a situation, and there’s debris everywhere.”
Carson glanced at the body of the Bucky replicant. Still dead.
“Give us like ten or fifteen minutes to get somewhere that makes sense. I’ll call you back, let you know where.” Pocketing his phone, he said to Carson, “Deucalion’s almost done at Mercy, he found what he hoped to find.”
“What do you want to do about the dog?”
Having been drinking from a puddle on the pavement, the shepherd looked up and favored Carson, then Michael, with a beseeching look.
Michael said, “We take him with us.”
“The whole car’s gonna smell like wet dog.”
“It’s a lot worse for him. From his point of view, the whole car smells like wet cops.”
“He’s a pretty boy,” she admitted. “And he looks like he ought to be a police dog. I wonder what his name is.”
“Wait a minute,” Michael said. “This must be Duke. The D.A.’s dog. Goes to court with Bucky. Or used to.”
“The Duke of Orleans,” Carson said. “Saved two kids in a fire.”
The dog’s tail spun so fast that Carson half expected it would propel him across the slick pavement in the manner of one of those Florida Everglades air-boats.
The wind soughed in the trees, and suddenly it seemed to carry the scent of the sea.
She opened the car door, coaxed the shepherd into the backseat, and got in behind the wheel once more. As she returned her Urban Sniper, muzzle down, to the leg space in front of the passenger’s seat, she realized that the bags of Acadiana food were gone.
Through the windshield, she saw Michael returning from a nearby roadside trash receptacle.
“What have you done?” she demanded when he splashed into his seat and pulled the door shut.
“We’d already eaten most of it.”
“We hadn’t eaten
“The smell of it would drive the dog crazy.”
“So we could’ve given him some.”
“It’s too rich for a dog. He’d be puking it up later.”
“The stupid Curly ring, and now this.”
She put the car in gear, hung a U-turn without driving over the Bucky replicant, switched the headlights to low beam, drove across the mangled park gate, hoping not to puncture a tire, and turned right onto St. Charles Avenue.
“So … I’m not going to get the silent treatment, am I?” Michael asked.
“You should be so lucky.”
“Another prayer unanswered.”
“Here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”
“I can’t afford it,” he said.
“Do you think I eat too much?”
“It’s none of my business what you eat.”
“You think I’m going to get a fat ass, don’t you?”
“Uh-oh.”
In the backseat, the shepherd panted but not with anxiety. He sounded happy. Maybe he’d heard so much replicant-speak lately that he delighted in real human conversation.
“Admit it. You’re worried I’ll get a fat ass.”
“I don’t sit around thinking about the future of your ass.”
“You were so hot for the Janet monster’s tight butt.”
“I wasn’t hot for it. I just noticed it, you know, as a nice work of nature, like you’d comment on a great wisteria vine if you saw one.”
“Wisteria? That is so lame. Besides, Victor’s people
“I don’t have a chance here if you’re gonna parse my every word.”
“Just so you know, my butt is as small as hers was, and even tighter.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“You’ll have to take my word for it because there isn’t going to be any exhibition. If you dropped a quarter on my butt, it would bounce to the ceiling.”
“That sounds like a challenge.”
“Let me tell you, partner, it’s gonna be a long time before you get a chance to bounce a quarter off my butt.”
“Just in case, from now on, I’m going to be sure I’ve always got a quarter in my pocket.”
“Bounce it off my butt,” she said, “you’ll get back two dimes and a nickel in change.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have no idea.”
He said, “Two dimes and a nickel in change,” and he broke into laughter.
His laughter was contagious, and when the dog heard them both laughing, he made sweet mewling sounds of delight.
After a minute, Carson settled to serious once more and said, “Thanks, pal. You saved my ass back there with the Bucky thing.”
“Each time we have to throw down on one of these New Race,” she said, “seems like we squeak by with less room to spare than before.”
“Yeah. But at least we do keep on squeakin’ by.”
CHAPTER 28
At 2:15 A.M., at Victor’s stylish workstation in the main lab at the Hands of Mercy, as Deucalion completed his electronic fishing and backed out of the computer, he thought he heard in the distance a scream as thin as the plaint of a lost child.
Given some of the experiments being conducted in this building, screams were not likely to be infrequent. No doubt the windows had been bricked up not solely to foil prying eyes but also to ensure that disturbing sounds would fail to reach passersby in the street.
The staff here, the subjects of the experiments, and those who were growing in the creation tanks were without exception victims of their lunatic god, and Deucalion pitied them. He hoped eventually to free them all from their anguish and despair, not one at a time as he had freed Annunciata and Lester, but somehow en masse.
He had no way to free them right now, however, and as soon as he heard from Michael, he would be leaving the Hands of Mercy in a quantum leap and joining the detectives. He could not be distracted by whatever horrors might be unfolding elsewhere in the building.
When the sound came again, marginally louder and longer than before but still distant, Deucalion recognized that it conveyed neither terror nor physical pain, and therefore was not a scream at all, but instead a shriek. He could not tell what the crier of this cry meant to express.
He stood listening — and only realized after the fact that he had risen from the workstation chair.
The silence following the wail had an expectant quality, like the mute sky during the second or two between a violent flash of lightning and the crash of thunder. Here, the sound came first and, though faint, managed to be as terrible as the loudest thunderclap.
He waited for the equivalent of the flash, cause after effect. But what followed a half minute later was another shriek.
On the third hearing, the sound had significance, not because he could identify its source but because it recalled to him cries he heard in certain dreams that for two hundred years had haunted him. They were not
