High Bloods

by John Farris

  Looking at the oncoming estate from eight hundred feet and the visible pleasures of being Brenta, I was reminded that in the old days the “sport of kings” consisted mainly of trying to stay alive.

  As soon as I penetrated their airspace Brenta Security squawked me. I identified myself with the chopper’s tail number and requested permission to land. They had three helipads near the main house, two occupied.

  “Please give me your name and state the nature of your business, six-one-niner.”

  “Rawson. Here to see Miles Brenta.”

  “Circle at eight hundred feet and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Roger that.”

  He needed a half minute to confirm what I’d already guessed the answer would be.

  “Negative on your request to land, six-one-niner. Mr. Brenta is not seeing visitors today. Please return immediately to unrestricted airspace.”

  “This is not a social call,” I said. “I’m ILC, here on official business.”

  “Continue circling.”

  I did, along with a couple of redtail hawks about half a mile away, who also probably didn’t have permission to land. By and by I saw a lone rider pushing a black horse at what appeared to be full gallop along a hillside trail. I voiced “binocular” to my Geekers and the optics shifted to give me a close look at Miles Brenta, riding hell-for-leather as if he were outdistancing a fantasy posse. He wore chaps with his Wranglers, a red and white checkered shirt like John Wayne’s in The Searchers, and a pale yellow, high-crowned Stetson.

  I got back on the radio.

  “Brenta Security, I’m getting excessive rotor vibe. It could be a laminate crack or a loose Jesus nut. My will’s not up to date so I’m setting down until it’s cool enough for me to have a look at the mast.”

  “Roger, six-one-niner. Stay with your helo on the ground and we’ll send out a mechanic.”

  “Thanks for your hospitality,” I said, and clicked off the radio.

  Miles Brenta had eluded the posse and reined in his horse to a walk. The sleek Arabian appeared to be limping off the right foreleg. Brenta left the saddle to examine the horse’s hoof and hock while the black stood patiently with the reins down.

  As a courtesy to Brenta and because I didn’t know how nervy the big black might be, I cut power, bottomed the pitch, turned into what was a pretty good breeze across rolling grassy hills that had been created by bulldozers from a few million cubic feet of nontoxic landfill, and drifted down to perch fifty feet from them like a bee on a buttercup.

  Brenta looked up in annoyance. He was wearing a wild-west-style gun belt studded with cartridges. His hand moved toward the butt of a big holstered revolver like the Frontier-model .44 Colt as I stepped down from the helicopter. I took off my Geekers, wincing in the strong noon light, and let him have a look at me.

  “It’s Rawson, Mr. Brenta. I apologize for dropping in, but we need to talk.”

  He looked around, but there were no hired hands in sight. Getting up on his injured horse again wasn’t an option. He didn’t throw down on me but his hand stayed near his shootin’ iron and his thumb twitched a couple of times. He hadn’t shaved today. There were no clouds in the sky, but his eyes looked overcast, his face taut with trouble.

  “You’re close enough,” he said. “I don’t want to talk to you. No questions! There’s nothing—” He took a deep breath, as if recovering from another in a series of body blows. “Serve me with a subpoena or leave me alone. And get your helicopter off my land.”

  I shook my head gently. The horse looked around at me.

  “Emergency landing,” I said. “Your security people told me they’d lend a mechanic to look for the problem. How is your horse?”

  He seemed to have forgotten the black’s lameness.

  “Oh. I don’t think it’s—” Using the red bandana draped around his neck he dabbed sweat from his forehead. Then he called and notified someone at the stable to bring up a horse trailer for the Arabian and to send for the vet.

  “I want to help you,” I said, trying it a different way. “I may be the only one who knows enough to help you, Mr. Brenta.”

  Sometimes you get lucky—make a blind stab, say the right thing without knowing what it was. Miles Brenta was an operator, a tough guy, at the peak of his career the way cannibals are at the top of the food chain. He had money and power. But he was alone in his grief today, trying manfully to handle it, or so it seemed to me, acting out like a Bill Hickok throwback. Always the fastest gun in the deal or with the women who caught his eye. But the very wealthy seldom have close friends. They have enablers, competitors, supplicants, and enemies. Sometimes there’s the love of a good woman. But Brenta’s wife was a demented cripple and the closest thing he’d had for a son, Bucky Spartacus, had become a monster.

  I thought that Bucky going Hairball had been a tipping point for Miles Brenta. The loss of Bucky was killing him and he simply had no one to talk to.

  He didn’t exactly come weeping into my arms. He scarcely changed expression. For an instant I saw confusion in his eyes. Then he turned away from me and lifted his head and squinted at the high sun, a hand going wearily to his forehead beneath the big brim of the old-fashioned cowboy hat.

  “Looks close enough to noon,” he said. “Offer you a drink? I sure as shit could use one.”

  Brenta didn’t conduct a tour, but he pointed out to me that his house consisted of half a dozen interconnected villas: living space for Brenta, guests, and, I assumed, his wife. Although he didn’t mention Carlotta. There were two villas for play and exercise and otherwise toning up the body and another for business when he was in residence. Pools, fountains, and green space were interspersed among the villas.

  His duplex was whitewashed limestone with tall tinted lancet windows recessed in the thick walls. There was a moatlike pool on three sides of the villa: it looked big enough for kayaking. Brenta liked to do his thinking and drinking on a patio that he said was paved with blocks of fourteenth-century Jerusalem limestone, sheltered by feathery palms in square white planters and furnished with club chairs in nubby white fabric. The patio was two steps up from the surface of the pool, which was tiled with frescoes taken from an old Roman bath.

  “I met your mother on a couple of occasions,” he said, pouring the Scotch I had requested himself. He’d used a brass bootjack to remove his custom-made black cowboy boots. His own drink was chilled vodka with two drops of lemon peel oil. “She sent me a signed copy of one of her books. The one about how Lycans evolve as a social group in hostile cultures.”

  I nodded. “And how their restrictive social position evolves into a psychological imperative for revenge.”

  He dropped into one of his chairs and put his feet up on an ottoman, ran a hand through thick, graying razor-cut hair. He looked at me the way men in his position and status group often looked at me, as if trying to decide how best I could serve some purpose beneficial to them. They can’t help themselves. Just the old alpha-dog reflex.

  Finally he lifted his glass in my direction in a halfhearted wordless toast and slugged some of the vodka down. I swallowed an ounce of the Glenlivet and maintained a benign expression.

  “Okay,” he said. “I think we can talk. I wasn’t sure before. But anything I say, Rawson, is off the record. If I don’t like the direction you’re going—”

  “Sure, I get it,” I said. “Very informal. I’m not taping anything. This is man-to-man. There’s a mystery to be fathomed. Could the key to our mystery be the late Bucky Spartacus?”

  It sounded callous to me as soon as I spoke; he didn’t like it either.

  Brenta had begun his drinking with an eight-ounce tumbler nearly full of vodka; he took a second pull and the glass was almost empty when he set it down on the top edge of his big silver belt buckle. He licked his lower lip, then his mouth hardened savagely.

  “I didn’t know about Bucky!” he said. “God’s truth. It had to have been recent. One of those curb roaches they all whore around with a
t the beach. Get a little careless, you’re in hell for life.”

  “Or it could’ve been—”

  He cut me off with a slash of the hand that wasn’t holding the tumbler.

  “No. Not Chickie. We both knew what she was. Knowing’s one thing, resisting it is another, particularly during the Aura.” He drained his glass, looked through it at me, as if he needed to put me at greater distance from his anger and grief. “Couldn’t keep my hands off her, even though I knew what she was up to. Bucky knew about us. He couldn’t quit her either. I feel like—like I’ve taken a bad fall, but the falling isn’t over yet. I just keep heading down. Once I’m all the way down, I won’t be able to get back up. Not this time. Carlotta—I was years younger then. I could handle the shock, deal with her—her condition.”

  He looked at a corner of the patio where there was a fireplace framed in beautifully sculpted white marble. Above it, a full-length portrait of his wife, painted years before the werewolf attack.

  “At least Bucky—he went fast,” Brenta said. He turned his face back to me, licked his lower lip again. It appeared to be soring up in one corner, as if a fever blister were erupting there. “So we’re talking. But all I hear is my own voice. I guess that’s what you’re good at. Waiting the other guy out. So I’ll just be a clam until you tell me something I ought to know.”

  “I think someone came up with a way to make werewolves hair-up out-of-phase.”

  He moved in his club chair like a man winding himself tight to take a punch. He was still wearing that old single-action Colt.

  I didn’t elaborate on my suspicion. Brenta absorbed my silence until it made him hostile. He rose abruptly from the club chair, went to the granite-topped bar, took the vodka from the concealed refrigerator, and milked the bottle into his glass. This time he added a couple of ice cylinders, dropped in the curlicue of lemon peel. He sprawled in his chair again, not taking his eyes off me. He pressed the cold glass against his swelling underlip.

  “The fuck,” he said. “Where are you getting that from?”

  “Here and there. Little pieces I’ve picked up. ILC INTEL/INT is one source, not the local clowns. Before I get into who and why, there’s a couple of gaps I’d like to fill in, beginning with Artie Excalibur. The Chickie-ball killed him—”

  “So you said,” Brenta growled, with another slash of his free hand. “Allegation, or fact?”

  “I was there when his head went flying. It was Chickie, all right.”

  He was trying to coil again, like a snake someone had a grip on just behind the head. His face suddenly looked old and bloodless. Even though an artery in his neck was working hard. For no good reason I wondered about the condition of his heart.

  “You killed her?” he said coldly.

  “No. But she’s dead somewhere. They didn’t have further use for Chickie, and she was carrying something in her body they didn’t want found.”

  “They?”

  “We’ll come to it. So Artie was murdered. I don’t know why. How well did you know him?”

  Brenta shrugged dismissively. “An Off-Blood?”

  “So you never did business with him.”

  “No.” He drank more of his vodka. The artery in his neck stopped its violent pulsing. Something occurred to him. “There was this little deal. A year, maybe a year and a half ago. I wasn’t directly involved in the negotiation. Francesca brought it to me. She felt it was a great opportunity. A good fit with NANOMIM. I trusted—I’ve always trusted her judgment. Without Francesca I—” He glanced again at the portrait of the youthful Carlotta, as if he’d felt the subtle impact of the eyes in the portrait on his soul. “Anyway, I said sure; go for it.”

  “Go for what?” I said patiently, and sipped my Scotch.

  “Artie had this little company near Antelope Valley, a startup he’d been pouring cash into. Enough cash so that he found himself strapped. Cesca negotiated a forty-nine percent interest. Five seats on the board.”

  “What was the name?”

  Brenta looked momentarily unsure. “I’m into so much stuff—XOTECH. Yeah, that was it. Microtechnology R and D. There were some good brains involved. Good growth prospects. Cesca will keep a close eye on XOTECH, but I probably won’t see much of a return for two or three years.”

  “Fran’s done a lot for you. Another good brain. CEO of a major corporation.”

  “Sound businesswoman,” he agreed.

  “And you take good care of her—financially, I mean.”

  “Francesca doesn’t have any complaints. Where are you going with—”

  “But I imagine it was hard on your long-term relationship, I’m talking about the personal arrangement, after you started fucking Chickie. That was kind of in the air when we all met last night, Fran trying to keep the deep sulks from showing when Chickie’s name was mentioned. Or is it something more complex, because Francesca has always been in love with you?”

  Brenta sat up straight and for a second I thought he was going to throw his glass at me. I could have dodged it, but I was aware of the six-gun again. I hoped he’d forgotten about it.

  “That’s it. Now get the hell out. We’re through talking, Rawson!”

  “And I’ve got a hell of a nerve, it’s none of my business and so forth. I thought this was going to be man-to-man, Brenta.” I showed him some locker-room lip, a knowing leer. “Do you think it’s a secret that Francesca took over the wifely chores from her first cousin when Carlotta was mauled by that werewolf?” I gestured to the portrait. “Almost uncanny how they once resembled each other. Nothing ugly about what happened between you and Fran. It was human nature. A man’s got to be a man. Then Chickie came along. That’s when it got ugly. We both know what a woman with Francesca’s pride and temperament can do when she feels betrayed. And brother, if she hasn’t done it already she’s getting close.”

  Brenta lunged from his chair but not as if he were coming for me. He wasn’t even looking my way. His eyes were as blank as a blind man’s. He walked slowly to the edge of the patio and stared into the turquoise water of the gently flowing pool, one hand flexing near the butt of the Colt on his thigh. I’d left my Glock in the helicopter because I hadn’t thought his security people would let me keep it. I felt reasonably confident that it wasn’t my day to get shot. I’d given Brenta something new to think about, which might already have been subconciously worrying him.

  I finished my Scotch, watching him. After about a minute of staring into the pool he said in a low harsh voice, “She has a temper. And we’ve had our moments. But Francesca’s a realist. She wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “I didn’t mean that Fran was working herself up to sticking a knife between your ribs. She carries one, but it’s a cheap kind of revenge and then where is she? Like you say, Francesca’s too smart to let her hot blood ruin her main chance. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold. I remember that’s what my horoscope said yesterday.” Now that I’d finished bullying him, at least temporarily, I adopted a more earnest tone. “Mr. Brenta, I’d like for you to look at something.”

  He touched a finger to the herpes sore on his lip.

  “Always get these,” he said. “Since I was a kid. Nerves.” He turned and came back to me, on edge, newly belligerent. “What is it, Rawson? I’m getting tired of—”

  I let dangle the LUMO-like object in a sealed bag, the one a scared little man had been hiding in his flesh while he ran for what was left of his life. Brenta glanced at it, and at me as if I were wasting his time.

  “A hundred million worth of research and development. What about it?”

  “Until this thing can be reconstructed by our lab techs I have no actual proof, but it’s almost certainly not a LUMO. I don’t know yet if it evolved accidentally in the course of development and was meant to be discarded after a few trials, or if it was purposely and privately tinkered together by Nanomimetics’ resident genius Dr. Chant. If that was the case, he lived to regret it.”

  I explained where and how the object was recove
red.

  “He’d been missing about six months,” I said. “But he was in touch with Artie Excalibur during his fugitive sabbatical. Artie sold you that interest in XOTECH. Something Artie also had cause to regret.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I’ll try to keep it simple. One way or another Dr. Chant came up with a device that can be used to control werewolves, most likely through low-frequency electrical impulses. But what if control isn’t all that reliable? Let’s say a nearby microwave oven could cause a hair-up out-of-phase. How about a hot-licks solo from a rock-and-roll bass player? There are a lot of possibilities when you think about it. Dr. Chant must have thought long and hard about what he had. Then, as head of NANOMIM R and D, he dutifully reported the existence of his little wolfmaker to his boss. Because of the chaos enough of the devices wrongly implanted in Lycans could cause, a responsible CEO would have ordered the wolfmaker’s destruction and seen to it that all relevant research data was erased from files. It’s a reasonable assumption that Francesca did order the deletions, because WEIR closely monitors everything that has to do with Snitchers at your firm. But the data first could have been transferred to XOTECH, away from WEIR’s eagle eye.”

  “Because?” His dark stare was half-lidded. The thumb on his gun hand was twitching again.

  “Francesca Obregon had a real need for the wolfmaker. It must have seemed ideal for implementing the revenge she wanted.”

  “I already told you—”

  “The Hispanic temperament. Proud, strong, loving, lusty people. But the hate lies deep in many of them. The desire to destroy what they can no longer have. Tear down a life to bare bones, then crush those bones under dancing heels. Olé!”—I snapped my fingers—”Motherfucker.”