High Bloods

by John Farris

“Two murders?” Paulo said.

  “Artie Excalibur’s is the one I’ve been working on. He was done in by an OOPs named Chickie Hickey early Monday morning. In his office above de Sade’s. Bea and I happened to be there. Chickie has yet to turn up. Probably dead herself. She was an actress and protégée, in the bird-in-nest sense, of Miles Brenta, who dabbles in movie production. Bucky Spartacus, the kid who went OOPs tonight at the concert, was more than a protégé of Brenta’s; from what I’ve heard he was like a son to him. The two kids have been an item for publicity purposes, but I think it went deeper than that for Bucky: he was in love with Chickie, even though he might have known or guessed that Chickie was doing both him and Brenta, a double-dip career move. Chickie might have infected Bucky with LC disease, but that’s guesswork. If Bucky, why not Brenta? It is plain fact that Bucky was toting an unregistered Snitcher, the remains of which we found in the little pile of burnt offering he turned into.”

  Paulo opened his envelope again and shook out three two-inch-square transparent evidence bags on the desk next to the photograph. I recognized the Snitcher recovered at the amphitheater.

  “That’s supposed to be in the ILC lab right now,” I said.

  “It will be,” Paulo said. “But I doubt they’ll learn anything from what’s left.”

  “What are the other two for?”

  “Number two is a standard-issue Snitch, the most recent upgrade, in use for nearly six years. There are tens of millions of them, reliable, maintaining what we hope is a balance of nature.” He smiled a little sadly. “Number three, as you can probably tell without a magnifying glass, is smaller, injectable, state-of-the-art: a LUMO, probably a prototype.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “From the body of the late Dr. Chant. Slightly modified so that wolf-scanners like yours wouldn’t detect it. But our chief pathologist in Rome is very thorough.”

  “Off-Bloods have no use for Snitchers. So he was on the run with a LUMO he helped design.”

  There was a polite tap at the door. Paulo got up from his perch on the desk and opened it.

  Beatrice came in supressing a yawn, looked first at me, seemed relieved that I hadn’t been given the third degree with a meat-axe. Although I could be sure it was part of their repertoire when needed. Then she looked at the gloves-wearing woman and smiled.

  “We’re keeping you up very late,” the gloves-wearing woman observed with a hint of apology. She spoke out of the side of her mouth. The cigarette didn’t move. Her voice had a lot of hard bark on it, probably due to a lifetime’s affection for gaspers.

  “Oh, that’s okay, Arl. I know it’s important.”

  “When did you two get chummy?” I said.

  “Oh,” Bea said, “we had a chance to chat before the Stork brought you.”

  Bea and the gloves-wearing woman seemed to find the allusion amusing, which made my mood and temper worse than they already were.

  “Your name’s Arles?” I said. “Like the French city?”

  “For Arlequin,” she croaked.

  “I always thought ‘Arlequin’ was INTEL/INT code for something. But you spook types always play it so tight and cozy. Working with any of you is like bedding down with a python.”

  “Let’s not be quarrelsome. Too much is at stake for discord. Why is Beatrice here?”

  “Yes, why?” Beatrice said brightly.

  “Have a look at the photo,” I said to her.

  Bea put a hand on my shoulder and leaned toward the desk.

  “Ohh. Ugh. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Know him?”

  Bea made herself take a longer look.

  “I may have seen him. A few months ago, at Artie’s digs. Late at night. Artie had asked me to bring him a spare computer from the safe at the office, the one he used at home had conked. Artie had me lock up all of his computers. I told you he was kind of paranoid about business matters.”

  Paulo said, “We think the man in the photo is Barsi Chanthar Vajracharya, a.k.a. Dr. Chant. Formerly employed by NANOMIM.”

  Bea’s hand squeezed my shoulder. “Well—a lot of men look like this, dead or not. But remember I told you, R, about the e-mails Artie was getting from this Dr. Chant?”

  “E-mails from where?” Paulo asked.

  “South America. India. As if the two of them, Artie and Chant, had some big deal about to happen.”

  “It happened,” I said. “They’re both dead because of it.”

  “What sort of deal?” Bea said.

  “Trafficking in stolen Snitchers. Maybe.”

  “Not Artie,” Bea insisted. “He got a little shady sometimes, but he wasn’t a criminal.”

  I looked at the gloves-wearing woman.

  “Is that what you’ve had DeMarco working on? Yeah, it would be a step up for an old bloodlegger like Ortega. If there was enough money in it.”

  “There is not,” she said hoarsely.

  “I didn’t think a deal like that would bring you here from Rome. Too much at stake, as you said.” I gave it a few seconds, then shrugged and got up from my chair. “Okay, go on playing python, but I won’t be your main squeeze. You’ve got DeMarco for that. I have two murders and a potential third to solve before the next full moon. That would be Mallory Scarlett, still missing and a potential trophy for werewolf hunters. Lycans are human too. In a manner of speaking. Besides, I sort of liked the little snot when she was living next door. Come on, Bea. Let’s vamoose.”

  Paulo stood too, turning to me and smiling. I looked him in the eye.

  “If you have no objections that I can’t deal with,” I said.

  The gloves-wearing woman said in her half-ruined voice, “Perhaps we can help you with the Scarlett girl.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Yes. She was taken from the Angeltowne Livery at 1230 hours yesterday in one of the armored trucks they keep over there.”

  “Taken where?”

  Paulo said, “The helicopter DeMarco assigned for surveillance tracked the armored truck to the Crestline Highway a few miles north of San Bernadino. That’s when the chopper had to turn back; apparently the EGT was running red-line.”

  “Swell,” I groused. “Crestline? There’s only about a hundred twenty square miles of forest and mountains we’ll have to search in the next forty hours.”

  He shrugged. “The girl wasn’t a priority with us. But if she’s going to remain a prisoner until she hairs-up, probably there are only so many areas suitable to conduct a mal de lune up that way. One or two may be hunting lodges owned by prominent sportsmen. And all hunters like to brag, some of them in advance, about their prowess. You know. It’s the Luke Bailiff, only-law-west-of-Dodge syndrome.”

  “Okay,” I conceded. “You’ve given me a worthwhile lead. I apologize for being edgy with you. This OOPs business has me—”

  It wasn’t the tingle of a distant bell competing with the headache bongos that stopped me: it was a full-throated cannonade of Notre Dame–sized bells as the tumbrels rolled through Paris streets. I turned and stared down at the Snitchers neatly labeled in evidence bags—two that looked unused, one nearly destroyed.

  “R?” Beatrice said tentatively. “What’s wrong?”

  An image of Chickie Hickey at de Sade’s whipped through my mind like a ghost released from an attic.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Anything but that.”

  Paulo clicked his lighter to fire up another cigarette for the gloves-wearing woman. She was looking at me when I turned to them.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” she said with a nod.

  Bea grabbed me pleadingly.

  “Don’t look like that,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

  I picked up the evidence bag with the Snitcher leftovers from the amphitheater.

  “Chickie had one of the new, injectable LUMOs,” I said. “Different location in the body, no surgical scar to cover up. After she went OOPS I thought it was probably because her Snitcher had been cut out of her. Which couldn’t have
accounted for her actions after she haired-up. So it had to be the LUMO. And this one was Bucky’s. Another LUMO? That leaves two possibilities.” I went after those with the dedication of a soused rat in a maze. I’m always full of ideas. Sometimes they turn out to be good for something. I made my choice. “The LUMOs are defective. A design flaw. They can’t stop a Lycan from hairing-up.”

  “Three years of testing,” Paulo countered. “All the tests done to WEIR’s specifications and under their supervision. A printout of all relevant data runs to about four thousand pages. Conclusion: no design flaws. All the prototypes, thousands of them, worked perfectly. And you’re missing something.”

  “Of course I am. Because Out-of-Phase Hairballs are extremely rare. I know of six documented cases in twenty-five years. Now there have been two occurrences within four days. Two kids. Lovers. What are those odds?”

  “Not worth calculating,” the gloves-wearing woman said within her mystical haze of cigarette smoke. “And not at all necessary. At least three million LUMOs have already come off the line and most have been shipped to WEIR clinics in SoCal. If they should be recalled, what is there to look for? But that also is wasted effort. That the design is good is beyond question. A recall and lengthy reevaluation of the LUMO’s integrity would accomplish but one thing. It is all a matter of critical timing for Miles Brenta and for Nanomimetics.”

  “No LUMOs, no big bucks for Brenta,” I said. “And there’s a domino effect. The patents his company holds on the old-model Snitchers expire in a few months. When that happens, anyone can tool up and manufacture Snitchers without paying licensing fees and royalties.”

  “Free-market economics will prevail,” Paulo said dryly. “No monopoly, and no LUMOs. NANOMIM will be undersold everywhere.”

  “Bad luck and bad timing,” I said. “Maybe. But if that’s how it goes down, then we come to the Really Bad Thing.”

  Beatrice was still holding on to me. I felt her shudder.

  “How bad?”

  “A sizable percentage of the newly manufactured but old-style Snitchers likely would be counterfeit, knockoffs from sweat-shops in twenty countries. Those Snitchers might work. Probably they would fail in wholesale lots and at unpredictable times.”

  “Oh my God,” Bea said softly. “But—there’s no need to recall the LUMOs. Maybe a couple of them failed, but the design is good. Isn’t that what you both said, Paulo?”

  She let go of me and reached for the little baggie on the desk containing the nodule that a pathologist in Rome had excised from the cold flesh of a corpse. She held it up.

  “LUMOs are a major advance in technology and micro-whatever. So there wouldn’t be a market for old-style anymore. Only WEIR buys Snitchers.”

  “There are thousands of WEIR clinics,” I said, “but no central purchasing agency. The usual bureaucratic shuffle-and-deal. Clinic managers don’t mind putting a few extra thousand into their own pockets. The yearly audits are a joke. Anyway, a flood of counterfeit Snitchers isn’t the immediate worst-case.”

  Bea looked at all of us in turn. She was dead for sleep and we were making her miserable. She blinked her tearing eyes. The smoke in the room was getting to be oppressive.

  “There’s something worse than the Really Bad Thing?” Bea said finally.

  “That item you’re holding,” I said, “is responsible for at least four deaths. So far. But I’d bet a pound of pure Mexican silver and a bottle of thirty-year-old Scotch that it isn’t a LUMO. It’s something else entirely.”

  15

  fter a further twenty-minute session with Paulo and the gloves-wearing woman I retrieved my gun, Range Rover, and Bea, and drove us to Beverly Hills, taking Laurel Canyon to Ventura, then Coldwater up into the hills where Coldwater merged with Mulholland for a mile or so before dropping south and into the Privilege through the Trousdale gate, which looked like a set left over from The Ten Commandments. With date palms.

  Almost as soon as we had left the bungalow in North Hollywood Beatrice curled up as comfortably as she could manage with her long legs in the bucket seat next to me and went to sleep. She didn’t want to talk and she didn’t want to hear me talk. It had been a long rough night and she’d had her fill of shocks and forebodings; a few hours of oblivion were a necessity for her now.

  For much of the way home I thought I was being followed. Motorcycle. Hanging back about a quarter of a mile behind us. Three-thirty in the morning and there was almost no other traffic. Because of the luminosity of the sky from the nearly full moon (Observance minus about forty-three hours), I could make out in my rearview the crouched shape of the biker low in the saddle.

  At the Mulholland summit the biker turned west and became no more than a pencil of light amid the dark hills. I felt a little disappointed. Maybe I had wanted it to be Elena.

  I left the Rover in front of the house on Breva Way. I had to shake the complaining Bea hard to get her out of the Rover. I walked her inside and down the black slate hall to my bedroom. Bea undressed to her bikini briefs with her eyes closed and a little help from me and collapsed on the futon with an unconscious sigh. I covered her with a satin throw and went to take a shower. There was a sour odor of old cigarette smoke clinging to my skin; I could taste it at the back of my throat.

  The meth was keeping me awake and reasonably sharp. The hot shower and hotter sauna soothed my aches and scrapes. What was left of my headache vanished. I got dressed, made myself a cup of green tea with Kabuchka and ate a few rice crackers with almond butter. I reviewed the plan that I had more or less convinced the spooks from Rome would work. How well it would work depended on how far I was willing to stick my neck out. And it would still be necessary to convince Booth Havergal that I knew what the hell I was doing.

  I left a DO not disturb sign on my bedroom door for the housekeeper, locked Bea inside the house, and drove to ILC on Burton Way for the six o’clock staff meeting I had called. I got there a little after five-thirty. There was a hint of daylight in the east and the birds in the greenspace eucalyptus were tuning up. The early PE trams were humming along the divider strip rails. I counted six satellite uplink trucks parked on the side street and there were lights in my eyes as I drove down to the basement parking levels beneath ILC headquarters. Bucky Spartacus’ final performance had shocked the world; the media were swarming.

  I had enough time to e-mail Booth Havergal a full account of my activities of a few hours ago, including my meeting with Cale DeMarco and the spooks of Rome. It was possible he didn’t know they were in the neighborhood.

  Then it was time for the meeting I’d called. My priority this morning was the armored truck last seen on the Crestline Highway, presumably with Mallory Scarlett inside. I sent two teams out to Crestline with instructions to enlist the local law and park rangers in our mal de lune investigation and come up with something. ILC business took precedence over all other law-enforcement activities. And the lunar clock was at Observance minus forty hours.

  It was almost seven A.M. when I sat down with a mug of coffee in our Virtual Reality lab for a look at 3-D simulations made from the amphitheater digital surveillance files, concentrating on those from the crowded two-acre backstage lot. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s tedious and boring work.

  But after only a few minutes’ worth of compressed-time simulations I caught a glimpse of something I wanted to see again. The techie working with me provided an enhanced image that didn’t leave much doubt in my mind. The figure was taller than the doorway he was framed in, so he had to stoop to look out. That characteristic and the starbus he was visiting had caught my eye: it was the bus Bucky Spartacus had borrowed for the concert.

  On a monitor I saw Lew Rolling walking past the Virtual Reality lab and paged him. When he joined us he leaned on the back of my chair and looked at our Virtual of the man on the starbus: he had an ascetic, lugubrious face like you see in deathbed paintings by El Greco or Velásquez, a face made longer by the kind of beard they were wearing in those da
ys.

  “Could be Raoul Ortega,” Lew said.

  “It is.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Visiting Bucky Spartacus before the show.”

  “So they knew each other?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. It’s a tight little circle, getting tighter all the time. With Miles Brenta and probably NANOMIM at the nexus.”

  I had a text message from Booth Havergal, responding to my report.

  Ys know spooks r here. Toss u a bone,

  they want bigger bone back. Yr prop

  one: squeeze the greaser, bring me poop.

  prop two: no grnds warrant so no

  fkg way unless u want to marry her.

  prop three: legit approach within

  bounds yr invest. B’s lawyers

  building walls already. Mat witness?

  don’t think so but keep digging. Hv

  nice day.

  “Been to the woodshed?” Lew said with a laugh.

  “Like most days. Sometimes Booth leaves me a mousehole to crawl through. Can you get me a copy of Miles Brenta’s schedule for today from his office?”

  Lew got on it. I reread Booth’s memo, looking for my mouse hole. Not this time. If he didn’t want me leaning on Fran Obregon in my inimitable fashion, I could sort of agree on the need for caution. But with what I knew so far Fran was dirty and when I could corroborate that I would skin her alive. The thought made me temporarily happy.

  I ordered a helicopter for ten o’clock, hoping I’d be finished reviewing VR surveillance by then.

  The next sequence of interest that turned up almost had me jumping out of my seat.

  “Again,” I said to the techie beside me.

  According to the time code what I was looking at had happened within moments of Bucky Spartacus’ other, impromptu, hairy performance onstage.

  I saw Miles Brenta exit the backseat of his limousine and take several running steps toward the backstage area. I saw Fran poke her head out as the beefer leaning against the trunk of the limo whirled and went after his boss. Fran followed.

  They practically had to wrestle Miles Brenta to the ground. Even without a close look at his face it was obvious to me that he was screaming.