Free Dexter Is Dead by Jeff Lindsay Page A

said, “Go up to the strip mall on the corner. I’ll walk up when I’m done.”
    Brian ducked down and looked at me searchingly, as if afraid he might never see me again. “If you’re not there in half an hour, I’m calling Kraunauer,” he said.
    “Forty-five minutes,” I said. “If I get in, I want a shower.”
    He looked at me a little longer, then shook his head. “This is a very bad idea,” he said. I closed the door, and he drove slowly away, up toward Dixie Highway.
    I understood Brian’s worry. It was perfectly natural caution on the part of somebody who preferred the sort of entertainment he liked. He had always seen cops as the Enemy, a rival predator in the food chain to be avoided whenever possible. But even though I shared his distinctive tastes, I had no inbred aversion to blue uniforms. My unique upbringing and career path had made me familiar with cops, and I understood them as much as I understood any human.
    So I walked right up to the patrol car, phony smile still on my face, and tapped on the glass.
    Two heads swiveled toward me in perfect unison, and two sets of cold eyes, one blue and one brown, looked me over with unblinking readiness.
    I mimed rolling down the window, and after another moment of staring, the owner of the brown eyes, closest to me, rolled down the window. “Can I help you, sir,” the officer said, making
help
sound as threatening as possible. I let my smile broaden just a little, but the officer didn’t seem impressed. He was thin, about forty, with olive skin and short black hair, and his partner, who was much younger and very pale, with blond hair that was Marine Corps short, leaned over to watch me.
    “Yes, I hope so,” I said. “Um, this is my house here? And I was hoping I could get in and get a few things…?”
    Neither one of them offered any encouragement, not even a blink. “What kind of things,” Brown Eyes said. It sounded more like an accusation than a question.
    “Change of clothes?” I said hopefully. “Maybe a toothbrush?”
    At long last, Brown Eyes blinked, but it didn’t soften him up noticeably. “The house is sealed,” he said. “Nobody in, nobody out.”
    “Just for a minute?” I pleaded. “You could come and watch me.”
    “I said
no,
” Brown Eyes said, and he was sliding down the scale now, from cold to positively hostile.
    And even though I had absolutely no hope that it would change their minds, I couldn’t stop myself from saying, in a kind of desperate, pathetic whine, “But it’s my house.”
    “It was your house,” Blue Eyes said. “It’s evidence now.”
    “We know who you are,” Brown Eyes said, openly angry now. “You’re the fucking psycho that killed Jackie Forrest.”
    “And Robert Chase,” Blue Eyes chimed in.
    “You made us all look like assholes,” Brown Eyes said. “The whole fucking force—you know that?”
    A very great number of wonderfully clever replies flitted into my brain, like,
Oh, no, you already did,
or
Maybe, but you sure helped,
or even
It wasn’t that hard
. And under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have hesitated to let one slip. But looking into the patrol car at Brown Eyes, I realized that there was a very good chance my lighthearted good humor would slide off ears that seemed to be fastened on a little too tightly—Brown Eyes looked altogether too tightly wrapped all over, in fact, to see any fun anywhere in a world that contained me, so I let the bon mot wither unspoken.
    “You’re supposed to be in lockup,” Brown Eyes went on. “What the hell are you doing out?”
    “We better call it in,” Blue Eyes said.
    “I was released this morning,” I said quickly. “All perfectly legal.” I thought about trying a reassuring smile, but decided it was a bad idea. Blue Eyes was already on the radio, and his partner was opening the door of the car and getting out to face me with the full majesty of the law and barely controlled fury. The effect was spoiled just a bit because