If she had been Erika Five, she would have dropped dead when he used the termination phrase.
Erika Four was alive again. For the first time ever, Victor seemed to have a marital problem with which he could not easily cope.
CHAPTER 25
The district attorney and his wife did not pull over, of course, because Carson didn’t have a siren or an array of flashing emergency beacons, because they probably knew they were not in any condition to pass a Breathalyzer test, but mostly because they were miscreations cloned in a lab by a narcissistic lunatic and were going haywire as fast as the average car would break down on the day that its warranty expired.
Leaning toward her, reading the speedometer again, Michael said, “Twenty-seven miles an hour. The dog is flagging. They’re gonna run right up his ass.”
As though multiple-word chants had become too exhausting to remember, Bucky and Janet each resorted to one word. She shouted, “Dog, dog, dog, dog….” He cried out, “Kill, kill, kill, kill….”
“Shoot them,” Michael said. “Shoot ’em on the run.”
“I can’t fire a.50 Magnum one-handed while driving a car,” Carson protested.
Evidently, Bucky was at least peripherally aware of them, after all, and they were enough of a distraction from his pursuit of the dog to annoy him. He closed the gap between them, running alongside the Honda, grabbed the side mirror for balance, and reached through the window toward Carson.
She stepped on the brake, and the mirror snapped off in Bucky’s hand. He stumbled, fell, tumbled away into the darkness.
The Honda shrieked to a full stop, and about fifty feet ahead of them, Janet halted without a shriek. She turned toward them, jogging in place.
Holstering his Desert Eagle, Michael said, “This is like some bizarre Playboy-channel special.” He handed one of the Urban Snipers to Carson and snatched up the other. “Not that I ever watch the Playboy channel.”
Michael threw open his door, and Carson switched the headlights on high beam because darkness helped her quarry, hampered her. As her heart provided the thunder that the storm had not yet produced, she clambered out into the rain, surveying the night, looking for Bucky, not finding him.
Glare of headlights reflected by the wet pavement, black and silver underfoot, and not far to the west, beyond trees, the lights of Walnut Street and Audubon and Broadway, which didn’t reach this far, and north- northeast, the university lights of Tulane and Loyola, which didn’t reach this far either, the park deep and dark to the east and to the south, the glow of maybe De Paul Hospital far out there.
A lonely place to die, to be found in the morning, left like illegally dumped trash, left like her father and mother were left all those years ago, facedown under power lines, near a double-circuit tower, on a grassy bank of the levee in Riverbend, just off the bike path, each shot once in the back of the head, with carrion-eating blackbirds gathering overhead on the crossarms of the tower as day broke …
Now this park, this lonely darkness, felt like Carson’s levee bank, her place to be left like a sack of trash, to be pecked at by bright-eyed birds. She had been out of the Honda ten seconds at most, edging away from the vehicle and defining the arc of the potential threat with the barrel of the shotgun, left to right, then right to left, but the ten seconds felt like ten minutes.
Suddenly a pale form rose from a drainage swale on the farther side of the road, the Bucky replicant, bloodied by his high-speed fall but back on his feet and shouting: “Something terrible has happened, terrible, terrible.” Looking no less powerful than a bull, he put his head down and charged her.
Carson planted her feet wide, assumed the stance, the compact shotgun held low in both hands, right hand on the pistol grip in front of the forecomb, left hand cupping the slide, weapon held slightly to her right side, both elbows bent, the better to absorb recoil, which would be brutal if she locked her joints — a tendon-tearing, shoulder-dislocating kind of brutal. As serious as a weapon gets, the Sniper fired only rhino-stopping slugs, not buckshot with a wide spread, but nevertheless she aimed by instinct, no time for anything else. The Bucky Guitreau impersonator, with blood in his wild eyes, lips snarled back from his teeth, barreled straight at her, fearless, ferocious.
She squeezed off the round, the recoil jumped her backward a few inches, the barrel kicked up like she knew it would, pain knocked through her shoulders, a sensitive filling in a molar throbbed the way it did once in a while when she drank something ice-cold, and though she wasn’t in an enclosed space, the shot rang in her ears.
The slug took the replicant dead-center in the chest, cracking his sternum, splintering bone inward, blood blooming, his left arm flailing up reflexively, right arm stroking down reflexively, as if he were launching into some novelty dance like the Chicken. Jolted but not staggered, slowed but not halted, he came on, not shouting anymore, but not screaming either, feeling no pain, and she fired again, but screwed up because she was shocked and scared by how he surged forward, didn’t get him in the gut or the chest, but in the right shoulder, which should have torn his arm off or at least a chunk of it, didn’t, and he was reaching out to grab the barrel of the Sniper, looking strong enough and furious enough and focused enough to take maybe two more rounds and still tear her face off, rip out her throat.
Michael appeared at the back of the Honda, his shotgun boomed, scored a flank hit just above the hip, and Carson fired again, maybe nailed the replicant point-blank in the left thigh, but his arm was in past the muzzle of the shotgun, knocking the barrel high, his crimson hand reaching toward her face. Guitreau said something that sounded like “Gimme your eyes,” and Michael fired again, a head shot, and that did it, finally dropped the Bucky thing, naked on the silver-and-black pavement, facedown, still for a moment, but then trying to belly-crawl away from them, a broken-melon head and other devastating wounds but trying to hitch away as if he were a crippled roach. He became still once more, lying there motionless, motionless, then a last convulsive spasm, and he was done.
From the corner of her eye, Carson saw something move, something close, and she swiveled toward tight- assed Janet.
CHAPTER 26
Cautioning silence, Erika Five led Jocko, the albino troll, up one of two sets of back stairs, to the second floor, well away from the centrally located master suite.
Of the three mansions that had stood on the three lots Victor purchased, two were very alike architecturally. He joined them in such a way that a foreground trio of oaks and a background lattice arbor draped with evergreen St. Vincent lilac left the impression, from the street, that the houses were still separate.
Between them, the two residences initially included thirty-four bedrooms, but interior walls were taken down and all that space put to other uses. Victor had no family and allowed no overnight guests.
He had intended to tear down the third residence and incorporate that lot into the grounds of his estate.
A city politician with ambitions for the governorship — and with rigid ideas about the preservation of historic buildings — blocked Victor’s attempt to have the third house certified for demolition. He tried to resolve the issue with respect for her public office and her social eminence. A fat bribe would have bought her cooperation on most matters; however, she believed that a reputation as a committed preservationist was key to the achievement of her political goals.
After the politician’s replicant had been birthed from the tank, Victor had the real woman snatched from her home and brought to the Hands of Mercy, where he described — and then demonstrated — to her the most ingenious methods of torture devised by the Stasi, the secret police of the former East Germany. When in time she stopped begging for surcease and begged instead for death, Victor allowed her to choose the instrument of murder from an imaginative selection that included, among other things, a compressed-air nail gun, a hand-held power sander, and a large bottle of carbolic acid.
The woman’s complete mental collapse and retreat into catatonic detachment not only made it impossible for
