Prodigal Son

CHAPTER 65

With a suction-adhered emergency beacon on the roof above the driver's door, Carson cruised fast on surface streets.

Struggling to absorb everything she had told him, Michael said, "The guy you saw in Allwine's apartment, he owns a movie theater?"

"The Luxe."

"The nutcase who says he's made from parts of criminals and brought alive by lightning-he owns a movie theater? I would have thought a hot-dog stand. A tire-repair shop."

"Maybe he's not a nutcase."

"A hamburger joint."

"Maybe he's what he says he is."

“A beauty salon."

"You should've seen what he did with those quarters."

"I can tie a knot in a cherry stem using my tongue," Michael said, "but that doesn't make me supernatural."

"I didn't say he was supernatural. He says part of what the lightning brought him that night, in addition to life, was… an understanding of the quantum structure of the universe."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "But somehow it explains how he makes the coins vanish."

“Any half-good magician can make a coin vanish, and they're not all wizards of quantum physics."

"This was more than cheap magic. Anyway, Deucalion said some of their kind are sure to have a strong death wish."

"Carson-what kind?"

Instead of answering his question, aware that she must lead him a careful step at a time toward her ultimate revelation, Carson said, “Allwine and his friend were in the library, poring through aberrant psychology texts, trying to understand their anguish."

"Don't drive so fast."

Accelerating, Carson said, "So the books weren't pulled off the shelves in a struggle. There wasn't a struggle. That's why the scene was so neat in spite of the apparent violence."

"Apparent? Allwine's heart was cut out."

"Hearts. Plural. But he probably asked his friend to kill him."

'"Hey, pal, do me a favor and cut my heart out?' He couldn't just slit his own wrists, take poison, bore himself to death with multiple viewings of The English Patient?"

"No. Deucalion said their kind are built to be incapable of suicide."

With a sigh of frustration, Michael said, "Their kind. Here we go again."

"The proscription against suicide-it's there in the original diary. I saw it. After the coins, after I started to accept… then Deucalion showed me."

"Diary? Whose diary?"

She hesitated.

"Carson?"

"This is going to be a real test."

"What test?"

"A test of you, me, our partnership here."

"Don't drive so fast," he cautioned.

This time, she didn't react to his admonition by accelerating. She didn't slow down, either, but she didn't pump up more speed. A little concession to help win him over.

"This is weird stuff," she warned.

"What-I don't have a capacity for weird? I have a fabulous capacity for weird. Whose diary?"

She took a deep breath. "Victor's diary. Victor Frankenstein." When he stared at her in flabbergasted silence, she said, "Maybe this sounds crazy-"

"Yeah. Maybe."

"But I think the legend is true, like Deucalion says. Victor Helios is Victor Frankenstein."

"What have you done with the real Carson O'Connor?"

"Deucalion-he was Victor's first… I don't know… his first creation."

"See, right away, I start getting geeky Renaissance Fair vibes from the name. It sounds like the Fourth Musketeer or something. What kind of name is Deucalion, anyway?"

"He named himself. It's from mythology. Deucalion was the son of Prometheus."

"Oh, of course," Michael said. "Deucalion Prometheus, son of Fred Prometheus. I remember him now."

"Deucalion is his only name, first and last."

"Like Cher."

"In classic mythology, Prometheus was the brother of Atlas. He shaped humans out of clay and gave them the spark of life. He taught humanity several arts, and in defiance of Zeus, he gave us the gift of fire."

"Maybe I wouldn't have fallen asleep in school so often if my teacher had been driving the classroom at eighty miles an hour. For God's sake, slow down."

“Anyway, Deucalion has Victor's original diary. It's written in German, and it's full of anatomical drawings that include an improved circulatory system with two hearts."

"Maybe if you give it to Dan Rather and Sixty Minutes, they'll do a segment on it, but it sounds like a forgery to me."

She wanted to punch him. To temper that impulse, she reminded herself of how cuddly he had looked back at his apartment.

Instead of hitting him, she pumped the brakes and slid the plainwrap sedan to the curb in front of Fullbright's Funeral Home.

"A good cop has to have an open mind," she said.

“Agreed. But it doesn't help much to have one so open that the wind blows through with a mournful, empty sound."