Frankenstein

Instead, he shook his head and laughed.
    “I don’t know what it is about you, Peaches.”
    “What what is?”
    “I just said I don’t
know
what it is. It sure isn’t your giant intellect, but you’re not bad company.”
    “You’re not bad company either, sir. Especially when you stink better, like now.”
    Nummy wanted to wash the dishes and put things away, but Mr. Lyss said he’d beat him to death with a shovel if he tried.
    They left by a window, keeping Mrs. Trudy LaPierre’s house between them and Nummy’s house, where the two cops-who-weren’t-just-cops might be doing things to Norman, the dog, that he didn’t dare think about.
    The sky was gray and looked hard. The air was colder. Nummy began to have a bad feeling about things.
    They left the neighborhood, and in a while they found a spooky house at the end of a narrow lane. Mr. Lyss said it was just the kind of place he was looking for. He wanted to ring the bell, but Nummy didn’t think they should. But Mr. Lyss was the smart one, and smart people always got their way.

    
chapter
48

    Deucalion would use Erika’s house as his base of operations. After Jocko proudly displayed his most treasured possessions—which included a collection of funny hats with bells on them, four Buster Steelhammer posters, and DVDs of every version of
Little Women
ever filmed—he offered his room to the tattooed giant. But Deucalion rarely slept and expected to get even less rest than usual in the days immediately ahead. Instead, he opted for the study because its large sofa would accommodate him if he chose to lie down, and because if he needed to do online research, there was a computer linked to the Internet via a satellite dish.
    Carson and Michael would find accommodations at one of the motels in town, which at this time of the year—or virtually any other—would not be fully booked. As homicide detectives in New Orleans and as private detectives in San Francisco, they were urban animals who did their best work when immersed in the buzz and bustle of a city.
    Rainbow Falls had no more buzz and only slightly more bustle than a cemetery in bee season. But in less than two hours at Erika’s house, the isolation of the place made Carson feel imprisoned. With apparent disquiet, Michael complained that if the world ended, they wouldn’t know about it until they ran out of milk and had to drive to a store in town. A front-row seat at Armageddon was preferable to the humiliation of being the last to get the news.
    Before finding a motel room, they cruised the streets, getting oriented—Carson in the pilot’s seat, Michael in his historically established position. With a population of perhaps ten thousand, the town wasn’t merely a wide place in the road. But anyone not a local might be quickly noticed, and Carson didn’t see any vehicle but their own with California license plates.
    “I’m not sure it would make sense for us to try a clandestine approach,” she said. “People who’ve been here most or all of their lives—they’ll smell an outsider in a minute, if they can’t actually spot one at a glance. The more we try to blend in, the more obvious we’ll be.”
    “Yeah, and I don’t want to wear a cowboy hat.”
    “Look around. Not everyone’s wearing a cowboy hat.”
    “I don’t want to wear a toboggan hat, either. And I’ll
never
wear a floppy hat with bells on it.”
    “Gee, I thought my Christmas shopping was finished.”
    “Besides, Victor must be keeping a low profile. As an outsider, he’d have to. He’s holed up somewhere, even more than Erika. Maybe the best way to smoke him out is if he learns we’re in the county looking for him.”
    Before stores closed for the day, and in respect of a weather forecast of snow, they found a sports-clothing outfitter. They tried on andpurchased black Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suits with foldaway hoods, overlay vests with Thermoloft insulation, gloves, ski boots, and—after some deliberation—the despised toboggan caps.
    On the way to the Falls Inn to book a room, unload the Cherokee, and gun-up, they passed the offices of the
Rainbow Falls Gazette
on Beartooth Avenue. This struck them as a serendipitous development, so Carson hung a U-turn in the street and parked in front of the three-story building.
    Like many structures in town, it was well over a century old, with a flat and parapeted roof, reminiscent of Western-movie hotels and saloons on which bad men with rifles skulked