High Bloods

by John Farris

  “I am not too old! I could have a nene who would love me and not find me ugly. Feo. Feo! I say to my husband, I will wear my veil. I say to him, mire, esposo: you no have to look at me while we are doing it. But no. No, no, no! Never he is coming to my bed!”

  I didn’t say anything. She stopped the head-wagging before she succeeded in snapping her neck and looked away from me and began to make a low, sad sound: part whine, part tuneless humming.

  “I really have to go now, Mrs. Brenta.”

  Without a flicker of warning she lunged at me, the letter opener flashing in her hand.

  I caught her wrist without difficulty and squared away, thinking I was prepared for her strength. I wasn’t. The wild demented ones, many smaller than Carlotta, require three trained psych techs to control them without causing serious injury. I remembered Miles saying something about Car and her “wingdings.” Understatement. Carlotta Brenta would’ve been a handful even in a straitjacket. I didn’t happen to have one with me.

  “Carlotta!”

  A woman’s voice came from beyond the archway behind us as I fought to keep the letter opener out of my eye and Car-lotta’s knees away from my groin.

  I felt as if I’d gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight contender before lamps brightened the suite. Suddenly Carlotta and I had a lot of company: two guys in male-nurse whites and white leather athletic shoes, a small plainly dressed nun in the gray and blue smock of her order, wearing a crucifix the size of a tuning fork.

  They deftly took Carlotta off my hands and relieved her of the letter opener. Carlotta by then had wrung herself out emotionally; forgotten why she’d wanted to kill me, assuming she ever knew. Attacking me had been a release of something pent-up, orgiastic, incredibly violent. Now she was in the eye of that hurricane. She didn’t look at me again as they led her away with soft soothing words.

  I was breathing hard and felt as lathered as Miles Brenta’s costly black Arabian after its long morning gallop. But at least I was wide awake when I turned to the fourth person who had come into the suite and who now watched me with a calm expression, a sense of inner detachment from the reality of who we were now, what we once had been to each other.

  “Hello, R,” Elena Grace said.

  I tried to smile at her, but I didn’t have the juice. I could only make a weak gesture of surprise, a perplexed hello.

  For the past couple of days, since I’d caught that virtual reality glimpse of her in motorcycle leathers and as companion to a man I wanted to kill, I had been suppressing the anxiety that if I ever did come face-to-face with Elena I would be looking at a less drastic version of Carlotta. No obvious scars but a psychic difference, beauty marred by anger and shame, her mysterious, muted quality in repose gone forever.

  The color of her eyes had changed but the capacity for contemplative silences had not left them. She had a confectionary swirl of white just off the right ear in her short dark brown hair, hair that always had had a stubborn quality no matter how many attempts she made to tame it. But the ruffled cat-fur look was her style, and suited her because she had no pretensions to glamour. Today instead of the unisex biker gear she was wearing a shantung navy pants suit with big white buttons on the short-sleeved jacket. A little eyeliner and pale pink lipstick on the longbow arch of her perfect mouth: that was Elena as I remembered her. But the crucifix was something new. And it was not the Lycans’ wolfshead symbol of ersatz Christianity.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can keep getting you out of pickles,” she said, with a sidelong look at the rumpled bed. Then she canceled the verbal thrust with a puckish smile. “Just kidding,” she said. But a pulse in her throat betrayed tension and uncertainty.

  “Where did you leave your hog and that scattergun?” I said.

  “The Kawasaki? It belongs to Miles. I borrowed the sawed-off from Ramon. He manages the stables for Miles.”

  “Miles, Miles, Miles,” I said. “What else belongs to him?”

  She gave me a deliberate look. “In a manner of speaking, I do,” she said.

  “I thought it was Raoul Ortega you were so damn chummy with.”

  Elena winced and shook her head.

  “We’re not getting anywhere like this.”

  “Okay. Where are we going and how do we get there?”

  I glanced at my wristpac. It was four-twenty. I’d had a long nap. I also did an L-scan. It was active, but nothing showed on the black screen except the notation O −31.10. I looked up at Elena; she stared back at me. Her eyes were permanently wolf, that disturbing Saxony-green color. She must have worn brown contacts around Carlotta.

  “I guess there are things about me you’d like to know.”

  “Well, no shit, Elena,” I said, coming down hard on the sarcasm.

  She was uncomfortable, and it made her hostile.

  “Could we do this somewhere else?”

  “How about your personalized Brenta villa? Or do you bunk in with the man himself?”

  That caused her to flare, although she was making an effort to keep our unexpected reunion at least partly agreeable.

  “We don’t have that sort of relationship. And I don’t live here.”

  “Where are you living?”

  “At the mission,” she said. “Would you like something to drink? To settle you down?”

  “Love one. Where is Miles, by the way? He has something of mine and I want it back.”

  Elena reached into the pocket of her jacket and showed me the baggie with Dr. Chant’s wolfmaker inside. At least I assumed it was the same one.

  “Do you mean this? He left it with a note where I’d find it.”

  “He’s gone?”

  “Yes. I don’t know where.” She was visibly anxious about that. “If anyone else knows, they aren’t telling me. I was supposed to meet Miles at four. Next thing I know Carlotta is screaming bloody hallelujah and we find you in here trying to teach her new dance steps.”

  “That’s rich,” I said. “Miles doped me and the next thing I knew loopy Carlotta was sneaking up on me in the dark with her letter opener. Can’t top that for entertaining a houseguest. If it wasn’t for the fact that she smells like buzzard puke with a Chanel chaser she might’ve—”

  “Miles doped you?” Elena said sharply.

  “To keep me on ice while he has a sit-down with Francesca Obregon before he kills her. Or hires it done.”

  Elena’s eyes closed briefly. “Dios mio!” she said, prayerfully clutching the plain gold crucifix on her breast.

  “About that drink,” I said. “Make it a double.”

  She opened her eyes, turned, and with a follow-me wave of the hand Elena walked out of the bedroom suite. She walked with a limp.

  “Make it yourself,” she said.

  On a patio not much different from the one outside Miles Brenta’s villa but with more colorful bamboo-framed furniture (and without a portrait of Carlotta over the fireplace) I had my drink. Because I hadn’t eaten much of anything since the meal I’d prepared for Bea almost forty-eight hours ago and my stomach was making noises, Elena asked the kitchen staff to bring over a buffet of fresh fruit and cold cuts. I made a prime rib sandwich. Elena nibbled some melon and sipped boysenberry lemonade because she didn’t drink the hard stuff anymore. For a couple of minutes while I ate we didn’t say anything, just listened to the sulfur-crested cockatoos in a gilded cage and the pleasant purling of clear water over big smooth stones in the pool below the patio.

  I’d settled down and no longer was in the mood to flay her with hurtful recriminations, however justified I felt they might be. Elena’s tense expression had softened. She was still shy about looking at me. There was a hell of a lot I wanted, needed to know, but it would just have to work its way to the surface gradually, with no hardcase interrogation on my part. And although I was nervous about and very angry with Miles Brenta for making me look and feel like a damn fool, dealing with Miles would have to wait a while longer.

  I was halfway through my sandwich when
my wristpac gave me some vibes. I looked at it.

  “Is that your office?” Elena asked.

  “No. It’s Bea. I’ll get back to her.”

  “Bea for Beatrice? I’m really glad you have someone now, R.”

  “I have yet to adopt celibacy as a way of life,” I said, sounding like a jackass. Then I shrugged ruefully, man enough to let her know I knew it.

  Elena smiled gently.

  “I’d like to meet her sometime. When the, ah, lava crusts over and cools down and we can walk on it.”

  “Thought you’d already met.”

  Elena ignored me. She got up and helped herself to a slice of melon from the buffet cart.

  “How long have you been a nun?” I said.

  “I’m not. Yet. I may take my vows in a few months. There’s no urgency. After all I’ve been through, God wants me to be certain about my vocation. I have time; He has patience. He’s always been there, always will be.”

  “And it was Brenta who set you on the—what do you want to call it?—the straight and narrow? Because when I saw you last you were pitiful. All rogue and hungering for hell.”

  She looked up at me thoughtfully.

  “I could’ve helped you,” I said. “Put you in one of the programs.”

  “But I wasn’t ready for redemption! I hadn’t reached the depths I’d convinced myself I deserved. You had already suffered enough. Your hair had turned white. When you wouldn’t put a bullet in my head I simply ran away. Ran and ran and ran.”

  “To Brenta. Strange choice, considering.”

  “But it was God who sent Miles to me.”

  “He’s never struck me as being particularly religious.”

  Elena limped to the patio’s edge with her plate. There were other things wrong with her physically. One shoulder lower than the other. An enlarged elbow joint. She had a little trouble picking up a piece of melon from her plate.

  “What happened to your leg?” I asked.

  “Surgery. Hip and knee.”

  “Fall off a cliff?”

  “Too many Observances. I stayed wide awake and rogue. Punishing myself.”

  “Nothing that happened to you was your fault.”

  “I was angry. Deeply angry. I turned it against myself. A common psychological dilemma, I’m told. But during my—phases—I didn’t want to hurt another human being, or animals. There’s no way to control the impulse, so each month I found a lonely place and locked myself in chains that not even my werewolf’s strength could break. Of course I damaged my joints and cracked some bones hairing-up in bondage like that.”

  “Where did Brenta come across you?”

  “He was surveying property he owns in the high desert, where he wants to build another of his magical kingdoms for the very rich. There I was, dehydrated, sunburned, dragging bloody chains. One look at me and he knew the score. He sent his associates away and put the muzzle of a pistol against my head. For Carlotta, he said. I didn’t know who she was then. I screamed at him. I was furious. ‘For me!’ I said. ‘I want it!’ He could see that in my eyes, I’m sure. I was mad from the pain of being myself. But he lowered the gun. Or the hand of God pushed it away from my head.”

  “Killing anything that’s looking at you in total surrender is only for hard-core psychopaths,” I said.

  Elena nodded.

  “I know that you couldn’t bring yourself to do it,” she said.

  My appetite was gone. I pushed half of my sandwich away. I didn’t want the last couple ounces of Scotch either. I drank water instead.

  “So Brenta couldn’t shoot you either. What did he do?”

  “He called his associates back. They were probably surprised to find me still breathing. I was loaded into the back of one of their off-roaders and driven ninety miles south to the mission.”

  “Which one?”

  “Sisters of Saint Pius in Arroyo del Cobre, not far from—”

  “I know where it is. It’s been there for three hundred years. Why the mission and not a private hospital?”

  “Because of Carlotta’s condition, Miles already had an ongoing relationship with Mother Mary Aquinas, a certified psychiatrist. The Sisters is a medical order, tiny, but with longer than a thousand-year history. The Mission of Arroyo del Cobre deals primarily with Lycan females, some of them not yet teenagers but all of them alone in the world, psychologically disabled. A few are pregnant. And there are some terminally ill girls in hospice.”

  “So what is Brenta’s connection?”

  “That was Sister Lloyd you saw with Carlotta. She’s a physician. Diseases of the blood. Sister Lloyd and I help Miles with Carlotta. Who some days needs a shitload of looking-after.”

  “I noticed. So your services are in exchange for a sizable donation from Brenta.”

  My wristpac vibrated again. I didn’t even look this time. I didn’t take my eyes off Elena, who had limped back to the buffet cart. She put her plate down. She wasn’t forty yet, but moved like sixty-plus. Her eyes were clear, though, her face serene. She had the luxury of a confident heart.

  “Without Miles’s contributions, and the funds he’s persuaded others to give, the order couldn’t survive.”

  “And he allows a rogue werewolf in his home? Around his wife?”

  “I’m Lycan now. I have been for almost four years.”

  “There’s no record of you at WEIR. Believe me, I’ve checked often.”

  “Miles arranged for me to have a nonreg Snitcher. After all, his company makes them.”

  “Both of you are breaking the law.”

  “Did you like me better the way I was?” she said with a smile that had an edge to it.

  I had no answer. I wasn’t going to arrest her, so I changed the subject.

  “I don’t understand why Brenta didn’t turn you over to Ida,” I said.

  “Because I told him nothing about myself except my nickname.”

  “Lenie.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he still doesn’t know who you are?”

  “He knows. I had to let him know eventually. I wanted to, in fact.”

  “You’re the werewolf who came to dinner. And stayed. There has to be more to your relationship than you’ve been willing to tell me. First of all, the secrecy. Your e-mail message two nights ago. ‘Get Bucky off the stage,’ you said. ‘I can’t do it, I’ll be exposed.’ Exposed to what?”

  “Not what, R. Who. Raoul Ortega. With whom I am also, how did you put it? Chummy.”

  There was a silver ice bucket on the buffet cart. It was big enough. I snatched it up, stuck my reeling head into the bucket, and held it there up to my ears in ice until my brain and my temper cooled down. Then I put the bucket back, brushed ice chips off my shoulders as I turned to stare at Elena. Ice water trickled down my face and neck.

  “Poor old R,” she said soothingly. “I’m confusing you.”

  “Just explain. Quickly. We’re burning daylight and I’ve got trouble to deal with. I know you’re a part of it, but I just hope like hell you’re going to let me off easy.”

  “Okay. About Raoul. Three of us from the mission had been shopping at the supermarket in Del Lindo. We were loading a week’s worth of groceries for the mission into the back of our Volvo wagon with two hundred thousand miles on it when Raoul and some of his fellow Diamondbackers came cruising through the lot. About six of them on their fabulous Harleys, right? Enough glitter to put your eyes out on a sunny day.

  “They weren’t all that interested in three nuns, or two nuns and one novitiate. I don’t know how he happened to recognize me. Probably he wasn’t all that sure at first, because they parked their bikes and went into the sporting goods store next to Ralph’s. All but Raoul. He stayed in the saddle blipping his engine and staring at us. Then, when we were about ready to leave, he rode over slowly and stopped two feet from me. Sort of making it difficult for me to get into the wagon with the others.”

  “You knew who he was,” I said.

  “Some faces just
get burned into your memory,” Elena said.

  “Don’t they.”

  “Raoul and I looked at each other and I didn’t so much as blink and finally he said, ‘I know you from somewhere.’“

  “That was witty. And you said—”

  “‘You should. I was engaged to a man named Rawson.’“

  “Jesus, Elena!” But I felt a perverse pride in her.

  “Ol’ Raoul rubbed a hand across his beard and he was like, ‘Oh yeah. Rawson. He doing okay?’ I said, ‘I haven’t seen him for a long time.’ He grinned and said, ‘So you don’t know if he still want to kill me?’ I said, ‘Oh no. I’m very sure he still wants to kill you.’ Well. You can imagine how Sister Rosetta and Sister Thomasina reacted to that. It was hot in the Volvo, the air conditioner was broken again, and they just wanted to get away from there fast. But Raoul and I continued to stare at each other. Finally he said, ‘And you into Jesus now?’ I said I was into Jesus now. He said, ‘How do you feel about me, Raoul? For what went down? You want to kill me, Sister?’ I said no, I thank God for giving me this opportunity to forgive you.”

  “Forgive him? He must’ve eaten that up.”

  “Let’s say it surprised him. Confused him, I think. And confusion quickly made him angry. He drove away without another word to me. But he didn’t go far. I was still watching him when he turned around. Came roaring back and stopped with the front wheel of his Harley a foot away from me. I didn’t flinch. He said, ‘They teach you that, at the mission? El perdón?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I learned from Jesus how to forgive. My heart is cleansed and I have a new life now. What have you got?’ “

  “Taunting him wasn’t a good idea.”

  “I don’t taunt. It was an honest question. I think, despite what Ortega was and is, his godless ways, he recognized that I was sincerely interested in what he might have to say. His boys had come out of the sporting-goods store. And here he was, talking to a nun—as far as they knew. Ortega looked at them, then said to me, ‘You got time to take a ride with me, Sister?’ I said I hadn’t, but I was willing to make time.”

  “So you went for a jaunt on his motorcycle along with a posse of Diamondbackers?”