Free Double Dexter by Jeff Lindsay Page A

mellow around the edges since his arrival. Still, I would almost rather have seen the old Debs and suffered one of her terrifying arm punches than see her so visibly deflated. But even her new sensitivity couldn’t get cheese from a stone; there truly wasn’t anything we could do that we had not already done. A taco wrapper from the floor of a car is not a lot to go on; that was all we had, and wishing for more wouldn’t make it appear in front of me.
    I spent the rest of the day turning the problem over in my head, trying to think of some neat and clever angle to make the wrapper yield more information, but I came up empty. I am good at my job, and I do have a certain amount of professional pride. I would also prefer to see my sister happy and successful. But there was just no way to take things any further than we had done. It was frustrating, and very bad for my sense of personal worth, and it added to my general feeling that life was a mangy dog that was badly in need of a hearty kick.
    By five o’clock I was quite happy to slip away from the frustration and tension, and head for a relaxing and recuperative weekend at home. Traffic was worse than usual; after all, this was Friday night. All the usual violence and anger were there, but there was a festive edge to it, as if people had saved all the energy left over from the workweek and were putting it into causing as much mayhem as possible on the way home. On the Dolphin Expressway a tanker truck had rammed into the back end of a van from a retirement village. They had only been going five miles per hour, but the back of the van still crumpled a bit, and it had plowed forward into a fifteen-year-old Toyota with only one regular tire and three doughnuts on it.
    I crawled past in a long, slow line of cars, most of them filled with people cheering as the tanker’s driver yelled at the four men in the Toyota and a flock of terrified old people from the van huddled together on the shoulder. Traffic ground to a dead stop, then slowly started up again. I saw two more fender-benders before I got off onto Dixie Highway. But somehow, through a combination of skill, lifelong practice, and blind luck, I made it home without serious injury.
    I parked my car behind a two-year-old SUV that was already in front of the house; my brother, Brian, was here for his every-week Friday-night dinner with the family. It was a custom we had gotten used to over the last year, after he had turned up and apparently wanted nothing more than to be with me, his only living relative. He had already bonded with Cody and Astor, since they knew him for what he was—a cold and empty killer, like me—and they wanted to be just like him. And Rita, showing the same solid good judgment about men that had led her to marry two different monsters, ate up Brian’s horribly fake flattery and thought he was wonderful, too. Andas for me? Well, I still had trouble believing that Brian did not have some secret motive for hanging around, but he was my brother, after all, and family is family. We don’t get to pick our kin. The best we can hope for is to survive them, especially in my family.
    Inside the house, Lily Anne was in her playpen next to the couch, where Brian was sitting with Rita, deep in very serious conversation. They looked up at me as I entered, and for some reason I thought Rita looked a little guilty when she saw me. It was impossible to read Brian, of course. He certainly couldn’t feel guilt, and he merely gave me his large and very fake smile of greeting, like always. “Greetings, brother,” he said.
    “Dexter,” Rita said, and she jumped up and came over to greet me with a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. “Brian and I were just talking,” she said, probably to reassure me that they had not been performing amateur brain surgery on the neighbors.
    “Wonderful,” I said, and before I could say more I sneezed.
    Rita jumped back and managed to avoid most of the spray from my nose.