by John Farris
Like a cat going after a bird the werewolf leaped to the helicopter, grabbed the cameraman, flung him and his digicam high into the dazzle of stage lights, then plunged into the cabin and killed the pilot.
The chopper autorotated out of control and smashed down hard on the infield. Busted rotor blades chopped lethally through the crowd.
From dust and smoke and flickers of flame the Hairball climbed slowly out of the broken chopper, showing signs of hard wear and brain fade. But it was able to stand erect on the fuselage and howl. I wasn’t amazed to hear, from the crowd, ecstatic, hair-raising wolf calls.
The Reverend Kingworthy was stage front on his knees, praying.
“It’s going to blow,” I said. I didn’t only mean the ruptured gas tank of the helicopter.
With the wolf calls there were isolated cries of “Lycan Power!” that became a chorus.
And then they started to applaud, and “Lycan Power” turned to shouts of “Bucky.”
BUCKY. BUCKY! BUCKY!!!
“They’ve got their martyr,” I said to Bea. “And for the rest of us the shit gets deeper.”
Kingworthy stood and raised his hands to the sky and as if on cue the helicopter exploded thirty yards from him.
All he got was a face like rare prime rib and badly singed eyebrows.
By the time I reached the corpse of the ex-rocker and Out-of-Phase werewolf with a fire extinguisher, only blackened hide and briquettes of flesh and a toothy jawbone remained.
But a legend had been born from the ashes.
After a meticulous search of the area where the werewolf had fallen in flames, one of our Evidence Response techies came up with a tweezerload of twisted titanium, a bit of melted acrylic, and fused microwiring that might have been a Snitcher. The object went back to the lab for trace analysis.
If it was a Snitcher, WEIR didn’t know anything about it. Bucky Spartacus was not on their roster as a Lycan. Miles Brenta’s Nanomimetics Corporation held all the contracts to make Snitchers and the new LUMO upgrade exclusively for WEIR. So we knew that if the suspected implant hadn’t served some legitimate medical purpose then Bucky, as he had seemed to fear when I talked to him, was or had been badly used. The purpose seemed clear to me.
“For the unification and further growth of the First Church of Lycanthropy,” I explained to Booth Havergal. We were watching another forensics team comb the area where I had been ambushed by El Gordo. “A werewolf was born tonight. Out-of-Phase, so to the credulous it’s a miracle birth. But not just another werewolf. An ordinary rock-and-roller becomes a mythic figure. I’m sure that’s the kind of heavy dupe Kingwor-thy’s PR will lay on it.”
“The Elvis of Lycanthropy?” Booth said. “Do you think the Right-bloody-Reverend is behind this business?”
“I’m not sure. It’s possible he was so cranked on Frenzies tonight he thought he was invulnerable. His press conference has been going on for forty-five minutes and he may keep it up till dawn.” ILC had done its usual thorough job of sealing the crime scene, but we had no grounds for detaining Kingworthy, who after being patched up by the paramedics was now, along with his entourage, entertaining the media nearby but out of our jurisdiction. I gave the Rev some thought, then shook my head. “Religious grifters are different from the typical con men. They seldom have that deep hard core of cynicism and disdain for the human race. Kingworthy’s a true believer of whatever part of his spiel he happens to tune into as it rolls off his tongue. I’ll talk to him, but I have no leverage. I can’t tie him into Miles Brenta.”
“It’s entirely coincidental, R.”
“Sometimes I like coincidences. In the last forty-eight hours two of Brenta’s celebrity pets have gone Hairball—but in freakish, atypical ways. Almost as if they were obeying commands. We don’t have Chiclyn Hickey’s body and we don’t have much of Bucky left, but the fact that there was a microchip in that meltdown of a Snitch facsimile is one coincidence too many. If it can be traced to Nanomimetics—”
“Brenta’s company is not the only one around capable of manufacturing one of those.”
“But not legally. Brenta has the best technology, most of the patents, and the government contracts worldwide. He also has a nervous girlfriend I think I should see more of.”
“What pretext?”
“I like making her nervous. Maybe it’s sexual. On her part.”
“Pay a call on Francesca if you think it may be useful. But walk the line, R. Don’t make Miles Brenta nervous.” He paused, not liking the prospect of a nervous and politically potent Miles Brenta. Then he said, “Control of Lycans is essential to human survival. But can you think of any reason why someone who might possess the necessary technology would want to control an actual werewolf?”
“They make ideal assassins. Artie never knew what hit him.”
“If only we had a motive.”
“Just before he was killed Artie was getting close to telling me something he’d learned that worried him. He’d been talking about those Hairballs in No Gal the last Observance.” I had to take a look at the moon. It’s a nearly irresistible twitch most people have around this time of the month. Look up. Look around. Be afraid. “I think Artie, who was heavily invested in research and technology companies, knew just how hairing-up can be triggered whenever it suits someone’s purpose. And I have a strong hunch that Francesca Obregon also knows how it’s done.”
“You seem obsessed with her,” Booth said disapprovingly.
It was an opportunity to tell him about Bea’s conviction that Francesca had her knife.
“Enough for an arrest warrant?” I said.
“You know better. If there’s anything to it, if your—if Miss Harp isn’t mistaken, then undoubtedly Francesca has rid herself of the knife already.”
But he had liked it. And he was frustrated. When the sun came up he had to face a largely hostile media throwing questions at him he couldn’t answer.
“She’s Brenta’s mistress and both of them are in this up to their necks,” I said.
He ignored me with an angry shake of his head.
“And aren’t you overdoing protective custody? You involved a civilian in ILC business tonight.”
“I needed a date for the prom.”
“If she wants to be a detective let her take a course on the Internet.”
We watched a tech guy making an impression of a portion of tire track left by the biker who had rescued me from El Gordo. Lifting the track was routine. It wasn’t going to tell us anything useful. But I was pretty sure I knew the biker’s identity. Booth listened pensively to my explanation.
“If it was Elena Grace, surely she’d have let you know.”
“Couldn’t risk it. Or so she implied in her text message a few minutes earlier. Christ, Booth! She’s working undercover for ILC Intel. And you know it.”
“What possible expertise or discipline would qualify her for that sort of work?”
“Qualify—Those Intel assholes use civilians all the time to make a case! Misuse them—they don’t care whose blood gets spilled if they look good.”
“Even if your hunch is correct,” he said, “I can’t afford a balls-out with Intel right now. I have too many problems as it is.” He stared at me, rubbing his chin with the back of a hand. “Don’t be another problem.”
“One phone call,” I said. “Whatever she’s into, you can get her yanked. Do it for me, Booth.”
He rocked slightly on his heels, looked around the back lot of the amphitheater. He was seething. But not at me.
“If you want Elena Grace back—”
“I just don’t want her killed.”
“—bring me someone else’s head. Before the Observance.”
I looked at the moon again. He was giving me forty-eight hours.
12
here are we going?” Bea asked as, ninety minutes later, we left the gates of the house on Breva Way behind. “And where did you get that jazzbo ensemble? I don’t know if I want to be seen with you.”
“The suit was my father’s. I think he bought it to wear to a costume party. If you’re patient everything comes back into style.”
“I wouldn’t quote odds on that set of threads,” Bea said skeptically.
I had added some gold chains to the sportin’ life suit with its wide, wide lapels, a pleated black shirt open at the neck, and a pair of perforated black-and-white wingtip shoes that also had belonged to my father. I couldn’t wear my Geekers—they were a dead giveaway that I was ILC. Instead I put on a pair of wraparound shades that covered as much of my face as the Lone Ranger’s mask. A pirate’s black headwrap and a pale gray, snap-brim fedora concealed my white hair.
“I’m in disguise,” I said. “Think you can impersonate a giddy newlywed?”
“I had the lead in my senior class play. Who are you supposed to be?”
“Just a rakehell gambler who got lucky at the Gold Spur Casino tonight. Call me ‘Reef,’ doll. Because I’m feeling flush, we got ourselves married up in the casino’s wedding chapel, and now we’re—”
“I don’t have a ring. I can’t feel married without a ring.”
I turned the Rover north onto Coldwater Canyon, then took a well-worn plush ring box from a pocket of the suit jacket and handed it to her.
Beatrice opened the box slowly, as women are apt to do.
“Omigod! That stone must be ten carats.”
“About that. You’re looking at my mother’s wedding ring, angel.”
“Omigod! And you want me to wear it? That’ll make me giddy, all right.”
“If you put Pym’s ring on your own finger, it’s Let’s Pretend. If I put it on, that’ll be for keeps.”
Bea took a very long breath and wiped under one eye with a finger. She took another long breath.
“You haven’t told me where we’re going and why we’re pretending.”
“Forty-two thirteen West Burbank Boulevard. Angeltowne Livery and Exotic Car Rentals. Open twenty-four hours. Reef and Honeychile are looking for something stylish to drive up the coast on their honeymoon.”
“Honeychile?” Her lip curled. “Okay, can we get serious? The real reason is—”
“I’m there to have a look around while you provide a diversion.”
“You’re on the job.”
“Right.”
“What is the job?”
“When Reef don’t have much else to go on, Reef goes with his gut, doll.”
“Would you stop? Why Angeltowne Livery? I know that Artie occasionally rented one of their limos.”
“Yeah. They have white for weddings, black for funerals. And even a couple of purple ones as homage to Elvis. Old-time Lincoln Continentals sawed and stretched. I’m sure it was one of those Lincolns the greasers who tried to throw me under the truck scrammed in when their play didn’t develop. Reef is still kind of chapped about that.”
“There are a lot of limo places, and some of them may have purple ones.”
“The last time I saw Sunny Chagrin she was able to say only a few words to me. She was dying and she knew it and she had to make the words count. Two of them were ‘Angel Town.’ Sunny could have meant Angeltowne Livery. And she may have found or seen something there that got her killed. Anyway, it’s a place to start.”
“I understand,” Beatrice said in a subdued tone. “And we could be killed too.”
“I’m not risking your life. Maybe it’s just a blocked trail and I won’t learn anything. But you’re not going to be in there for more than five minutes.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll need more time to look around.”
Bea crossed her arms and settled a little lower in her seat.
“I have a chill,” she said faintly. “Would you turn down the air conditioner?”
Angeltowne Livery occupied a block with one diagonal side to it, a two-story stucco building. Their location was convenient to the movie studios where they probably did a sizable business renting out their antique cars to period productions awash in sentiment and nostalgia.
At 2 A.M. the showroom was brightly lighted; a crew was waxing and dusting an assortment of elegant automobiles: a 1956 Thunderbird, a pink tailfin Caddy, a Stutz Blackhawk. All of the window spaces on the second floor had been filled in and painted over.
I drove around the building before settling on a place to leave the Rover. They were busy in the back, where a courtyard surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with the obligatory razor wire protected a compound of limos. I saw a gleaming bale of the deadly wire sitting in the bed of a pickup truck outfitted with chromed pipes and handholds and a rack of off-roader lights. The truck had the bulky tires and shocks necessary for desert rambling.
A car carrier was being unloaded, half a dozen vehicles from the late 1940s—the beginning of an era on the drop-edge of an abyss of time, before anyone had fully realized what was in store for humanity. The big worry back then was the Bomb, which now seemed quaint. Man had made his peace with the atom. Any political redhot who wanted a big bang could have one, but so what? The true assassins were everywhere, as we drifted to extinction in the final season of our blood.
The returned cars were driven into the garage beneath the building. There was a guard on the gate, another patrolling the lot with a pair of Rottweilers and a burp gun slung across his chest. I counted four surveillance cameras.
While we were idling along a big Harley zoomed up from the hive of the garage and turned into the street behind us. The Harley headed west into North Hollywood. The biker looked like a Diamondbacker.
I found a parking spot on a lighted section of the diagonal side street half a block north of the livery. I opened the flask filled with Boodles that I had brought from the house and basted my whiskery chin, then added a few drops of gin to my shirt collar.
“Excuse me,” I said to Beatrice. I gargled with the stuff, then spat it through an empty window.
Bea stared at me and pitched her voice higher, whining a little.
“Now, Reef! Baby, don’t you think you’ve had about enough?”
“Hell, we just got married! Gettin’ on my case already? I can drink more liquor than a freight train can haul! Now let’s go grab ourselves a hunk set of wheels. I feel like flyin’ tonighttt!”
With our act established I pocketed the flask. We strolled down to Burbank Boulevard hand in hand. Opposite Angeltowne Livery on the wide street there was a collection of low, drab-looking buildings housing businesses that were seedy, second-rate, or out-of-date. Chinese takeout. Dry cleaning. Porn books and collector DVDs. A gas station on the corner was closed. There was a yellow van partly visible behind it.
We went through a glass door marked RENTAL OFFICE and up a couple of steps. The agent stuck with the graveyard shift was, according to the plaque on his desk, T. Hollingsworth Sibley. He was watching TV. He had narrow shoulders, a hairpiece he might have borrowed from a poodle, and the disgruntled expression of a man who knows the joke is always on him.
His mood didn’t improve when I leaned over his desk and breathed on him.
“Mr. Sibley, the little woman and me—she’s been the ‘litle woman’ for, what is it now, a whole hour and a half, darlin’?” Bea simpered prettily. “Give Sib here a gander at your rock.”
Bea flashed the diamond for him, posing this way and that with the toothy élan of a low-rent movie starlet. Then she turned and gawked at the cars on the showroom floor.
“The little woman and me are about to depart on our honeymoon, as you might have guessed,” I said with a randy leer.
“Well, congrat—” Sibley murmured halfheartedly.
“Oh my gawdd, Reef! Have you ever seen more beautiful cars in your life? They are so hot. What’s that red convertible there called? That’s the one I want! Can you get it for us, baby?”
Sibley’s thin eyebrows knitted in consternation. But before he could move from behind his desk to head us off I had Bea around the waist and was walking her into the showroom, managing to be a littl
e unsteady on my feet.
“Uh, just a moment, please?”
Bea smiled at him over her shoulder. “Oh, he’s okay. Reef’s just celebrated a little too much. But I can drive just fine. I hardly ever touch a drop myself. Even though my first two husbands were slaves to the bottle.”
“You never told me about two other husbands! Where the hell’s this news coming from all of a sudden?”
“Oh, Reef. I was only a kid then. Tige and Randolph hardly count at all! They were just practice husbands. You’re the only one I have ever really truly loved, and it’ll be forever, baby. Now don’t you sulk.”
“I’ll sulk if I want to!”
One of the Hispanic women in coveralls who were polishing the rolling stock looked up with a smirk. I dug out my flask and tippled.
Sibley said, “Oh, now, we can’t have that! I must ask you—”
“Reef, you are going to give Mr. Sibley the impression we’re not responsible people to rent to!”
Sibley undoubtedly had decided that already. I reinforced the bad impression I was making by gagging, then spraying gin on the windshield of a candy-apple-red Chevrolet Mako Shark II, such a beautiful machine that desecrating it was almost enough to give me guilt spasms.
Sibley sprang to the rescue with his own initialed handkerchief before either of the cleaning women could respond. He gave me a hateful look. I spat up a little more. Sibley pointed wildly down a hallway.
“Not here! First door on your right!”
“Oh, Reef!” Beatrice wailed. “Are you sick? Was it all that sushi?”
I nodded and stumbled away toward the bathrooms. LADIES and GENTS side by side. There were two other doors. The one at the end of the hall had a sign that read GARAGE—EMPLOYEES ONLY. The other one, next to the men’s room, had no ID. Both doors required card key access.
I glanced back as Bea was carrying on, doing a good job of distracting or entertaining everyone. I ducked into the ladies’.
On the terrace at Valdemar as she lay dying Sunny had tried to guide me precisely to where she wanted me to go: dead drop, she had said, then: handicap.
The bathroom stall designed for wheelchairs. At least that’s how I had it figured. Sunny had left something in there for future retrieval because someone might have made her and she knew her chances of walking out of Angeltowne Livery with whatever it was, borrowed or copied, were not all that good.
