Chapter 23

Like a manta ray gliding through deep sea waters, Dexter cruised around the night-darkened streets of St. Louis, Missouri.

He’d visited the city twice before; his former law firm had a large client based there. His fondest memory of St. Louis was of staying at an opulent downtown hotel, and having the client’s executive assistant—a fine, redbone sista with booty for days—bent over an upholstered chair while he hammered her from behind and gazed out the window at the city’s famous giant arch.

He smiled wistfully. Those had been the good old days. Although married, he’d routinely taken advantage of the plentiful opportunities to have sex with other women. It was just sex; there was no relationship, no genuine emotion involved. He’d saved his heart, devotion, and deepest commitment for his wife.

And look at what she had done to him in return. The ungrateful bitch.

The GPS system directed him to a subdivision on the city’s outer limits. A tall, wrought iron fence ran along the perimeter of the property, festooned with holiday lights. Shrubbery garlanded with more lights flanked a large sign that read, Juniper Estates.

There was no gate; Dexter drove through the wide entrance. The community’s grandiloquent title was misleading. The residences were hardly estates. They were modest ranches and two-story homes with partial brick fronts and Hardiplank siding.

He followed a gently curving road. The houses and lawns were dusted with snow that resembled white frosting on a cake. Residents had gotten into the spirit of the holidays. Every yard boasted light displays; some of them had representations of little baby Jesus in the manger, reindeer, Santas, and snowmen.

Dexter’s heart swelled. The holidays always had been his favorite time of year. Traditionally, he would buy a lavish gift for himself: a Rolex, a new knife, an Italian suit. The tradition had been put on hold during his incarceration, but he aimed to resume it this year, in the boldest, most meaningful way.

He was going to give himself the gift of vengeance.

He drove around a bend. The home he sought was ahead, nestled in a cul-de-sac at the end of the block.

It was a basic two-story model with an attached garage. Neatly maintained shrubbery entwined with Christmas lights, which happened to be shut off. The rest of the house was dark, too.

Had his wife warned Thad about him? Had Thad, frightened, gone somewhere else to spend the night—perhaps in the arms of a lover?

It was a possibility.

It was half-past eight. Thad could have been out to dinner, or working a night shift somewhere. There were many possible answers as to why the house appeared to be vacant.

But in these situations, prudence, usually, was best. He would park around the corner, cut the engine, and wait for a while. Anyone going to the house would have to drive past him.He wasn’t worried that someone would identify him as a threat. An hour ago, he had ripped the “License Applied For” tag off the Chevy, and replaced it with a set of Missouri tags that he had stolen off a car parked at a strip mall. And the battered Chevy had the further advantage of being so ordinary, it was virtually invisible.

Like me, he thought.

After his shoplifting spree at the gas station, he’d spent some time reflecting upon his unusual talent. Wondering where it had come from, how, and why. He had not arrived at any conclusions, had not even formed any concrete theories. He had spent the last four years in prison, and his bid had been free of incident. Nothing unusual had happened to him in the joint.

And his pre-prison life had been equally mundane. He’d lived life in the fast lane: expensive cars, lots of money, sex with beautiful women, drugs. Although it would have seemed an extraordinarily exciting existence to another brother, to him, it was just everyday living.

Obviously, a talent to walk the earth invisible did not spring from everyday living. Something had happened to him, at some point in his life, to awaken—or instill—the cloaking ability. But what?

Maybe I was abducted by aliens. Little green men beamed me into their starship, injected me with extraterrestrial syringes, and zapped me back down here to roam the world as a guinea pig.

Although he was merely passing the time, musing ridiculous scenarios, a face surfaced in his mind like a full moon: a white-jacketed, middle-aged black man with skin so light he appeared biracial, curly brown hair, glasses, and inquisitive eyes.

Dexter sat up straighter in the seat.

Where have I seen that face before?

He couldn’t remember. The man might have been only a figment of his overheated imagination. But hadn’t he dreamed of the man last night, too?

Dexter never, ever forgot a face. When he thought of the guy, his heart rate accelerated, as if the man was an actual, flesh-and-blood person, someone with whom Dexter had experienced a very negative interaction.

The face retreated into the murk of Dexter’s subconscious mind.

He would wait, patiently, for a revelation. He was good at waiting when it suited his purposes.

He sank down into the seat again. His breath plumed in front of him, like answers yet to be fully formed.

About twenty minutes later, a pair of headlights broke up the blackness inside his car. Someone was coming.

He stayed low in the seat, hat pulled over his head.

A white Toyota SUV drove past, music bumping from the speakers. He recognized the song: “Santa Claus Comes Straight to the Ghetto,” by the immortal James Brown.

The truck headed toward Thad’s house.

“Invisible,” Dexter said. His heart beat like a tribal drum, and he spoke solemnly, as if he were supplicating some powerful, pagan god. “Make me invisible.”

A darting movement . . . a hissing of phantom serpents . . . and soon, the warm force field shrouded him.

He didn’t understand the source of this talent, and perhaps never would, but he didn’t need to comprehend the workings of it in order to use it for his advantage.

He selected a Bowie knife, checked to ensure that he had the roll of duct tape that he had taken from Betty’s house. Then he got out of the car.

* * *

The Toyota was pulling into the garage as Dexter approached at a brisk jog. There was a black Honda Accord already parked inside, on the left. The driver switched off the Toyota’s engine and doused the lights. The garage door began to rattle downward.

Dexter slipped inside between the vehicles.

No one sounded an alarm. His cloak was fully intact.

The garage door thumped shut against the concrete floor. Weak yellow light filtered from an overhead bulb and glimmered on Dexter’s blade.

The driver’s side door opened. A tall, athletically-built, dark-skinned brother with dreadlocks climbed out. He wore jeans, a black leather jacket, and Timberlands. It wasn’t Thad; it was probably his lover.

“I’ll check the house first, all right,” the guy said, in a rumbling, Barry White baritone. “You sit tight.”

“You’re so sweet, Malik,” the passenger said, in a soft, lisping voice that seemed to be the exclusive province of openly gay men. It was Thad, for sure. “Be careful, baby.”

Malik was clearly the man of the relationship. Dexter had figured as much. Their exchange also proved that his wife had warned Thad about him.

Malik shut the door. Dexter was only a few feet away, at the rear of the vehicle, and still Malik didn’t see him.

But he was going to feel him.

When Malik turned to walk toward the door that connected the garage to the house, Dexter grabbed the tail of his jacket, hiked it up, and rammed the blade deep into his right kidney. Malik screamed, a surprisingly high shriek for a man with such an authoritative voice.

Dexter twisted the knife savagely, and a spasm shuddered through the man’s body. He grabbed a fistful of Malik’s dreads and pushed the guy to the floor, easing the blade out of his flesh. Malik dropped like a sack of potatoes, twitching weakly and moaning. A puddle of blood began to form around his body.

Dexter felt lighter, and cooler. He checked himself, saw the force field had vanished; his body was clearly visible to him again. Did intense physical activity disrupt the energy field? He didn’t know.

He knew only that it was too late to turn back now.

Inside the vehicle, Thad was staring at him, eyes full of terror.

Dexter reached for the door handle on the driver’s side. Thad hit a button, snapping down the power locks before Dexter could gain entry.

“You’re only going to make this harder on yourself,” Dexter said.

“Go to hell!” Thad picked up a cell phone.

Dexter knelt to Malik—the guy had gone still and silent—and found a ring of car and house keys resting in his curled fingers. He mashed the button on the keychain to disengage the car locks, and jerked open the driver’s side door.

Thad cowered against the passenger door. He was a mocha-skinned guy, girlishly thin, with a clean-shaven face, a fade haircut, and diamond stud earrings in both ear lobes. He clutched the cell phone in his trembling hands.

 Dexter saw the phone display, and relaxed. Thad hadn’t completed the call.

“Please . . . don’t kill me,” Thad said. Tears slid down his cheeks.

“Put down the phone. We don’t need the cops here. I only want to talk to you.”

“You won’t kill me?” Thad was almost hyperventilating.

“If you tell me what I want to know—no, I won’t kill you. Let’s go inside and chat.”

“Okay.” Thad appeared to relax.

“Come on,” Dexter said.

“Liar!” Thad flung the cell phone at Dexter’s face.

The phone smashed like a brick against Dexter’s forehead. He reeled backward, momentarily stunned.

Thad had hopped out of the truck and was scrambling to the connecting door. Dexter shook off his daze, and chased after him.

Thad had taken his keys out of his pocket. He was fumbling to unlock the door. He looked over his shoulder, and Dexter threw a right hook at him that connected squarely with his jaw. The back of Thad’s head thunked against the wall, and his knees buckled, sending him to the ground, unconscious.

Standing over him, Dexter massaged his fist.

“Our talk isn’t going to be friendly now.”

Dexter unlocked the door and pulled Thad inside the house by his legs. It was a lavishly decorated home, which Dexter would have expected of two men living together. The rooms were painted bright colors. The furniture had soft edges, smooth lines, fluffy decorative pillows on the sofas and chairs. Lots of photos of the lovebirds. An abundance of live plants. Intricately carved, wooden figures of nude men.

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.