High Bloods (25 page)

“That’s it. Now get the hell out. We’re through talking, Rawson!”

“And I’ve got a hell of a nerve, it’s none of my business and so forth. I thought this was going to be man-to-man, Brenta.” I showed him some locker-room lip, a knowing leer. “Do you think it’s a secret that Francesca took over the wifely chores from her first cousin when Carlotta was mauled by that werewolf?” I gestured to the portrait. “Almost uncanny how they once resembled each other. Nothing ugly about what happened between you and Fran. It was human nature. A man’s got to be a man. Then Chickie came along. That’s when it got ugly. We both know what a woman with Francesca’s pride and temperament can do when she feels betrayed. And brother, if she hasn’t done it already she’s getting close.”

Brenta lunged from his chair but not as if he were coming for me. He wasn’t even looking my way. His eyes were as blank as a blind man’s. He walked slowly to the edge of the patio and
stared into the turquoise water of the gently flowing pool, one hand flexing near the butt of the Colt on his thigh. I’d left my Glock in the helicopter because I hadn’t thought his security people would let me keep it. I felt reasonably confident that it wasn’t my day to get shot. I’d given Brenta something new to think about, which might already have been subconciously worrying him.

I finished my Scotch, watching him. After about a minute of staring into the pool he said in a low harsh voice, “She has a temper. And we’ve had our moments. But Francesca’s a realist. She wouldn’t hurt me.”

“I didn’t mean that Fran was working herself up to sticking a knife between your ribs. She carries one, but it’s a cheap kind of revenge and then where is she? Like you say, Francesca’s too smart to let her hot blood ruin her main chance. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold. I remember that’s what my horoscope said yesterday.” Now that I’d finished bullying him, at least temporarily, I adopted a more earnest tone. “Mr. Brenta, I’d like for you to look at something.”

He touched a finger to the herpes sore on his lip.

“Always get these,” he said. “Since I was a kid. Nerves.” He turned and came back to me, on edge, newly belligerent. “What is it, Rawson? I’m getting tired of—”

I let dangle the LUMO-like object in a sealed bag, the one a scared little man had been hiding in his flesh while he ran for what was left of his life. Brenta glanced at it, and at me as if I were wasting his time.

“A hundred million worth of research and development. What about it?”

“Until this thing can be reconstructed by our lab techs I have no actual proof, but it’s almost certainly not a LUMO. I don’t know yet if it evolved accidentally in the course of development and was meant to be discarded after a few trials, or if it was purposely and privately tinkered together by Nanomimetics’
resident genius Dr. Chant. If that was the case, he lived to regret it.”

I explained where and how the object was recovered.

“He’d been missing about six months,” I said. “But he was in touch with Artie Excalibur during his fugitive sabbatical. Artie sold you that interest in XOTECH. Something Artie also had cause to regret.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’ll try to keep it simple. One way or another Dr. Chant came up with a device that can be used to control werewolves, most likely through low-frequency electrical impulses. But what if control isn’t all that reliable? Let’s say a nearby microwave oven could cause a hair-up out-of-phase. How about a hot-licks solo from a rock-and-roll bass player? There are a lot of possibilities when you think about it. Dr. Chant must have thought long and hard about what he had. Then, as head of NANOMIM R and D, he dutifully reported the existence of his little wolfmaker to his boss. Because of the chaos enough of the devices wrongly implanted in Lycans could cause, a responsible CEO would have ordered the wolfmaker’s destruction and seen to it that all relevant research data was erased from files. It’s a reasonable assumption that Francesca did order the deletions, because WEIR closely monitors everything that has to do with Snitchers at your firm. But the data first could have been transferred to XOTECH, away from WEIR’s eagle eye.”

“Because?” His dark stare was half-lidded. The thumb on his gun hand was twitching again.

“Francesca Obregon had a real need for the wolfmaker. It must have seemed ideal for implementing the revenge she wanted.”

“I already told you—”

“The Hispanic temperament. Proud, strong, loving, lusty people. But the hate lies deep in many of them. The desire to destroy what they can no longer have. Tear down a life to bare
bones, then crush those bones under dancing heels. Olé!”—I snapped my fingers—”Motherfucker.”

Brenta smiled. Maybe because of the herpes sore it was painful for him.

“Miles Brenta doesn’t tear down so easily,” he said. “Your story is fantastic. And it’s crap. Francesca and I aren’t lovers anymore. But we still have something together and it’s solid, Rawson.”

“As solid as the relationship she has going with Raoul Ortega?”

He snorted in contempt.

“
Cabrón
. She uses him, that’s all. To get back at me? So what? Like I care she’s fucking a Diamondbacker? I get along with Diamondbackers. They come in handy sometimes.”

“For staging
mal de lunes
to entertain your wife?”

“Car likes seeing werewolves killed. Do you blame her? What’s another goddamn werewolf anyway?”

“Maybe nothing, until you find yourself up to your nutmuffins in H-balls with no place to hide. And werewolves have made you the fortune Francesca’s about to take away from you.”

“Are you dreaming this shit? You’re wearing out your welcome.”

“So call a couple of beefers to show me the door.”

Instead he looked again at the probable wolfmaker I was holding. He touched his lip again.

“Need some ice for this,” he said vaguely. “Get you another Scotch while I’m at it?”

“Okay. Thanks.”

We were back to being more or less cordial. He busied himself at the patio bar, twisting cylinders of clear ice into a towel, getting a clean glass for me from a row on a glass shelf. He was laying off the vodka this round. My wristpac was vibrating. I looked at it. The calling number was my home phone. Probably Beatrice.

“I’ll play along with this for a minute,” Brenta said, bringing my second Scotch to me. “I could tell you how Francesca’s twenty
ways different from what you think she is, but okay: how do you figure she comes after me?”

He stayed close, on his feet, looking down. Because he hadn’t shaved the little white scars from previous outbreaks of herpes showed more clearly on his underlip.

“Like I said, she’s already begun. But let’s clear up some murders, all of which involve her and, I think, Raoul Ortega.”

“Partners in crime? She’d have to be the brains of
that
outfit.”

He was trying to act as if he found the whole thing entertaining. But there was no laughter in the depthless obsidian of his eyes. He was tense, holding the towel-wrapped ice to his lip, and there was hazard in his tension.

I said, “I wouldn’t underestimate Ortega. I did that once and nearly got killed. All right. First there was Dr. Chant, who dropped out of sight and was on the run until the Roman carabinieri fished him out of the Tiber a few days ago. That took care of the wolfmaker’s inventor, who might not have been able to cope with a bad conscience. Then Artie got slabbed, because Dr. Chant had spilled to him everything about his little invention. Artie would’ve investigated, and I’m sure he found out that Fran was having wolfmakers secretly manufactured at XOTECH. That won’t be hard to verify. Now Chickie: she and Fran were not pals, but Fran could have persuaded her to give up an old-style Snitcher for what Chickie was led to believe was a superior prototype. Money probably had something to do with it. Chickie was up-and-coming but not yet cashing any big paychecks. Expensive gifts from you wouldn’t be enough for Chickie; she was just that kind of girl. As for Bucky—”

“That I don’t get. Thirty days between Observances, give or take a day. Last month he was a High Blood. This month—”

“However he’d become infected, and having unprotected sex with Lycans isn’t the only way, he’d have been frantic to keep it quiet, keep it from you.”

“I suppose,” Brenta said reluctantly, and looked away. “Anything wrong with your Scotch?”

“No,” I said, and drank some of the Glenlivet.

“So in this fantasy epic of yours, Bucky shares the news with Chickie.”

“Probably.”

“Bucky is desperate to stay off WEIR’s roster of Lycans. Chickie sends him to Francesca.”

“Fran has access to both unregistered Snitchers and plenty of TQs.”

There was a deep notch of pain between his eyebrows.

“She knew what Bucky meant to me. So she set the kid up to be slabbed?”

“And the other half of the partnership, Ortega, stands to profit in a big way from the increased awareness of the First Church of Lycanthropy. Which he chartered with the assistance of the Reverend Kingworthy. Ortega’s rake-off last night was probably high six figures. Anything to do with Lycans is under our jurisdiction. We’ll audit the shit out of them. We might be able to put both of them away for three or four years. But tax evasion’s not how I want it to go down for Raoul Ortega.”

Brenta went for another walk around his patio, came to a stop below the portrait of Carlotta with her reflective smile as she posed holding a vivid handful of amapola blooms. He stared up at her with that look of lingering pain and said in a voice almost too low for me to hear, “If it hadn’t happened—”

I had another sip of Scotch. I empathized with his regrets. And I knew he had begun to accept that Francesca could have betrayed him.

Because of the way sunlight came through a bowl-shaped structure of redwood rafters overhead, his face when he turned to me was blurred like the face of an actor standing at the fringe of a high-intensity bolt of stage lighting.

“So Francesca threw Bucky to the wolves, so to speak, to get back at me. Is that where your revenge story ends?”

“Far from it,” I said, blinking, trying to see him more clearly. I looked at the Scotch in my glass.

“No, it’s over.” Brenta said. “Because there’s nothing else she can do. I’ve lost Bucky. But if she tries to rip me another way, she’ll bleed just as bad.”

“Think so? How many wolfmakers does Fran have left? We don’t know. One OOPs, or two: no really big deal. But a couple of thousand Lycans hairing up at the movies or because of static electricity at a laundromat—very big deal.” I sounded a little croaky; my throat was parched. I thought to ask for water, but instead I drank the rest of my Scotch. The rim of the tumbler clicked against my front teeth. My hand holding the glass felt oddly unrelated to the rest of me. “It would be an earthquake-magnitude blow to confidence in ILC, WEIR, and particularly NANOMIM. The foundation of Miles Brenta’s financial empire.

I wondered vaguely why I was speaking of him in the third person—as if in a moment of confusion Miles Brenta had slipped away and a complete stranger stood in his place.

“A few thousand wolfmakers,” I said, “included with millions of LUMOs will result in a recall of all LUMOs—the defective little bastards. Of course they aren’t defective, but we’ll be a long while making sure of that. Meanwhile billions in government contracts go into the shredder, and basic patents on old-style Snitchers expire.”

“And Francesca stands to lose a couple hundred million in incentive bonuses and stock options. She wants revenge that bad? Bullshit.”

“Bullship?” I said. My tongue felt like the backside of a gila monster. My heartbeat accelerated the way it used to when I was twelve years old and standing with my toes curled over the edge of a high-diving platform. While I looked down at the surface
of the diving pool that was broken by sparkling jets of water. My face felt cold at that high altitude and I was teetering, trying to maintain my toe grip on the rough surface of the platform. I looked up because I couldn’t focus well on the pool surface any longer. The blue of the sky hurt my eyes. But I didn’t want to let them close. I’d lose my balance. My raspy tongue searched for the words I needed to say to Miles Brenta. He had come accommodatingly close and was staring gravely down at me.
Just give me a few seconds, Coach
, I thought.
Don’t make me get off the platform. I’m not scared. I can do this dive
.

“No bullship,” I said again. “She’s too… fucking clever.” I saw each word big as skywriting in my brain as I spoke. Then wisping away into the high blue. My eyelids were like sacks of lead shot. I was desperate to keep his attention. I wanted him to like me. Believe in me. Not cut me from the team.

“Listen,” I said. “Fran… would give up money to make a lot more. Fran. Ore-tegga. What I think… they’ve been buying up little factories. South of the border. Bet on it. You listening? Turn out cut-rate… or counterfeit Snitch. Flood market once LUMOs recalled. You get me?”

Brenta nodded thoughtfully. Each movement of his head caused my own head to loll. I was doped, I thought craftily. Sure. That’s how it was. He’d put one over on me. But I couldn’t bring myself to dislike him for having done it. We were all friends here. Man-to-man.

“Maybe that makes sense,” Brenta said. He wasn’t loud but there was a lot of reverb inside my skull. Old bells tolling.

The tumbler slipped from my nerveless fingers. It was empty. Why struggle to hold on any longer? I’d expended too much energy already keeping my leaded eyelids off my cheeks.

Brenta reached down, a blurry motion at the edge of my shrinking field of vision, and caught the tumbler before it could shatter on the stone floor. I made an effort to sit up straight. He put his other hand flat against my chest and gently pushed me
back against the seat cushion. I felt as light and airy as an oblivious gliding bird in the shadow of a hawk.

“Take it easy, Rawson,” Brenta said. “Time for a little shut-eye.”

“What… put in the Scosh?” I managed to hold my head still. I was able to squint with one eye. Sort of a wink. Just letting Brenta know that I was on to him.

He held up a small dark bottle. I stared at it for a few seconds but couldn’t make out the printing on the label. No skull and crossbones, though. My eyelids sank again. So what? Anyway it was getting cloudy on the patio. I thought he was probably right. A little nap might be a good thing. If sleep was all he had in mind for me.