High Bloods Read online

  The driver gunned his engine as if he were thinking about making another run at me.

  I crawled a little farther behind the pillar. The garage echoed voices. Flashlight beams overlapped on the walls of the garage. I rolled over onto my back like a whale rolling over on the ocean floor. My head throbbed and I tasted blood on my lower lip.

  I raised my head but couldn’t locate the she-wolf, and every passing second without knowing her whereabouts chilled my blood a degree lower.

  There was a scuffle of feet on the side of the SUV away from me. A door slammed shut. Then the SUV burned rubber again. It was instantly pedal-to-the-metal and heading for the exit, taking hits from a couple of Remington police models, which slowed it not at all.

  I made it to my knees in time to see the SUV scatter Socal-West sheriff’s deps as it drove up the ramp, demolished the back end of a cruiser parked in the alley, and roared away.

  Beatrice appeared cautiously from behind another pillar. I looked at the dead guy in the elevator. His head was where it belonged, meaning the she-wolf had only eviscerated him, a next-favorite target of the breed.

  But the Hairball was nowhere to be seen.

  How the hell?

  Beatrice kneeled beside me. She gently wiped my bloody lip with the back of a wrist. Sheriff’s deps were everywhere, some of them throwing down on me. The garage reeked of cordite and werewolf.

  The confused deputies were yelling at me to put my gun down, as if I were a deranged felon.

  “ILC!” I yelled back. “Anybody see where the Hairball went?”

  “She’s in the SUV,” Beatrice said.

  I didn’t see how she could be. But I took Beatrice at her word and barked at the uniforms, “Get a stop on that SUV!”

  All they wanted was for someone to act like he was in charge. I gave them a look at my shield and they backed off respectfully. I tried moving my shoulder. Sore, but the collarbone wasn’t broken. Beatrice, grimacing, helped me to my feet.

  “Take a look around upstairs,” I said to the uniforms. “There could be other victims.”

  “Or other Hairballs?” one of them said.

  “What you saw is not what you think you saw,” I told them, the best Official Denial I could come up with on short notice.

  “The hell it wasn’t,” another dep muttered, but none of them seemed too sure. I told them to get moving. They preferred action to uncertainty, and three of them went running up the stairs to the lobby. A fourth deputy looked into the elevator, then placed a coroner call.

  “How did the Hairball get into an SUV that was wearing a dust shroud?” I asked Beatrice.

  “Some sort of Velcro thing, you know, like a tent flap? On the left side over the rear door. Zip, they were out of the vehicle. They grabbed the—the Hairball and pulled her inside. She didn’t resist. She looked half dead. Bloody all over. And she still has my—”

  “They? How many?”

  “Two big guys. Ninja dress. Black hoods. I couldn’t tell you much about—”

  “Hey, hero!” Sunny Chagrin called to me. Still sounding out of breath.

  I looked around. She was toting the big-ass PHASR (Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response) rifle from our department Humvee. The rifle uses laser beams to cause temporary blindness, even in werewolves.

  “Did you get a shot at that SUV?”

  “Not a good one. Traveling too fast. I had to hit a foot-long slit in that dust cover that was maybe two inches wide. No time to steady this big bastard.” She set it down carefully, muzzle up. “How many dead, R?”

  “Other than Artie Excalibur? The vic in the elevator. Could be more bodies upstairs. The Montmorency gets a full thirty-day quarantine, although I don’t think she was going to lair in this building.” I paused to get my breath, thinking fast. Sunny opened a link with her wristpac to ILC Special Tactics. “All of Artie’s building, including de Sade’s, is now a crime scene. Detain everybody. But if we’re lucky only half a dozen people outside this garage got a look at the Hairball. Chase Soc-w off this one and button it up tight. My authority. Total news blackout, of course.”

  “We wish,” Sunny said, as she finished relaying my instructions to SPECTAC. “Know anything for sure, other than we have a Hairball out-of-phase?”

  An out-of-phase Hairball in ILC jargon was an OOPs. Extremely rare but not unheard-of.

  “This wasn’t a random wilding,” I said. “Artie was targeted.”

  Beatrice drew a sharp breath.

  Sunny looked her over. Beatrice had the kind of looks that could give other women jealousy cramps. Or cause their short hairs to grizzle, depending on their sexual orientation. Sunny had been my partner and close friend for five years. She was half Filipino and half Hawaiian, and when it came to looks she didn’t need points from any woman. Probably we would have got married long ago but for that matter of sexual orientation: Sunny was acey-deuce.

  “This is Beatrice,” I said. “Artie’s executive assistant. An eyewitness to the killing. I’m taking her into protective custody.”

  Beatrice flashed me a look I chose to interpret as grateful; Sunny’s reaction was a slight, knowing leer.

  “You need to go home and change,” Sunny said. “Put some ice on that bump.”

  “Plan to. West Hollywood should already have an APB out on our wanted vehicle. Of coure we don’t know the make because of that shroud.”

  “Which they probably got rid of at the first opportunity.”

  “Sunny, check the ladies’ lounge wastebaskets at de Sade’s right away. We’re looking for a robin’s-egg flapper dress, jewelry, a Tiffany wristpac, a gold mesh swag bag, maybe a wolf’s head crucifix.”

  “You’ve already ID’d this Lycan?”

  “If it’s who I’m thinking of we may be in luck. I’ll meet you back at the office in a couple of hours.”

  Sunny looked at Beatrice again.

  “Both of us,” I said. “Oh, I’ll need the Humvee.”

  “Jesus, R. You stink of werewolf. Among other things.” But she tossed me the keys. She also handed Beatrice a half-ounce spray bottle of scent killer.

  “I’ll air the Humvee out after I clean myself up. Let’s go, Beatrice.”

  There was a trace of envy simmering in Sunny’s brown eyes.

  “Nice meeting you. Beatrice.”

  Beatrice nodded, expressionless. It wasn’t out of rudeness. Her mind was far away.

  In the Humvee, after we had cleared the Doheny gateway and entered the city-state of Beverly Hills, expanded years ago to incorporate all of Bel Air north to Mulholland Drive and L.A. west to the Santa Monica line, Beatrice said, “If you’re dropping me at my place, I’m on Rexford south of Wilshire.” Her tone said, Please don’t.

  “You don’t really want to be alone right now.”

  She shook her head then looked away, at the bright corona of the Privilege: a blitz of casino lights, gold-leafed towers of the world’s major financial institutions. The Privilege glittered 24/7 like perpetual Christmas beneath the powerful, sordid smog of the Los Angeles basin, surrounded by its Great Wall. The security the wall provided was enhanced by technology such as acoustic bouncers and heat rays: electromagnetic radiation that caused wall-scaling werewolves to suffer from intense burning sensations. If that didn’t discourage them, there were plenty of Zippos at intervals atop the wall capable of throwing hundred-foot gushers of flame.

  A few decades ago the sure method of dealing with the plague of werewolves—or almost anything else wearing fur during an Observance—was wholesale slaughter. Flamethrowers were popular. Spike guns, corrosive acids, chain saws. Then it became obvious that the world’s population was declining drastically. Innocent people as well as Hairballs were being killed indiscriminately by the overanxious or trigger-happy. Neighbors were wiping out neighbors and, not infrequently, members of their own families.

  But it occurred to those who had any common sense left after the initial years of hysteria that human beings afflicted with LC disease were
indisposed or unproductive only for brief spells. Just a small percentage were hopelessly addicted to their monthly changes, which, as in the case of binge drinkers, amounted to a two-or three-day blackout.

  So billions were poured into Lycanthropy research. Drugs that suppressed the triggering mechanism in the brain at the onset of the full moon were discovered and synthesized from rare specimens of jungle plants. My mom and her colleagues found some of those, and as a result Pym had a Nobel for her work. With the drugs cheaply available, International Lycan Control was established and financed by a consortium of the richest city-states around the world, including the one we were driving through.

  ILC had roughly eighty percent of the Lycan population identified and Snitched. Snitches are surgically implanted, satellite-monitored transponders. Active life three years, then they must be replaced. They come with a microcomputer that controls a flow of drugs collectively known as TQs into the bloodstreams of Lycans for the forty-eight-hour period centered around the full moon each month. TQs put all Lycans into a state of twilight sleep after switching off the hairing-up impulse.

  There was maintenance involved along with monitoring. The failure rate of Snitchers was less than two percent. The reservoirs had to be refilled six times a year at ILC clinics. Woe to the careless or forgetful Lycan, and the occasional smartass who deliberately ignores his responsibility. But there are always those people who just don’t like being told what to do.

  Harsher methods exist to deal with that triggering mechanism, but they leave the individual in a permanent vegetative state. Another expense the rest of us don’t need. What we do need is the Lycans’ cooperation. Because, for one instance, the North American population continues to shrink. It’s illegal for Lycans to breed. High Blood women are continually encouraged, through financial incentives and massive doses of PR dupe, to have more children. Booty for High Blood babies. The various programs had all been failures. Women just didn’t want to make babies anymore, and who could blame them?

  “My mother is about your height,” I said to Beatrice. “She’s partial to old jeans and colorful native kit, but we’ll find something for you to change into.”

  “Oh, I’m meeting your mother?”

  “Not this visit. Last I heard from Pym, she was crossing the Plains of Bah in Sarawak, heading for her favorite rain forest.”

  “Ah.” Beatrice exhaled softly. “Borneo. Where it began. As the legend has it.”

  “That’s what Mom and her team would like to find out for sure.”

  “She’s a biologist?”

  “Anthropologist. I didn’t catch your last name, Beatrice.”

  “Harp. Like I could be playing right now if you hadn’t paid such a timely call on Artie.”

  “From where I saw it, you would’ve done a first-rate job of defending yourself.”

  Beatrice didn’t say anything, only shuddered. She was still holding back a lot of fright and anguish. She began to lick her lips again. I put down the window on her side to let the night air stream in.

  “I don’t think there’s much I’ll be able to tell you,” she said. “I mean—a motive. And since when do werewolves bear a grudge? Artie lived under the radar anyway. Always careful. Didn’t make enemies.”

  “That you know of. I’m not so much interested at this point in the motive for his killing. What concerns me is that someone may have learned to control and direct the murderous impulse of a Hairball.”

  Beatrice looked at me. We were both thinking the same thing.

  “Maybe that’s the motive,” she said.

  At this time of night there was almost no traffic except for the near-silent glide of monorail trains and the automated Pacific Electric MagLev transit system. Few vehicles other than those used by tradesmen or others for official use were allowed on the streets of the Privilege. Requirements to own a private vehicle were strict.

  Of the 28 million population of SoCal, about a third resided in the Privilege. Of that number nearly one hundred percent were High Bloods. I say “nearly” because we can never be completely sure. LC disease was always only a few careless moments of ecstasy away.

  Private residences had become nearly nonexistent south of Sunset Boulevard. More than three hundred condominiums of thirty stories or better were jammed into the twelve square miles of the walled city, just enough room between them to allow for swaying in an R-8 earthquake. Anything stronger than that and much of the Privilege would, in less than sixty seconds, become a very large tribal burial mound for extraterrestrial archaeologists of the far future to puzzle over.

  I turned right off Sunset at Benedict Canyon.

  Breva Way was a serpentine road through a much smaller canyon like a barranca, with acacia-covered bluffs above it. The homes were tucked away from the road behind hibiscus hedges, pepper and eucalyptus trees, high brick and stone walls covered in roses or bougainvillea thick enough to conceal the coils of razor wire. The still air was redolent with the rich, dark, stinking fertilizer the gardeners spread over emerald lawns.

  A private patrol pickup truck came slowly toward us. I blinked a code with my lights, because the Humvee had no ILC decal on it.

  “You live around here?” Beatrice said. “I’m impressed.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “Anyway I’m just house-sitting.”

  I don’t think she believed me. “What possessed you to become a Wolfer? It’s less dangerous skydiving with an umbrella.”

  “Faute de mieux,” I said.

  “‘For want of anything better,’” Beatrice translated. She didn’t believe that either. When she looked at me this time she was able to smile. “Oh, yeah. Just a tough guy with the heart of an idealist.”

  “Maybe I think civilization is worth saving,” I said. I stopped the Hummer to key in the code that opened the gates of 141 Breva Way. “What do you want from life, Beatrice?”

  “To go on living it.”

  3

  hose were the last words Beatrice said to me for quite a while, although she did favor me with a low, two-note whistle on her first look at the layout as we drove toward the house at the rear of a three-acre lot on a curving drive paved with brown river stones set in concrete.

  My mother’s house was Japanese, a three-thousand-square-foot minka, or farmhouse, with an entrance pavilion that enclosed a garden of raked gravel, more smooth round stones, and bonsai banyan trees.

  My father had inherited tens of millions of oil money, which I suppose kept gushing in. He was the kind of luckless gambler who would have bet against the Trojan horse, so a lot of the wealth had gushed right out again. Maybe he’d have succeeded in getting us into receivership, but a faulty heart valve put an end to his high-rolling ways when he was one month shy of fifty.

  I’d always liked him. We had fun together. He taught me, by example, never to draw to an inside straight.

  It had never occurred to me to wonder what had attached my mother, whose name was Penelope but who liked to be called Pym, to my father. She was probably a genius, and he had coasted through an Ivy League school with a gentleman’s C. They were both nearsighted, liked Boodles gin, and liked Sinatra. That was about it. Opposites do attract, of course. And once Pym had said to me, “He doesn’t mean any harm and he never hurts my feelings,” probably the only serious examination of their relationship she ever undertook.

  I opened the front doors of the minka, which were never locked, for Beatrice. Clapped the recessed lighting on as she walked in, looked around, looked at me with a tense expression.

  “Bathroom?” I gave directions.

  She didn’t forget to slip out of her boots before going briskly down a hallway floored in black slate. The hall separated a large minimally furnished living room from the tea room, each with twenty-five-foot bamboo ceilings. The post-and-beam construction mimicked that of Japanese farmhouses, but the posts were steel, better to handle seismic events. I went on to the kitchen, untypically modern: stainless steel appliances, a cooking island with a ceramic
range top.

  I pulled two bottles of Killian’s Red from one of the side-by-side refrigerators, where I chilled the beer to a couple of degrees above freezing. Lord Killian probably would’ve had a fit, but that was how I liked my brew. I held the cold bottle against the bump over one ear, then drank the Killian’s slowly, giving Bea the privacy she required.

  The WC and separate spa were on two levels, walled in teak, skylighted, floored in big rectangles of rough-finished red quarry tile. The spa contained a sauna, a cold plunge, and an open-front shower I could lie down in should I be in no shape to stand.

  Beatrice had turned on the water walls on two sides of the shower, along with the spectrachrome overhead lighting. I knocked on one of the Shoji doors.

  “Cold beer here.” I could see through a translucent door panel her ghostly shape in drifting warm mist.

  I had expected her to reach out discreetly. Instead she slid one of the doors all the way open. She was neither bold nor shy about her nakedness. She drank most of the beer I handed her in three long swallows, her small breasts taut as she tilted her head back.

  I stepped inside, closed the door behind me. When Beatrice had finished off the bottle she smothered a burp with one hand, shrugged in childlike embarassment, then turned and walked through the mist into the shower, a rainbow of lovely skin in the spectrachrome lights. While I was throwing off my clothes she played with jets spurting at all angles, luxuriating in the massaging sprays, dancing a little, coming fully alive. When I stepped in with her she was into my arms at a touch, holding me very tightly.

  There wasn’t much foreplay. Just high-burn sex, that urgent desire to banish, for a little while, dark and frightful images from our conscious minds.

  Beatrice had had a few lovers before me, but she wasn’t sexually experienced. In the shower her body had been telling her what she wanted, had to have, as quickly as possible.