Frankenstein: City of Night Read Free

sleepy-eyed look made him more delicious than usual. Carson tried not to notice.
    They were partners, not lovers. If they tried to be both, they would wind up dead sooner than later. In police work, kick-ass and grab-ass don’t mix.
    After getting in the car and pulling the door shut, Michael said, “Seen any monsters lately?”
    “In the bathroom mirror this morning,” she said, accelerating away from the curb.
    “You look terrific. Really. You don’t look half as bad as I feel.”
    “You know how long it’s been since I had my hair done?”
    “
You
take time to go to a hairdresser? I thought you just set it on fire and burned it off now and then.”
    “Nice shoes.”
    “The box said they’re made in China, or maybe it was Thailand. Everything’s made somewhere else these days.”
    “Not everything. Where do you think Harker was made?”
    Detective Jonathan Harker, who had turned out to be the serial killer that the media dubbed “the Surgeon,” had also turned out not to be human. Neither a 12-gauge shotgun nor a four-story fall had fazed him.
    Michael said, “I don’t quite see Helios building his New Race in the parlor of his mansion in the Garden District. Maybe Biovision is a front for it.”
    Biovision, a cutting-edge biotechnology firm founded by Helios when he first came to New Orleans more than twenty years previously, was the holder of many patents that made him richer year by year.
    “All those employees,” Carson said, “all those outsourced services coming in every day—you couldn’t conduct a secret people-making lab in the middle of all that.”
    “Yeah. For one thing, being a walleyed hunchback in a cowled cloak, Igor would really stand out when he went for coffee in the vending-machine room. Don’t drive so fast.”
    Accelerating, Carson said, “So he has another facility somewhere in the city, probably owned by a shell corporation headquartered in the Cayman Islands or someplace.”
    “I hate that kind of police work.”
    He meant the kind that required researching thousands of New Orleans businesses, making a list of those with foreign or otherwise suspicious ownership.
    Although Carson disliked desk-jockey sessions as much as Michael did, she had the patience for them. She suspected, however, that she didn’t have the time.
    “Where are we going?” Michael asked as the city blurred past. “If we’re going to Division to sit in front of computers all day, let me out right here.”
    “Yeah? And what’ll you do?”
    “I don’t know. Find somebody to shoot.”
    “Pretty soon you’ll have lots of people to shoot. The people Victor’s made. The New Race.”
    “It’s kind of depressing being the Old Race. Like being last year’s toaster oven, before they added the microchip that makes it sing Randy Newman tunes.”
    “Who would want a toaster oven that sings Randy Newman?”
    “Who wouldn’t?”
    Carson might have blown through the red traffic light if a refrigerated eighteen-wheeler hadn’t been crossing the intersection. Judging by the pictorial advertisement painted on the side of the truck, it was loaded with meat patties destined for McDonald’s. She didn’t want to be hamburgered to death.
    They were downtown. The streets were busy.
    Studying the swarms of pedestrians, Michael wondered, “How many people in this city aren’t really people? How many are Victor’s…creations?”
    “A thousand,” Carson said, “ten thousand, fifty thousand—or maybe just a hundred.”
    “More than a hundred.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Eventually Helios is going to realize we’re on to him.”
    “He knows already,” she guessed.
    “You know what that makes us?”
    “Loose ends,” she said.
    “Totally loose. And he seems to be a guy who likes everything tied up neat.”
    She said, “I figure we’ve got twenty-four hours to live.”

CHAPTER 4
    CARVED OF MARBLE , weathered by decades of wind and rain, the Virgin Mary stood in a niche, overlooking the front steps of the