderful, all-seeing, all-knowing man. Harry. My dad.

If only I was capable of love, how I would have loved Harry.

So long ago now. Harry long dead. But his lessons had lived on. Not because of any warm and gooey emotional feelings I had. Because Harry was right. I'd proved that over and over. Harry knew, and Harry taught me well.

Be careful, Harry said. And he taught me to be careful as only a cop could teach a killer.

To choose carefully among those who deserved it. To make absolutely sure. Then tidy up. Leave no traces.