Free City of Night by Dean Koontz Page A

the legal system as he could from within it. Though father and son had for a while been estranged, eventually Maurice had been proud of his boy.
    The Milkman’s son had been indicted only twice. Both times he had escaped conviction. In each case, after the foreman delivered the innocent verdict, the juries stood and applauded Aubrey.
    To forestall a pending third indictment, he had secretly turned state’s evidence. After ratting out scores of thugs without their knowledge, he retired at seventy-five, his reputation intact among the criminal class and its admirers.
    “I don’t do guns anymore,” Aubrey said. “Not the big, loud, door-busting kind or any others.”
    “We know you’re retired—”
    “For true,” Aubrey assured her.
    “—but you still have friends in all the wrong places.”
    “This rose is called Black Velvet,” said Aubrey. “The red is so dark, it looks black in places.”
    “We’re not setting you up,” Carson said. “No prosecutor will waste thousands of hours to nail a harmless octogenarian gardener.”
    Michael said, “Besides, you’d fake Alzheimer’s and have the jury in tears.”
    “French Perfume doesn’t belong in a bouquet with this,” Aubrey told Carson, “but Black Velvet strikes me as more of a rose for you.”
    “What we need are two Desert Eagle pistols, .50 Magnum.”
    Impressed, Michael said to Carson, “Is that what we need?”
    “I said loud , didn’t I? If you have two hearts and you take one chest punch of that caliber, both tickers ought to pop.”
    Aubrey gave a Black Velvet rose to Carson, who accepted it reluctantly. She held one flower in each hand, looking nonplussed.
    “Why don’t you requisition through the PD?” Aubrey asked.
    “’Cause we’re going to kill a man who would walk out of a courtroom, free and laughing, if we put him on trial,” she lied.
    In the shade of his hat, Aubrey’s eyes glittered with interest.
    “We aren’t wired,” Carson assured him. “You can pat us down.”
    “I’d like to pat you down, all right, darlin’,” said Aubrey, “but not for a wire. This isn’t how you’d talk if you were wearing one.”
    “For the Eagles, I’ll want one hundred rounds of .50AE’s, .325 weight,” Carson said, “jacketed hollow points.”
    “Formidable. You’re talking maybe fourteen-hundred-feet-per-second muzzle velocity,” Aubrey said.
    “We want these guys very dead. We’ll also need two shotguns. We want to use slugs, not buckshot.”
    “Slugs, not buckshot,” Michael agreed, nodding, as if they were entirely simpatico about this, as if he weren’t scared half numb.
    “Big stopping power,” Aubrey said approvingly.
    “Big,” Michael agreed.
    “Semi-auto so we can fire a second round single-handed,” Carson continued. “Maybe an Urban Sniper. What’s the barrel length on that?”
    “Eighteen inches,” Aubrey said.
    “We’d want it cut down to fourteen. But we need these fast, so there’s no time to wait for customizing.”
    “How fast?”
    “Today. Soon. As soon as now. Urban Sniper, SGT, Remington—we’ll have to take any credible shotgun that’s already been modified to meet those specifications.”
    “You’ll want a three-way sling for each,” Aubrey said, “so you can shoulder-carry and hip-fire.”
    “So who do we go to?” Carson asked, still holding a rose in each hand as if she were protesting to end all war.
    Unconsciously working the rose snips— click-click, click-click, click-click —Aubrey studied her and Michael for half a minute, then said, “That’s a lot of firepower to go after one guy. Who is he—the Antichrist?”
    “He’s well protected,” she said. “We’re going to have to wade through some people to nail him. But they’re all dirtbags, too.”
    Not convinced, Aubrey Picou said, “Cops go bad all the time. Given the lack of support they get and all the flack they take, who can blame them? But not you two. You two don’t go bad.”
    “You remember what