“And they don't. And they won't,” Deborah said bitterly. “Instead of getting me into homicide, this is going to kill my career. I'll die a meter maid, Dexter.”

“There is a way out, Deb,” I said, and the look she turned on me now was only about one-third hope.

“What,” she said.

I smiled at her, my most comforting, challenging, I'm-not-really-a-shark smile. “Find the truck,” I said.

It was three days before I heard from my dear foster sister again, a longish period for her to go without talking to me. She came into my office just after lunch on Thursday, looking sour. “I found it,” she said, and I didn't know what she meant.

“Found what, Deb?” I asked. “The Fountain of Grumpiness?”

“The truck,” she said. “The refrigerated truck.”

“But that's great news,” I said. “Why do you look like you're searching for somebody to slap?”

“Because I am,” she said, and flung four or five stapled pages onto my desk. “Look at this.”

I picked it up and glanced at the top page. “Oh,” I said. “How many altogether?”

“Twenty-three,” she said. “In the last month, twenty-three refrigerator trucks have been reported stolen. The guys over on traffic say most of 'em turn up in canals, torched for the insurance money. Nobody pushes too hard to find them. So nobody's been pushing on these, and nobody's going to.”

“Welcome to Miami,” I said.

Deborah sighed and took the list back from me, slouching into my extra chair like she'd just lost all her bones. “There's no way I can check them all, not by myself. It would take months. Goddamn it, Dex,” she said. “Now what do we do?”

I shook my head. “I'm sorry, Deb,” I said. “But now we have to wait.”

“That's it? Just wait?”

“That's it,” I said.

And it was. For two more weeks, that was it. We waited.

And then…

CHAPTER 9

I WOKE UP COVERED WITH SWEAT, NOT SURE WHERE I was, and absolutely certain that another murder was about to happen. Somewhere not so far away he was searching for his next victim, sliding through the city like a shark around the reef. I was so certain I could almost hear the purr of the duct tape. He was out there, feeding his Dark Passenger, and it was talking to mine. And in my sleep I had been riding with him, a phantom remora in his great slow circles.

I sat up in my own little bed and peeled away the twisted sheets. The bedside clock said it was 3:14. Four hours since I'd gone to bed, and I felt like I'd been slogging through the jungle the entire time with a piano on my back. I was sweaty, stiff, and stupid, unable to form any thoughts at all beyond the certainty that it was happening out there without me.

Sleep was gone for the night, no question. I turned on the light. My hands were clammy and trembling. I wiped them on the sheet, but that didn't help. The sheets were just as wet. I stumbled into the bathroom to wash my hands. I held them under the running water. The tap let out a stream that was warm, room temperature, and for a moment I was washing my hands in blood and the water turned red; just for a second, in the half-light of the bathroom, the sink ran bloodred.

I closed my eyes.

The world shifted.

I had meant to get rid of this trick of light and my half-sleeping brain. Close the eyes, open them, the illusion would be over and it would be simple clean water in my sink. Instead, it was like closing my eyes had opened a second set of eyes into another world.

I was back in my dream, floating like a knife blade above the lights of Biscayne Boulevard, flying cold and sharp and homing in on my target and-

I opened my eyes again. The water was just water.

But what was I?

I shook my head violently. Steady, old boy; no Dexter off the deep end, please. I took a long breath and peeked at myself. In the mirror I looked the way I was supposed to look. Carefully composed features. Calm and mocking blue eyes, a perfect imitation of human life. Except that my hair stuck up like Stan Laurel's, there was no sign of whatever it was that had just zipped through my half-sleeping brain and rattled me out of my slumber.

I carefully closed my eyes again.

Darkness.

Plain, simple, darkness. No flying, no blood, no city lights. Just good old Dexter with his eyes closed in front of the mirror.

I opened them again. Hello, dear boy, so good to have you back. But where on earth have you been?

That, of course, was the question. I have spent most of my life untroubled by dreams and, for that matter, hallucinations. No visions of the Apocalypse for me; no troubling Jungian icons burbling up from my subconscious, no mysterious recurring images drifting through the history of my unconsciousness. Nothing ever goes bump in Dexter's night. When I go to sleep, all of me sleeps.

So what had just happened? Why were these pictures appearing to me?

I splashed water on my face and pushed my hair down. That did not, of course, answer the question, but it made me feel a little better. How bad could things be if my hair was neat?

In truth, I did not know. Things could be plenty bad. I might be losing all, or many, of my marbles. What if I had been slipping into insanity a piece at a time for years, and this new killer had simply triggered the final headlong fall into complete craziness? How could I hope to measure the relative sanity of somebody like me?

The images had looked and felt so real. But they couldn't be; I had been right here in my bed. Yet I had almost been able to smell the tang of salt water, exhaust, and cheap perfume floating over Biscayne Boulevard. Completely real-and wasn't that one of the signs of insanity, that the delusions were indistinguishable from reality? I had no answers, and no way to find any. Talking to a shrink was out of the question, of course; I would frighten the poor thing to death, and he might feel honor bound to have me locked away somewhere. Certainly I could not argue with the wisdom of that idea. But if I was losing my hold on sanity as I had built it, it was all my problem, and the first part of the problem was that there was no way to know for sure.

Although, come to think of it, there was one way.

Ten minutes later I was driving past Dinner Key. I drove slowly, since I didn't actually know what I was looking for. This part of the city slept, as much as it ever did. A few people still swirled across the Miami landscape: tourists who'd had too much Cuban coffee and couldn't sleep. People from Iowa looking for a gas station. Foreigners looking for South Beach. And the predators, of course-thugs, robbers, crackheads; vampires, ghouls, and assorted monsters like me. But in this area, at this time, very few of them altogether. This was Miami deserted, as deserted as it got, a place made lonely by the ghost of the daytime crowd. It was a city that had whittled itself down to a mere hunting ground, without the gaudy disguises of sunlight and bright T-shirts.

And so I hunted. The other night eyes tracked me and dismissed me as I passed without slowing. I drove north, over the old drawbridge, through downtown Miami, still not sure what I was looking for and still not seeing it-and yet, for some uncomfortable reason, absolutely sure that I would find it, that I was going in the right direction, that it was waiting for me ahead.

Just beyond the Omni the nightlife picked up. More activity, more things to see. Whooping on the sidewalks, tinny music coming and going through the car windows. The night girls came out, flocks of them on the street corners, giggling with each other, or staring stupidly at the passing cars. And the cars slowed to stare back, gawking at the costumes and what they left uncovered. Two blocks ahead of me a new Corniche stopped and a pack of the girls flew out of the shadows, off the sidewalk, and into the street, surrounding the car immediately. Traffic stumbled to a half stop, horns blattered. Most of the drivers sat for a minute, content to watch, but an impatient truck pulled around the knot of cars and into the oncoming lane.