Dinner was annoyingly pleasant, as if to prove to me that I was buying into a lifetime of happiness and pork chops, and I played along even though my heart was not in it. I cut the meat into small chunks, wishing I was cutting something else and thinking of the South Pacific cannibals who referred to humans as “long pork.” It was appropriate, really, because it was that other pork I truly longed to slice into and not this tepid mushroom soup-covered thing on my plate. But I smiled and stabbed the green beans and made it all the way through to coffee somehow. Ordeal by pork chop, but I survived.

After dinner, Rita and I sipped our coffee as the kids ate small portions of frozen yogurt. Although coffee is supposed to be a stimulant, it gave me no help in thinking of a way out of this-not even a way to slip out for a few hours, let alone avoid this lifelong bliss that had snuck up behind me and grabbed me around the neck. I felt like I was slowly fading away at the edges and melting into my disguise, until eventually the happy rubber mask would meld with my actual features and I would truly become the thing I had been pretending to be, taking the kids to soccer, buying flowers when I drank too many beers, comparing detergents and cutting costs instead of flensing the wicked of their unneeded flesh. It was a very depressing line of thought, and I might have grown unhappy if the doorbell had not rung just in time.

“That must be Deborah,” I said. I’m fairly sure I kept most of the hope for rescue out of my voice. I got up and went to the front door, swinging it open to reveal a pleasant-looking, overweight woman with long blond hair.

“Oh,” she said. “You must be, ahm- Is Rita here?”

Well, I suppose I was ahm, although until now I hadn’t been aware of it. I called Rita to the door and she came, smiling. “Kathy!” she said. “So nice to see you. How are the boys? Kathy lives next door,” she explained to me.

“Aha,” I said. I knew most of the kids in the area, but not their parents. But this one was apparently the mother of the faintly sleazy eleven-year-old boy next door, and his nearly always-absent older brother. Since that meant she was probably not carrying a car bomb or a vial of anthrax, I smiled and went back to the table with Cody and Astor.

“Jason’s at band camp,” she said. “Nick is lounging around the house trying to reach puberty so he can grow a mustache.”

“Oh Lord,” Rita said.

“Nicky is a creep,” Astor whispered. “He wanted me to pull down my pants so he could see.” Cody stirred his frozen yogurt into a frozen pudding.

“Listen, Rita, I’m sorry to bother you at dinnertime,” Kathy said.

“We just finished. Would you like some coffee?”

“Oh, no, I’m down to one cup a day,” she said. “Doctor’s orders. But it’s about our dog-I just wanted to ask if you had seen Rascal? He’s been missing for a couple of days now, and Nick is so worried.”

“I haven’t seen him. Let me ask the kids,” Rita said. But as she turned to ask, Cody looked at me, got up without a sound, and walked out of the room. Astor stood up, too.

“We haven’t seen him,” she said. “Not since he knocked over the trash last week.” And she followed Cody out of the room. They left their desserts on the table, still only half eaten.

Rita watched them go with her mouth open, and then turned back to her neighbor. “I’m sorry, Kathy. I guess nobody’s seen him. But we’ll keep an eye open, all right? I’m sure he’ll turn up, tell Nick not to worry.” She prattled on for another minute with Kathy, while I looked at the frozen yogurt and wondered what I had just seen.

The front door closed and Rita came back to her cooling coffee. “Kathy’s a nice person,” she said. “But her boys can be a handful. She’s divorced, her ex bought a place in Islamorada, he’s a lawyer? But he stays down there, so Kathy’s had to raise the boys alone and I don’t think she’s very firm sometimes. She’s a nurse with a podiatrist over by the university.”

“And her shoe size?” I asked.

“Am I blathering?” Rita asked. She bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I guess I was just worrying a little bit… I’m sure it’s just…” She shook her head and looked at me. “Dexter. Did you-”

I never got to find out if I did, because my cell phone chirped. “Excuse me,” I said, and I went over to the table by the front door where I had left it.

“Doakes just called,” Deborah said to me without even saying hello. “The guy he went to talk to is running. Doakes is following to see where he goes, but he needs us for backup.”

“Quickly, Watson, the game’s afoot,” I said, but Deborah was not in a literary mood.

“I’ll pick you up in five minutes,” she said.

I LEFT RITA WITH A HURRIED EXPLANATION AND WENT outside to wait. Deborah was as good as her word, and in five and a half minutes we were heading north on Dixie Highway.

“They’re out on Miami Beach,” she told me. “Doakes said he approached the guy, Oscar, and told him what’s up. Oscar says, let me think about it, Doakes says okay, I’ll call you. But he watches the house from up the street, and ten minutes later the guy is out the door and into his car with an overnight bag.”

“Why would he run now?”

“Wouldn’t you run if you knew Danco was after you?”

“No,” I said, thinking happily of what I might actually do if I came face-to-face with the Doctor. “I would set some kind of trap for him, and let him come.” And then, I thought, but did not say aloud to Deborah.

“Well, Oscar isn’t you,” she said.

“So few of us are,” I said. “Where is he headed?”

She frowned and shook her head. “Right now he’s just cruising around, and Doakes is tailing him.”

“Where do we think he’s going to lead us?” I asked.

Deborah shook her head and cut around an old ragtop Cadillac loaded with yelling teenagers. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and headed up the on-ramp onto the Palmetto Expressway with the pedal to the floor. “Oscar is still our best chance. If he tries to leave the area we’ll pick him up, but until then we need to stick with him to see what happens.”

“Very good, a really terrific idea-but what exactly do we think might happen?”

“I don’t know, Dexter!” she snapped at me. “But we know this guy is a target sooner or later, all right? And now he knows it, too. So maybe he’s just trying to see if he’s being followed before he runs. Shit,” she said, and swerved around an old flatbed truck loaded with crates of chickens. The truck was going possibly thirty-five miles per hour, had no taillights, and three men sat on top of the load, hanging on to battered hats with one hand and the load with the other. Deborah gave them a quick blast of the siren as she pulled around them. It didn’t seem to have any effect. The men on top of the load didn’t even blink.

“Anyway,” she said as she straightened out the wheel and accelerated again, “Doakes wants us on the Miami side for backup. So Oscar can’t get too fancy. We’ll run parallel along Biscayne.”

It made sense; as long as Oscar was on Miami Beach, he couldn’t escape in any other direction. If he tried to dash across a causeway or head north to the far side of Haulover Park and cross, we were there to pick him up. Unless he had a helicopter stashed, we had him cornered. I let Deborah drive, and she headed north rapidly without actually killing anyone.

At the airport we swung east on the 836. The traffic picked up a little here, and Deborah wove in and out, concentrating fiercely. I kept my thoughts to myself and she displayed her years of training with Miami traffic by winning what amounted to a nonstop free-for-all high-speed game of chicken. We made it safely through the interchange with I-95 and slid down onto Biscayne Boulevard. I took a deep breath and let it out carefully as Deborah eased back into street traffic and down to normal speed.