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Doakes looked around the room and back at me. I ll be outside, he said, and turned for the door.
Doakes, I said, thinking it really wasn t a good idea. But I got no more than one step after him when
once again I was savagely ambushed.
Gotcha! Vince roared out, holding me in a clumsy bear hug.
Vince, let me go, I said.
No way! he chortled. Hey, everybody! Help me out with the blushing bridegroom! There was a
surge of ex conga liners from the floor and the last standing cop by the fountain and I was suddenly at
the center of a mini mosh pit, the press of bodies heaving me toward the chair where Camilla Figg had
passed out and rolled onto the floor. I struggled to get away, but it was no use. There were too many
of them, too filled with Vince s rocket juice. I could do nothing but watch as Sergeant Doakes, with a
last molten-stone glare, went through the front door and out into the night.
They levered me into the chair and stood around me in a tight half-circle and it was obvious that I was
going nowhere. I hoped Doakes was as good as he thought he was, because he was clearly on his own
for a while.
The music stopped, and I heard a familiar sound that made the hairs on my arms stand up straight: it
was the ratchet of duct tape spooling off the roll, my own favorite prelude to a Concerto for Knife
Blade. Someone held my arms and Vince wrapped three big loops of tape around me, fastening me to
the chair. It was not tight enough to hold me, but it would certainly slow me enough to allow the
crowd to keep me in the chair.
All righty then! Vince called out, and one of the strippers turned on her boom box and the show
began. The first stripper, a sullen-looking black woman, began to undulate in front of me while
removing a few unnecessary items of clothing. When she was almost naked, she sat on my lap and
licked my ear while wiggling her butt. Then she forced my head between her breasts, arched her back,
and leaped backward, and the other stripper, a woman with Asian features and blond hair, came
forward and repeated the whole process. When she had wiggled around on my lap for a few moments,
she was joined by the first stripper, and the two of them sat together, one on each side of me. Then
they leaned forward so that their breasts rubbed my face, and began to kiss each other.
At this point, dear Vince brought them each a large glass of his murderous fruit punch, and they drank
it off, still wiggling rhythmically. One of them muttered, Whoo. Good punch. I couldn t tell which
one of them said it, but they both seemed to agree. The two women began to writhe a great deal more
now and the crowd around me began to howl like it was full moon at a rabies convention. Of course,
my view was somewhat obscured by four very large and unnaturally hard breasts two in each
shade but at least it sounded like everyone except me was having a great deal of fun.
Sometimes you have to wonder if there is some kind of malign force with a sick sense of humor
running our universe. I knew enough about human males to know that most of them would happily
trade their excess body parts to be where I was. And yet, all I could think of was that I would be
equally pleased to trade a body part or two to get out of this chair and away from the naked squirming
women. Of course, I would have preferred it to be somebody else s body part, but I would cheerfully
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collect it.
But there was no justice; the two strippers sat there on my lap, bouncing to the music and sweating all
over my beautiful rayon shirt and each other, while around us the party raged on. After what seemed
like an endless spell in purgatory, broken only by Vince bringing the strippers two more drinks, the two
roiling women finally moved off my lap and danced around the circling crowd. They touched faces,
sipped from the partyers drinks, and grabbed at an occasional crotch. I used the distraction to free my
hands and remove the duct tape, and it was only then that I noticed that no one was paying any
attention at all to Dimpled Dexter, the theoretical Man of the Hour. One quick look around showed me
why: everyone in the room was standing in a slack-jawed circle watching the two strippers as they
danced, completely naked now, glistening with sweat and spilled drinks. Vince looked like a cartoon
the way he stood there with his eyes almost bulged out of his head, but he was in good company.
Everyone who was still conscious was in a similar pose, staring without breathing, swaying slightly
from side to side. I could have barreled through the room blasting away on a flaming tuba and no one
would have paid me any attention.
I stood up, walked carefully around behind the crowd, and slipped out the front door. I had thought
that Sergeant Doakes would wait somewhere near the house, but he was nowhere to be seen. I walked
across the street and looked in his car. It was empty, too. I looked up and down the street and it was
the same. There was no sign of him.
Doakes was gone.
CHAPTER 24
T HERE ARE MANY ASPECTS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE THAT I will never understand, and I
don t just mean intellectually. I mean that I lack the ability to empathize, as well as the capacity to feel
emotion. To me it doesn t seem like much of a loss, but it does put a great many areas of ordinary
human experience completely outside my comprehension.
However, there is one almost overwhelmingly common human experience I feel powerfully, and that is
temptation. And as I looked at the empty street outside Vince Masuoka s house and realized that
somehow Dr. Danco had taken Doakes, I felt it wash over me in dizzying, nearly suffocating waves. I
was free. The thought surged around me and pummeled me with its elegant and completely justified
simplicity. It would be the easiest thing in the world just to walk away. Let Doakes have his reunion
with the Doctor, report it in the morning, and pretend that I d had too much to drink my engagement
party, after all! and I wasn t really sure what had happened to the good sergeant. And who would
contradict me? Certainly no one inside at the party could say with anything approaching realistic
certainty that I was not watching the peep show with them the whole time.
Doakes would be gone. Whisked away forever into a final haze of lopped off limbs and madness, never
to lighten my dark doorway again. Liberty for Dexter, free to be me, and all I had to do was absolutely
nothing. Even I could handle that.
So why not walk away? For that matter, why not take a slightly longer stroll, down to Coconut Grove,
where a certain children s photographer had been waiting for my attentions much too long? So simple,
so safe why, indeed, not? A perfect night for dark delight with a downbeat, the moon nearly full and
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that small missing edge lending the whole thing a casual, informal air. The urgent whispers agreed,
rising in a hissed insistent chorus.
It was all there. Time and target and most of a moon and even an alibi, and the pressure had been
growing for so long now that I could close my eyes and let it happen all by itself, walk through the
whole happy thing on autopilot. And then the sweet release again, the afterglow of buttery muscles
with all the knots drained out, the happy coasting into my first complete sleep of far too long now. And
in the morning, rested and relieved, I would tell Deborah . . .
Oh. Deborah. There was that, wasn t there?
I would tell Deborah that I had taken the sudden opportunity of a no-Doakes zone and gone dashing
into the darkness with a Need and a Knife as the last few fingers of her boyfriend trickled away into a
trash heap? Somehow, even with my inner cheerleaders insisting that it would be all right, I didn t think
she would go for it. It had the feel of something final in my relationship with my sister, a small lapse in
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Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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