High Bloods

by John Farris

  The ladies’ was deserted. There were no cameras, although the showroom was lousy with them. It was a reputable business after all, at least on the surface. Employees could get used to being watched anywhere else but not on the john.

  I closed the door of the big stall behind me. No need to look around. There was no tank for the toilet. I kneeled and felt around the bottom of the bowl. Something was stuck to the porcelain there. So I got down on my back and had a look.

  Sunny had left me a card key, fastened to the porcelain with two corn plasters she probably found in her purse. I pulled it free, flushed the plasters, and got up, shrugging the kinks out of my neck and shoulders.

  I heard Bea even before I cracked the door to the hall an inch. She was bawling, on Reef’s case as Sibley tried to shush her. She felt so humiliated, sobbed Beatrice. Maybe she’d made a mistake after all. Men who drank might be fun for a while, but in the end they meant heartbreak. When would she ever learn?

  Bea had maneuvered Sibley so that his back was to the hall. She had a hand on his arm in case he tried to look my way. She would keep it up for another minute or so, then her humiliation would get the best of her and she would leave in a final cloudburst of tears and wait for me in the Rover.

  I slipped out of the ladies’, tried the card key in the lock of the door next to the bathroom and got a green light. I went in fast and the door closed on Bea’s squall of suffering. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing.

  I went two at a time up a flight of stairs to a second-floor hall where a couple of fluorescent bulbs needed to be changed: they flickered and buzzed. There were offices or cubicles along the right side of the long hall. Most of the doors stood open. Nothing to hide. A big one-way window was set into the middle of the left-side wall. It overlooked the garage two floors below. Mechanics were at work. The zip-buzz of power wrenches. I saw choppers worth twenty thousand or better and several Diamondbackers working on them. Four more members of the Brotherhood were playing hold ‘em and drinking beer from quart bottles in a brightly lit lounge area ringed with vending machines.

  One of the players looked like El Gordo.

  (So Angeltowne Livery was also a clubhouse for Diamondbackers. Was that what you wanted me to know, Sunny?)

  I wasn’t satisfied. I prowled the length of the hall and came to the last two doors. One was marked SECURITY. The other could have been an exit door with stairs beyond, but it also required a card key.

  I put my ear to the first of the doors and listened. A faint hum of computers inside. I used my card key and the lock clicked open. So it was probably a master key that Sunny had left me, with access to any part of the building.

  I peeked inside. One wall was all monitor screens for the surveillance cameras. A guy in a khaki uniform had his feet on a desk amid paper plates and cartons of Chinese. He was snoring softly.

  I didn’t go in, but I spent a little time looking at the monitors. I saw Bea leave the showroom downstairs and walk quickly along Burbank. I saw a basement area apart from the garage big enough to hold a couple of armored trucks. Nobody was there. And I saw a small, empty room with a narrow bed in it, nothing on the bed but a mattress. The walls appeared to be padded. There was a table, a molded plastic chair, a washbasin, and a lidless commode.

  Furnished like a holding cell, but soundproofed. No clue as to where this room might be. But I wanted a closer look, if I could find it.

  I left the surveillance room and the snoozing guard and opened the last door. Beyond it was a flight of stairs going down and another hallway along the east side of the building. More locked doors, which I opened one by one. Finding nothing of interest until I came to a chilly room in which there were six restaurant-sized stainless steel refrigerators. Each contained a hundred or so 500 cc bags filled with what appeared to be blood.

  The door opposite the blood bank had a small window, about eight inches square, at eye level. I looked in at the cell-like soundproofed room I had seen on the surveillance monitor. What light there was came from the overhead fluorescent fixture in the hall.

  I unlocked the door and went in. The window in the door was one-way from the hall. The air inside was stale but there was a faint linger of woman-odor, a mix of bodily effluvia: of skin and glands, of perfume and lotions, the merest trace one out of a few thousand noses might detect. I picked up the residue quickly. If a man had occupied this room for any length of time the air would’ve had a sharper, rye, rancid smell to me.

  The room, or cell, was tonelessly dull visually, but clean. Not a hair to be found in the sink or a ring in the toilet. I kneeled and sniffed the mattress. She had spent a lot of time lying on the bed, asleep or drugged, and her odor was as definite as if she’d been there only moments ago.

  I inhaled again, then stood and backed away to the center of the room, hoping that the guard on night security wouldn’t wake himself with the velocity of his snoring, or his feet wouldn’t fall off the desk. If I was going to raise her I needed another two or three minutes, and there was nothing I could do about the wide-angle security camera mounted in a corner of the room below the high ceiling.

  I had been taught, in the long nights of the forest and the dark of the shaman’s lodge where only a dim red glow from the ever-present fire provided necessary light for orientation purposes, what might have been called miraculous by the uninitiated, or black arts by the fearful. But there was nothing otherworldly or profane about it. With training almost anyone could do what I was about to do.

  With a firm olfactory impression of her, what I needed now was to telepathically “see” as much of her as possible from the energy field she’d left behind.

  I didn’t look directly at the mattress, but at a place on the blank wall a few feet above the bed. Putting my mind at rest. She was there; I had only to let the energy field provide me with a glimpse of her spirit body.

  “There have been rumors,” Booth Havergal had said to me. “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.”

  Mal Scarlett was an insolent little scatterbrain, but nobody deserved such a fate.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” I said softly as her image faded from my mind’s eye. “Uncle R is coming to get you.”

  I had notice of an upcoming mal de lune shoot with Mal as the designated trophy, but I needed a line on where and when. To get that information I also needed to make good use of ten minutes, alone, with Raoul J. Ortega. President of the SoCal Diamondbackers, a criminal organization. Angeltowne Livery, judging by what I had already seen, was a favorite hangout of Diamondbackers. The refrigerators across the hall attested to the fact that they were still in the bloodlegging business. I didn’t think I would have much difficulty finding out that Ortega was a silent partner in Angeltowne. Or a shell company called Luxor Films. And one of Ortega’s least attractive ventures appeared to be setting up mal de lunes to amuse wealthy and morally deficient High Bloods.

  I’d been hanging around Angeltowne a little too long. Bea would be safely back in the Rover and T. Hollingsworth Sibley might be wondering about me.

  So I retraced my steps, not pausing to find out if the security guard was still asleep in front of his monitors, and went down the steps to the first floor. There didn’t seem to be a reason for caution at this point, so I just barged out into the hallway where the bathrooms were.

  And almost ran into El Gordo, smelling of beer and pomade and just maybe underarm flop-sweat from a bad couple of hours at the poker table.

  I don’t know how drunk he was. He sidestepped me, blinking, glanced off the opposite wall, mumbled something in Spanish, and went into the men’s room, unzipping and hauling out his cock as the door closed behind him.

  I took a couple of seconds to start breathing again, looking tow
ard the showroom. I didn’t see Sibley. The Hispanic women were running floor polishers.

  My heart was pounding from rage, and there was nothing in my brain but an intense burning light.

  I went into the men’s room with no concern about stealth and went up behind El Gordo where he was blissfully relieving himself at a urinal and crooning a Mexican song under his breath. I drew my Glock and put a hand on his shoulder and when he turned his head to give me a blearily surprised look I lashed him backhanded across his fat face with the gun, opening a cheek to the bone. He staggered away from the urinal, pissing in spurts on the floor, and I hit him again with everything I had, coming across the other side of his face and smashing his nose.

  He fell back into a stall and sprawled there, an arm across the toilet, his other hand going to his bleeding face. He stared up at me.

  I pulled off my shades and leaned over him.

  “It’s Rawson, cabrón.”

  I pushed the muzzle of the .45 against his forehead and thought about Sunny in her cocoon of razor wire and thought about justifiable homicide. Drunk and hurt as he was, he saw it coming in my eyes and spasmed, swallowing blood.

  But I didn’t do it. I needed him alive, at least for another sixty seconds. I had two questions for El Gordo. And there was no alternative to pleasing me with his answers.

  T. Hollingsworth Sibley looked up from the infomercial he was watching on the TV behind his desk when I approached him on my way out.

  “You’ll need a bucket and a mop in the men’s room,” I said.

  Outside I walked back to the Rover, which was parked a block up the street. I didn’t feel as good about my encounter with El Gordo as I wanted to feel. Because dead was dead and I wasn’t going to get Sunny back no matter what I did now. As for Mal Scarlett—a sense of urgency was beginning to tick out of control next to my heart when I reached the Rover.

  I opened the door. The light came on and it was obvious right away that Beatrice wasn’t inside.

  I turned around to call her name and someone who was both quick and confident put the muzzle of his gun into the notch of my throat.

  “Rawson, you asshole,” he said.

  13

  he tall man with the gun prodding my tonsils was strung together like a big wading bird, with an overhang of head and almost no shoulders. That made him a bad fit in off-the-rack suits. Instead of demonstrating the ease with which I could disarm anyone so clueless as to crowd me like that, I smiled forgivingly. And I let him take my piece from the shoulder rig.

  “Well, well. It’s Stork McClusky, right? Long time no see.”

  “You’re going to be sorry you saw me tonight,” he growled.

  McClusky had backup, this one coming toward us from across the street, thumb of one hand hooked in his belt. The whites of his eyes gleamed in the available light. Him I didn’t know, but it had been a while since I had worked ILC Intel.

  McClusky took a step back but with his automatic, a big H and K two-tone, still close to my face.

  “Get in the backseat, Rawson,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

  “Oh my,” I said. “Two Intel boyos coming on hard to me. Just give me a few seconds while I finish peeing down my leg.”

  “I’m Maltese Greek,” the other one said quietly, with a shrug and a smile to strum the heartstrings of the lovelorn. He had thick dark curly hair and thick glossy eyelashes. He wore a summer-weight blue mock-turtleneck with his faded jeans, a gold medallion on a chain centered on his breast, and a gold loop earring. Small loop. McClusky had a gun and a line of hard talk and he wasn’t somebody I’d turn my back on. The kid was half McClusky’s size, had a diffident way of speaking, a winsome smile, and a brand of deadliness he had no reason to advertise. It was just there, and anyone who’d had experience with his type would recognize it.

  “Where’s Beatrice?” I said.

  “She went on ahead,” McClusky said, giving me the bitch eye. “Now get in and be quick about it.”

  “If you shoved your gat in my girl’s face,” I said to McClusky, “we’ll need to have a short discussion about your crummy manners before the night’s over.”

  “She’s all right,” the Greek kid said reassuringly. “She handled herself fine.”

  I looked at him.

  “It’s just going to be conversation,” he said. “About teamwork, or so I understand. We can’t exactly chew you up and spit you out, now can we? My name’s Paulo. By the way, I like your outfit.”

  “You seem to have a brain,” I said. “That should have disqualified you right away for Intel.”

  He grinned, opened the door for me, and nodded politely. I climbed in without a fuss. McClusky put his gun away, put a finger on his earbud. He looked up and down the street, then said importantly to someone, “We got him. Leaving now. ETA about three minutes.”

  “If you make the lights,” I said, and settled back to await developments.

  McClusky drove us into North Hollywood, took some residential side streets in a cunningly evasive manner in case we were being followed, which we weren’t. We came to a bungalow in the middle of a block of similar 1930s-sytle homes. There was a black wrought-iron gate across the drive and somone waiting near the gate in the dark front yard. He opened it when McClusky blinked the Rover’s lights. At the end of the drive there was a small garage with the doors chained shut. A couple of sedans were parked haphazardly beneath jacaranda trees in the small backyard, which was surrounded by a seven-foot wooden privacy fence with bougainvillea spilling over from the yard behind it.

  “Not much to show for your budget,” I said idly. “And in this neighborhood all of you should be wearing T-shirts with SEXUAL PREDATOR logos.”

  “We know what we’re doing,” McClusky said.

  “There’s always a first time,” I allowed. “But this probably ain’t it.”

  McClusky left the Rover at the end of the driveway beside a large yellow van with JAKE’S JIFFY ELECTRIC in red script on the side. This van or a similar one, I remembered, had been parked at the gas station across from the Angeltowne Livery.

  I followed Paulo the Greek onto a small back porch. A dog barked close by. McClusky hung back, ready and able to mow me down if I made a sudden break. The glass in the kitchen door had a blackout shade covering it. Nifty. Inside a couple of techie types, red-eyed in the wee hours, were hanging out waiting for a fresh pot of coffee to brew. We continued along a short hall. Bathroom, two bedrooms. McClusky rapped on a bedroom door as he went by. It didn’t sound like a secret knock. But like I said I’d been away for a few years. Maybe they’d changed it.

  There were two snug rooms at the front of the bungalow. A dining room with pocket doors half closed and a parlor. More blackout shades on windows that faced a roofed front porch and the street. The dining room contained utility shelves and a lot of audio and visual surveillance equipment. The latest and best available. Overhear a whispered conversation in a restaurant half a mile away. See through walls, clothing, locked safes. Peer into the hearts of desperate men. Or maybe they hadn’t yet reached that level of snooper refinement.

  In the dining room Paulo joined a tall, formidable-looking woman with his olive coloring. She wore all black: sweater, leather gloves, high-waisted slacks. She had been watching a TV monitor I couldn’t see, but when Paulo spoke to her she turned and gave me a flat incurious stare. She said something to Paulo. He opened a pewter cigarette box on a table and lighted one, then took the cigarette from his lips and placed it between hers. Something wrong with her concealed hands; rheumatoid arthritis? The fitted gloves could only have worsened her pain. But maybe her vanity required them.

  The woman had a severe, beautifully boned face, heavy eyebrows, and countersunk lightless black eyes like dark wells in a soothsayer’s cave. I thought she might have passed through my life at some point like a messenger from the damned. But the hour was late, I was tired, and I couldn’t place her.

  I sat next to Bea on the sofa. Her eyes opened. She looked happy to se
e me, then worried.

  “Did I screw up?”

  “No,” I said. “Did any of them lay a finger on you?”

  “They’ve been nice enough. But they don’t say much. Who are they? What’s going on, R?”

  “Remains to be seen.”

  In response to a summons on his wristpac Stork McClusky beat it back down the hall and briefly visited the bedroom behind the closed door. I squeezed Bea’s hand.

  “Whatever it is, we shouldn’t be long.”

  “Good. Do you know any of them? Are they ILC?”

  I nodded and looked at the Greek woman’s profile. Still familiar, but elusive, just a shadow among shadows in memory. I shook my head, which needed clearing. McClusky returned and gave me a smug, hostile look. So I was about to get my nuts busted. But not by the likes of McClusky.

  The bedroom had been turned into an office: standard rental stuff designed to take a beating. Gray steel, an eighth of an inch of padding on the chair seats. Nothing on the desk blotter but two landline scrambler phones and a micro recorder. Also a pair of hands under a fluorescent lamp, palms down. The nails were buffed. He’d always taken good care of them. He hadn’t much liked the jobs that required him to get his hands dirty.

  He motioned with his right hand. I sat down in one of the chairs that faced him squarely and we looked at each other. Nothing was said. After almost a minute of that he nodded slightly.

  “How about taking off the shades, Rawson?”

  I took them off and put them into an inside pocket of my coat. I had left the fedora in the Rover. I was still wearing my pirate’s black do-rag. I kind of liked it.

  “How long has it been?” he said in a disinterested, bored tone of voice.

  “Not long enough.”

  When Cale DeMarco smiled, which was rare, it was a thin-lipped effort that always ended up with him sucking at a tooth somewhere in his mouth, making a noise like a minor expression of skepticism, or disgust. So he was seven years older, bearded now, a square salt-and-pepper job. Some men grew beards when their hair began thinning out. He wore glasses with a heavy-duty black frame. He’d been promoted twice while I was still in rehab after being nearly kicked to death by Raoul J. Ortega’s Diamondbacker posse and now he ran it all: director of SoCal ILC Intelligence Division. The Head Spook. He had acquired the bookish, professional look that lent added distinction to his eminence. Just the right amount of high seriousness in his demeanor.