City of Night

Chapter 61

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?”

“Who cares?”

“Probably making babies.”

“Give it a rest, Cindi.”

“We could always adopt.”

“Get real. We kill for Victor. We don’t have jobs. You need real jobs to adopt.”

“If you had let me keep the one I took, we’d be happy now.”

“You kidnapped him. Everyone in the world is looking for the brat, and you think you can push him around the mall in a stroller!”

Cindi sighed. “It broke my heart when we had to leave him in that park.”

“It didn’t break your heart. Our kind aren’t capable of any such emotion.”

“All right, but it pissed me off.”

“Don’t I know it. Okay, so we go in there, we knock them down, tie them up, then you drive around to the back of the house, and we load ‘em like cordwood.”

Studying the O’Connor house, Cindi said, “It does look slick, doesn’t it.”

“It looks totally slick. In and out in five minutes. Let’s go.”