Double Dexter by Jeff Lindsay Page B

hear a niggling little whisper in my inner ear that my only real objection to what had been done to Klein was the use of the wrong tools. After all, hadn’t I made sure that Valentine, too, stayed awake to feel every moment of my attention? Of course, Valentine had earned it with his habit of molesting and killing young boys—but were any of us truly innocent? Maybe Detective Klein had been a tax cheat, or a wife beater, or perhaps he had chewed food with his mouth open. He might have deserved what the so-calledpsycho had done to him—and really, who was to say that what I did was any better?
    I knew very well that there was a great deal wrong with that unpleasant argument, but it stayed with me anyway, a discontented murmur of self-loathing in the background as I ate my breakfast, sneezed, got ready for work, sneezed, and finally took two cold pills and headed out the door, sneezing. I couldn’t shake the absurd notion that I was just as guilty—perhaps far more so, since Klein was the only victim of this killer so far, and I had fifty-two glass slides tucked away in my rosewood souvenir box, each with its single drop of blood representing a departed playmate. Did that make me fifty-two times as bad?
    It was completely ridiculous, of course; what I had done was totally justified, sanctified by the Code of Saint Harry, and beneficial to society, aside from being a great deal of fun. But because I was so wrapped up in navel-gazing, it was not until I crawled off U.S. 1 to merge onto the Palmetto Expressway that the insistent sibilance of self-preservation finally broke through my egotistical fog. It was just a quiet hiss of warning, but it was persistent enough to get my attention, and as I finally listened to it, it solidified into a single, very definite thought.
    Someone is watching me
.
    I don’t know why I was certain, but I was. I could feel the gaze in a nearly physical way, almost as if somebody was trickling the razor-sharp point of a knife along the back of my neck. It was a sensation as definite and inarguable as the heat from the sun; someone was watching me, specifically
me
, and they were watching me for some reason that did not have my best interests at heart.
    Reason argued that this was Miami at morning rush hour; almost anyone might stare at me with distaste, even hatred, for any reason at all—maybe they didn’t like my car, or my profile reminded them of their eighth-grade algebra teacher. But whatever Reason said, Caution argued back: It didn’t matter
why
someone was watching me. It only mattered that they
were
. Someone was watching me with mischief in mind, and I needed to find out who.
    Slowly, oh-so-casually, I looked around me. I was in the middle of an exceptionally normal crush of morning traffic, indistinguishablefrom what I drove through every morning. To my immediate right there were two lanes of cars: a battered Impala, and beyond it an old Ford van with a camper roof. Behind them was a line of Toyotas, Hummers, and BMWs, none of them appearing to be any more menacing than any of the others.
    I looked ahead again, inched forward with the traffic, and then slowly turned to look to my left—
    —and before my head had turned more than six inches, there was a screech of tires, a chorus of blaring horns, and an old Honda accelerated off the Palmetto’s on-ramp, down the shoulder, and back onto U.S. 1, where it squealed north, slid through a yellow light, and vanished down a side street, and as it went I could see the left taillight dangling at an odd angle, and then the dark birthmark stain on the trunk.
    I watched it go until the drivers behind me began to lean on their horns. I tried to tell myself that it was pure coincidence. I knew very well how many old Hondas there were in Miami; I had them all on my list. And I had visited only eight of them so far, and it was very possible that this was one of the others. I told myself that this was just one more idiot changing his mind and