Dean Koontz - City of Night

Dooley had not been programmed as an assassin, though he wished that he had been. Instead, he was basically a sneak with a lot of technical knowledge.

Cindi Lovewell drove past Dooley, who was sitting in his parked PT Cruiser in Faubourg Marigny. The Lovewells had been issued an SUV — a Mercury Mountaineer with darkly tinted side and rear windows — which facilitated the discreet transport of dead bodies.

Cindi liked the vehicle not only because it had a lot of power and handled well but also because it had plenty of room for the children she yearned to produce.

When they had to drive to Crosswoods Waste Management north of Lake Pontchartrain with a couple of corpses, how much nicer the trip would be if it were a family adventure. They could stop along the way for a picnic.

In the front passenger’s seat, studying the red dot that blinked near the center of the street map on the screen of their satellite-navigation system, Benny said, “The cops should be parked about” — he surveyed the curbed vehicles past which they drifted, and glanced at the screen — “right here .”

Cindi rolled slowly past an unmarked sedan, cheap iron that had seen a lot of use. Victor’s people were always better equipped than the so-called authorities.

She parked at a red curb near the end of the block. Benny’s driver’s license was in the name of Dr. Benjamin Lovewell, and the Mountaineer had MD plates. From the console box, he took a card that read PHYSICIAN ON CALL, and hung it from the rearview mirror.

Tailing a target, professional killers need to be able to park as conveniently as possible. And when police see a speeding vehicle with MD plates, they often assume that the driver is rushing to a hospital.

Victor disliked his funds being spent on parking tickets and traffic fines.

By the time they walked past the sedan to the PT Cruiser, Dooley had gotten out of his car to meet them. If he’d been a dog, he would have been a whippet: lean, long-legged, with a pointy face.

“They went into The Other Ella,” Dooley said, pointing to a restaurant across the street. “Not even five minutes ago. Did you kill anybody yet today?”

“Not yet,” Benny said.

“Did you kill anybody yesterday?”

“Three days ago,” Cindi said.

“How many?”

“Three,” Benny said. “Their replicants were ready.”

Dooley’s eyes were dark with envy. “I wish I could kill some of them. I’d like to kill all of them.”

“It’s not your job,” Benny said.

“Yet,” Cindi said, meaning that the day would come when the New Race would have achieved sufficient numbers to bring their war into the open, whereupon the greatest slaughter in human history would mark the swift extinction of the Old Race.

“Everything is so much harder,” Dooley said, “when we have to watch them all around us, watch them leading their lives any way they want, any way they please.”

A young couple walked past, shepherding their two tow headed children, one boy and one girl.

Cindi turned to watch them. She wanted to kill the parents right now, right here on the sidewalk, and take the children.

“Easy,” Benny said.

“Don’t worry. There’s not going to be another incident,” Cindi assured him.

“That’s good.”

“What incident?” Dooley asked.

Instead of answering him, Benny said, “You can go. We can handle it from here.”

Occasionally smacking her lips over her broken yellow teeth, Francine led Carson and Michael through the restaurant, across a busy kitchen, into a storeroom, and up a set of steep stairs.

At the top were a deep landing and a blue door. Francine pressed a bell push beside the door, but there was no audible ring.

“Don’t give it away for free,” Francine advised Michael. “Lots of ladies would be happy to keep you in style.”

She glanced at Carson and snorted with disapproval.

“And stay away from this one,” Francine told Michael. “She’ll freeze your cojones off as sure as if you dipped them in liquid nitrogen.”

Then she left them on the landing and started unsteadily down the stairs.

“You could push her,” he told Carson, “but it would be wrong.”

“Actually,” Carson said, “if Lulana were here, even she’d agree, Jesus would be all right with it.”

The blue door was opened by a Star Wars kind of guy: as squat as R2-D2, as bald as Yoda, and as ugly as Jabba the Hutt.

“You been truly blood-sworn by Aubrey,” he said, “so I ain’t goin’ to take away dem kill-boys you carryin’ under your left arms, nor neither dat snub-nose you got snuggled on a belt clip just above your ass, missy.”

“And good afternoon to you, too,” Michael said.

“You follow me like baby ducks their mama, ‘cause you make the wrongest move, you be six ways dead.”

The room beyond the blue door was furnished with only a pair of straight-backed chairs.

A shaved gorilla in black pants, suspenders, a white chambray shirt, and a porkpie hat sat in one of the chairs. On the floor next to his chair was a tented paperback — a Harry Potter novel — that he had evidently set aside when Francine had pressed the bell push.

Across his thighs lay a semi-auto 12-gauge, on which both his hands rested in the business position. He wasn’t aiming the shotgun at them, but he would be able to blow their guts out before their pistols cleared their holsters, and blast off their faces as an afterthought even before their bodies hit the floor.

Baby-duck walking, Carson and Michael obediently followed their squat leader through another door into a room with a cracked yellow linoleum floor, blue beadboard wainscoting, gray walls, and two poker tables.

Around the nearest table sat three men, one woman, and an Asian transvestite.

This sounded like the opening to a pretty good joke, but Michael couldn’t think of a punch line.

Two of the players were drinking Coke, two had cans of Dr Pepper, and at the transvestite’s place stood a cordial glass and a bottle of anisette.

None of the poker players seemed to have the slightest interest in Carson and Michael. Neither the woman nor the transvestite winked at him.

In the middle of the table were stacks of poker chips. If the greens were fifties and the blacks were hundreds, there was perhaps eighty thousand dollars riding on this hand.

Another shaved gorilla stood by a window. He carried his piece in a paddle holster at his hip, and he kept his hand on it as Carson and Michael passed through his duty station.

A third door led to a shabby conference room that smelled like lung cancer. Twelve chairs stood around a scarred table on which were fourteen ashtrays.

At the head of the table sat a man with a merry face, lively blue eyes, and a mustache. His Justin Wilson hat rested on the tops of his jug-handle ears.

He rose as they approached, revealing that he wore his pants above his waistline, between his navel and his breasts.

Their mama duck said, “Mr. Godot, though they smells like da worst kind of righteous, these here be da ones what were vouched by Aubrey, so don’t bust my stones if’n you got to gaff ‘em like catfish ‘fore dis be finished.”

To the right of the man with jug ears and slightly behind him stood Big Foot in a seersucker suit. He made the previous gorillas look like mere chimps.

Big Foot looked as if he would not only kill them but eat them at the smallest provocation.

Godot, on the other hand, was hospitable. He held out his right hand and said, “Any friend to Aubrey, he a friend to me, ‘specially when he come with cash money.”

Shaking the offered hand, Michael said, “I expected we’d have to wait for you, Mr. Godot, not the other way around. I hope we’re not late.”