High Bloods (26 page)

“It’s just something we keep around in handy places in case Car throws one of her wingdings,” Brenta said. “Calms her right down. The stuff won’t hurt you. You might have a mild headache when you wake up.”

“Should be going,” I said thickly. Cautious is as cautious does. Very cloudy now. A purple twilight.

He kept his hand on my chest. His face receded in the velvety gloaming, along with his voice. Now he sounded as if he were talking to me from a villa next door.

“Francesca,” he said. “So maybe you’re able to get a warrant based on this LUMO lookalike you brought to me, and you go through your official routine the way you’re supposed to. But what of it? She’s a sidewinder in the sack, and she’ll slither out of anything you try to get on her legally. No, my way’s better and faster. Frontier justice, Luke Bailiff-style.”

I felt a faint ticking of distress within my cocoon of blissful surcease.

“Damn fool. Don’t try—”

He shook his head. His face was a blur that stayed blurry once his head was still. Nothing was clear except for the remote, cold light in his eyes.

“If Francesca was only trying to screw me financially—” Brenta shrugged. “It’s only money. And I say the hell with money. I can always make more. But she crossed the line, and Bucky’s dead.”

I was going under and taking his voice with me, a voice thick with grief and murderous passion.

“She pays, and pays hard, for Bucky. Now. Today. I’ve known Cesca for a long time. So maybe I’m partly responsible for what she’s done. It hasn’t exactly been news to me, Rawson. But from here on it’s my play. Thanks for stopping by and chinking up some gaps for me.”

He did like me. I think I grinned at him. I felt a slight movement of the facial muscles responsible for grins and giggles. I tried, once more, to get my eyelids up for another peep at his face. But his hand wasn’t on my chest anymore and all I saw was a flash of blue and light playing on the jets of water of the diving pool.

I wasn’t afraid of it anymore, or the height of the platform. I was ready.
Watch this, Coach. Here goes Rawson. You old sonofabitch
.

’m not sure what woke me up. It might have been the
smell, like potatoes rotting in a musty old cellar, laced with a strong sting of perfume. Or it could simply have been the hindbrain (which never sleeps) warning of something morbid and dangerous creeping my way in semidarkness. Something or someone breathing asthmatically, a harsh snotty sibilance.

I had no idea where I was. My eyelids felt welded shut. I remembered fragments of my conversation with Miles Brenta. I had shown him the little wolfmaker I’d brought to his shining white villas in the desert. Mistake. My heartbeat on waking was too big, too rapid. I’d had a drink with him. Then another which he’d doped and which had plowed me under. Not six feet under, fortunately. He had said something about my having a headache when I woke up. I had the headache, which wasn’t too bad. The idea that I’d been jobbed by Brenta was harder to bear.

I wondered fuzzily what Sunny would make of all this. Rawson’s big screwup. Probably when I told her about it she’d—

But Sunny was dead. No more conversations with Sunny. A sense of loss side-slipped through me like an electric eel.

Come on, Rawson
.

You’re lying on your back, that much is obvious even to a dull boy like yourself. There’s a mild tingling in your fingertips.
The air you’re breathing is cool even though it’s disgustingly tainted. That nearby sickening odor strong as a storm front. Get a grip, get up, find out what the smell is and where you are. Before—

The scream was feral, guttural, chilling. Not like anything I could recall hearing before. It got me going, all right.

I rolled hard to my left and fell off the low bed I’d been lying on. Plush carpet made the fall easy on my elbows. I kept rolling and bumped hard into the figure that had been creeping up on me, just as she was taking another step.

She sprawled across the bed I’d vacated with another scream and I saw the flash of a blade in low rainbow-tinted light like sundown through a church window.

She was mostly naked. Her long legs were badly scarred. She had on white bikini pants and a white T-shirt with socal IRVINE and the school’s mascot, an anteater, on the front of it. As she tried to get herself upright on the bed I made it to one knee, took a couple of deep breaths, and rose to my feet. I wasn’t wearing my boots. Otherwise I was dressed as I had come: gray slacks, short-sleeved striped shirt unbuttoned at the throat. My throat was too dry for me to get a word out.

Carlotta Brenta put her feet on the floor and leaned toward me from the edge of the bed. In addition to the loose tee and nearly transparent panties, draped around her neck she wore a small soggy yellow-stained towel that seemed like a parody of the loosely knotted cowboy bandana that her husband had sported earlier.

Carlotta growled at me, making preliminary stabbing motions with the narrow blade.

Her face was the wreckage that had been described to me by Ida Grace. Plastic surgery had succeeded only in giving it a stiff, purplish-pink appearance. One eye was still misplaced, staring off in the general direction of hell on earth. Beneath the T-shirt she was missing a breast. That made me very angry. They could
have done something about that. What was her husband thinking? Were there no mirrors where she spent most of her time now? But her shoulder-length hair was still dark, thick, and well brushed.

Obviously she’d eluded someone who was supposed to be watching her, had wandered and sniffed me out. A stranger. Also obvious that they should have gone to the trouble to keep sharp objects locked away from Carlotta. But once I took a closer look I saw that it wasn’t a knife she was holding. More like a letter opener she’d snatched off a desk.

“Wolf,” she said, getting up slowly and without physical awkwardness, her stench moving more forcefully in my direction. Her parted lips on one side formed a permanent savage-looking sneer.

“Mrs. Brenta?” I said. “Carlotta? I’m not a werewolf. I’m a friend of Miles. I think I—I had a little too much to drink for lunch, and Miles was letting me sleep it off in here.”

With quick glances I was taking in a well-appointed bedroom suite. The bedchamber and a sitting room were separated by an archway. There were chrome-framed glass-front fireplaces in both rooms to take the chill off cold desert nights. In the dusky light I saw oblongs of furniture, sculpture, big folk-art paintings on every wall. In the trey ceiling over the bed were six small spotlights assuming a rosy glow in response to the lower light level outside the narrow windows. The overhead lights deepened the brute contours of her surgically recomposed face.

She tilted her head and the light above us was captured by the dark brown agate of her good eye. The light danced there. She gave her abundant hair a shake and some of it settled over the grosser part of her face, the baffled wayward eye. The half face that was turned to me retained hints of beauty lost, beauty defiled. The feeling in my constricted heart was a forsaken cold sorrow.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “if I disturbed you. I need to be going now. But—if there’s—is there anything I can do for you?”

The letter opener dipped slowly toward a scar-waxed thigh. She tilted her head a little more, inquiringly. Saliva gleamed on her lower lip and dripped into the towel.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Rawson.”

“
Su nombre es Rawson.
”

“Yes.”

“Well… don’t rush off. Meester Rawson.”

Her tongue appeared and swiped along her lower lip. She made a noise in her throat like a sink unclogging.

“You want to do something…
por mi.
” Her speech was badly slurred.

“If I can.”

“
Conmigo?
” she said slyly.

When I didn’t reply to the insinuation she said, “Do you have a big one, Rawson?” I shook my head slightly.

“Miles does.
Muy largo
. But my husband won’t do it to me no more.”

She began to wag her head, dismally coquettish. The head wags became increasingly violent, waves of dark hair lashing across her face. Spit flew from the mouth she couldn’t fully close.

“I am not too old! I could have a
nene
who would love me and not find me ugly. Feo.
Feo!
I say to my husband, I will wear my veil. I say to him,
mire, esposo:
you no have to look at me while we are doing it. But no. No, no, no! Never he is coming to my bed!”

I didn’t say anything. She stopped the head-wagging before she succeeded in snapping her neck and looked away from me and began to make a low, sad sound: part whine, part tuneless humming.

“I really have to go now, Mrs. Brenta.”

Without a flicker of warning she lunged at me, the letter opener flashing in her hand.

I caught her wrist without difficulty and squared away, thinking I was prepared for her strength. I wasn’t. The wild demented ones, many smaller than Carlotta, require three trained psych techs to control them without causing serious injury. I remembered Miles saying something about Car and her “wingdings.” Understatement. Carlotta Brenta would’ve been a handful even in a straitjacket. I didn’t happen to have one with me.

“Carlotta!”

A woman’s voice came from beyond the archway behind us as I fought to keep the letter opener out of my eye and Car-lotta’s knees away from my groin.

I felt as if I’d gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight contender before lamps brightened the suite. Suddenly Carlotta and I had a lot of company: two guys in male-nurse whites and white leather athletic shoes, a small plainly dressed nun in the gray and blue smock of her order, wearing a crucifix the size of a tuning fork.

They deftly took Carlotta off my hands and relieved her of the letter opener. Carlotta by then had wrung herself out emotionally; forgotten why she’d wanted to kill me, assuming she ever knew. Attacking me had been a release of something pent-up, orgiastic, incredibly violent. Now she was in the eye of that hurricane. She didn’t look at me again as they led her away with soft soothing words.

I was breathing hard and felt as lathered as Miles Brenta’s costly black Arabian after its long morning gallop. But at least I was wide awake when I turned to the fourth person who had come into the suite and who now watched me with a calm expression, a sense of inner detachment from the reality of who we were now, what we once had been to each other.

“Hello, R,” Elena Grace said.

I tried to smile at her, but I didn’t have the juice. I could only make a weak gesture of surprise, a perplexed hello.

For the past couple of days, since I’d caught that virtual reality glimpse of her in motorcycle leathers and as companion to a man I wanted to kill, I had been suppressing the anxiety that if I ever did come face-to-face with Elena I would be looking at a less drastic version of Carlotta. No obvious scars but a psychic difference, beauty marred by anger and shame, her mysterious, muted quality in repose gone forever.

The color of her eyes had changed but the capacity for contemplative silences had not left them. She had a confectionary swirl of white just off the right ear in her short dark brown hair, hair that always had had a stubborn quality no matter how many attempts she made to tame it. But the ruffled cat-fur look was her style, and suited her because she had no pretensions to glamour. Today instead of the unisex biker gear she was wearing a shantung navy pants suit with big white buttons on the short-sleeved jacket. A little eyeliner and pale pink lipstick on the longbow arch of her perfect mouth: that was Elena as I remembered her. But the crucifix was something new. And it was not the Lycans’ wolfshead symbol of ersatz Christianity.

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep getting you out of pickles,” she said, with a sidelong look at the rumpled bed. Then she canceled the verbal thrust with a puckish smile. “Just kidding,” she said. But a pulse in her throat betrayed tension and uncertainty.

“Where did you leave your hog and that scattergun?” I said.

“The Kawasaki? It belongs to Miles. I borrowed the sawed-off from Ramon. He manages the stables for Miles.”