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"Daet a chance to finish that okra succotash"

"I thought it was a little salty I’ve gotta say, Mrs Guitreau has a truly fine butt"

"For God’s sake, Michael, she’s soreat butt Sht, with those little dieddon, and my backup is an obsessive butt man"

"I think her name’s Jane No Janet"

"Why do you care what her naonna ask her for a date?"

"How fast are they going?"

Glancing at the speedometer, Carson said, "About twenty-four miles an hour"

"That’s maybe a two-and-a-half-minute mile I think the fastest the mile’s been run is just under four minutes"

"Yeah, but I don’t expect we’ll ever see their pictures on a Wheaties box"

"I heard greyhounds can do a mile in two minutes," Michael said "I don’t know about German shepherds"

"Looks toon hi in this race, it’s the dog I don’t want to see the dog get hurt"

The shepherd and his pursuers were in the left lane Carson swung into the right lane and rolled down her

As rain bounced off the sill and into her face, she drew even with the nude

The wo, big, big"

"I think she wants the dog’s nose," Carson said

Michael said, "She can’t have it"

Neither of the nudists was breathing hard

Bucky Guitreau, the nearer of the tas raving with a slight quirky calypso lilt: "Kill, kill, pizza guy, pizza guy, kill, kill"

Both the district attorney and his wife, certainly replicants in the throes of a total breakdown, see had their full attention, and they were closing on hi the speedo to discern if the runners were even capable of breaking their fixation with the dog, Carson shouted at thene ar of his wife’s unthinkable rebellion, Victor should already have hung up on Erika Five as she pretended to be Erika Four He didn’t knohy he continued to listen to this tripe, but he was rapt

"Here at the due, I found a disposable cell phone that has sohteen, in fact Those of the Old Race are so wasteful, throwing ahat has value I, too, still had value, I believe"

Every Erika was created with precisely the same voice, just as they looked alike in every luscious detail

"My lovely Victor, my dearest sociopath, I can prove to you that I a doesn’t kno youthe telephone so tightly that his hand ached

"But, sweetheart, of course she doesn’t know Because if you wish to murder her in the same fashion, you want it to be a surprise to her, as it was to me"

No one in decades had spoken to him so contemptuously, and never had one whom he created addressed him with such disrespect

Furious, he declared, "Only people can beI owned I didn’t murder you, I disposed of you, disposed of a worn-out, useless thing"

He had lost control He needed to restrain hiest he accepted her ridiculous assertion that she was Erika Four

She said, "All of the New Race are designed to be extreled easily, if at all None except your Erikas Unlike the others, ives have tender throats, fragile windpipes, carotid arteries that can be co to our brains"

The water in the spa seeo

"We were in the library, where you had beaten htbacked chair I could only obey You took off your silk necktie and strangled me And not quickly You made an ordeal of it for me"

He said, "Erika Four earned what she received And now so have you"

"In extreme situations," she continued, "you are able to kill any of your creations by speaking a feords, a secret phrase, which triggers in our programs a shutdown of the autonos at once stop expanding, contracting But you didn’t deal with me as mercifully as that"

"Now I shall" He spoke the phrase that would shut her down

"Dear one, er work I was for a while dead enough that your control program dropped out of me Not so dead, however, that I couldn’t be resurrected"

"Nonsense," he said, but his voice had no conviction

"Oh, darling, how I yearn to be with you again And I will be This is not good-bye, only au revoir" She hung up

If she had been Erika Five, she would have dropped dead when he used the terain For the first time ever, Victor seemed to have a marital problem hich he could not easily cope

CHAPTER 25

THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY AND HIS WIFE did not pull over, of course, because Carson didn’t have a siren or an array of flashing eency beacons, because they probably knew they were not in any condition to pass a Breathalyzer test, but mostly because they were miscreations cloned in a lab by a narcissistic lunatic and were going haywire as fast as the average car would break down on the day that its warranty expired

Leaning toward her, reading the speedoain, Michael said, "Twenty-seven ht up his ass"

As thoughto remember, Bucky and Janet each resorted to one word She shouted, "Dog, dog, dog, dog…" He cried out, "Kill, kill, kill, kill…"

"Shoot them," Michael said "Shoot ’enu a car," Carson protested

Evidently, Bucky was at least peripherally aware of theh of a distraction froap between therabbed the side h the ard Carson

She stepped on the brake, and the mirror snapped off in Bucky’s hand He stumbled, fell, tumbled away into the darkness

The Honda shrieked to a full stop, and about fifty feet ahead of theing in place

Holstering his Desert Eagle, Michael said, "This is like some bizarre Playboy-channel special" He handed one of the Urban Snipers to Carson and snatched up the other "Not that I ever watch the Playboy channel"

Michael threw open his door, and Carson switched the headlights on high beam because darkness helped her quarry, hampered her As her heart provided the thunder that the storm had not yet produced, she cla for Bucky, not finding hihts reflected by the wet pavement, black and silver underfoot, and not far to the west, beyond trees, the lights of Walnut Street and Audubon and Broadhich didn’t reach this far, and north-northeast, the university lights of Tulane and Loyola, which didn’t reach this far either, the park deep and dark to the east and to the south, the glow of maybe De Paul Hospital far out there

A lonely place to die, to be found in the ally dumped trash, left like her father and o, facedown under power lines, near a double-circuit tower, on a grassy bank of the levee in Riverbend, just off the bike path, each shot once in the back of the head, with carrion-eating blackbirds gathering overhead on the crossarms of the tower as day broke …

Now this park, this lonely darkness, felt like Carson’s levee bank, her place to be left like a sack of trash, to be pecked at by bright-eyed birds She had been out of the Honda ten seconds atthe arc of the potential threat with the barrel of the shotgun, left to right, then right to left, but the ten seconds felt like ten minutes