High Bloods Read online

  “Two, three times a week. Sometimes Mal and her entourage close up the place. They’re good for business. You saw the paparazzi outside. Like flies on spoiled meat.” He laughed softly, then went on about Mal. “Great body, birdshit for brains. Enough money to paper the Louvre. Guilt money. Mother Ida gave Mal the boot, of course, when she got infected. I don’t have to tell you about Ida Grace.” Artie sipped his tea, staring at me, a fat mauled lid nearly obscuring his left eye. “Mal’s daddy died, didn’t he?”

  “A bug he picked up in the tropics conked both kidneys.”

  “The Rawsons live next to the Graces, so you must’ve known Mal when she was a kid. And her older sister. What was her name?”

  “Elena Grace. Half sister.”

  “Disappeared too, didn’t she? Ever learn what happened to her?”

  As far as I knew I might have been the last one to see Elena alive. When she begged me to kill her. I was in love with her, so of course I hadn’t. But sometimes, in the throes of the bad mean blues, with no clue to Elena’s fate, I thought it might have been merciful to do what she’d asked of me.

  “I don’t think Mal has disappeared,” I said. “Probably just holed up somewhere with the rock star du jour. WEIR reported that she went off-line at 0110 hours Friday.”

  “Off-line?” Artie mused. “Lose many that way?”

  “More and more lately, it seems.” My turn. “What do you know about the First Church of Lycanthropy?”

  Artie cocked his head slightly, as if he might have detected a certain grimness in my question.

  “How it got started? Don’t know. One thing I can tell you, it’s more entrepreneurial than religious.”

  “Or political?”

  “All religion is politics. One way or another.”

  Beatrice looked up from her laptop and shook her shapely head, sprinkles of stardust in her close-cropped hair glinting at me.

  “I’ve checked all the up-to-the-minute Bleat blogs,” she said. “Mal Scarlett, she lay low.”

  “She’ll turn up,” Artie predicted. “No technology is perfect, I guess.”

  I had a hunch there was more Artie could have told me—about Mal, or the First Church of Lycanthropy. An oddball religion so astutely promoted had to be a cover for something else. But Artie always had been a miser with info that might eventually be worth a bundle to him. My resources as an ILC employee were limited.

  I got up from the lounge chair to prowl around the office, a converted loft with fifteen-foot ceilings and two skylights. The she-Lycans didn’t exactly bristle at my passing, but their tension was evident. Bea, on the other hand, was High Blood: she just grinned at me when I gave her a thank-you pat on one shoulder.

  No visit to Artie’s would have been complete without a look at the latest of his boojum trees that he couldn’t manage to keep alive indoors in spite of compulsive pampering. But maybe that was his problem: too much love for something basically unlovable.

  The boojum was a spindly, fuzzy-looking thing in the glow of full-spectrum lights trained on it. In the wild, and fully mature, they grew past fifty feet in height. This one was just getting a good start at ten feet; beneath one of the pyramidal skylights it still had room to grow.

  Boojums are found only in Baja California and the Sonoran Desert of Mexico. Which meant that in the wild they survived the harshest imaginable conditions. Lack of water, intense heat, high winds, blistering sandstorms. They seemed to thrive only under the most terrible, destructive conditions nature could devise.

  “Still trying, huh?” I said to Artie. I finished my bourbon.

  “Yeah. But it’s almost impossible to domesticate them. No matter how carefully you tend a boojum, they almost always go sour on you. What do you make of that?”

  “They want to be wild,” I said.

  We looked at each other. Artie smiled sadly with his scar-intaglio’d lips.

  “They’re going to win, aren’t they?” he said, keeping his voice even lower than its usual hoarse level. All those punches to the side of the neck.

  He wasn’t talking about boojums now.

  “I don’t have a head for technology,” I said. “But where there’s a problem there’s always a fix.”

  I found myself looking for Beatrice, and discovered her looking back at me, with a small speculative smile that reminded me of how long it had been since I had wanted the company of any woman, pay-for-play or not.

  “Sure,” Artie said. “The answer to every desperate need in history has been human ingenuity. That’s if time permits. Dysgenic research looks promising—but slow. I have inside information to that effect. While the inhuman race finds itself near a stage that you might call warp-speed Darwinism.”

  “That’s the pessimistic view.”

  “You probably heard about that small pack of wilding Lycans that sacked a pueblo near Nogales during the last Observance. Now wasn’t that interesting.”

  “What about them?”

  “Crissake, you were raised by an anthropologist, Rawson! It’s also rumored you have certain… preternatural skills that make you the top Wolfer in town. You know Lupus canae don’t like being by themselves. They’re highly sociable creatures. Very sensitive, family oriented. When they’re removed from the wild, some of them just… pine away without the company of their own kind.”

  He looked at me, mildly exasperated. I have a graduate degree in wolf biology. But I didn’t comment on Artie’s little lecture. He’d taken some beatings in his ring days, now lived always on the brink. I would’ve thought there was no fear left in him.

  “Werewolves, on the other hand—solitary. Loners. Hatred for anything warm-blooded. They’re killing machines. They’ll kill each other for shits and giggles.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen it happen.”

  “What they don’t do is hang out with their kind. Much less participate in pack activities. But it happened. Less than a month ago. Would you like another drink to settle your nerves?”

  “My nerves are fine, Artie. Have to be going. Time to look up the Aussie and maybe get some religion.”

  Artie hunched his shoulders a little. He paused before walking away from his beloved boojum tree to snip with his fingernails a tiny bloom from one flowering branch. Whatever load was weighing on him he had shrugged off. He had that near-blissful look on his face again.

  That’s when the skylight above Artie and the tree exploded, showering glass everywhere. Something huge and smelling like a sack of shit came down feetfirst next to Artie. And with one bite through neckbones and muscle Artie’s head wasn’t on his shoulders anymore: it was bouncing like a football twenty feet away across the onyx top of his desk while the air around his still-standing body turned red from arterial spray.

  2

  y threat-reaction time, even to the totally unexpected, is about a third of a second. But, although the deluge of glass surrounding a tawny monster twice the size of a timberwolf was—to put it mildly—bizarre and shocking, some hint of danger in my reptilian brain such as a momentary shadow, a rooftop-prowling Lycan eclipsing the moon above Artie’s skylight, had alerted the organism. Not in time to save Artie, because the monster had landed upright on huge paws between us. But I was able to keep from being seriously cut or blinded by flying shards.

  I did what the old-time flyboys call a “Mongo Flip” and came down a little off balance, staggerng backward as I pulled my compact .45 from its quick-release holster. As Artie’s head finished its trip down his desk and made a streak of red on the nearby wall beneath a horror show of a Francis Bacon painting, I shot three times through a jet of blood from Artie’s toppling body, the shots counterpoint to the screams from Artie’s girls.

  If you’re going to drop a werewolf stone-dead you shoot it through the heart or pineal gland. With silvertips. Otherwise you’ll just annoy it. I missed the vital spots but the impact of high-velocity silvertips jolted her just long enough to allow me to scramble farther away—but only marginally beyond her leaping distance.
/>   The she-wolf looked at me with rapt eyes that I found vaguely familiar. I hit her again dead center on the breastbone, which may have deflected most of the slug away from her heart. The she-wolf shuddered but didn’t fall.

  She howled then.

  No matter how hardened you believe yourself to be by the terrors of combat or by the experienced hunter’s realization that his dangerous prey might now be stalking him, when a werewolf howls, literally in your face, you pee like an infant in its diaper. No matter how many times you may have heard it, how many of them you’ve managed to kill, you can’t help yourself.

  Werewolves are half wolf, half human, with powerful jaws. And something a little extra to stupefy the senses: that nauseating fecal odor. But a ghostly imprint of humanness lurks in their hairy faces, particularly around the eyes. If you have to kill or be killed, that startle reaction to the imprint can be distracting for a fatal instant.

  I wasn’t likely to be distracted, or miss again.

  But before I got off the killshot something winked in the air past my head. The blade of a silver throwing knife sliced into the monster a notch below her jaw, cutting off the howl she was raising.

  The impact of the knife jolted the she-wolf. Pain flared in her yellow eyes. I sensed her losing interest in killing me, and eased the pressure of my finger on the trigger.

  The she-wolf looked up, then leaped straight off the floor and caught the frame of the shattered skylight with one hand.

  “Kill her!” Beatrice shouted at me.

  But I didn’t fire again. The she-wolf pulled herself up through the skylight space and swung out into the moonlight, already struggling and woozy. But she was able to bound away. A string of werewolf blood fell from some jagged glass into the corrupted air of the loft.

  I hadn’t finished her off for a couple of reasons. One, she had so much silver in her hide she wasn’t going to last another hour anyway. And two: if she died before she skinnydipped then she couldn’t tell me some things I needed to know, and fast.

  “How do I get to the roof?” I yelled at Beatrice.

  But she was already running past me, veering from the body of Artie Excalibur that was bleeding out and destroying the value of his rare carpet. Artie had always liked nice things. Probably there were worse places to die, although I would’ve preferred not to have my head thirty feet away, eyes still open and watching it happen.

  “Follow me!” Beatrice yelled back.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  I voiced Sunny Chagrin’s ILC call sign on my wristpac.

  “That knife cost me five thousand and I want it back!”

  I couldn’t blame her; the price of silver was now close to four thousand an ounce, in Beverly Hills Free Zone dollars, when you could find any for sale.

  Beatrice had given me a little time. Somehow our she-wolf, an undiscriminating killer like all of them, had rationalized her situation and chosen to get the hell out of there. Showing any sort of reasoning ability or discretion was aberrant behavior for werewolves.

  Besides silver there are other methods of defense against them, all problematical. Animal tranquilizers or anesthetics sometimes made werewolves a little giddy, but that was all. Wolfsbane temporarily befuddled the youngsters. Essence of wolfsbane in a spray bottle was a useful item, which we all carried in addition to our choice of firepower. But unlike junkyard dogs, werewolves seldom let you know they’re around. There are those people who believe in spells, symbols, and incantations to keep werewolves away from the home place. It has been a thriving quack industry for decades.

  Sunny answered. “What’s up, R?”

  “We’ve got a Hairball on the roof of Excalibur’s. Artie has lost his head. The Hairball is toting silver and should be powering down.”

  “Wha—? A Hairball? Are you fuckin’ serious?”

  “We were nearly nose to nose for a few seconds. I want de Sade’s and the immediate neighborhood iso’d. Roll the wagons, but no Zippos. We need remains, not ashes.”

  I sprinted after Beatrice, who was jumping nimbly up a spiral of iron stairs to the roof. Couldn’t fault her for courage. But if the she-wolf still had any fight in her, Beatrice’s head could roll too as soon as she set foot on the roof.

  I caught up to her and grabbed her by her Peter Pan tunic before she could stick her head out into the night.

  “What are you planning to do, take her on bare-handed?”

  “Okay, you go first.”

  The building was oblong in shape, with a fire escape to the alley behind it. As soon as I reached the roof in the misty moonlight I heard the monster clattering down the fire escape. Mid-roof there was a trio of TRADs—for Taser Remote Area Denial—on their tripods, but for some reason none were operative. If they had been, the she-wolf would have been bouncing around the intersecting force fields like a shaggy tennis ball.

  I pulled Beatrice up after me.

  “Did Artie deactivate his TRADs?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would he do that?”

  We ran to the fire escape just as the she-wolf made it to the alley between a couple of Dumpsters. She paused long enough to look up at us with eyes that shone like isotopes. I aimed my .45 to hobble her, but she was off like a streak. She jumped twelve feet from the alley to a barred window of the four-story apartment building next door, tore the bars out of the concrete, and disappeared headfirst inside, smashing through the window.

  “This can’t be happening,” Beatrice said, licking her lips as if she were about to be sick. “Can it?”

  We heard screams from inside the apartment the she-wolf had invaded.

  “I guess it can,” Beatrice said, still licking, her face momentarily blank from shock. Then she turned her head and threw up violently.

  I raised Sunny again. She was breathing as if she were coming our way at a dead run.

  “The Hairball’s gone to ground,” I said. “Montmorency apartments. How far away are you?”

  “Block and a half.”

  “Get the PHASR out of the Humvee. As long as the bitch is alive I want to keep her that way. Sunny, you’ve got the atrium entrance to the building.”

  “You haven’t explained how—”

  “I don’t have any answers. Maybe she’s just one of Nature’s little anomalies.”

  “We hope and pray. How do you know the Hairball is a she-wolf?”

  “Because,” I said, “she doesn’t have a dick. Swell pair of boobs, though.”

  “Oh, ha-ha. R?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t go in there after her. Wait for—”

  “I’m closest, Sunny. And children may be sleeping in their beds. They don’t need a nightmare like this one.”

  “So be a macho asshole. And good luck.”

  I went over the parapet to the fire escape and began climbing down. Beatrice finished retching and followed me.

  “Go back,” I told her.

  “If I stop moving I’ll shake myself to pieces. I’d rather be with you. Maybe I could help. And I still want my knife.”

  I wasn’t going to get into the condominium the way the she-wolf had managed. The screams had stopped abruptly. But lights were coming on in the building. It was quiet now. Not a good quiet. My closest point of entry was the underground parking garage, locked down behind rolling gates. I headed for it. People were congregating at either end of the alley, attracted by the screams. I heard sirens; they were eight or ten blocks away.

  I used my electronic jimmy to decode the key card access lock outside the gates. They parted slowly.

  The building’s basement garage was a single floor. Two slots per occupant was the norm in a condo like the Montmorency. I went down the ramp with my .45 in hand, Beatrice close behind me, our footfalls echoing. The lighting was barely adequate. The garage looked nearly full, chockablock with expensive sets of wheels, some of them wearing customized dust shrouds.

  I took it slow getting to the stairs at the front of the building. Beatrice re
ached out to touch me a couple of times. Maybe to tell me she had my back, or just to reassure herself.

  There was a small elevator next to the stairs. I started up to the lobby level, then heard the elevator’s whine. My hair may have gotten a little whiter. I backed down to the basement floor, bumping into Beatrice.

  “Stay put,” I said. “And don’t give me any sass.”

  In the alley outside, police vehicles screeched to a stop within a few seconds of each other. They would be SoCal Sheriff’s deputies; the West Hollywood substation was nearby.

  The elevator stopped. The door opened. I drew a bead with the .45.

  There she was, overwhelming the small space inside, a foot planted on the crumpled remains of some unlucky soul. His gore dripped from her jaws.

  We stared at each other.

  Midway in the garage a deputy worked the slide on a shotgun while the other cast his light on our little tableau. The silver hilt of Beatrice’s throwing knife gleamed at the base of the she-wolf’s throat.

  “Keep back!” I warned the uniforms. Not that they were eager or equipped to rush into the fray. To the she-wolf I said, “Be a good girl and don’t give me any more trouble.”

  But her eyes were glazing from trauma as she came limping out of the cabinet-sized elevator toward me. She was bent over and making sounds of distress. Slowly she lifted her head again and tried to glare at me. I heard a ghostly, burbling voice.

  “Piss… in your face, Wolf… er.”

  She choked then and coughed up a gout of blood. I heard the start-up roar of a powerful engine close by. Talk about ghosts. A gray-shrouded SUV with only a view slit at windshield level on the driver’s side burned rubber leaving its space and barreled straight at me.

  I had two blinks of an eye to throw myself from its path as Beatrice shouted a warning. I collided with a concrete pillar, left shoulder and the side of my head. I slumped to the floor with my field of vision full of sparklers as the SUV panic-stopped between the she-wolf and me.

  The automatic in my hand felt as heavy as an anvil. I could barely lift it. What physical effort I was capable of went into crawling away from the path of the shrouded SUV. From the size of the tires, the shape of it, I figured Navigator or Escalade.