Dean Koontz - City of Night

“Leave Arnie alone.”

“Randal thinks there is enough happiness here for two, but maybe Arnie doesn’t think so. Randal needs to hear Arnie say two brothers are okay.”

“Arnie hardly ever talks,” she said. “Depending on his mood, he might not even tune in to you. He zones out. It’s like the castle is real and he’s inside it, locked away. He might not really hear you.”

“Mother, you are talking too loud, too much, too fast. Loud-fast talk sounds ugly.”

He crosses toward the door to the hall.

She raises her voice: “Randal, untie me. Untie me right this minute! ”

“You aren’t acting like a nice mother now. Shouting scares Randal. Shouting is not happiness.”

“Okay. All right. Slow and quiet. Please, Randal. Wait. Please untie me.”

At the threshold of the hallway, he glances back at her. “Why?”

“So I can take you to see Arnie.”

“Randal can find him all right.”

“Sometimes he hides. He’s very difficult to find when he hides. I know all his favorite hiding places.”

Staring at her, he senses deceit. “Mother, are you going to try to hurt Randal?”

“No. Of course not. Why would I hurt you?”

“Sometimes mothers hurt their children. There’s a whole Web site about it — www.homicidalmothers.com.”

Now that he thinks about it, he realizes that the poor children never suspect what’s coming. They trust their mom. She says she loves them, and they trust her. Then she chops them up in their beds or drives them in a lake and drowns them.

“Randal sure hopes you’re a good mother,” he says. “But maybe you need to answer a lot more questions before Randal unties you.”

“All right. Come back. Ask me anything.”

“Randal needs to talk to Arnie first.”

She says something, but he tunes out her meaning. He steps into the hallway.

Behind him, Mother is talking fast again, faster than ever, and then she is shouting.

Randal Six has been in this living room previously. When Mother first regained consciousness, she chattered at him so hard that he had come here to calm himself. Now here he is again, calming himself.

He hopes that he and Mother don’t already have a dysfunctional relationship.

After a minute or two, when he is ready, he goes in search of Arnie. He wonders whether his new brother will prove to be Abel or Cain, selfless or selfish. If he is like Cain, Randal Six knows what to do. It will be self-defense.

Carson parked in her driveway, shut off the engine and the headlights, and said, “Let’s get the shotguns.”

They had put the suitcases and shotguns in the trunk before they’d driven Lulana and Evangeline home from the parsonage.

After hurriedly retrieving the Urban Snipers, they went to the front of the sedan and crouched there, using it for cover. Peering back along the driver’s side, Carson watched the street.

“What’re we gonna do for dinner?” Michael asked.

“We can’t take the kind of time we took for lunch.”

“I could go for a po-boy.”

“As long as it’s sleeve-wrapped to eat on the fly.”

Michael said, “The thing I’ll miss most when I’m dead is New Orleans food.”

“Maybe there’s plenty of it on the Other Side.”

“What I won’t miss is the heat and humidity.”

“Are you really that confident?”

The night brought them the sound of an approaching engine.

When the vehicle passed in the street, Carson said, “Porsche Carrera GT, black. That baby’s got a six speed transmission. Can you imagine how fast I could drive in one of those?”

“So fast, I’d be perpetually vomiting.”

“My driving’s never gonna kill you,” she said. “Some monster is gonna kill you.”

“Carson, if this is ever over and we come out of it alive, you think we might give up being cops?”

“What would we do?”

“How about mobile pet grooming? We could drive around all day, bathing dogs. Easy work. No pressure. It might even be fun.”

“Depends on the dogs. The problem is you have to have a van for all the equipment. Vans are dorky I’m not going to drive a van.”

He said, “We could open a gay bar.”

“Why gay?”

“I wouldn’t have to worry about guys hitting on you.”

“I wouldn’t mind running a doughnut shop.”

“Could we run a doughnut shop and still have guns?” he wondered.

“I don’t see why not.”

“I feel more comfortable with guns.”

The sound of another engine silenced them.

When the vehicle appeared, Carson said, “White Mountaineer,” and pulled her head back to avoid being seen.

The Mountaineer slowed but didn’t stop, and drifted past the house.

“They’ll park farther along, on the other side of the street,” she said.

“You think it’s going to go down here?”

“They’ll like the setup,” she predicted. “But they won’t come right away. They’ve been looking for an opportunity all day. They’re patient. They’ll take time to reconnoiter.”

“Ten minutes?”

“Probably ten,” she agreed. “No less than five. Let’s get Vicky and Arnie out of here yesterday.”

When the Mountaineer was out of sight, they hurried to the back of the house. The kitchen door was locked. Carson fumbled her keys from a jacket pocket.

“Is that a new jacket?” he asked.

“I’ve worn it a couple times.”

“I’ll try not to get brains on it.”

She unlocked the door.

In the kitchen, Vicky Chou was at the table, tied in a chair.

Benny and Cindi carried pistols, but they preferred to avoid using them whenever possible.

The issue wasn’t noise. Their weapons were fitted with sound suppressors. You could pop a guy three times in the face, and if people in the next room heard anything at all, they might think you sneezed.

You could try shooting to lame; but the Old Race were bleeders who lacked the New Race’s ability to seal a puncture almost as fast as turning off a faucet. By the time you got the wounded prey to a private place where you could have some fun torturing them, they were too often dead or comatose.

Some people might enjoy dismembering and decapitating a dead body, but not Benny Lovewell. Without the screams, you might as well be chopping up a roast chicken.

Once, when a gunshot woman had inconsiderately died before Benny could even start to take off her arms, Cindi supplied the screams, as she imagined the victim might have sounded, synchronizing her cries to Benny’s use of the saw, but it wasn’t the same.

Aimed at the eyes, Mace could disable any member of the Old Race long enough to subdue him. The problem was that people blinded by a stinging blast of Mace always shouted and cursed, drawing attention when it wasn’t wanted.

Instead, Victor supplied Benny and Cindi with small pressurized cans, the size of Mace containers, which shot a stream of chloroform. When squirted in the face, most people inhaled with surprise — and fell unconscious before saying more than shit , if they said anything at all. The chloroform had a range of fifteen to twenty feet.

They also carried Tasers, the wand type rather than the pistol type. These were strictly for close-in work.

Considering that O’Connor and Maddison were cops and already jumpy because of what they knew about the deceased child of Mercy, Jonathan Harker, getting in close wouldn’t be easy.

After parking across the street from the O’Connor house, Cindi said, “People aren’t sitting on their porches around here.”

“It’s a different type of neighborhood.”

“What’re they doing instead?”