by John Farris
“‘They’re going to win, aren’t they?’ Those were his exact words,” I said.
Booth grimaced. It was the one question never far from the thoughts of anyone who worked for ILC.
“He also said that dysgenic research had begun to look promising. Claimed to have inside information to that effect.”
“For instance?”
“I don’t know. Maybe something that he was funding quietly. I’m looking into it. I have his assistant, a bright girl named Beatrice Harp, more or less in protective custody. My personal custody. While she digs into Artie’s business arrangements.”
Booth took that in and smiled slightly. “All right. I won’t begrudge you. You could use the right sort of distraction, but be discreet.”
“Speaking of distractions—” I hesitated, not knowing just where to put this in the context of our immediate concerns.
Booth watched me patiently.
“Elena Grace dropped by the house this morning. Clandestinely. Very early.”
“Oh. How long has it been?”
“More than six years.”
“How is she?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Elena also visited her mother. This is a reach, but it may be that Elena showing up now has something to do with her kid sister going off-line. Although I couldn’t get much out of Ida, she was clearly disturbed about Mal.”
“Is that why you have a watch on the house? Do you think the expense is justified?”
“Just going with my gut,” I admitted.
“No evidence yet that Mal is being held for ransom?”
“I have Lew checking phone logs. But I don’t believe that’s why Mal is missing. It’s not another celebrity snatch. But if she’s off-line—” I glanced at Booth’s centuries-old Lunarium, which had been updated to also display the time, to the second, that remained before the next full moon. “About eighty-two hours from now Mal will hair-up. There are two reasons for that happening. One, Mal is just being a rebellious twenty-four-year-old brat. She’s never been the cookie in the jar with the most raisins. Or else—and I’m still reaching—someone wants her to go Hairball, like Chickie Hickey.”
“For a similar motive?”
I caught myself rubbing my stomach where it hurt, but deeper inside.
“Maybe. Or to be offered up as some kind of sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice is another way of saying ‘prey.’” Booth stroked his cheek, lost in thought. “There have been rumors, little wisps of speculation floating around the Privilege. A shoot is being set up. Very large money involved, perhaps even a loving cup. If one is going to chance hunting werewolves, even under controlled conditions, it’s so much more prestigious as well as rewarding if the hunter bags a trophy werewolf: a celebrity. Dozens have been nabbed for ransoms, but how many are simply missing during the course of the last two years?”
I couldn’t answer that one. Booth queried his computer and the tally blitzed back to us.
“Eleven in twenty-six months. Hadn’t thought it was so many. Movie stars like Lance Rodd, Curt Cannon, and Shell Scott. That corporate swindler and deluxe party-giver Colorado Gaines. Jackie Kirk, a very funny bloke. Diane Richelieu, Paula von Hymen—top-tier, all of them, of whom no traces remain.”
I said, “There’s been one prosecution for staging a hunt. A rancher in Seco Grande named Max Thursday. Claimed he leased his property to a movie company for three days and went fishing. Much to his surprise there was a mal de lune shoot in his absence, and if any movies got made they were home movies. His story didn’t quite sync up with reality, but all they nailed him with was a fine. What the hell, they were only Lycans. I was thinking of paying Max a call today, to see what I can jog loose from his memory. Like who approached him in the first place.”
With Booth’s approval I ordered a helicopter. While I waited for the chopper to be serviced, Lew Rolling got back to me about Bucky Spartacus’ Escalade.
“The GPS aboard has either been disabled or yanked,” Lew said. “Sorry, R.”
“Let’s find his ride anyway. I’m beginning to believe there’s a possibility it was Bucky who spirited his girlfriend away from the Montmorency last night. With help from some members of his loyal entourage. One of them is Cam, the other is Fitz. They live in Carbon Beach.”
“Chuck a werewolf, even a dying one, into your ride? That reminds me of the old joke—”
“Heard it,” I said. “Just get on your way to Carbon and begin sweating Bucky’s crew. I want that boy and I want him fast.”
I called Beatrice. She answered on the second ring.
“How are you coming along?” I asked her.
“Wow. I had no idea. Artie was one secretive guy. Paranoid, even. His holdings are like mazes within labyrinths. There’s a name I keep coming up with. Dr. Chant. As in Gregorian.”
“Medical doctor?”
“Don’t know.”
“Local address?”
“Uh-uh. In the past couple of months he’s e-mailed Artie from places like Rio and Darjeeling. Always on the move.”
“What’s in the e-mails? Wish you were here?”
“No, he keeps asking Artie, ‘Does he have it yet?’ Situation urgent, he says. Situation critical.”
“Maybe he needed to close a deal. Keep digging, angel.”
“I’m getting a headache,” Bea complained.
I had an idea.
“I sent Sunny home to sleep, but I feel kind of one-armed without a partner. I’m about to hop over to Seco Grande, and I thought you might—”
“Where are you? Burton Way? I’ll be there in five, make it five and a half minutes, the elevators in the Radcliffe are poky. So if I’m your partner, do I get sworn in or something? A badge like yours? Wow.”
I had to laugh. “You get a free lunch. Now move your sweet—”
Beatrice had already hung up.
6
nyone who wanted to get around the SoCal hinterland (an area almost three times the size of the state of Massachusetts) without spending hours on old, frequently dangerous roads in elderly vehicles and chancing bridges that could crumble into an arroyo without warning, traveled by air taxi. Or else they owned their choice of aircraft ranging from minijets to ultralight helicopters. The skies could be hazardous over thickly populated provinces.
Except for the rich enclaves like the Privilege or Paradiso Palms out in the desert or Laguna Nigel on the Pacific, the tax base of the rest of SoCal was inadequate to maintain infrastructure properly. There were brownouts and blackouts and bad water and worse sewage systems. Public schools were erratic. In some provinces police protection was subsidized and good. Fire protection throughout SoCal was excellent, a simple matter of self-preservation, financed by the wealthy with everything to lose and supported by celebrity fund-raisers. Otherwise vast areas of SoCal would have been nothing but charred stubble and we all would have choked to death on the dust raised by the Santa Anas.
The SoCal Lycan population, according to statistics kept by the ILC and never made public, was creeping up to sixty percent. Out of 28 million souls. Rogue werewolves, a much smaller group, were a major headache for us and for large landowners with cattle and other livestock to protect. Low taxes and more subsidies kept the ranchers and growers flush and productive, even those whose cash crops were squantch and poppies, covering thousands of acres.
Max Thursday was a third-generation cattleman. His spread was twenty-five hundred acres of graze east of the Santa Ana Mountains and south of Corona. Good pasture cut through with arroyos and a couple of large barrancas that had water in them in August, probably from deep slow springs. There were maybe three hundred head of cattle on the hillsides. Closer to the home place on an additional, flatter thousand acres we saw wind turbines and a rectangular tank with a few dairy cows grazing in the shade of big cottonwoods.
Beatrice had been researching Max Thursday during our flight.
“One thing is for sure,” she said. “Whatever he was paid for the use of his
land, he didn’t need the money. Majority stockholder in the Citizens’ Bank of Riverside. Net worth eight million.”
“Maybe he has ex-wives to support.”
“One wife. Died four years ago. He lives with his granddaughter Francesca.”
I put the ILC chopper down where I had been told to at the south end of an unpaved landing strip. There was a twin-engine Cessna parked beneath an aluminum sunshade and a couple of pumps for the underground tanks of aviation fuel. A golf cart was waiting there along with a teenaged Mexican boy wearing a tattered straw hat and an unbuttoned blue shirt. He smiled bashfully. We climbed aboard and were driven down a straight quarter-mile lane of California oak trees with their hard, sharply pointed little leaves that enabled the trees to thrive where daytime temperatures usually topped a hundred degrees this time of the year.
Irrigation equipment was idle in a flat green truck garden. It was already hot, and still. The house waiting for us at the end of the lane was one of those California old-timers completely alien to the landscape. Three stories high, not counting assorted chimneys bristling with lightning rods and peaked, jerkinhood eaves. The sort of thing that wealthy folk from Philadelphia, where my father was from, put up along the Jersey Shore as the twentieth century was getting off to a good start. This house rambled, with a deep covered porch on one corner and an enclosed solarium on the other side. It was shingle-sided with hand-adzed western cedar. Cross-mullioned windows were partly shielded against the Seco Grande winds and summer heat by the hooded eaves and dormers.
There were no fences except for stock pens and a corral. The usual sheds and equipment you find around ranches. The house was protected from werewolf incursions by the latest in electronic deterrence: a Humvee-mounted Zippo backed up by acoustic blasters (AUGIEs) on the roof of the house. Two TRADs stood at either end of the deep porch.
As if he had been watching us from the moment we landed from behind the screen door, Max Thursday came out of the house when we reached the top step of the porch. An old black-and-white dog limped at his heel. Max himself was eighty-four, standing about five-ten on bulldogger heels and lean to the bone in his Wranglers and pressed khaki work shirt. In the husk of his face old eyes seemed to yearn for greener years. He didn’t offer to shake hands when I introduced us, but his good eye, the one without a sizable bloodknot, lingered in appreciation on Beatrice.
“Well, now. Said I would see you as a courtesy, but my lawyer has told me I don’t need to say ‘nother word about what went on here without my knowledge and consent. I was hoodwinked, as you must know.”
“I’m aware of what you told the local law, Mr. Thursday.”
“Much as I’m a cattleman, last thing I want is a bunch of werewolves turned loose. I told ‘em, anybody who’d listen. It just ain’t common sense. Not that I won’t shoot a Hairball on sight, and I have kilt aplenty of them. But not for sport. There are laws, and I abide by them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pled nolo contendere as I was advised to do, and paid my fine. It’s all behind me.” To Beatrice he said with a one-sided smile, the other side of his face seeming to be without muscle tone, “You are a very pretty girl. Got that Creole coloring like some women I comed to know while I was serving in the U.S. Army at Camp Polk, Louisiana. That was in ‘64, before I was shipped off to that ruckus in Southeast Asia. Would you happen to hail from New Orleans?”
“My mom was from Baton Rouge.”
He nodded. His gaze wandered, came to rest on the throwing knife Bea wore. It seemed to impress him.
“Mr. Thursday,” I said, “what can you tell me about the movie company people who approached you?”
“There was two of them. Company they represented was called Luxor Pictures. Turned out to be a shell, but the bond they put up was good as gold. Made sure of that before I turned the keys over to them. Then I went fishing.”
“By yourself?”
He looked at me with a weary contempt I had unknowingly earned.
“I can do anything now I could do when I was fifty years younger.”
Way off in the bright blue distance there was a plume of dust from a motorcycle headed our way.
“In your deposition you said you didn’t recall the names of the men from Luxor, and you misplaced their business cards.”
He looked blankly at me, as if he’d momentarily misplaced himself. I repeated the question.
“Oh. That’s how it was.”
“Could you describe the men?”
“Messkins. One kind of stocky, with that long greaser hair tied in back. The other was tall, about your height. Had a couple of gold-lined teeth, and three scars under one eye, like some woman had got her nails into him. He called me jefe. Now, when some Messkins call you that, it’s the same as calling you a pubic hair.” Max Thursday’s lip twitched sourly. “Not that I got anything again’ the Messkin. Plenty a them’s good people. Married myself to a woman from Hermosillo for forty-three years. She’d still turn heads in the street when she was sixty.”
The motorcyclist must have been winding it up close to a hundred miles per hour on the straight farm road to the house. The old dog heard it coming although Max didn’t seem to: the dog got creakily to his feet and huffed a couple of times, all the bark he had left in him.
“Where do you usually do your fishing, Mr. Thursday?”
“Got me a place in the San Gabes on the Hawknail River. Don’t get up there often enough nowadays. Haven’t been this year at all.”
Beatrice and I looked at each other.
“Was there anything else?” Max asked me, and then to Beatrice, “You’re a very pretty girl. You come again sometime. Always room in my house for a pretty girl.”
“Thank you,” Beatrice said, and with another, brief glance at me she turned to watch the approach of the biker.
“Ain’t noontime yet,” Max Thursday said, squinting at the sky. “Reckon why she’s home early today.”
“Is that Francesca?” I said.
It was Francesca. She sat idling twenty thousand worth of BMW road rocket near the steps to the porch and looked up at us from her bronze-tinted face shield before she killed the 1300 cc engine and swung a long leg out of the saddle. Halfway up the steps she took off her helmet and paused to shake out her thick mahogany-toned hair. She was smiling. Beatrice whistled softly, just for me to hear and interpret.
“Company, Max?” Francesca said, looking us over.
Introductions again. Francesca’s last name was Obregon. She was in her mid-thirties, I guessed. But with many beautiful Hispanic women it could be hard to tell. She might have been as old as forty-five. Her cheekbones were so prominent they made the rest of her face look almost gaunt. She had bold dark slanting eyebrows and in the clear light of day her eyes looked as black as hot black coffee. She had a sharply notched upper lip and a full underlip; there was a certain proud as opposed to sullen stubbornness in the set of her mouth. She had the kinetic attitude of zest for risky things that went with the expensive hog she rode.
It was the cheekbones, the body language, the toss of her lovely head that prompted a sharp jab of recognition, the certainty that I knew her from somewhere.
“Call me Fran,” she said, her free hand on her hip. Not quite a challenge-to-combat stance. “ILC, huh? What’s it about this time?”
“Routine,” I said, trying to look benign.
Fran shrugged slightly but with unmistakable disbelief and took Bea’s measure, her eyes lingering on the throwing knife in Bea’s scabbard.
“Hunky,” she said. “For show?”
“No damn way,” Bea said, as she looked at the silver handle of the knife Fran wore. She blinked a couple of times. “Yours looks kind of neat,” she said slowly.
Almost in sync the two women drew their knives and offered them hilt-first to each other for inspection.
“They were just leaving,” Max said, taking a couple of steps toward me with hands upraised as if to shoo me off his porch. Then he stumbled. I caught h
im. He felt as frail as a paper lantern in my grasp.
“Max, did Luz Marie check your blood sugar this morning?” He mumbled something unhelpful. To me Fran said, “Would you mind helping him inside?” And with swift concern she went into the house first, leaving Bea holding both of the throwing knives.
Max Thursday wanted to shake me off, protesting that he could walk five miles by himself anytime he wanted, but right now he wasn’t able to keep his feet from crossing, so I kept a hand on his elbow and guided him across the threshold, then into a partly shuttered parlor with eighteen-foot ceilings and three paddle-bladed fans going overhead. He sank into an old rocker with a Navaho blanket thrown across the high back and looked vacantly at the floor while he breathed through his mouth. His spotted hands grappled weakly with each other.
Fran had disappeared momentarily, through an arched doorway where a beaded curtain was moving. Somewhere in the house parrots squawked, birds twittered; it sounded like a distant aviary. Bea stood by a stone fireplace studying pictures on the walls: horses, dogs, ancestors, portraits framed like museum pieces.
I watched the old man. After a little while he looked up at me.
“How do you do, sir.”
“Doing okay. Can I get you anything?”
“A drink of water.” He nodded his head toward a deal table where there was a pitcher and glasses. I poured some for him. He was looking around now, but seemed far from alert.
“Carlotta may have my room,” he said. “She’ll be more comfortable there.”
“All right,” I said. I helped him drink some water.
“Where did she go? She was just here, wasn’t she?”
“Fran?” I said.
His brows knitted in feeble asperity. “No. Carlotta. I’m doing this for Carlotta.”
“I see,” I said.
Fran Obregon returned to the parlor followed by an anxious Mexican woman as plump as a bumblebee. Fran had a diabetics’ kit with her. Luz Marie dithered.
“I check him at nine-thirty this morning. He okay then. Dios mio.”
