Blood World

by Chris Mooney

  She said she did, thinking about the ring she’d found in his pocket and wondering if he was going to pop the question, a part of her glad he didn’t. She couldn’t worry about him and their life together and do her job effectively. Yet another part was sad, maybe even a bit alarmed, Ellie wondering if he had changed his mind.

  Hearing his voice now, she felt overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude so powerful, it almost made her believe in that whole Prince Charming thing she’d been sold when she was a kid. It was fantasy bullshit, but she would live happily because she had found someone who not only understood her but also—and this was the most important part—treated her as an equal and would have her back. A man who could be taken at his word.

  “Ellie? You there?”

  “Yeah,” she said, keeping her voice low on the off chance someone was standing behind the bathroom door, listening. “Yeah, I’m here. Sorry, it’s just . . .” I didn’t realize just how much I missed you these past few months, how important and special and rare you are. “I didn’t expect— I had no idea they’d arranged a phone call with you,” she said. “No one told me.”

  “They wanted to surprise you. They said you’re doing great. Terrific, actually.”

  “Good. That’s good to hear.”

  “And you’re safe, right? They told me you are, but I don’t know if they’re blowing smoke.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “So you’re not in any danger.”

  “No. Not at all. They’re taking good care of me.”

  “The LAPD, you mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.” She heard his breath explode against the receiver. “Good,” he said again, like he was being relieved of a great burden. “They won’t give me any updates.”

  “Protocol.”

  “What did you say? I can barely hear you.”

  Ellie flushed the toilet again, in case someone was at the bathroom door. “Protocol,” she said, a little louder. “Don’t take it personally.”

  “I’m not. Well, I’m trying not to.” A short chuckle, and then his voice turned serious. “I thought I’d be . . . well, better at all this. Handling it better.”

  Out of all the men she’d met, Cody was by far the best when it came to expressing his feelings. But she sensed the hesitation in his voice, felt him fumbling for the right choice of words, and she suspected he wasn’t alone, that someone was standing close by, listening to him, or maybe listening in on their conversation.

  Cody said, “I keep thinking about you, wondering if you’re okay, and sometimes my mind goes to a . . . I just hate not knowing, is what I’m trying to say.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No. No, don’t be. I’m just—”

  “I realize how hard this is for you. It’s hard for me, too.”

  “You’re doing a good thing.”

  “I think about you. Constantly.”

  “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty.”

  Her smartwatch vibrated against her wrist. It was paired via Bluetooth to her phone, so she could be alerted to incoming texts and calls. She saw that Anton was calling and her heart jumped. Anton expected you to answer his calls ASAP—and may God have mercy on your soul if you didn’t.

  Cody said, “The only reason I brought it up is—”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah. It’s fine.” She plunged her hand into the tank and grabbed the waterproof pouch.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Work stuff. We’ll talk soon.”

  “Okay. I love you.”

  Ellie didn’t answer him; she had already pulled the phone away from her ear. She heard Cody’s voice echo over the tiny speaker as the burner slipped from her hand and fell into the toilet.

  There was no time to feel guilty. She had to answer Anton’s call now, before it went to voicemail. One more ring, and it would.

  Anton, as usual, got right to the point: “Go to Bloomingdale’s at Beverly Center. Women’s section. Ask for Binx. She will—”

  “Blink?”

  “Binx. B-I-N-X.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “It’s a name. Jesus, you and your questions.” He sighed, his breath exploding against the receiver. Something Anton despised, his stickmen asking questions. “She will give you clothes. Meet me tonight, at eight, place called Inge in Beverly Hills.”

  Click, and he was gone.

  CHAPTER 16

  AVA LIVED IN what the people in Sebastian’s business called a “dramatic contemporary.” The description was certainly accurate. Her home, a modern architectural marvel of stone and glass, sat on half an acre high above Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood Hills West, and featured dramatic and stunning ocean views. Sebastian came out here, to the spot where he now stood, because it offered him a direct line of sight to the side and back of the house, with its lower-level lounge and infinity pool and space. Because the home was constructed mostly of glass that stretched from floor to ceiling, he had a good, solid view into the majority of the rooms.

  He dreamed about Ava often now, their time together and the good memories—all of it had been resurrected in the days following his attempted assassination. Sebastian felt oddly reborn, and he’d had this need to search for her. After an hour’s worth of work he found out she was still living in LA. He found her address.

  Finding out personal, intimate stuff was trickier. Ava wasn’t on any social media, which he thought was strange until he remembered how fiercely private, like he was, she had been when they were together. When they were teenagers, she’d had no desire to use her phone to post pictures and every single detail about her life for the world to see. She was still that way now, it seemed.

  Her twenty-two-year-old daughter was another story. She posted everything about her life. Using hacks Frank had taught him years ago, Sebastian learned Ava was separated from her husband. A search of public records revealed she had divorced Charles early this year, in January.

  His mother’s steadfast belief in God, and all the time he’d spent with her at church, hadn’t instilled much in the way of faith. If God did, in fact, exist, He was a lot like Sebastian’s father—a sperm donor who had given him the gift of life and then left, never to be seen or heard from again. Then came the miracle—and it was a miracle—of getting his life sentence overturned. Then, in AA, he learned to form a God of his understanding—sort of a Build-A-Bear approach to spirituality—and what Sebastian came to believe was that things did happen for a reason. And maybe the reason behind getting shot was to wake him up to the fact that he wasn’t fully living out his true life’s purpose. He didn’t think it was a coincidence that he’d been thinking about Ava the moment he was shot.

  Ava’s black Range Rover was parked in the driveway, but he couldn’t find her. He kept looking, wondering what Frank would think about what he was doing. Frank would say he was insane. And maybe he was; alcoholics, by definition, were insane. Then again, wasn’t love its own form of insanity? And what did Frank know about love?

  Sebastian couldn’t find Ava; she had to be in some other part of the house. He sighed, disappointed, about to give up when he saw someone jogging up the road in front of Ava’s house—it was Ava, dressed in tight black running shorts and a matching midriff sports top, her long black hair tied back into a ponytail. Seeing her made the fist inside his chest unclench and finally relax.

  She went in through a gate on the side of the yard and he lost sight of her, spotted her a moment later climbing the stairs. He lost her again, then quickly found her in the master bedroom suite she had, at one time, shared with her husband. She had already removed her running sneakers and socks. The deep red shade of nail polish on her toes matched that of her fingernails. Now she was removing her running top.

  Sebastian looked away. Even t
hough he had seen her naked before, his twice-a-week treks to this spot weren’t about indulging some pervy fetish. This was about getting to know her again, so he could take the next step.

  His phone rang, its bleating sounding loud in the canyon. Sebastian started—he’d forgotten to mute the goddamn ringer. He did so, not even bothering to check the caller, shoved the phone in his pocket, and went back to waiting for Ava to return from the shower.

  She did, several minutes later, now dressed in a pair of boy shorts and a tank, her long jet-black hair still damp. She propped up the pillows on her king-sized bed and then, from the nightstand, grabbed the same book she’d been reading all summer—a monstrously thick trade paperback on Winston Churchill. She picked up a pair of stylish reading glasses, got herself settled on the bed, and began to read.

  She had never looked more beautiful to him.

  His phone rang again, vibrating. He ignored it, thinking back to the day when he walked into court for a new trial with a new judge, who reviewed the case and agreed with his lawyer’s findings. You’re free to go, Mr. Kane.

  To where? Sebastian wanted to say. To what? You took everything from me, and I have no way to get it back.

  One of the great many tenets he’d learned in AA was to let go of the past. And he had. Took him a long time to do it, but he had said goodbye to Ava—not in person but to the Ava that existed in his mind, the Ava he had carried with him through prison and then later met doing what he was doing right now, watching her from afar. And now the past had come back to him. Demanded his full attention.

  Call her, an inner voice urged.

  And say what? Where would he even start?

  His phone rang again, goddammit, and he pulled away the binoculars and removed the phone, wondering who was blowing it up.

  The caller was Frank. “Ron’s been trying to get in contact with you.”

  “Ron?” Sebastian asked, his mind still drunk on the image of seeing Ava lying in her bed.

  “Ron Wolff.”

  Right, Ron. Their security guy. Sebastian blinked and inhaled, focusing his attention back on the moment. “He got something?”

  A slight pause, and then Frank said, “Where are you?”

  “Out and about. What did Ron say?”

  Another pause. “Have you been drinking?”

  Sebastian stiffened.

  “You sound—” Frank began.

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask me that. Tell me about Ron.”

  “He’s got an update—a big one,” Frank said. “He wants to meet—the sooner, the better.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Ron Wolff sat outside, under an umbrella at one of the tables. He waved, stood, picked up the two coffee cups, and headed to the car.

  With his discount-warehouse chinos and bland polo shirt, Ron looked like just another middle-aged guy passing through town before heading out to play a quick nine at a public course, maybe hit a family barbecue afterward. That was one of the things Sebastian admired about Ron, how low-profile he was, dressing like Joe Average and driving a Honda Accord even though his net worth was somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a billion dollars—all of it from blood profits.

  No one knew that, of course. To the outside world, Ron was just the owner of yet another private security outfit, albeit a very successful one. He provided all sorts of security services to some major high-end corporations, as well as private citizens. His real talent, what made him stand out, was his success at finding missing carriers.

  It had been Frank’s idea, back when the three of them started out together, to turn Ron into a valuable resource for the LAPD. Over the years, Frank and Sebastian would abduct carriers and house them in private locations for a few weeks, maybe a couple of months; and then Ron, through staged investigative work, would find these carriers and contact the police. The LAPD, mired in bureaucratic red tape, was more than grateful to receive information from Ron.

  Because Ron had no problem sharing information, the contacts he had made within both the LAPD and the FBI had no problem sharing sensitive and sometimes classified information on their cases, and now, after all these years of hard work and patience, Sebastian and Frank had nearly unfettered access to any blood-related crime in the country.

  Sebastian reached across the seat and opened the door. Ron slid inside, grimacing in discomfort, and handed Sebastian a venti cup.

  “Knee still acting up?” Sebastian asked.

  “Like a mad bastard.”

  “I can help you with the arthritis. Just say the word.”

  Ron waved it away. He had no use for blood treatments—or anything else modern, for that matter. Ron was old-school. While his office had computers with Internet access, all of his case files were stored on paper. If you visited him you had to hand over your phone and any other electronic device, which he stored inside a Faraday cage that blocked all electromagnetic fields to prevent eavesdropping.

  Sebastian drove aimlessly.

  “Frank told me about the trip you took this morning with Link,” Ron said. “He give you anything?”

  Sebastian sighed. “He did not.”

  “What I thought. He passed the polygraph—twice—remember? Him and the other one, Ferreria.”

  Sebastian did remember, but what he resented right now—what was annoying the shit out of him—was the subtext in Ron’s words, that “I told you so” tone. Frank spoke to him that way, too, he and Ron explaining things like he, Sebastian, was an adult toddler. Or the world’s biggest idiot.

  Sebastian drew in a deep breath, his thoughts shifting to Link’s boss and Sebastian’s quasi-silent partner, Anton.

  “Anton also passed the polygraph,” Ron said, as if reading his mind. “Not twice but three times.”

  “I know.”

  “But you’re still thinking he might be somehow involved with Paul.”

  The truth was, Sebastian didn’t know what to think. Paul had worked for Anton, but that didn’t mean Anton had worked with Paul. The distinction was important. And there were other facts to consider. When Anton had found out about his dead stickman in Brentwood, he had contacted Frank. Anton professed to know nothing about it and immediately agreed to submit to a polygraph, guided hypnosis—anything to prove his innocence, that he, too, had been fucked over by Paul. And when Anton passed the first polygraph, he demanded another one, from someone different. Again he passed.

  But polygraphs were not flawless. They could be beaten.

  Ron said, “There’s still not a single thing to indicate Anton knew about what Paul was going to do in Brentwood.”

  “I know—you’ve told me.”

  “We’ve kept a very close eye on Anton, listened in on his conversations courtesy of the bugs we placed in his house and car. He’s still livid that Paul put him in this situation. And don’t forget, Paul royally screwed him over by killing one of Anton’s guys, that kid there at the house.”

  Sebastian already knew all this. “Frank said you had a major update.”

  Ron nodded and took a sip of his coffee. “LAPD has officially finished processing the Vargas home. Feds even loaned them their top lab geeks to go through it with a fine-tooth comb. I’m pleased to report they failed to recover a single fingerprint or DNA sample that belonged to Paul. We’re in the clear there.”

  That had been a major, major concern from the very beginning, the police finding something that could link Paul to the house. When Paul enlisted in the military, he’d had, like every other potential candidate, to undergo a criminal background check. That meant submitting fingerprints and a DNA sample to see if they were related to any unsolved crimes. If something had been found at Sophia Vargas’s home, the police and FBI would have come knocking, asking questions.

  Ron said, “Still no activity on any of Paul’s financial accounts. We know he dumped his sma
rtphone the day you were shot. His friends are still texting and calling, wondering where he is and why he won’t answer. Same deal on his emails. They keep piling up, and he hasn’t answered a single one of them.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No. Pull over—I want to show you something.”

  Sebastian saw a couple of curbside spots in front of the Delta Cinema, Brentwood’s only movie theater and the oldest in the city. He parked in front of the big art deco neon sign, which was turned off, and had flashes of memories of bringing Paul and Trixie here, the three of them sitting in the balconies and loges that had been built back in the 1930s. The kid who had sat next to him watching superhero and Disney movies had grown up into a man who had tried to kill him.

  Ron dipped his fingers into his shirt pocket. He came back with a folded sheet of paper and handed it to Sebastian.

  It was a color-printed photo of a lean, muscular guy dressed in a bathing suit and standing, tanned and smiling, on the beach. He looked to be around Paul’s age, early to mid-twenties, and had a blond crew cut and 0 percent body fat or close to it, skinny but shredded. He wasn’t big in the height department—five foot six, max eight, Sebastian guessed.

  “You ever seen him before?” Ron asked.

  Sebastian was pretty good with remembering faces. He shook his head. “Who is he?”

  “Your sniper, I’m pretty sure.”

  Sebastian held the picture closer to his face, as if it contained some hidden clue. He hadn’t seen the sniper, just the glint of sun off the scope before he got shot. The guy in the photo had a plain but wholesome face, like one he’d seen on those old “Milk. It does a body good” ads that were now popping up again on billboards all over the city.