High Bloods

by John Farris

  Lew parked the R-Two on Circle Drive behind the Applied Math building and we got out. Lew unlocked the R-Two’s arsenal. In addition to heavy stuff like the PHASR and compact zippos there was an array of small arms, each with silencer attachments and sonic stunners. I changed my shoulder holster to allow for the silencer I attached to my Glock.

  From the roof of Applied Math Lew would have an unobstructed view of all levels of UCLA North station, which was about two hundred yards west. Paulo was to be his contact; they checked walkie reception on Paulo’s whisper tit. Lew took binoculars and went upstairs. Paulo declined to choose a weapon.

  “Guns make me uncomfortable,” he said.

  A monorail train passed overhead a few yards away, ghostly quiet but with that charge of momentum you felt in the gut; sunlight winked off its tinted windows. Summer session at the university was over and there were few students around as we walked toward the station.

  “There really shouldn’t be any need to shoot McClusky,” Paulo said. “Rat that he is.”

  “Now don’t go and spoil my day,” I said.

  Before we reached the southwest exit ramp of the station, Lew Rolling had positioned himself on the roof of UCLA’s Applied Math building and had checked in on the walkie.

  “I’ve got McClusky on the lower westbound platform,” he said.

  Paulo handed me the walkie.

  “What’s he doing?” I said to Lew.

  “Moving around; checking the time; checking the arrivals board.”

  “Lew?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful where you aim those binoculars. The lenses aren’t tinted. The sun is just at the right angle now to give you away if he looks in your direction.”

  “Roger that.”

  An eastbound triple-tandem streetcar was in the station; a crowd from the Malibu beaches was streaming toward us down the ramp. Most were college kids. Backpacks, beach blankets, folding chairs, a couple of surfboards.

  “McClusky knows both of us on sight,” Paulo said. “But he’ll pick you out first. You’re as obvious as an anthill on a putting green.”

  “Check,” I said. I stepped in front of a gangly kid with zinc oxide on his prominent nose. He had his arm around a tink with a gamin haircut and merry close-set eyes. He was wearing one of those beach hats that are woven from palm fronds.

  He looked startled, then anxious when I gave him a look at my ID folder.

  “We’re High Bloods.”

  I’d already scanned them. “I like your hat. Would you take a fifty for it?”

  “Uh—what? You want to buy my hat?”

  “Sure,” the girl said, nudging him out of neutral with a sharp elbow. “Let’s see the money.”

  I gave him the money and he gave me the hat.

  “What’s going down?” the girl said.

  “Nothing to worry about,” I said. “Just keep moving.”

  I put the hat on. It had a beachy tang and a faint beeriness. I was already wearing Reef’s sunglasses. I looked at Paulo and said out of the side of my mouth, “Lothario in the sixth at Del Mar. Back up the truck on this one.”

  “You’ll do,” Paulo said. He checked the time. “Four minutes past the hour.”

  “We want ILC helo Interceptors and BHPD prowlies on the scene at ten after. Gives me time to have a chat with the Stork.”

  “If he takes off?”

  “Then I’ve done a bad job of convincing him that he’s wasting his time.”

  We split up. I stopped at a newsstand and bought a paper. Then I idled my way through a crowd descending from the monorail platform. I positioned myself next to the line at the pizza stand on the eastbound side and watched Stork McClusky grow more and more agitated on the platform across from me. Six minutes after the hour: he was scowling as he stared up Sunset for a glimpse of the late streetcar. He took out a blue handkerchief and blotted some sweat below the snap brim of his cocoa-colored Panama straw hat.

  A groan ran through the crowd waiting with McClusky. More faces turned up to see what the arrivals board had to tell them. I couldn’t see from where I stood but I had a good idea what the message was: ACCIDENT DELAY WESTBOUND.

  Stork took in the bad news with his lips compressed. I saw indecision in his face. “Delay” could mean five minutes, or an hour.

  Time to go for his balls, I thought.

  I drew the Glock and concealed it with the folded newspaper. Then I transmitted McClusky’s call sign on the ILC channel of my wristpac. A silent signal. He stared at his vibrating wristpac for a few moments, indecisive, then wary. But he responded wordlessly.

  “Hi, Stork,” I said. “Rawson. You were fucked as soon as you got the idea of extorting money from a woman who is just trying to salvage something of her family. But that’s nothing compared to how fucked you’re going to be if you don’t tell me in the next couple of minutes where I can find Mallory Scarlett. Understand, asshole? You’re not going anywhere. We’re all over you like stink on a hand-me-down whore.”

  McClusky rubbed a hand angrily across his mouth. He glanced around. He looked up. Nine minutes past the hour. We both heard the helicopters. And sirens on Sunset.

  I took off my palm-frond hat and waved it, so he could easily locate me.

  He saw me. He hesitated for a couple of seconds, then smiled a savage smile.

  “Fuck you, Rawson. Come and get me.”

  Then he headed for the escalator to the monorail platform. He shoved his way past a Little League team with parents and coaches, not in a panic, just in a hurry. As if he had an out prepared. He looked at me once as he ran up the escalator with a motion of his head as if he wanted me to follow.

  I did, contacting Paulo on the run.

  “McClusky wants to play. Westbound monorail. If he gets on the train, I’ll take him off at Veteran or Sepulveda.”

  The five-car train that was operating on the west side of the loop was pulling in when I reached the platform above me. The ILC helicopters had arrived and were circling overhead. I crossed the bridge unhurriedly as passengers left the train. McClusky looked up at the helos, then boarded the middle car with that smile fixed on his face.

  I strolled aboard along with the baseball kids, who were stuffing their faces with pretzels, pizza, and ice cream while chattering excitedly about the game they had won. I stood in the middle of the car as it filled up and looked at McClusky. He was facing me about ten feet away, one hand on an overhead grip rail, the other hand holding his panama hat against his chest, like in the good old days at the ballpark when they were playing the national anthem and Dimaggio was in his rookie year.

  His whisper tit was in his ear. He hadn’t disconnected us, as if he might be interested in talking while he stared fixedly at me over the heads of the small fry. He was perspiring. His eyes bothered me but not as much as his smile.

  “This train ends up back where it started,” I said, as patiently as if I were explaining to a child. “What’s the point, Stork?”

  “I know where I’m going,” he said. “Where we’ll all go if you don’t leave me alone.” He sounded petulant, aggrieved, and a little frightened. Falling out of touch with reality like someone falling from a high window.

  The fully automated train started up smoothly. The next stop was about eight-tenths of a mile away, at Veteran and Gayley. Then it would continue on to the West Wilshire gateway to the Privilege at Sepulveda.

  “You don’t have anything to bargain with,” I said. “Other than Mal Scarlett’s life. Tell me where she is and I’ll develop a bad memory about the extortion attempt. Let’s get off at the next stop and we’ll have ourselves some coffee and when it’s confirmed that we’ve found Mallory—”

  Below us were the playing fields and tennis courts of the university and the shadow of the passing train and another moving shadow, that of one of the helicopters keeping pace with us.

  He stooped to look out at the black helicopter thirty yards away.

  “SWAT, huh?” he said. He was breath
ing heavily and he had that smile again. Cunning and ruthless. “Get rid of them.”

  “I will. Just give me a reason for playing ball with you, Stork. Give me Mal Scarlett.” I tried not to let emotion into my voice. “It’s no beef against you. You didn’t kidnap her.”

  But the look he flicked my way gave me reason to wonder. His eyes said, Wouldn’t you like to know?

  “You want to play ball?” he said. “Okay, let’s play ball.”

  His smile, no longer senseless, was touched by a fleering evil.

  He showed me what he had in his hat.

  “How do you like your kids cooked, Rawson?” he said.

  The tan grenade was an ILC Armory standard item. It was incendiary and the arming light was on, a pinhead red glow. Six seconds after it hit anything—the roof of the car, the floor, someone’s body—the packed car would light up like an exploding star. At least twenty men, women, and children would die in one of the most frightful ways imaginable.

  I had a clean shot at him with the silenced Glock. He knew I had a gun and didn’t care. No point thinking about it. The grenade could not be allowed to explode.

  “Okay,” I said, trying without a lot of success to control my rage. “You walk, McClusky. There’ll be another time.”

  I’d barely spoken when the girl standing close and belt-high to Stork said in a loud voice, “Mama, this man has a bomb in his hat!”

  Screams.

  And some damn fool hit the emergency stop button.

  Half of those standing in the car lurched backward as braked tires smoked on the rail. Stork McClusky was piled into by bodies of assorted sizes. He had a tight grip on the overhead handrail and managed to keep one foot on the floor. But his upper body was wrenched violently to the right. His arm flew up past his shoulder and the thermite bomb, a little larger than a handball, popped up out of his hat like a lazy infield fly, grazed the ceiling, and began to arc down.

  A chubby kid with a peeling nose who had kept his seat facing the aisle at the rear end of the car saw the grenade coming. I’d noticed him before, pounding a baseball into his catcher’s mitt while he relived the game with a teammate seated beside him. Still into that game, he reached out instinctively to snag the falling grenade with his mitt.

  He almost made the catch. But instead of nestling in the small pocket of the mitt, the grenade hit the front edge and teetered there. Distracted by the screaming and jostling, the kid made a determined effort to bring in the grenade, but his teammate gave him a shove off the seat and the grenade fell to the floor amid several pairs of feet in flip-flops, sneakers, and sandals.

  Three seconds.

  The grenade was going to explode, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  But there are those moments—ask any athlete who makes his living in pro sports—when time on the field or court seems to slow down, allowing for an almost preternatural clarity of vision. Ted Williams had claimed he could see and sometimes count the seams on a fastball dished up to him at ninety-plus miles an hour in six-tenths of a second.

  I had some of that, a clarity of vision prompted by extreme crisis, an acute appraisal of all options available to me. As the grenade rolled up the aisle and back to us while others scrambled frantically to get out of the way, I moved toward Stork McClusky, calmly aware of what I must do.

  Two seconds.

  His head was coming around as he shifted his feet to keep his balance and I hit him with a straight shot to the point of the chin. The punch traveled only about a foot but I had never thrown a better one. His eyes rolled up and out and he lost his grip on the handrail.

  One second.

  I caught McClusky by the lapels of his sports jacket as he began to sag, spun him around and threw him down between the scuffling feet of terrorized riders: threw him onto the incendiary grenade as it was detonated.

  There was a muffled whump and McClusky’s long body arced in a floppy sort of way like a broken jackknife, but rose only a few inches off the floor. At a temperature of around three thousand degrees Fahrenheit the magnesium accelerant produced enough thermal energy to burn instantly through most of his skinny torso and begin to melt the floor around and under him. Those closest to the flash also were burned: clothing, shoes, bare legs. But most of the force of the grenade had been directed downward by the dampening effect of McClusky. The burn would eat a hole in the floor of the car three feet in diameter before it slowed down. But the physical damage was contained. There was very little smoke; the stench was as ripe as a cannibals’ cookout. There were maybe a dozen injuries, half of those serious.

  I grabbed a large bottle of designer water from someone’s backpack and used it to douse a screaming kid whose flips were melting. I grabbed her off the sizzling floor and shoved her into her mother’s arms and yelled for more water, soda, aloe vera gel; anything to cool down other burn victims.

  Paulo pushed his way inside from the car behind us, made a quick and accurate guess as to what had happened.

  “SWAT wants to know our situation!”

  “Help me empty this car and get the train moving again! We’ll need medical at the next stop.”

  It may have been the same helpful idiot who had stopped the train in the first place who now thought it was a great idea to emergency-open the doors. Possibly forgetting that the train was between stations and about eighteen feet in the air. There was still a lot of panicky shoving going on as everyone tried to put distance between themselves and the steadily shrinking blackness of Stork McClusky. The smell; the horror. A bearded man with a guitar strapped across his back toppled backward into space, fell with a shriek. The guitar, I hoped, would absorb some of the shock from his fall.

  When a kid was knocked off balance and almost rolled out through another door I’d had enough: I pulled the Glock, un-clipped the silencer, and fired four quick shots into the ceiling of the car. It was a risky gamble. Either they all would continue to panic, or I would have a few moments to grab control of the situation.

  Most of them froze, staring at me.

  So I explained that the worst was over, I didn’t want to hear any more goddamn screaming and yelling and anyone who chose not to cooperate could leave the car by the nearest exit.

  Someone laughed nervously. But there was a noticeable easing of fear as they began to believe me.

  “We have an emergency here! People are injured, but there are first-aid kits and fire extinguishers aboard. Use them. Get calm, get organized, and we’ll soon be moving on.

  “Any questions?”

  I had a gun and the voice of authority. There were no questions.

  A few minutes later the doors closed and the train was rolling again, slowly, to the next stop.

  About half an hour after the train had been emptied, as twilight settled in and the sky had darkened to a tranquil shade of indigo and I could breathe again without smelling burned flesh, Paulo and I watched what little remained of Stork McClusky in a body bag being loaded into the back of the coroner’s bus.

  “Was there anyone at SoCal Intel who wasn’t corrupt?” I said.

  “We’ll be sorting that out in the next few months. McClusky was just dirtier than most.”

  “While DeMarco looked the other way? I don’t get why he’s not in lockdown.”

  “No formal charges yet. He’s cooperating with us.”

  I sighed and shook my head, looked at my wristpac. Cell call. It was Beatrice.

  “Hiya.”

  “R?” She sounded tense.

  “Who else?”

  “W-where are you?”

  She was tense, all right. Her voice low, tentative. As if she were afraid to talk, almost afraid to breathe. I tried to raise her hologram. The image was shaky tonight. My wristpac either needed a charge, or it had taken a beating when I clocked McClusky.

  “Not far away,” I said. “There was some trouble. It’s sorted out. How’s Ida?” Now I was tense, my teeth on edge, because Stork McClusky might have been my last hope for finding Mal Scar
lett before the mal de lune.

  “I—I’m not with her. I’m still at the hotel.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re going to be mad.”

  “No I’m not. What’s going on?”

  “It’s about my knife—the silver one.”

  “Jesus, Bea. Not that again.”

  “Just listen! I found it.”

  “You—where?”

  She took a long breath.

  “It’s, uh—oh, hell.”

  “Bea, are you where I think you are?”

  Her blurry hologram trembled in the darkening air as a strong breeze flowed through the ficus trees behind me.

  “Yes. F-Francesca Obregon’s bungalow. She still has my knife, R. I mean—she’s sort of wearing it?”

  I let five seconds go by. Whistled three low notes.

  “That mean what I think it means?”

  “Uh-huh,” Beatrice said tearfully.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. Well—except f-for—R, it’s getting dark and I’m kind of scared, can you—”

  “Go to the door,” I said. “Lock it. Wait. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  21

  rancesca Obregon was half reclining with a lot of colorful taffeta-covered pillows on a bed with a sateen pearl-gray spread and an ornate headboard of wrought iron painted white and accented with ormolu. The bedroom was half of the first-floor master suite of the bungalow leased by one of Miles Brenta’s companies. The suite contained, among other luxuries and examples of Hollywood whimsy, two wood-burning fireplaces, a pink grand piano in a windowed alcove, and a standing harp with two stuffed lovebirds perched on it.

  Francesca’s beautiful nude lightly oiled body looked relaxed, as death first relaxes us all. Her long legs were crossed at the ankles and her thighs were primly together. Her large dark eyes were open and fixed on us behind the netlike brim of one of those summery hats two or three of the models at the fashion show had been wearing.