High Bloods (17 page)

“There’s a PHASR in our chopper!” Ben Waxman said, and added, “I think.”

“Go!”

The Hairball howled again. Then in one leap it cut by half the distance to the fifty or so people still hanging around backstage. Now our area emptied out fast, led by the Reverend A. A. Kingworthy’s gospel choir, all of them in good voice if you enjoy hysterical screaming, their robes billowing around us like a crimson tsunami.

The Rev, however, chose not to run. At his height and with his girth he was hard to miss, and the Hairball seemed to take an avid interest in him.

I backed up a couple of steps and bumped into Beatrice. I thought she’d fled along with the others. She grabbed my arm and I snarled at her.

“Would you get the hell out of here?”

Her mouth was ajar in a kind of cockeyed smile, or a poleaxed grimace. Hard to tell just how she was reacting, but I noticed that her eyes were focusing, clear of shock. Then she held up the throwing knife she’d concealed in the waistband of her loose-fitting trousers.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I’m all we’ve got.”

“Give me the blade. I’ll do it.”

“No you won’t. Not to hurt your feelings, but you couldn’t stick a pitchfork in an elephant’s butt.”

“I thought of that. I’ll get in close enough to cut the Hairball’s throat.”

“
What?
”

“It can be done. You have to have the right moves.”

“
Bullshit
,” Bea said, holding me in a death grip. Then: “Wait a minute. Look! What does he think
he’s
doing?”

Far from being intimidated by the imminent prospect of having his Mount Rushmore head chewed on by a werewolf, the Reverend A. A. Kingworthy was approaching, with firm step and squared shoulders and a hand raised in a gesture of beatification like the hand of Jesus on the painted backdrop, the Hairball alter ego of Bucky Spartacus.

And the werewolf, instead of attacking in a fit of maniacal bad humor, just crouched where it was and let him come.

Those in the crowd who were located far enough away so as not to have been panicked by the hairing-up of the pop idol greeted Kingworthy’s bold appearance onstage with an outcry that was somewhere on a scale between dread and awe. And everything was being recorded, with at least three cameras active around the stage. ILC was going to have a tough time suppressing those images. In our official view, there was no such thing as an OOPs.

“Have you ever seen a werewolf lie low?” Beatrice said in my ear.

“Uh-uh.” And I never had seen one retreat, which is just what the Bucky-Hairball was doing now.

“There are no alien creatures in
God’s
universe!” Kingworthy proclaimed. He had a shapely and authoritative preacher’s basso that could have been heard with perfect clarity for nearly a mile on a calm night. “There are only God’s children! We are
all
the
children of God! His way is the only Way! Let us give thanks and praise to the heavenly father, and
love
one another!”

God’s child the werewolf raised its already blood-smeared chops a few inches higher. It stared at the Rev, who was less than ten feet away. I had thought I knew everything there was to know about werewolves. But this baby was writing a whole new chapter for my book.

Bea hadn’t surrendered her knife to me.

“If I can get a little closer while it’s not paying attention I can take my shot,” she said. “Or else Kingworthy is dead meat.”

My turn to lock her down.

“That’s
his
problem.”

“Welcome, child of Godddd!” Kingworthy said, holding out his arms to the werewolf.

And someone in the crowd screamed, “Lycan power!”

Uh-oh
, I thought.

That’s when the helicopter showed up.

Not one of ours. It belonged to Channel Two News. And suddenly a nasty situation had escalated into a crisis.

The chopper made a pass at the stage, coming in close, raising infield dust where the mostly youthful fans were still pushing and shoving to clear the area. There was a cameraman in an open doorway. The nearness of the helicopter and the rotor wash set the Reverend Kingworthy back on his heels, his shoulder-length Moses-style locks flowing back from his head like the tail of a comet.

The Hairball rose up with a snarl of fury, giving Channel Two News full frontal nudity. But that apparently wasn’t enough for them. The pilot, just taking orders or momentarily forgetful of what they were dealing with, edged the helicopter closer to the stage.

Like a cat going after a bird the werewolf leaped to the helicopter, grabbed the cameraman, flung him and his digicam high
into the dazzle of stage lights, then plunged into the cabin and killed the pilot.

The chopper autorotated out of control and smashed down hard on the infield. Busted rotor blades chopped lethally through the crowd.

From dust and smoke and flickers of flame the Hairball climbed slowly out of the broken chopper, showing signs of hard wear and brain fade. But it was able to stand erect on the fuselage and howl. I wasn’t amazed to hear, from the crowd, ecstatic, hair-raising wolf calls.

The Reverend Kingworthy was stage front on his knees, praying.

“It’s going to blow,” I said. I didn’t only mean the ruptured gas tank of the helicopter.

With the wolf calls there were isolated cries of “Lycan Power!” that became a chorus.

And then they started to applaud, and “Lycan Power” turned to shouts of “Bucky.”

BUCKY. BUCKY! BUCKY!!!

“They’ve got their martyr,” I said to Bea. “And for the rest of us the shit gets deeper.”

Kingworthy stood and raised his hands to the sky and as if on cue the helicopter exploded thirty yards from him.

All he got was a face like rare prime rib and badly singed eyebrows.

By the time I reached the corpse of the ex-rocker and Out-of-Phase werewolf with a fire extinguisher, only blackened hide and briquettes of flesh and a toothy jawbone remained.

But a legend had been born from the ashes.

After a meticulous search of the area where the werewolf had fallen in flames, one of our Evidence Response techies came up
with a tweezerload of twisted titanium, a bit of melted acrylic, and fused microwiring that might have been a Snitcher. The object went back to the lab for trace analysis.

If it was a Snitcher, WEIR didn’t know anything about it. Bucky Spartacus was not on their roster as a Lycan. Miles Brenta’s Nanomimetics Corporation held all the contracts to make Snitchers and the new LUMO upgrade exclusively for WEIR. So we knew that if the suspected implant hadn’t served some legitimate medical purpose then Bucky, as he had seemed to fear when I talked to him, was or had been badly used. The purpose seemed clear to me.

“For the unification and further growth of the First Church of Lycanthropy,” I explained to Booth Havergal. We were watching another forensics team comb the area where I had been ambushed by El Gordo. “A werewolf was born tonight. Out-of-Phase, so to the credulous it’s a miracle birth. But not just another werewolf. An ordinary rock-and-roller becomes a mythic figure. I’m sure that’s the kind of heavy dupe Kingwor-thy’s PR will lay on it.”

“The Elvis of Lycanthropy?” Booth said. “Do you think the Right-bloody-Reverend is behind this business?”

“I’m not sure. It’s possible he was so cranked on Frenzies tonight he thought he was invulnerable. His press conference has been going on for forty-five minutes and he may keep it up till dawn.” ILC had done its usual thorough job of sealing the crime scene, but we had no grounds for detaining Kingworthy, who after being patched up by the paramedics was now, along with his entourage, entertaining the media nearby but out of our jurisdiction. I gave the Rev some thought, then shook my head. “Religious grifters are different from the typical con men. They seldom have that deep hard core of cynicism and disdain for the human race. Kingworthy’s a true believer of whatever part of his spiel he happens to tune into as it rolls off his tongue. I’ll talk to him, but I have no leverage. I can’t tie him into Miles Brenta.”

“It’s entirely coincidental, R.”

“Sometimes I like coincidences. In the last forty-eight hours two of Brenta’s celebrity pets have gone Hairball—but in freakish, atypical ways. Almost as if they were obeying commands. We don’t have Chiclyn Hickey’s body and we don’t have much of Bucky left, but the fact that there was a microchip in that meltdown of a Snitch facsimile is one coincidence too many. If it can be traced to Nanomimetics—”

“Brenta’s company is not the only one around capable of manufacturing one of those.”

“But not legally. Brenta has the best technology, most of the patents, and the government contracts worldwide. He also has a nervous girlfriend I think I should see more of.”

“What pretext?”

“I like making her nervous. Maybe it’s sexual. On her part.”

“Pay a call on Francesca if you think it may be useful. But walk the line, R. Don’t make Miles Brenta nervous.” He paused, not liking the prospect of a nervous and politically potent Miles Brenta. Then he said, “Control of Lycans is essential to human survival. But can you think of any reason why someone who might possess the necessary technology would want to control an actual werewolf?”

“They make ideal assassins. Artie never knew what hit him.”

“If only we had a motive.”

“Just before he was killed Artie was getting close to telling me something he’d learned that worried him. He’d been talking about those Hairballs in No Gal the last Observance.” I had to take a look at the moon. It’s a nearly irresistible twitch most people have around this time of the month. Look up. Look around. Be afraid. “I think Artie, who was heavily invested in research and technology companies, knew just how hairing-up can be triggered whenever it suits someone’s purpose. And I have a strong hunch that Francesca Obregon also knows how it’s done.”

“You seem obsessed with her,” Booth said disapprovingly.

It was an opportunity to tell him about Bea’s conviction that Francesca had her knife.

“Enough for an arrest warrant?” I said.

“You know better. If there’s anything to it, if your—if Miss Harp isn’t mistaken, then undoubtedly Francesca has rid herself of the knife already.”

But he had liked it. And he was frustrated. When the sun came up he had to face a largely hostile media throwing questions at him he couldn’t answer.

“She’s Brenta’s mistress and both of them are in this up to their necks,” I said.

He ignored me with an angry shake of his head.

“And aren’t you overdoing protective custody? You involved a civilian in ILC business tonight.”

“I needed a date for the prom.”

“If she wants to be a detective let her take a course on the Internet.”

We watched a tech guy making an impression of a portion of tire track left by the biker who had rescued me from El Gordo. Lifting the track was routine. It wasn’t going to tell us anything useful. But I was pretty sure I knew the biker’s identity. Booth listened pensively to my explanation.

“If it was Elena Grace, surely she’d have let you know.”

“Couldn’t risk it. Or so she implied in her text message a few minutes earlier. Christ, Booth! She’s working undercover for ILC Intel. And you know it.”

“What possible expertise or discipline would qualify her for that sort of work?”

“Qualify—Those Intel assholes use civilians all the time to make a case! Misuse them—they don’t care whose blood gets spilled if they look good.”

“Even if your hunch is correct,” he said, “I can’t afford a balls-out with Intel right now. I have too many problems as it is.” He
stared at me, rubbing his chin with the back of a hand. “Don’t be another problem.”

“One phone call,” I said. “Whatever she’s into, you can get her yanked. Do it for me, Booth.”

He rocked slightly on his heels, looked around the back lot of the amphitheater. He was seething. But not at me.

“If you want Elena Grace back—”

“I just don’t want her killed.”

“—bring me someone else’s head. Before the Observance.”

I looked at the moon again. He was giving me forty-eight hours.

here are we going?” Bea asked as, ninety minutes
later, we left the gates of the house on Breva Way behind. “And
where
did you get that jazzbo ensemble? I don’t know if I want to be seen with you.”

“The suit was my father’s. I think he bought it to wear to a costume party. If you’re patient everything comes back into style.”

“I wouldn’t quote odds on that set of threads,” Bea said skeptically.

I had added some gold chains to the sportin’ life suit with its wide, wide lapels, a pleated black shirt open at the neck, and a pair of perforated black-and-white wingtip shoes that also had belonged to my father. I couldn’t wear my Geekers—they were a dead giveaway that I was ILC. Instead I put on a pair of wraparound shades that covered as much of my face as the Lone Ranger’s mask. A pirate’s black headwrap and a pale gray, snap-brim fedora concealed my white hair.

“I’m in disguise,” I said. “Think you can impersonate a giddy newlywed?”

“I had the lead in my senior class play. Who are
you
supposed to be?”