Dead and Alive Read Online Free Page A

pavement.
    Homicide detective Carson O’Connor and her partner, Michael Maddison, had abandoned their unmarked sedan because it would be easily spotted by other members of the police department. They no longer trusted their fellow officers.
    Victor Helios had replaced numerous officials in city government with replicants. Perhaps only ten percent of the police were Victor’s creations, but then again … maybe ninety percent. Prudence required Carson to assume the worst.
    She was driving a car that she had borrowed from her friend Vicky Chou. The five-year-old Honda seemed reliable, but it was a lot less powerful than the Batmobile.
    Every time Carson turned a corner sharp and fast, the sedan groaned, creaked, shuddered. On the flat streets, when she tramped on the accelerator, the car responded but as grudgingly as a dray horse that had spent its working life pulling a wagon at an easy pace.
    “How can Vicky drive this crate?” Carson fumed. “It’s arthritic, it’s sclerotic, it’s a dead car rolling. Doesn’t she ever give it an oil change, is the thing lubed with sloth fat, what the
hell?”
    “All we’re doing is waiting for a phone call from Deucalion,” Michael said. “Just cruise nice and easy around the neighborhood. He said stay in Uptown, near the Hands of Mercy. You don’t have to be anywhere yesterday.”
    “Speed soothes my nerves,” she said.
    Vicky Chou was the caregiver to Arnie, Carson’s autistic younger brother. She and her sister, Liane, had fled to Shreveport, to stay with their Aunt Leelee in case, as seemed to be happening, Victor’s race of laboratory-conceived post-humans went berserk and destroyed the city.
    “I was born for velocity,” Carson said. “What doesn’t quicken dies. That’s an indisputable truth of life.”
    Currently, Arnie’s caregivers were the Buddhist monks with whom Deucalion had lived for an extended period. Somehow, only hours ago, Deucalion opened a door between New Orleans and Tibet, and he left Arnie in a monastery in the Himalayas, where the boy would be out of harm’s way.
    “The race doesn’t always go to the swift,” Michael reminded her.
    “Don’t give me any of that hare-and-tortoise crap. Turtles end up crushed by eighteen-wheelers on the interstate.”
    “So do a lot of bunnies, even as quick as they are.”
    Squeezing enough speed out of the Honda to make the rain snap against the windshield, Carson said, “Don’t call me a bunny.”
    “I didn’t call you a bunny,” he assured her.
    “I’m no damn bunny. I’m cheetah-fast. How does Deucalion just turn away from me, vanish with Arnie, and step into a monastery in Tibet?”
    “Like he said, it’s a quantum-mechanics thing.”
    “Yeah, that’s totally clear. Poor Arnie, the sweet kid, he must think he’s been abandoned.”
    “We’ve been through this. Arnie is fine. Trust Deucalion. Watch your speed.”
    “This isn’t speed. This is pathetic. What is this car, some kind of idiot
green
vehicle, it runs on corn syrup?”
    “I can’t imagine what it’ll be like,” Michael said.
    “What?”
    “Being married to you.”
    “Don’t start. Keep your game on. We’ve got to live through this first. We can’t live through this if we’re playing grab-ass.”
    “I’m not going to grab your ass.”
    “Don’t even talk about grabbing or not grabbing my ass. We’re in a war, we’re up against man-made monsters with two hearts in their chests, we have to stay focused.”
    Because the cross street was deserted, Carson decided not to stop for a traffic light, but of course Victor Helios Frankenstein’s freak show wasn’t the only mortal danger in New Orleans. A pie-eyed prettyboy and his slack-jawed girlfriend, in a black Mercedes without headlights, barreled out of the night as if racing through a quantum doorway from Las Vegas.
    Carson stood on the brake pedal. The Mercedes shot across the bow of the Honda close enough for her headlights to reveal the Botox injection marks