No Rest for the Wicked

3. ICE CREAM

Rita and the kids were happy to see me, as I walked through the door. It was Sunday morning and I had brought the traditional peace offering of donuts. “Dexter!” Cody cried, throwing his arms around me in a convincing display of affection, and I ruffled the scamp’s hair in an equal affectionate way. “My hard worker!” Rita said, emerging from the kitchen, followed by an ever quiet and introvert Astor, who still shot me a faint smile.

“Yeah, I know. But you know…” I said, balancing the box of donuts onto the table.

“Something came up,” Rita nodded with a smile and gave me a welcome-home kiss. There was something about coming to Rita that made me able to forget about my next victim for a while. “I just wish you didn’t have to work that much.”

“Me too.” I said and planted a playful kiss on her nose, distracting her from this tiresome subject. “But before the kids explode with eager, what do you say we start eating?”

The beach was warm, even for Miami and even the kids seemed to have less energy than normal, though that was certainly not for a lack of trying. I normally considered myself to be in excellent shape, but between the half-healed graze on my leg – courtesy of Sergeant Doakes – and the suffocating heat I found myself hard-pressed to keep up with even those quickly-tiring kids.

“Mom! Dexter! Look!” Cody exclaimed with an enthusiasm becoming only for children – though Dexter noticed that the boys eyes weren’t as excited as were his voice – as he pointed towards an ice-cream truck that had stopped next to the beach and starting supplying the masses with frozen treats. ‘Like my brother’ I couldn’t help thinking to myself, as I looked at Rita, “My treat?” I offered.

“You didn’t ask them for any Saudi flavours,” I said to Cody with a wink and the boy looked up from his chocolate-chip ice cream. “Why would I do that?” he asked uncomprehendingly, much to my disappointment. He laughed when I told the joke after his presentation as far as I remembered, but then again he’d had a busy few days since then. “Hey, what’s the matter?” I asked, dropping down to Cody’s eyelevel. Looking Cody in the eyes, I saw something I would’ve never expected: nothing.

I had seen it before, obviously, but never expected to see it in this young boy I thought I knew so well. Doakes had that emptiness in his eyes, Brian – my brother – had it and, yes, I had it.

Hesitantly Heroic Harry was sitting on a bench not far from his foster-son. He watched his son drop into a crouch and tackle another young boy and throw the boy on his back, grabbing a hold around the boy’s throat. Harry didn’t move.

He saw the calm, calculated way that his son, his monster, his punishment compressed the carotid artery of his opponent, even as he effortlessly controlled the clumsy counters his opponent attempted to make. After a few seconds – though it felt like an eternity – the opponent stopped moving, having now lost consciousness. Slowly and reluctantly, Dexters fingers loosened from the throat of his opponent.

“Nice going, Dex.” Harry said with convincing pride, though it pained him how skilled his son seemed to be at hurting people. “Go hit the showers and I’ll meet you outside,” Harry said and patted his son on the shoulder, before he turned and walked out of the Dojo.

Bowing for his sensei, Dexter thanked him for the daily training in archaic Japanese, before following Harry’s commands.

Before he left the Dojo himself, though, he looked back and saw his sparring partner from before, rubbing his neck, as though Dexter’s steel grip was still threatening to squeeze the life out of him. “See you tomorrow, Dex! One of these days, I’ll get ya!” the graceful loser promised in a cheerful voice, as he walked out the door.

The revelation that Cody was like me wasn’t all that shocking, when I thought about it. He had seen his father – Paul – beat Rita, his mother (and possibly received a beating himself, though I doubted that either Rita or Cody would ever admit to that), and such a thing was enough to make people at least skewed in their perception of the world – or so I’d read in countless psychoanalysis’s – and perhaps his fathers drug-addiction combined with his sudden, violent and unexpected death at the hand of a state prison inmate was enough to push the boy into my dark corner of the world? Still, with both Rita and Astor here, none of whom (to my knowledge at least) shared these traits I couldn’t exactly confront him and ask ‘do you like to kill things?’

That simply wasn’t the way things were done. Harry wouldn’t have approved of such obvious admission of ones Need in such a public area.

No, it would have to wait.

Cody looked away, apparently unwilling to answer my question, and who could blame him? The desire to kill was not a thing you spoke very openly about and Cody was – for all he had opened up – a very silent kid. “Tell you what,” I said in the friendliest voice I could manage, “Next weekend, I was thinking about taking the boat out for a bit of fishing,” it was a lie, of course, “perhaps you’d like to come with me?” Cody grinned and I was exhilarated to find that it was the same smile I bore myself, when I was dancing Dexters Deadly Dissecting Dance. “I like fishing!” he said, with eagerness in his voice that left me no
doubt about the honesty of his answer. “We’ll have to ask your mother, though,”
I added, looking up at Rita who was smiling at us.

“Wouldn’t want to get in trouble, now would we?”

‘What a terrifying idea,’ I thought to myself, ‘there’s been another ME around without attracting my attention. I must be starting to lose it,’ I added musingly, and thought of the implications of training a child to be a killer, surely it would be better to get him to counselling and rid him of the urges? No, I knew the Need would only grow and grow, until it consumed him entirely if some psychologist did nothing more than poke around and hamfistedly try to indoctrinate him into becoming a couch potato. ‘No,’ I thought, ‘I’ve just become a father.’

And I looked at my little monster as he savagely attacked his ice cream.