High Bloods (2 page)

I followed her inside.

Artie was pacing around on a beautiful Savonnerie carpet, talking on his retro cell phone. He gestured to a lounge chair and winked at me. I hadn’t thought he could manage that, considering the shape his eyes were in. Artie was an educated man with a jones for fine art. He collected paintings by Bosch, Bacon, Dali. He also had pursued a life in the ring long past the point where it would have been sensible not to answer the bell. Never going anywhere with it, except to various hospitals for stitches and X-rays. He fought a few names, but for most of his career he was just hamburger on some hack promoter’s menu.

A poorly screened transfusion in a tank town infirmary gave Artie Lycanthropy, or LC disease. There are those, it seems, who like being werewolves in spite of the monthly wear and tear and limited life expectancy. Others just live with what, as time goes by and their numbers inexorably increase (one thing is certain: nature had never invented a more ghastly disease by which the majority of mankind paid for the fleeting ecstasy of sex), is less of a stigma, even a social distinction. Particularly among the young with their limited sense of mortality or lack of interest in the future of the human race.

Lycans contributed to the world’s economies, or all semblance of civilization would have disappeared following World War II. For putting in a mandatory thirty-two-hour workweek, the Lycans known to ILC, or International Lycan Control, were wards of government everywhere, including the city-state republics that had replaced the centralized governments of North America.

Although lycanthropy is epidemic, for only a small segment of humanity is LC disease quickly fatal. Artie was in that subgroup. His choices, once infected, were to Off-Blood—which is an agonizing process—or go to an early grave. Artie had opted for living. Which meant a complete change of blood twice a year and the ambiguous status of the Off-Bloods.

Unlike those werewolves—about eighty percent of their estimated number—whose activities were monitored and controlled by ILC, Off-Bloods could do business with High Bloods, marry whom they pleased, easily obtain visas for travel outside their official places of residence. They enjoyed citizenship but couldn’t hold public office.

And if they had a talent for making money, they could obtain licenses to do business on their own. But not in Beverly Hills, known as “the Privilege,” the shining example of what regrouped civilization could aspire to and achieve. Neither Off-Blood nor Lycan was permitted to pass a night in Beverly Hills,
unless they were being treated at a private clinic or the UCLA Medical Center. Those who lived in the Privilege and unluckily became infected, like Mal Scarlett, were expelled.

Expelled and frequently despised by High Blood families, lovers, former friends.

Those who had “the blood” made the rules.

Eventually (as my mother liked to say after about a half pint of Boodles, lemon twist) the fate of every culture seemed to come down to “damned if you do, double-damned if you don’t.” After a fourth martini Pym also was apt to conclude, “I like to think there’s an afterlife. But we’ll probably screw that one up also.”

America had won a long and grueling war in the Pacific. What that war unearthed in a previously little-known, nearly inaccessible region of the Kalimantan then followed both victor and vanquished home—to Japan, Australia, the U.S. Another, even more terrible war began, and after more than eighty years no one could predict an end to it.

But, getting back to Artie, a victim who had made the best of things in a big way:

Arthur Excalibur Enterprises owned Mexican silver mines, real estate on three continents, vineyards in Sonoma, wind turbine farms in the deserts, small but rewarding pieces of casinos. With High Blood partners he was in the movie and music businesses, areas of popular culture dominated by Lycan talent. Because so many Lycans, off-Observance, were beautiful people, with that shadowy, ravishing mystique behind the eyes.

Perversely Artie was also in a business that could have brought heavy sanctions. He employed a stable of elite call girls, ten-thousand-a-night lovelies. Worth every penny to High Bloods who liked living dangerously. Girls guaranteed to be at their erotic best during the time just before an Observance known as the Aura.

It was a business he didn’t need, but not within my area of enforcement. Artie claimed that he was in prostitution for the favors
to be returned by grateful clients. Like all Lycans and most Off-Bloods, Artie despised High Bloods. Maybe with one exception. He couldn’t afford the luxury of having me for an enemy.

In spite of expert makeup Artie wasn’t looking well tonight. It was difficult for virologists to keep up with all the mutating viruses that thrived in human blood. Some were so new even advanced screening couldn’t detect them.

“Sorry I kept you waiting,” Artie said. “New girls from Budapest made the border an hour ago.” Artie took a drag on his black cigarillo, exhaling with an expression that might have been bliss on a less-devastated face. “Romany bloods. I have a couple of media kings panting for those honeys already.”

“All that time in quarantine must eat into profits,” I said.

“Same for government regs and fees. So I use intermediaries in Mexico and skip the red tape. But you know me—all of my girls are Snitched before I expose them to Highs.”

Or he wouldn’t have been telling me about them. Artie had his back-channel contacts at WEIR. Off-Bloods were seldom bothered by werewolves, for whom they lack charisma or something. But the penalty for introducing an unregulated werewolf into the population was death. No appeal, no exceptions.

We were served refreshments by a Nordic beauty who shone like a polished silver loving cup. She wore de Sade’s obligatory chains and leather, a coiled pink cat-o’-nine, boudoir-style, on her wide belt. She was new to me, trying not to react badly to my presence.

“Saw you when you came in,” Artie said, glancing at a wall of surveillance screens monitored by two more of his girls. “Interested in somebody, or is this a social call?” He smiled cynically at the notion, then snapped his fingers and said to one of the girls who turned alertly to him, “Put Mr. Rawson up on number three.”

So I was treated to a rerun of my encounter with Chickie Hickey after I had walked into de Sade’s.

“Know her?” I asked Artie.

“Aussie. Minor roles in three movies. Her agent’s Johnny Padre.”

“Once she got on to me she was ginky. More than they usually are. I’ll probably look her up again before I leave. How often do you see Mal Scarlett in the club?”

“Two, three times a week. Sometimes Mal and her entourage close up the place. They’re good for business. You saw the paparazzi outside. Like flies on spoiled meat.” He laughed softly, then went on about Mal. “Great body, birdshit for brains. Enough money to paper the Louvre. Guilt money. Mother Ida gave Mal the boot, of course, when she got infected. I don’t have to tell you about Ida Grace.” Artie sipped his tea, staring at me, a fat mauled lid nearly obscuring his left eye. “Mal’s daddy died, didn’t he?”

“A bug he picked up in the tropics conked both kidneys.”

“The Rawsons live next to the Graces, so you must’ve known Mal when she was a kid. And her older sister. What was her name?”

“Elena Grace. Half sister.”

“Disappeared too, didn’t she? Ever learn what happened to her?”

As far as I knew I might have been the last one to see Elena alive. When she begged me to kill her. I was in love with her, so of course I hadn’t. But sometimes, in the throes of the bad mean blues, with no clue to Elena’s fate, I thought it might have been merciful to do what she’d asked of me.

“I don’t think Mal has disappeared,” I said. “Probably just holed up somewhere with the rock star du jour. WEIR reported that she went off-line at 0110 hours Friday.”

“Off-line?” Artie mused. “Lose many that way?”

“More and more lately, it seems.” My turn. “What do you know about the First Church of Lycanthropy?”

Artie cocked his head slightly, as if he might have detected a certain grimness in my question.

“How it got started? Don’t know. One thing I can tell you, it’s more entrepreneurial than religious.”

“Or political?”

“All religion is politics. One way or another.”

Beatrice looked up from her laptop and shook her shapely head, sprinkles of stardust in her close-cropped hair glinting at me.

“I’ve checked all the up-to-the-minute Bleat blogs,” she said. “Mal Scarlett, she lay low.”

“She’ll turn up,” Artie predicted. “No technology is perfect, I guess.”

I had a hunch there was more Artie could have told me—about Mal, or the First Church of Lycanthropy. An oddball religion so astutely promoted had to be a cover for something else. But Artie always had been a miser with info that might eventually be worth a bundle to him. My resources as an ILC employee were limited.

I got up from the lounge chair to prowl around the office, a converted loft with fifteen-foot ceilings and two skylights. The she-Lycans didn’t exactly bristle at my passing, but their tension was evident. Bea, on the other hand, was High Blood: she just grinned at me when I gave her a thank-you pat on one shoulder.

No visit to Artie’s would have been complete without a look at the latest of his boojum trees that he couldn’t manage to keep alive indoors in spite of compulsive pampering. But maybe that was his problem: too much love for something basically unlovable.

The boojum was a spindly, fuzzy-looking thing in the glow of full-spectrum lights trained on it. In the wild, and fully mature, they grew past fifty feet in height. This one was just getting a good start at ten feet; beneath one of the pyramidal skylights it still had room to grow.

Boojums are found only in Baja California and the Sonoran Desert of Mexico. Which meant that in the wild they survived
the harshest imaginable conditions. Lack of water, intense heat, high winds, blistering sandstorms. They seemed to thrive only under the most terrible, destructive conditions nature could devise.

“Still trying, huh?” I said to Artie. I finished my bourbon.

“Yeah. But it’s almost impossible to domesticate them. No matter how carefully you tend a boojum, they almost always go sour on you. What do you make of that?”

“They want to be wild,” I said.

We looked at each other. Artie smiled sadly with his scar-intaglio’d lips.

“They’re going to win, aren’t they?” he said, keeping his voice even lower than its usual hoarse level. All those punches to the side of the neck.

He wasn’t talking about boojums now.

“I don’t have a head for technology,” I said. “But where there’s a problem there’s always a fix.”

I found myself looking for Beatrice, and discovered her looking back at me, with a small speculative smile that reminded me of how long it had been since I had wanted the company of any woman, pay-for-play or not.

“Sure,” Artie said. “The answer to every desperate need in history has been human ingenuity. That’s if time permits. Dysgenic research looks promising—but slow. I have inside information to that effect. While the inhuman race finds itself near a stage that you might call warp-speed Darwinism.”

“That’s the pessimistic view.”

“You probably heard about that small pack of wilding Lycans that sacked a pueblo near Nogales during the last Observance. Now wasn’t that interesting.”

“What about them?”

“Crissake, you were raised by an anthropologist, Rawson! It’s also rumored you have certain… preternatural skills that make you the top Wolfer in town. You know
Lupus canae
don’t
like being by themselves. They’re highly sociable creatures. Very sensitive, family oriented. When they’re removed from the wild, some of them just… pine away without the company of their own kind.”

He looked at me, mildly exasperated. I have a graduate degree in wolf biology. But I didn’t comment on Artie’s little lecture. He’d taken some beatings in his ring days, now lived always on the brink. I would’ve thought there was no fear left in him.

“Werewolves, on the other hand—solitary. Loners. Hatred for anything warm-blooded. They’re killing machines. They’ll kill each other for shits and giggles.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it happen.”

“What they don’t do is hang out with their kind. Much less participate in pack activities. But it
happened
. Less than a month ago. Would you like another drink to settle your nerves?”

“My nerves are fine, Artie. Have to be going. Time to look up the Aussie and maybe get some religion.”

Artie hunched his shoulders a little. He paused before walking away from his beloved boojum tree to snip with his fingernails a tiny bloom from one flowering branch. Whatever load was weighing on him he had shrugged off. He had that near-blissful look on his face again.

That’s when the skylight above Artie and the tree exploded, showering glass everywhere. Something huge and smelling like a sack of shit came down feetfirst next to Artie. And with one bite through neckbones and muscle Artie’s head wasn’t on his shoulders anymore: it was bouncing like a football twenty feet away across the onyx top of his desk while the air around his still-standing body turned red from arterial spray.

y threat-reaction time, even to the totally unexpected
, is about a third of a second. But, although the deluge of glass surrounding a tawny monster twice the size of a timberwolf was—to put it mildly—bizarre and shocking, some hint of danger in my reptilian brain such as a momentary shadow, a rooftop-prowling Lycan eclipsing the moon above Artie’s skylight, had alerted the organism. Not in time to save Artie, because the monster had landed upright on huge paws between us. But I was able to keep from being seriously cut or blinded by flying shards.