Darkly Dreaming Dexter (Dexter, #1)

by Jeff Lindsay

I poked at the white paper bag. There was nothing left inside. Just like me: a clean, crisp outside and nothing at all on the inside.

I don’t do my job to catch the bad guys. Why would I want to do that? No, I do my job to make order out of chaos.

“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.”

I don’t pretend to understand why, but in my darker moments I find cold cleansing. Not refreshing so much as necessary.

“I had a, um, an idea. A different idea. About trying something in a slightly different direction.” She said it like it was in quotation marks, and indeed it was.

She had deflected anyone from possibly thinking about Deb’s idea, put Deb in her place, and brought the team back together

I smiled at her, my most comforting, challenging, I’m-not-really-a-shark smile.

Completely real—and wasn’t that one of the signs of insanity, that the delusions were indistinguishable from reality?

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.

A night wind blew across my face, bringing with it all the enchanting odors of our tropical paradise: diesel oil, decaying vegetation, and cement.

life’s only obligation, after all, was to be interesting, which it certainly was at the moment.

’Ta luo,” which was Cuban for hasta luego.

I was merely going prematurely senile from the strain of all my clean living.

“Unlike Anything We Have Ever Seen Before.” You could actually hear her capitalize the letters.