High Bloods

by John Farris

  Brenta smiled. Maybe because of the herpes sore it was painful for him.

  “Miles Brenta doesn’t tear down so easily,” he said. “Your story is fantastic. And it’s crap. Francesca and I aren’t lovers anymore. But we still have something together and it’s solid, Rawson.”

  “As solid as the relationship she has going with Raoul Ortega?”

  He snorted in contempt.

  “Cabrón. She uses him, that’s all. To get back at me? So what? Like I care she’s fucking a Diamondbacker? I get along with Diamondbackers. They come in handy sometimes.”

  “For staging mal de lunes to entertain your wife?”

  “Car likes seeing werewolves killed. Do you blame her? What’s another goddamn werewolf anyway?”

  “Maybe nothing, until you find yourself up to your nutmuffins in H-balls with no place to hide. And werewolves have made you the fortune Francesca’s about to take away from you.”

  “Are you dreaming this shit? You’re wearing out your welcome.”

  “So call a couple of beefers to show me the door.”

  Instead he looked again at the probable wolfmaker I was holding. He touched his lip again.

  “Need some ice for this,” he said vaguely. “Get you another Scotch while I’m at it?”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  We were back to being more or less cordial. He busied himself at the patio bar, twisting cylinders of clear ice into a towel, getting a clean glass for me from a row on a glass shelf. He was laying off the vodka this round. My wristpac was vibrating. I looked at it. The calling number was my home phone. Probably Beatrice.

  “I’ll play along with this for a minute,” Brenta said, bringing my second Scotch to me. “I could tell you how Francesca’s twenty ways different from what you think she is, but okay: how do you figure she comes after me?”

  He stayed close, on his feet, looking down. Because he hadn’t shaved the little white scars from previous outbreaks of herpes showed more clearly on his underlip.

  “Like I said, she’s already begun. But let’s clear up some murders, all of which involve her and, I think, Raoul Ortega.”

  “Partners in crime? She’d have to be the brains of that outfit.”

  He was trying to act as if he found the whole thing entertaining. But there was no laughter in the depthless obsidian of his eyes. He was tense, holding the towel-wrapped ice to his lip, and there was hazard in his tension.

  I said, “I wouldn’t underestimate Ortega. I did that once and nearly got killed. All right. First there was Dr. Chant, who dropped out of sight and was on the run until the Roman carabinieri fished him out of the Tiber a few days ago. That took care of the wolfmaker’s inventor, who might not have been able to cope with a bad conscience. Then Artie got slabbed, because Dr. Chant had spilled to him everything about his little invention. Artie would’ve investigated, and I’m sure he found out that Fran was having wolfmakers secretly manufactured at XOTECH. That won’t be hard to verify. Now Chickie: she and Fran were not pals, but Fran could have persuaded her to give up an old-style Snitcher for what Chickie was led to believe was a superior prototype. Money probably had something to do with it. Chickie was up-and-coming but not yet cashing any big paychecks. Expensive gifts from you wouldn’t be enough for Chickie; she was just that kind of girl. As for Bucky—”

  “That I don’t get. Thirty days between Observances, give or take a day. Last month he was a High Blood. This month—”

  “However he’d become infected, and having unprotected sex with Lycans isn’t the only way, he’d have been frantic to keep it quiet, keep it from you.”

  “I suppose,” Brenta said reluctantly, and looked away. “Anything wrong with your Scotch?”

  “No,” I said, and drank some of the Glenlivet.

  “So in this fantasy epic of yours, Bucky shares the news with Chickie.”

  “Probably.”

  “Bucky is desperate to stay off WEIR’s roster of Lycans. Chickie sends him to Francesca.”

  “Fran has access to both unregistered Snitchers and plenty of TQs.”

  There was a deep notch of pain between his eyebrows.

  “She knew what Bucky meant to me. So she set the kid up to be slabbed?”

  “And the other half of the partnership, Ortega, stands to profit in a big way from the increased awareness of the First Church of Lycanthropy. Which he chartered with the assistance of the Reverend Kingworthy. Ortega’s rake-off last night was probably high six figures. Anything to do with Lycans is under our jurisdiction. We’ll audit the shit out of them. We might be able to put both of them away for three or four years. But tax evasion’s not how I want it to go down for Raoul Ortega.”

  Brenta went for another walk around his patio, came to a stop below the portrait of Carlotta with her reflective smile as she posed holding a vivid handful of amapola blooms. He stared up at her with that look of lingering pain and said in a voice almost too low for me to hear, “If it hadn’t happened—”

  I had another sip of Scotch. I empathized with his regrets. And I knew he had begun to accept that Francesca could have betrayed him.

  Because of the way sunlight came through a bowl-shaped structure of redwood rafters overhead, his face when he turned to me was blurred like the face of an actor standing at the fringe of a high-intensity bolt of stage lighting.

  “So Francesca threw Bucky to the wolves, so to speak, to get back at me. Is that where your revenge story ends?”

  “Far from it,” I said, blinking, trying to see him more clearly. I looked at the Scotch in my glass.

  “No, it’s over.” Brenta said. “Because there’s nothing else she can do. I’ve lost Bucky. But if she tries to rip me another way, she’ll bleed just as bad.”

  “Think so? How many wolfmakers does Fran have left? We don’t know. One OOPs, or two: no really big deal. But a couple of thousand Lycans hairing up at the movies or because of static electricity at a laundromat—very big deal.” I sounded a little croaky; my throat was parched. I thought to ask for water, but instead I drank the rest of my Scotch. The rim of the tumbler clicked against my front teeth. My hand holding the glass felt oddly unrelated to the rest of me. “It would be an earthquake-magnitude blow to confidence in ILC, WEIR, and particularly NANOMIM. The foundation of Miles Brenta’s financial empire.

  I wondered vaguely why I was speaking of him in the third person—as if in a moment of confusion Miles Brenta had slipped away and a complete stranger stood in his place.

  “A few thousand wolfmakers,” I said, “included with millions of LUMOs will result in a recall of all LUMOs—the defective little bastards. Of course they aren’t defective, but we’ll be a long while making sure of that. Meanwhile billions in government contracts go into the shredder, and basic patents on old-style Snitchers expire.”

  “And Francesca stands to lose a couple hundred million in incentive bonuses and stock options. She wants revenge that bad? Bullshit.”

  “Bullship?” I said. My tongue felt like the backside of a gila monster. My heartbeat accelerated the way it used to when I was twelve years old and standing with my toes curled over the edge of a high-diving platform. While I looked down at the surface of the diving pool that was broken by sparkling jets of water. My face felt cold at that high altitude and I was teetering, trying to maintain my toe grip on the rough surface of the platform. I looked up because I couldn’t focus well on the pool surface any longer. The blue of the sky hurt my eyes. But I didn’t want to let them close. I’d lose my balance. My raspy tongue searched for the words I needed to say to Miles Brenta. He had come accommodatingly close and was staring gravely down at me. Just give me a few seconds, Coach, I thought. Don’t make me get off the platform. I’m not scared. I can do this dive.

  “No bullship,” I said again. “She’s too… fucking clever.” I saw each word big as skywriting in my brain as I spoke. Then wisping away into the high blue. My eyelids were like sacks of lead shot. I was desperate to keep his attention. I wanted
him to like me. Believe in me. Not cut me from the team.

  “Listen,” I said. “Fran… would give up money to make a lot more. Fran. Ore-tegga. What I think… they’ve been buying up little factories. South of the border. Bet on it. You listening? Turn out cut-rate… or counterfeit Snitch. Flood market once LUMOs recalled. You get me?”

  Brenta nodded thoughtfully. Each movement of his head caused my own head to loll. I was doped, I thought craftily. Sure. That’s how it was. He’d put one over on me. But I couldn’t bring myself to dislike him for having done it. We were all friends here. Man-to-man.

  “Maybe that makes sense,” Brenta said. He wasn’t loud but there was a lot of reverb inside my skull. Old bells tolling.

  The tumbler slipped from my nerveless fingers. It was empty. Why struggle to hold on any longer? I’d expended too much energy already keeping my leaded eyelids off my cheeks.

  Brenta reached down, a blurry motion at the edge of my shrinking field of vision, and caught the tumbler before it could shatter on the stone floor. I made an effort to sit up straight. He put his other hand flat against my chest and gently pushed me back against the seat cushion. I felt as light and airy as an oblivious gliding bird in the shadow of a hawk.

  “Take it easy, Rawson,” Brenta said. “Time for a little shut-eye.”

  “What… put in the Scosh?” I managed to hold my head still. I was able to squint with one eye. Sort of a wink. Just letting Brenta know that I was on to him.

  He held up a small dark bottle. I stared at it for a few seconds but couldn’t make out the printing on the label. No skull and crossbones, though. My eyelids sank again. So what? Anyway it was getting cloudy on the patio. I thought he was probably right. A little nap might be a good thing. If sleep was all he had in mind for me.

  “It’s just something we keep around in handy places in case Car throws one of her wingdings,” Brenta said. “Calms her right down. The stuff won’t hurt you. You might have a mild headache when you wake up.”

  “Should be going,” I said thickly. Cautious is as cautious does. Very cloudy now. A purple twilight.

  He kept his hand on my chest. His face receded in the velvety gloaming, along with his voice. Now he sounded as if he were talking to me from a villa next door.

  “Francesca,” he said. “So maybe you’re able to get a warrant based on this LUMO lookalike you brought to me, and you go through your official routine the way you’re supposed to. But what of it? She’s a sidewinder in the sack, and she’ll slither out of anything you try to get on her legally. No, my way’s better and faster. Frontier justice, Luke Bailiff-style.”

  I felt a faint ticking of distress within my cocoon of blissful surcease.

  “Damn fool. Don’t try—”

  He shook his head. His face was a blur that stayed blurry once his head was still. Nothing was clear except for the remote, cold light in his eyes.

  “If Francesca was only trying to screw me financially—” Brenta shrugged. “It’s only money. And I say the hell with money. I can always make more. But she crossed the line, and Bucky’s dead.”

  I was going under and taking his voice with me, a voice thick with grief and murderous passion.

  “She pays, and pays hard, for Bucky. Now. Today. I’ve known Cesca for a long time. So maybe I’m partly responsible for what she’s done. It hasn’t exactly been news to me, Rawson. But from here on it’s my play. Thanks for stopping by and chinking up some gaps for me.”

  He did like me. I think I grinned at him. I felt a slight movement of the facial muscles responsible for grins and giggles. I tried, once more, to get my eyelids up for another peep at his face. But his hand wasn’t on my chest anymore and all I saw was a flash of blue and light playing on the jets of water of the diving pool.

  I wasn’t afraid of it anymore, or the height of the platform. I was ready. Watch this, Coach. Here goes Rawson. You old sonofabitch.

  17

  ’m not sure what woke me up. It might have been the smell, like potatoes rotting in a musty old cellar, laced with a strong sting of perfume. Or it could simply have been the hindbrain (which never sleeps) warning of something morbid and dangerous creeping my way in semidarkness. Something or someone breathing asthmatically, a harsh snotty sibilance.

  I had no idea where I was. My eyelids felt welded shut. I remembered fragments of my conversation with Miles Brenta. I had shown him the little wolfmaker I’d brought to his shining white villas in the desert. Mistake. My heartbeat on waking was too big, too rapid. I’d had a drink with him. Then another which he’d doped and which had plowed me under. Not six feet under, fortunately. He had said something about my having a headache when I woke up. I had the headache, which wasn’t too bad. The idea that I’d been jobbed by Brenta was harder to bear.

  I wondered fuzzily what Sunny would make of all this. Rawson’s big screwup. Probably when I told her about it she’d—

  But Sunny was dead. No more conversations with Sunny. A sense of loss side-slipped through me like an electric eel.

  Come on, Rawson.

  You’re lying on your back, that much is obvious even to a dull boy like yourself. There’s a mild tingling in your fingertips. The air you’re breathing is cool even though it’s disgustingly tainted. That nearby sickening odor strong as a storm front. Get a grip, get up, find out what the smell is and where you are. Before—

  The scream was feral, guttural, chilling. Not like anything I could recall hearing before. It got me going, all right.

  I rolled hard to my left and fell off the low bed I’d been lying on. Plush carpet made the fall easy on my elbows. I kept rolling and bumped hard into the figure that had been creeping up on me, just as she was taking another step.

  She sprawled across the bed I’d vacated with another scream and I saw the flash of a blade in low rainbow-tinted light like sundown through a church window.

  She was mostly naked. Her long legs were badly scarred. She had on white bikini pants and a white T-shirt with socal IRVINE and the school’s mascot, an anteater, on the front of it. As she tried to get herself upright on the bed I made it to one knee, took a couple of deep breaths, and rose to my feet. I wasn’t wearing my boots. Otherwise I was dressed as I had come: gray slacks, short-sleeved striped shirt unbuttoned at the throat. My throat was too dry for me to get a word out.

  Carlotta Brenta put her feet on the floor and leaned toward me from the edge of the bed. In addition to the loose tee and nearly transparent panties, draped around her neck she wore a small soggy yellow-stained towel that seemed like a parody of the loosely knotted cowboy bandana that her husband had sported earlier.

  Carlotta growled at me, making preliminary stabbing motions with the narrow blade.

  Her face was the wreckage that had been described to me by Ida Grace. Plastic surgery had succeeded only in giving it a stiff, purplish-pink appearance. One eye was still misplaced, staring off in the general direction of hell on earth. Beneath the T-shirt she was missing a breast. That made me very angry. They could have done something about that. What was her husband thinking? Were there no mirrors where she spent most of her time now? But her shoulder-length hair was still dark, thick, and well brushed.

  Obviously she’d eluded someone who was supposed to be watching her, had wandered and sniffed me out. A stranger. Also obvious that they should have gone to the trouble to keep sharp objects locked away from Carlotta. But once I took a closer look I saw that it wasn’t a knife she was holding. More like a letter opener she’d snatched off a desk.

  “Wolf,” she said, getting up slowly and without physical awkwardness, her stench moving more forcefully in my direction. Her parted lips on one side formed a permanent savage-looking sneer.

  “Mrs. Brenta?” I said. “Carlotta? I’m not a werewolf. I’m a friend of Miles. I think I—I had a little too much to drink for lunch, and Miles was letting me sleep it off in here.”

  With quick glances I was taking in a well-appointed bedroom suite. The bedchamber and a sittin
g room were separated by an archway. There were chrome-framed glass-front fireplaces in both rooms to take the chill off cold desert nights. In the dusky light I saw oblongs of furniture, sculpture, big folk-art paintings on every wall. In the trey ceiling over the bed were six small spotlights assuming a rosy glow in response to the lower light level outside the narrow windows. The overhead lights deepened the brute contours of her surgically recomposed face.

  She tilted her head and the light above us was captured by the dark brown agate of her good eye. The light danced there. She gave her abundant hair a shake and some of it settled over the grosser part of her face, the baffled wayward eye. The half face that was turned to me retained hints of beauty lost, beauty defiled. The feeling in my constricted heart was a forsaken cold sorrow.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “if I disturbed you. I need to be going now. But—if there’s—is there anything I can do for you?”

  The letter opener dipped slowly toward a scar-waxed thigh. She tilted her head a little more, inquiringly. Saliva gleamed on her lower lip and dripped into the towel.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Rawson.”

  “Su nombre es Rawson.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well… don’t rush off. Meester Rawson.”

  Her tongue appeared and swiped along her lower lip. She made a noise in her throat like a sink unclogging.

  “You want to do something… por mi.” Her speech was badly slurred.

  “If I can.”

  “Conmigo?” she said slyly.

  When I didn’t reply to the insinuation she said, “Do you have a big one, Rawson?” I shook my head slightly.

  “Miles does. Muy largo. But my husband won’t do it to me no more.”

  She began to wag her head, dismally coquettish. The head wags became increasingly violent, waves of dark hair lashing across her face. Spit flew from the mouth she couldn’t fully close.