Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 38

Duke slept in the backseat of the Honda during the drive east-northeast on I-10 and then west on I-12.

The dog’s snoring didn’t induce drowsiness in Carson, though it ought to have, considering how little sack time she’d grabbed in the past couple of days.

The half liter of supercaffeinated cola from Acadiana helped. Before crossing the city line, they stopped at a combination service station and convenience store that was open 24/7, where they drained themselves of some of the first cola they had consumed, and then bought two more half-liter bottles. They also bought a package of caffeine tablets.

As they hit the road again, Michael said, “Too much caffeine ties the prostate in knots.”

“I don’t have a prostate.”

“Carson, you know, everything isn’t always about you.”

One thing keeping her awake and focused was the suspicion that the Helios-Frankenstein case might be as much about her as it was about anyone. Not merely because she happened to be one of the two detectives who stumbled on the case. And not because her path crossed Deucalion’s just when she needed to meet him.

Of all the cops Carson knew, she and Michael had the deepest respect for individualism, especially when a particular individual was quirky and therefore amusing or even if he proved stubborn and frustrating. Consequently, they were more alarmed than some might have been by the prospect of a civilization with a single-minded purpose and a regimented population of obedient drones, whether that population was comprised of propagandized human beings or of pseudo-humans cultured in a lab.

But her respect for individualism and her love of freedom was not why this case was so powerfully, immediately, intimately about her. Early in this investigation, she began to suspect that her father, who had been a detective with the NOPD, might have been murdered by the New Race — and her mother with him — at the order of Victor Helios. Her dad could have encountered something exceedingly strange that had led him to Helios, just as his daughter would be led to the same suspect years later.

Her parents’ murders had never been solved. And the evidence concocted to portray her father as a corrupt cop — who might have been executed by criminal elements with which he was involved — had always been too pat, an insult to common sense, and an offense against the truth of her dad’s character.

Over the past few days, her suspicion developed into conviction. As much as the caffeine, a hunger for justice and a determination to clear her father’s name kept her awake, alert, and ready to rumble.

The vast lightless expanse of Pontchartrain lay to their left, and it seemed to have the irresistible gravity of a collapsed star, as if this night the world were rolling along its rim, at risk of spiraling down into oblivion.

Except in the headlights, the rain that came off the lake was black, insistently rapping against the driver’s side of the car as they drove west on I-12, as if the night itself had fists of bony knuckles. And the wind seemed black, blowing down out of a moonless and starless sky.