City of Night

coat hangers.”
    “Cary Grant never beat anyone with coat hangers, and he had a fabulous life.”
    “Yeah, but he was the greatest actor in the history of film. The rules don’t apply to him. Victor and Frankenstein are two power names if I ever heard them, and he was born with them. No matter what you say, I’d feel more comfortable if his mother had named him Nancy.”
     
    “What are they doing? ” Cindi asked impatiently, glancing again at the street map on the dashboard screen.
    Benny had been studying the screen continuously as Cindi drove. He said, “At the end of every block, she makes another turn, back and forth, zig-zag, around and around, like a blind rat in a maze.”
    “Maybe they know they’re being tailed.”
    “They can’t know,” he said. “They can’t see us.”
    Being able to track the sedan by the continuous signal of the transponder that Dooley had secreted under its hood, the Lovewells didn’t need to maintain visual contact. They could conduct a most leisurely pursuit from a distance of several blocks and even follow the detectives on parallel streets.
    “I know how she feels,” Cindi said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Like a blind rat in a maze.”
    “I didn’t say that’s how she feels. I don’t know how she feels. I said that’s how she’s driving.”
    “Most of the time,” Cindi said, “I feel like a blind rat in a maze. And she’s childless like me.”
    “Who?”
    “Detective O’Connor. She’s old enough to have had half a dozen children, at least, but she doesn’t have any. She’s barren.”
    “You can’t know that she’s barren.”
    “I know.”
    “Maybe she just doesn’t want kids.”
    “She’s a woman. She wants.”
    “She just turned again, left this time.”
    “See?”
    “See what?”
    “She’s barren.”
    “She’s barren just because she made a left turn?”
    Solemnly, Cindi said, “Like a blind rat in a maze.”
    Carson turned right on Chartres Street, past the exquisitely decaying Napoleon House.
    “Taking Victor down at Biovision is out of the question,” she said. “Too many people, too many witnesses, probably not all of them people he’s made.”
    “We could hit him in his car, coming or going.”
    “On a public street? If we can manage not to die while doing this, I don’t want to end up in women’s prison with all your former girlfriends.”
    “We learn his routine,” Michael said, “and we find the least public place along the route.”
    “We don’t have time to learn his routine,” she reminded him. “We’re a target now. We both know it.
    “The secret lab we talked about earlier. The place where he… creates.”
    “We don’t have time to find that, either. Besides, it’ll have better security than Fort Knox.”
    “Fort Knox’s security is probably overrated. The bad guys had it figured in Goldfinger .”
    “We’re not bad guys,” she said, “and this isn’t a movie. The best place to get him is at his house.”
    “It’s a mansion. It’s got a big staff.”
    “We’ll have to cut through them, straight to him, go in hard and fast,” she said.
    “We’re not SWAT.”
    “We’re not just parking patrol, either.”
    “What if some of his household staff is our kind?” Michael worried.
    “None of them will be. He wouldn’t want our kind serving in his home, where they might see or overhear something. They’ll all be part of the New Race.”
    “We can’t be a hundred percent sure.”
    On Decatur Street at Jackson Square, where carriages lined up to offer tours of the Quarter, one of the usually placid mules had broken away from the curb. The driver and a policeman were giving chase on foot as the mule pulled its fancy equipage in circles, blocking traffic.
    “Maybe old Francine shoved someone up its butt,” Michael suggested.
    Staying on point, Carson said, “So we’ve got to nail Victor at his house in the Garden District.”
    “Maybe it would make more sense to pull out of New Orleans. We could go somewhere he couldn’t find us, take more time to think this through.”
    “Yeah. Take the pressure off. Give ourselves a week to really think . Maybe two weeks. Maybe we’d never come back.”
    “Would that be so bad?” he asked.
    “ ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil’—”
    “—‘is for good men to do nothing.’ Yeah. I heard already.”
    “Who said that, anyway?” she wondered.
    “I think it was Tigger, but it might have been Pooh.”
    The carriage