More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
And the Need was very strong now, very careful cold coiled creeping crackly cocked and ready, very strong, very much ready now - and still it waited and watched, and it made me wait and watch.
He would never turn into the kind of mess he had made of the children. I would never do that, could never allow that. I am not like Father Donovan, not that kind of monster. I am a very neat monster.
I’m quite sure most people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake all of it.
For some reason that I can’t fathom, she actually prefers me to be alive. I think that’s nice, and if I could have feelings at all I would have them for Deb.
I had developed hunches before. I had a small reputation for it. My hunches were often quite good. And why shouldn’t they be? I often know how the killers are thinking. I think the same way. Of course I was not always right. Sometimes I was very wide of the mark. It wouldn’t look good if I was always right. And I didn’t want the cops to catch every serial killer out there. Then what would I do for a hobby?
‘I’m getting old, Dexter.’ He waited for me to object, but I didn’t, and he nodded. ‘I think people understand things different when they get older,’ he says. ‘It’s not a question of getting soft, or seeing things in the gray areas instead of black and white. I really believe I’m just understanding things different. Better.’
And with those few little words he gave a shape to my whole life, my everything, my who and what I am. The wonderful, all-seeing, all-knowing man. Harry. My dad. If only I was capable of love, how I would have loved Harry.
If I am ever careless enough to be caught, they will say I am a sociopathic monster, a sick and twisted demon who is not even human, and they will probably send me to die in Old Sparky with a smug self-righteous glow. If they ever catch Size 7½, they will say he is a bad man who went wrong because of social forces he was too unfortunate to resist, and he will go to jail for ten years before they turn him loose with enough money for a suit and a new chainsaw. Every day at work I understand Harry a little better.
Other people are less important to me than lawn furniture. I do not, as the shrinks put it so eloquently, have any sense of the reality of others. And I am not burdened with this realization.
‘It’s like, everything really is two ways, the way we all pretend it is and the way it really is. And you already know that and it’s like a game for you.’
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.
How wonderful to have such an authentic human experience. Now I knew what it was like to feel like a total idiot.
HARRY DID NOT DIE QUICKLY AND HE DID NOT DIE EASILY. He took his own terrible long time, the first and last selfish thing he had ever done in his life.
Really, now: If you can’t get me my newspaper on time, how can you expect me to refrain from killing people?
‘Women today are so forward, and when you are as handsome as I am they absolutely fling themselves at your head.’ Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words; as I said it I couldn’t help thinking of the woman’s head flung at me not so long ago.
LaGuerta shrugged. ‘It’s Miami, what do they think? Here is where these guys come on vacation. There’s lots of bad guys out there. I can’t catch them all.’ To be truthful, she couldn’t catch any of them unless they hurled themselves off a building and into the front seat of her car, but this didn’t seem like a good time to bring that up.
And were they really saying in the department that I had a feeling for serial homicide? That was very troubling. It meant my careful disguise might be close to unraveling. I had been too good too many times. It could become a problem. But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn’t sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation.
He was playing catch with me, showing all of us just how good he was and telling one of us - me - that he was watching. I know what you did, and I can do it, too. Better. I suppose that should have worried me a little. It didn’t. It made me feel almost giddy, like a high-school girl watching as the captain of the football team worked up his nerve to ask for a date. You mean me? Little old me? Oh my stars, really? Pardon me while I flutter my eyelashes.
I was not completely crazy yet. Seriously antisocial, of course, and somewhat sporadically homicidal, nothing wrong with that. But not crazy. There was somebody else, and he was not me. Three cheers for Dexter’s brain.
I did not mind Sergeant Doakes, or whatever he thought or did. How could I mind? He could no more control who he was and what he did than anyone else could. He would come for me. Truly, what else could he do? What can any of us do? Helpless as we all are, in the grip of our own little voices, what indeed can we do?
