“Any of our business?” Michael asked.
“No,” Carson said.
She raised her poor boy to her mouth, but instead of taking a bite, she returned it to the bag with the side dishes, rolled the top of the bag shut, and handed it to Michael.
“Damn,” she said, as she put the Honda in gear and hung a U-turn in the street.
“What were they shouting?” Michael asked.
“Her, I don’t know. Him, I couldn’t catch anything except the
“You think the dog ate their pizza?”
“They don’t seem angry.”
“If they aren’t angry, why is the dog running from them?”
“You’ll have to ask the dog.”
Ahead, the trio with eight legs turned left off the street and onto the Audubon Park entrance lane.
“Did the guy look familiar to you?” Michael asked, as he put their bags of takeout on the floor between his feet.
Accelerating out of the turn, Carson said, “I didn’t get a look at his face.”
“I think it was the district attorney.”
“Bucky Guitreau?”
“And his wife.”
“Good for him.”
“Good for him?”
“He’s not chasing naked after a dog with some hooker.”
“Not your ordinary New Orleans politician.”
“A family-values guy.”
“Can people run that fast?”
“Not our kind of people,” Carson said, turning left toward the park.
“That’s what I think. And barefoot.”
The park had closed at ten o’clock. The dog might have slipped around the gate. The naked runners had gone
As Carson drove across the rattling ruins, Michael said, “What are we gonna do?”
“I don’t know. I guess it depends on what they do.”
CHAPTER 21
Blue is the color of cold vision. All things are shades of blue, infinite shades of blue.
The double-wide restaurant-style freezer has a glass door. The glass is torment for Chameleon.
The shelves have been removed from the freezer. No food is ever stored here.
From a hook in the ceiling of the unit hangs a large sack. The sack is prison.
Prison is made from a unique polymeric fabric that is both as strong as bulletproof Kevlar and transparent.
This transparency is the first torment. The glass door is the second.
The sack resembles a giant teardrop, for it is filled with fourteen gallons of water and is pendulous.
Within the freezer, the temperature varies between twenty-four and twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit.
The water in the polymeric sack is a saline solution treated with chemicals in addition to the salt, to prevent congelation.
Although the temperature remains below freezing, although tiny ice particles float freely in the sack, the solution will not freeze.
Cold is the third torment for Chameleon.
Drifting in the sack, Chameleon lives now in a waking dream.
It is not able to close its eyes to its circumstances, because they have no lids.
Chameleon needs no sleep.
Perpetual awareness of its powerless condition is the fourth torment.
In its current circumstances, Chameleon cannot drown, for it has no lungs.
When not imprisoned, it breathes by virtue of a tracheal system akin to but materially different from that of insects. Spiracles on the surface admit air into tubes that pass throughout the body.
In semisuspended animation, it needs little oxygen. And the saline fluid flowing through its tracheal tubes is oxygen-enriched.
Although Chameleon looks like no insect on Earth, it resembles an insect more than it resembles anything else.
The size of a large cat, Chameleon weighs twenty-four pounds.
Although its brain weighs just 1.22 pounds, Chameleon is as intelligent as the average six-year-old child, but significantly more disciplined and cunning.
In torment, Chameleon waits.
CHAPTER 22
In the spa, the hot water churned against Victor’s body, and the bubbles of Dom Perignon burst across his tongue, and life was good.
The wall phone beside the spa rang. Only select Alphas had the number of this most private line.
The caller-ID window reported UNKNOWN.
Nevertheless, he snared the handset from the cradle. “Yes?”
A woman said, “Hello, darling.”
“Erika?”
“I was afraid you might have forgotten me,” she said.
Recalling how he had found her at dinner in the living room, he chose to remain the stern disciplinarian for a while longer. “You know better than to bother me here, except in an emergency.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you forgot me. It’s been more than a day since you had sex with me. I’m ancient history to you.”
Her tone had a faint but unmistakable sarcastic quality that caused him to sit up straighter in the spa. “What do you think you’re doing, Erika?”
“I was never loved, only used. I’m flattered to be remembered.”
Something was very wrong. “Where are you, Erika? Where are you in the house?”
“I’m not in the house, darling. How could I be?”
He would be in error if he continued to play her conversational game, whatever the point of it might be. He must not encourage what seemed to be rebellious behavior. Victor answered her with silence.
“My dearest master, how could I be in the house after you sent me away?”
He hadn’t sent her away. He had left her, battered and bleeding, in the living room, not a day previously but mere hours earlier.
She said, “How is the new one? Is she as lubricious as I was? When brutalized, does she cry as pitifully as I did?”
Victor began to see the nature of the game, and he was shocked by her effrontery.
“My darling, my maker, after you killed me, you had your people in the sanitation department take me to a landfill northeast of Lake Pontchartrain. You ask where I am in the house, but I am nowhere in the house — though I hope to return.”
Now that she’d carried this demented charade to an unacceptable extreme, silence was not the appropriate response to her.
