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.The laundry room had a vinyl-tile floor, just as did all the hallways and most of the rooms at the Hands of Mercy.He hadn’t expected vinyl tile.He had thought that everything would be wildly different from what he had known.The vinyl tiles in Mercy are gray with speckles of green and rose.In the laundry room they are yellow.These two styles of flooring are at once different yet the same.While the music from high in the house changes a few times, Randal gradually grows embarrassed by his timidity.Peering through a door into the O’Connors’ laundry is not, after all, a heroic accomplishment.He is deluding himself.He is succumbing to his agoraphobia, to his autistic desire to minimize sensory input.If he proceeds at this agonizing pace, he will need six months to make his way through the house and find Arnie.He can’t live under the structure, in the crawl space, for such an extended time.For one thing, he is hungry.His superlative body is a machine in need of much fuel.Randal doesn’t mind eating what spiders, rodents, earthworms, and snakes that he might find under the house.However, judging by the creatures he has encountered thus far during his hours in the crawl space, that shadowy realm doesn’t contain even a small fraction of the game he needs to sustain himself.He opens the door again.The wonderful laundry room.Waiting.He steps out of the furnace closet and gently closes the door behind him.Thrilled beyond words.He has never walked on yellow vinyl tiles before.They work the same as gray-vinyl tiles.The soles of his shoes make the faintest squeaking sounds.A door stands open between the laundry room and the kitchen.Randal Six halts at this new threshold, marveling.A kitchen is everything—more!—that he thought it would be, a place of numerous conveniences and overwhelming charm.He could easily become inebriated with ambience.He must remain sober and cautious, prepared to retreat if he should hear someone approaching.Until he can locate Arnie and wrench from him the secret of happiness, Randal wants to avoid coming face to face with anyone.He isn’t sure what would happen in such an encounter, but he feels certain that the consequences would not be pleasant.Although he was engineered to be autistic for the purposes of Father’s experiments, which makes him different from others of the New Race, he shares much of their programming.He is incapable of suicide, for instance.He isn’t permitted to kill except when instructed by his maker to do so.Or in self-defense.The problem is that Randal is terribly fearful in his autism.He feels easily threatened.Hiding in the Dumpster, he had killed a homeless man who had come searching for soft-drink cans and other small treasures.The hobo might not have meant him any harm, might not in fact have been capable of causing him harm, yet Randal had dragged him headfirst into the Dumpster, had snapped his neck, and had buried him under bags of trash.Considering that mere newness frightens him, that the smallest change fills him with trepidation, any encounter with a stranger is more likely than not to result in a violent act of self-defense.He has no moral concern about this.They are of the Old Race and must all die sooner or later, anyway.The problem is that snapping the spine of a hobo in a deserted alleyway is not likely to draw attention; but killing someone in this house will be a noisy affair certain to reveal his presence to other residents and possibly even to neighbors.Nevertheless, because he is hungry and because the refrigerator no doubt contains something tastier than spiders and earthworms, he steps out of the laundry room and into the kitchen.Chapter 26Each carrying a suitcase full of weapons, Carson and Michael left The Other Ella.As the daughter of a detective who had supposedly gone bad, Carson believed that she was under closer scrutiny by her fellow officers than was the average cop.She understood it, resented it—and was self-aware enough to realize that she might be imagining it.Fresh from consorting with the likes of foulmouthed Francine and courtly Godot, crossing the sidewalk toward the unmarked sedan, Carson surveyed the street, half convinced that the Internal Affairs Division, having staked out the scene, would at any moment break cover and make arrests.Every pedestrian appeared to take an interest in Carson and Michael, to glance with suspicion at the bags they carried.Two men and a woman across the street seemed to stare with special intensity.Why would anyone walk out of a restaurant with suitcases? Nobody bought takeout in that volume.They put the bags in the trunk of the sedan, and Carson drove out of Faubourg Marigny, into the Quarter, without being arrested.“What now?” Michael wondered.“We cruise.”“Cool.”“We think it through.”“Think what through?”“The color of love, the sound of one hand clapping.What do you think we have to think through?”“I’m not in a mood to think,” he said.“Thinking’s going to get us killed.”“How do we get at Victor Frankenstein?”“Helios.”“Helios, Frankenstein—it’s still the same Victor.How do we get at the Victor?”Michael said, “Maybe I’m superstitious, but I wish the Victor had a different first name.”“Why?”“A victor is someone who defeats his adversary.Victor means ‘winner.’”“Remember that guy we busted last year for the double homicide in the antique shop on Royal?”“Sure.He had a third testicle.”“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” she asked impatiently.“We didn’t know that till he’d been arrested, charged, and had his jailhouse physical.”“It doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” he admitted [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]