The Darkness to Come (16 page)

Being in the house reminded Dexter of prison, where pussy-starved inmates commonly took on male lovers, just to have someone’s body cavity to thrust into. And then there had been the infamous booty bandits, the gangs of hardened thugs who, upon spotting a weak-hearted man in the population, would plot to run trains on him, to flip him into someone’s bitch.

During Dexter’s first week in the joint, while out in the yard, he had provoked a fight with two young, jail-toughened brothers—not one, but two—and with only his bare hands, beat them both within a centimeter of their lives. Afterward, he’d been thrown into solitary confinement for ten days, but he didn’t care, his point had been made: an Alpha male had arrived. No one dared to start any shit with him, sexual or otherwise, for the duration of his bid.

In the kitchen, Dexter spun a chair away from the table and dropped Thad into it. He bound Thad’s hands behind him with duct tape, and taped his ankles together.

In the refrigerator, Dexter found a block of cheddar cheese, a thick rope of smoked sausage, and a half-gallon carton of milk. He was famished, though he had eaten all of the junk food he’d stolen from the gas station only a few hours ago. Perhaps the use of his talent demanded a great deal of energy.

Standing at the counter, he had devoured all of the sausage and cheese and drank most of the milk when Thad awakened. He blinked groggily and opened and closed his mouth, wincing at his swollen jaw.

Dexter picked up the Bowie knife off the counter and moved in front of Thad.

Thad’s eyes were now open wide. He tried to break his bonds, a useless effort.

“What . . . what do you want from me?” Thad asked, in a small voice.

“You know what I want,” Dexter said. “You’ve been in touch with my wife.”

“Who’s your wife?”

He was a terrible liar. Dexter moved the knife to his earlobe.

“Lie to me again,” Dexter said. “And I slice off this tender little earlobe of yours that your lover, Malik, probably liked to nibble on.”

“Malik . . .” Thad shut his eyes, began to cry.

“About my wife,” Dexter said.

Thad nodded fervently. “Yeah, Joy, right, I knew her. We were good friends when I lived in Chicago, we worked at the salon together. But I haven’t talked to her in a long time—we lost touch after I moved to St. Louis.”

He had told another lie, but Dexter would come back to it shortly. In the meantime, Dexter reached into his jacket pocket and removed the check. He waved it in front of Thad’s eyes.

“Why were you sending money to her aunt?” he asked. He pressed the blade against Thad’s earlobe, drawing blood and wringing fresh tears from the man. “Remember—don’t lie.”

“Joy sent me the money to give to her Aunt Betty.”

“Why you? She has other relatives. She could have sent the money to them to give to Betty.”

“I don’t know. She trusts me, I guess.”

“Probably true. I also think the fact that you aren’t in her family was a major factor. She thought I would be less likely to track down someone like you than I would one of her family members.”

“I don’t know. I guess so.” Greasy sweat had congealed on his forehead.

Dexter moved the blade back to Thad’s earlobe. “Back to one of your lies. You talked to Joy today.”

“I told you, I haven’t talked to her in a long—“

Dexter cut him, clean and quick. The blade sliced through his earlobe like the proverbial knife through butter. Thad shrieked and rocked back and forth in the chair, blood spouting from his ruptured flesh and plopping onto the tile floor in quarter-size droplets.

“I told you, don’t lie to me,” Dexter said. “I know you talked to her today because Malik was going to search the house before you guys came in tonight, to make sure the coast was clear. She warned you that I might be coming.”

“Yes!” Thad said, sobbing and nodding. “She did, she did . . .”

Dexter knelt so that he and Thad were at eye level. “Listen to my next question very carefully, Thad. Don’t fix your lips to tell me another lie, because if you do, I’m going to cut off another tender part of your anatomy.”

Dexter balanced the tip of the knife on Thad’s crotch.

“Okay, okay,” Thad said. “Ask me, ask me anything, I’ll tell you the truth.”

“Where did Joy call you from?”

“I don’t know. She hid her number, didn’t tell me where she was. Honest truth.”

Dexter studied the guy’s face, glazed with sweat, tears, and blood.

“Fine, I believe you,” Dexter said. “Next question: where was she sending you the money from?”

Thad squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, God. Please.”

“At the moment, I’m your god, Thad. I’ll grant you mercy if you give me the information I want. Answer the question.”

“Jesus, help me.”

“I’m your Jesus right now, too.” He slid the tip of the blade to Thad’s eye socket, traced it around. Eyes huge, Thad tried to draw away, couldn’t.

“Last chance,” Dexter said. He applied slight pressure to the knife.

“Atlanta! She sent them from Atlanta.”

“Atlanta.” Dexter turned over the answer in his mind, like a jeweler examining the quality of a diamond with a loupe. Atlanta. The so-called Black Mecca. It felt plausible to him. It was such a popular city for black folks that she probably figured she could blend in there, get lost in the chocolate masses, and start her life anew.

“Very good,” Dexter said. “Do you have a record of her address? An envelope from a recent payment, perhaps?”

“In the master bedroom. On the desk, by the shredder. I always shredded the envelopes, like she told me to do, but she just sent me a money order today, extra Christmas money for her aunt, and I hadn’t deposited the money yet. Forgive me, Jesus.”

“No, Jesus is thanking you for that minor oversight.” Dexter straightened. “You might have saved your life.”

In the bedroom, Dexter located the envelope on the corner of a desk, next to a large paper shredder. The envelope contained a money order drawn from the United States Post Office, from Celie Walker payable to Thad Washington, in the amount of five hundred dollars.

Dexter honed in on the name: Celie Walker. How cute. Celie was the illiterate, dyke bitch main character in
The Color Purple
, the novel by Alice Walker. His wife had loved that stupid book and had kept it displayed in a prominent place on their bookshelf.

Obviously, the name was intended solely to mislead anyone who might be seeking to track her down—namely, him. She was no more calling herself Celie Walker than he was calling himself Kunta Kinte. He expected that she would be using her maiden name, middle name, or some variation thereof.

The return address on the envelope was a commercial mail box in East Point, Georgia. Dexter folded the envelope in his pocket and returned to the kitchen.

A fair quantity of blood spattered the floor around Thad. His sliced ear was deep-red, like some strange, ripe fruit.

Trembling, Thad looked at him, hopefully. “Find it?”

“I did, yes. As a token of appreciation for your help, I’m going to set you free.”

“You are?”

“Of course. I’m a man of mercy and compassion, Thad.”

Dexter went behind Thad and cut through the tape binding the man’s wrists. He tore away the tape holding together Thad’s ankles, too.

Rubbing his wrists, Thad sat in the chair, frightened to move. Terrible knowledge glimmered in his eyes. “You aren’t really letting me go, are you?”

“I’m afraid not,” Dexter said. “See, you’ve been helping my wife lead a life of dishonor and deceit. I’m a man of mercy and compassion. But I’m also a man of vengeance.”

* * *

The madman left Thad on the kitchen floor, mortally wounded, bleeding his life away.

Thad could not dwell on the terrible thing that had been done to his lover, Malik. Such awful thoughts would cripple him with grief. For the moment, he could focus only on his own survival.

But persistent questions tugged at him: How had Dexter shown up so suddenly in their garage? Had he been hiding in there, waiting in the shadows for them to arrive? When he’d attacked Malik, it was as if he had materialized from thin air.

Thinking required too much energy, and his energy was in short supply. He pushed the questions away.

He crawled across the kitchen floor, leaving a wide streak of fresh blood in his wake. There was no landline in the house; he and Malik had ditched the landline in favor of going one hundred percent cellular, and they used cable Internet access. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now, he regretted it. He’d lost his cell in the garage when he’d thrown it at the psycho.

The garage door seemed to be a mile away. He crawled out of the kitchen and down the carpeted hallway, groaning, stopping every few inches to draw shallow, agonizing breaths. The doorway ahead shimmered in his vision like a desert mirage.

He gritted his teeth, and kept pushing. Rising to turn the door knob almost spun him into unconsciousness, but he managed to hang on.

He found his cell phone on the floor, next to Malik’s body, in a pool of dark blood. He choked back a sob, turned away from his dead partner, and grabbed the cell phone. It was sticky with gore, and it took all his strength to keep from vomiting.

He called 911. Talking was so difficult he wasn’t sure he made any sense at all, but the dispatcher assured him help was on the way.

Then he lay beside Malik, to hold him one last time, and passed out in his cold, dead arms.

Chapter 24

Asleep in his old bedroom, Joshua had the most vivid dream of his life.

He and Rachel were strolling barefoot along a curve of pristine white beach, hand-in-hand. A summer sun smiled down on them, and a cool, salty breeze ruffled the comfortable white shirts and shorts that both of them wore. They were alone on the shore, the vast sun-spangled ocean on his right, stretching to a hazy horizon.

Something warm clung to Joshua’s shoulder and waist. Joshua turned his head, and looked into the eyes of a child who was perhaps a year old. A boy. With soft skin the color of nutmeg, the child had Rachel’s eyes and nose, Joshua’s lips and cheekbones, a full head of dark, curly hair.

Justin,
he thought.
Our son.

Rachel looked at their child, then at Joshua, and smiled—an expression of the purest joy, free of worry and fear. Her curly hair was auburn, not black, and she wasn’t wearing her customary glasses.

Joshua brought Rachel’s hand to his lips and kissed her fingers.

Let’s go to the house
, she said. She winked, seductively.
Justin looks like he needs a nap.

A house was ahead, on the left. It was a two-story Cape Cod, with lots of sun-silvered windows that provided priceless ocean views. A stone footpath, shaded by a palm tree, led from the shore to the house’s broad patio and a balcony staircase.

Justin tugged at Joshua’s ear, drawing his attention away from the house. His son pointed excitedly at something in the distance: a ferry that bobbed on the ocean waves like a child’s bath toy.

That’s the ferry, little man,
Joshua said.
You’ve been on the ferry before, remember?

Justin only giggled, and tugged Joshua’s ear again.

Rachel had walked ahead; she was waiting at the patio door. Joshua kissed his son on the forehead, and followed Rachel inside . . .

Joshua awoke, breathing hard. His face was wet, and he realized that perspiration wasn’t the culprit. He had been crying in his sleep.

He wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands.

He’d never had a dream like that. It had been so
real
. He touched his earlobe; he felt the soft flesh throbbing from when his son had tugged at it during the dream. The kid had a helluva grip.

Justin
. It was one of the boy names he and Rachel had chosen, after they had married and were discussing their plans to start a family. His memory of the dream child’s innocent face, the smooth texture of his skin, and the sweet, baby-fresh scent of him was imprinted on his mind as powerfully as the recollection of an actual, recent experience.

And what about Rachel? He’d never seen her with auburn hair, and she never went around without her glasses.

Weird.

A small shape shifted at the foot of the bed, reining Joshua back into his present place in the darkened bedroom. Coco was sleeping with him on the king-size bed, and was having a dream of her own.

He’d tried to put the little dog in her kennel, where she slept at their house, but she had whined incessantly. Mom had banged on the door and yelled at Joshua to make the dog shut up, or she was going to throw her outside and chain her to a tree in the backyard. When Joshua brought Coco out of the kennel and put her in the bed with him, she had fallen into a restful slumber.

He was available to comfort the dog. But who could comfort him? The dream had left him with an almost paralyzing sense of loss—because it would never come true.

He wasn’t convinced that he would ever see Rachel again. If she did return some day, he would never be able to trust her. How could he trust someone who would leave him? How could he trust someone who had concealed so much from him?

Their marriage was irreparably damaged. He and Rachel would never experience the happiness they had shared in his dream. At one time, they’d had a chance at claiming such joy. But that possibility was gone forever, whether she was carrying his child or not.

He’d hoped that spending the night at his parents’ house would grant him a reprieve from the sickening emotions that tormented him at home. But nausea was beginning to seep through his stomach. He got out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom across the hallway, not bothering to put on his glasses.

With his weakened vision, he bumped against the wall, swore softly. The last thing he wanted to do was to awaken his mother and hear another tirade. In his present mood, he felt as if he might collapse to the floor and weep like a child.

In the mirror, he saw that tears had crusted underneath his eyes. He dampened a towel with warm water and used it to mop his skin clean.