Free Double Dexter by Jeff Lindsay Page B

“Oh,” she said. “Here, I’ll get some tissues.” And she vanished down the hall toward the bathroom.
    I blotted my nose with my sleeve and sat in the easy chair. I looked at my brother, and he looked back at me. Brian had recently landed a job with a large Canadian real estate conglomerate that was buying up homes in South Florida. My brother was charged with approaching people whose houses were in foreclosure and encouraging them to leave right away. In theory, this was done by offering them “key money,” usually around fifteen hundred dollars, to walk away and let the corporation take over and resell the property. I say “in theory” because Brian seemed very prosperous and happy lately, and I was almost certain that he was pocketing the key money and using less conventional means of emptying the houses. After all, if someone is running out on a mortgage, they generally want to disappear for a while—and why shouldn’t Brian help them do a more thorough job of it?
    I had no proof, of course—and it was none of my business how my brother conducted his social life, as long as he showed up at the house with clean hands and good table manners, which he always did. Still, I hoped he had abandoned his flamboyant recreational style and was being careful.
    “How’s business?” I asked him politely.
    “Never better,” he said. “They may say the market is recovering, but I haven’t seen it yet. It really is a good time to be me in Miami.”
    I smiled politely, mostly to show him what a really
good
fake looked like, and Rita hustled back in with a box of tissues.
    “Here,” she said, thrusting the box at me. “Why don’t you just keep the box with you, and— Oh, damn it, there’s the timer,” she said, and she vanished again, into the kitchen this time.
    Brian and I watched her go with very similar expressions of bemused wonder. “A really lovely lady,” Brian said to me. “You are very lucky, Dexter.”
    “Don’t let her hear you say that,” I said. “She might think you sound envious, and she does have single friends, you know.”
    Brian looked startled. “Oh,” he said. “Silly me, I hadn’t thought of that. Would she really try to, ah … I think the expression is, ‘fix me up’?”
    “In a heartbeat,” I assured him. “She thinks marriage is man’s natural state.”
    “And is it?” he asked me.
    “There is much to be said for domestic bliss,” I said. “And I am quite sure Rita would love to see you try it.”
    “Oh, dear,” he said, and he looked at me thoughtfully, running his eyes over my entire frame. “Still,” he said, “it seems to agree with you.”
    “I suppose it must seem like it,” I said.
    “Do you mean it
doesn’t
agree with you?” Brian asked, arching his eyebrows up high on his forehead.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it really does. It’s just that lately—”
    “Lights seem dimmer, tastes are all duller?” he asked me.
    “Something like that,” I admitted, although in truth I could not tell if he was merely mocking me.
    But Brian looked at me very seriously, and for once he did not seem to be faking his expression, nor the thoughts behind his words. “Why don’t you come along with me some night very soon?” he said softly. “We’ll have a Boys’ Night Out. Rita couldn’t possibly object.”
    There was absolutely no mistaking what he meant; aside from the fact that he only had one form of recreation, I knew that he had longdreamed of sharing a playtime with me, his only living relative, who had so much in common with him—we were brothers of the blade as well as in blood. And truthfully the idea was almost unbearably compelling to me, too—but … but …
    “Why not, brother?” Brian said softly, leaning forward with genuine intensity on his face. “Why shouldn’t we?”
    For a moment I simply stared at him, frozen between lunging at his offer with both hands and thrusting him away from me, probably with one hand to