Prodigal Son

several. They were kept in the gun locker with spare weapons. You were supposed to requisition one, in writing, through the duty officer each time that you had a legal right to use it.
        No detective was authorized to carry a Lockaid gun at all times. Because of a screwup in the requisition process, Carson had come into permanent possession of one-and chose not to reveal that she had it.
        She had never used it in violation of anyone's rights, only when it was legal and when precious time would be saved by dispensing with a written requisition. In the current instance, she couldn't violate the rights of Bobby Allwine for the simple reason that he was dead.
        Although she liked those old movies, she wasn't a female Dirty Harry. She'd never yet bent a rule far enough to break it, not in a situation of true importance.
        She could have awakened the superintendent and gotten a pass key. She would have enjoyed rousting the rude old bastard from his bed.
        However, she remembered how he'd looked her up and down, licking his lips. Without Michael present, roused from sleep perhaps induced by wine, the super might try to play grab-ass.
        Then she would have to reacquaint him with the effect of a knee to the gonads. That might necessitate an arrest, when all she wanted was to meditate on the meaning of Allwine's black-on-black apartment.
        She switched on the living-room ceiling fixture, closed the door behind her, and put the Lockaid gun on the floor.
        At midnight, even with a light on, the blackness of the room proved so disorienting that she had half an idea what an astronaut might feel during a space walk, tethered to a shuttle, on the night side of Earth.
        The living room offered nothing but the black vinyl armchair. Because it stood alone, it seemed a little like a throne, one that had been built not for earthly royalty but for a middle-rank demon.
        Although Allwine had not been killed here, Carson sensed that getting a handle on the psychology of this particular victim would contribute to her understanding of the Surgeon. She sat in his chair.
        Harker claimed that the black rooms expressed a death wish, and Carson grudgingly conceded that his interpretation made sense. Like a stopped clock, Harker could be right now and then, although not as often as twice a day.
        A death wish did not, however, entirely explain either the decor or Allwine. This black hole was also about power, just as real black holes, in far reaches of the universe, exert such gravitational pull that not even light can escape them.
        These walls, these ceilings, these floors had not been painted by a man in a state of despair; despair enervated and did not inspire action. She could more easily imagine Allwine blackening these walls in an energetic anger, in a frenzy of rage.
        If that was true, then at what had his rage been directed?
        The arms of the chair were wide and plumply padded. Under her hands, she felt numerous punctures in the vinyl.
        Something pricked her right palm. From the padding beneath a puncture, she extracted a pale crescent: a broken-off fingernail.
        A closer look revealed scores of curved punctures.
        The chair and the room chilled her as deeply as if she had been sitting on a block of ice in a cooler.
        Carson hooked her hands, spread her fingers. She discovered that each of her nails found a corresponding slit in the vinyl.
        The upholstery was thick, tough, flexible. Extreme pressure would have been required for fingernails to puncture it.
        Logically, despair would not produce the intensity of emotion needed to damage the vinyl. Even rage might not have been sufficient if Allwine had not been, as Jack Rogers had said, inhumanly strong.
        She rose, wiping her hands on her jeans. She felt unclean.
        In the bedroom, she switched on the lights. The pervasive black surfaces soaked up the illumination.
        Someone had opened one of the black blinds. The apartment was such a grim world unto itself that the streetlamps, the distant neon, and the glow of the city seemed out of phase with Allwine's realm, as if they should have existed in different, isolated universes.
        Beside the bed, she opened the nightstand drawer, where she discovered Jesus. His face looked out at her from a litter of small pamphlets, His right hand raised in blessing.
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