High Bloods (29 page)

In about fifteen hours (I didn’t bother to touch the appropriate key on my wristpac that would give the exact time of peak full moon) the world these people actually lived in would begin fearfully to lock down. Some of the fashion-show guests might then be back here to drink their way through yet another Observance, in a werewolf-free zone, safety guaranteed by the wall around the Privilege and in-house protection on the order of TRADs and AUGIEs. If those babies ever did have to be put to use it would be hell on the guests as well. But then nothing compared to a werewolf attack, and more often than was commonly known they did show up, Privilege be damned. It was just a highly catchable disease, and social rank had nothing to do with it.

I made my way around the terrace perimeter behind pool lounge chairs and geraniums in massive pots. Waiters in mess jackets and hickory-striped pants hustled to and from the long bar with deftly balanced trays of drinks and mounds of minced-olive finger sandwiches. I checked the crowd for either Brenta or Obregon. Didn’t see them. But the gloves-wearing woman and her associate or consort Paulo were at Booth Havergal’s table. That was interesting.

Beatrice was throwing glances over her shoulder at me until I gave her the cut sign. Ida sat opposite her at their shaded table, her face turned toward the runway; I couldn’t read her expression. The tote full of gold certificates wasn’t visible either.

There were standees at the bar, most of them men, some in tennis whites. I edged in next to Duke Sanborn. He was wearing a medium gray suit with a black bow tie and a look of acute anxiety. He jumped when I touched the elbow that wasn’t propped on the deeply lacquered, ebony surface of the bar.

“Mr. Rawson!”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I’ll take it from here.”

There was a gleam of relief in his eyes before he said cautiously, “Well, I—I don’t zackly know what you mean, sir.”

“Yes you do. How long has it been since Ida attended one of these soirees? A year or two? She’s here to pay off someone who could be conning her. Do you know what he looks like?”

Duke shook his head nervously.

“No, sir. Neither one of us knows. He never come to the house at all. Only sent video of Miss Mallory to prove she was alive.”

“What else is he selling?”

“Well, he—he give to Miss Ida a location where she can find Mallory ‘fore it’s too late. But what he wrote was—”

“In code,” I said. “Sure. Ida hands over the money, she gets the key to solving the code. Sounds jailhouse to me. How much does the perp want?”

“Fifty thousand,” Duke said miserably. “At five-thirty, he said. Here at the hotel.”

I checked the time. We had five and a half minutes. I looked at Ida again.

She was doing a lot of fidgeting in her chair. She glanced at the bar and was not happily surprised to see me next to Duke. She had the good sense to look away quickly. Bea leaned across the small table and spoke to her.

The girls of the runway, and a few well-bronzed guys, were showing off the latest in sportswear. The bandleader, a suave number with a hairline mustache and ravishing eyes he kept dancing toward the audience, kicked up the tempo a notch. A girl singer in a blouse with big ruffled sleeves and hips in overdrive launched into “Enjoy yourself—it’s later than you theenk.”

I wondered how the guy planned to collect his money.

Odds were he’d give Ida a call soon, have her walk into the hotel. The exchange, if there was going to be one, wouldn’t
happen in the lobby. Ida would never agree to meet him in a room upstairs. The way it would work best, he’d tell her to take an otherwise empty elevator, stop at the second or third floor, leave the tote and send the elevator to the service basement or VIP parking. Where he would be whistling and waiting near a convenient exit.

Once he was in the clear and if he was on the level, he would then call Ida and tell her where to pick up the code-break info, which he’d left for her in a will-call envelope at the front desk, probably hours ago when there was a different shift on.

But they were so seldom on the level.

I called Lew Rolling and told him what was going down.

“Grab yourself some hotel security and cover all sublevel entrances and exits. I’ll take the lobby in case he’s bold enough to stroll out through the front door.”

“Who are we looking for, R?”

“No description. He’ll probably have a gym bag with him, just large enough for stashing fifty G’s worth of gold certs in a hurry.”

Sure enough, half a minute later Ida had incoming.

I saw her stiffen. She cupped a hand around her whisper tit, nodded twice, then got up slowly from the table. She reached down for her tote, glanced at Bea with a weak smile and another excuse for taking a break. Then she looked up at us.

I put a hand on Duke’s shoulder, also a signal to Ida.

“Stay put,” I said to Duke. “It’s routine now. I’ll follow Ida and make sure she’ll be okay.”

“Yes, sir. Please don’t let nothin’ happen to her.”

I had it figured beautifully, I thought.

But I was all wrong.

t just a few seconds past five-thirty either a computer
malfunction (unlikely) or someone hacking into the hotel’s deterrence system set off a couple of AUGIEs, which instantly spoiled what had been a good party.

An AUGIE, for Augmented Galvanomagnetic Intercept Effector, employs staggered electromagnetic fields with laterally vectored sonic pulses to mentally disorient and physically incapacitate anything in the vicinity that is warm-blooded and walks, flies, or crawls.

The overall effect was close to that of a Richter-10 earthquake. But only the air around us was moving, invisibly, with the staggering force of a tsunami; the aquamarine surface of the pool barely rippled and no roofs fell in. Everyone was holding their ears in pain. A dozen swans in their own pool, props for the fashion show, went squawking flapping nuts. Waiters reeled with their trays and crashed into tables. Anyone making it to his feet sprawled helplessly.

Most people have never been exposed to the devastating effects of an AUGIE—or TRADs or PHASRs. As part of my Wolfer training I had endured all three. But ILC also has countermeasures, unknown and unavailable to the public, that gives us the edge in dealing with temporarily brain-locked werewolves.

Duke Sanborn lurched against me. One hand clutched his chest in pain. I sat him down with his knees raised and his back to the bar. The tinted lenses in my Geekers already had darkened to full black and adjusted prismatically to neutralize the assault of the AUGIE pulses on my equilibrium. That left the skull-splitting low tones to deal with. I popped a spare whisper tit from a compartment on a sidebar of my Geekers and put it in my left ear, then manually activated the noise-cancel function on my wristpac.

Suddenly I had complete silence and the rest of my faculties. I was a secure island in a universe of pandemonium.

Booth Havergal and his guests from ILC Rome had eye-wear similar to mine. Booth’s wife didn’t, unfortunately, and she was throwing up in her lap—that was a stage-two reaction to an AUGIE blast.

I looked at Duke, who was gasping. I wondered if he had a pacemaker. Not good. AUGIEs were hard on pacemakers.

Within my cone of silence I couldn’t contact anyone; that feature of our wristpacs was blocked.

I got Duke on his feet again, intending to carry him to the lobby and call for help once I was out of AUGIE range. I glanced at Ida Grace’s table. She had placed the tote on the table in front of her just before the AUGIEs went off. Now she was down on hands and knees along with Bea, torment in both their faces. I didn’t think about the money in the tote; Duke was my priority here.

Then I saw the kid.

He was heading casually for Ida’s table, sidestepping reeling or prostrate fashion show guests. He wore noise-canceling headphones and, unmistakably, a pair of Geekers. If he wasn’t with ILC, it was a third-class felony for him to have them. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. His glam was the tie-dye duds and love beads of an era decades in the past. He was tall, with shoulder-length, dirty blond hair and a pimply nose. He knew just where he was going and what he was there for.

I had Duke as deadweight in my arms and I couldn’t react as the kid reached out while walking past Ida’s table and snatched the moneybag. He headed for the hotel lobby with a broad smile on his face.

I followed, dragging Duke along with me.

Fortunately the kid was in no hurry. He was aces up and two more in the flop. His lips were pursed as if he were whistling a happy tune, although he couldn’t have heard himself.

I reached the lobby with Duke as the kid was going out the front door. I put Duke down in a nearby lounge chair, kicked over another chair and lifted his feet up to the seat. He had both hands on his chest, fingers digging in, and was breathing with difficulty.

The AUGIEs were shut off. I could tell by the reaction of those hotel guests who were down on the carpet but no longer holding their ears in pain.

I popped out the spare whisper tit as my Geeker lenses lightened up. I signaled for a Catastrophe Med Team from Beverly Hills Providian Hospital and took off after the kid, pulling my Glock from the shoulder leather.

He had crossed the drive opposite the entrance and walked past a small crowd of pedicab operators untangling themselves on the greensward. Now he was loping down to Sunset, the tote slung over his shoulder, in more of a hurry because he’d seen a westbound Pacific Electric tandem streetcar that he apparently wanted to catch.

There was a bright red TRAD box mounted on one of the stucco columns supporting the canopy over the driveway. I busted the glass with the butt of my Glock and passed my other hand over the heat-sensitive arming eye. On the sunny open downslope of the lawn TRADs popped up like mechanical mushrooms, one of them about ten feet directly in front of the getaway kid. I keyed all six of the TRADs to active, folded my arms, leaned against the column and watched.

The kid was violently repulsed by the force field generated by the TRAD closest to him. It knocked him out of his Haight-Ashbury sandals and back a good fifteen feet. Where he encountered another field that bounced him into the air. He came down like someone being blanket-tossed, but he didn’t touch the ground again. A third TRAD sent him windmilling toward the street and the three-foot-high chain-link fence isolating Pacific Electric’s westbound track from those lanes on Sunset devoted to pedicabs, commercial, and emergency vehicle traffic.

He cleared that fence with room to spare and sprawled across the track. The juice was underground and he wasn’t in danger of being electrocuted. But he’d come down hard, and the wind was knocked out of him. He staggered up and fled blindly into the path of the oncoming automated streetcar, which was slowing but still traveling about thirty miles an hour. He was knocked down and under the wheels as the sensors aboard applied the brakes.

I got there as fast as I could, feeling sick about the accident I’d caused. I heard sirens. I picked up Ida’s tote that the kid had dropped on his way to a brutal end. I hopped the fence and had a look. Only about half of him was under the streetcar. The rest was lying faceup. He’d lost the Geekers in the impact with the front of the streetcar. I kneeled beside him.

“Sorry, kid.” There wasn’t much else to say.

His eyes were filming over. His arms shook. Blood bubbled from his mouth, and he died before I could ask him his name.

I didn’t really need to know. He was just a delivery boy for whoever owned the Geekers.

They were lying a dozen feet away. Not in great shape. One of the complex and very expensive optical systems was shattered. Two Beverly Hills Police Department prowlies were speeding up Beverly from the Flats, followed by Fire and Rescue. I had the Geekers stowed away. Now this was just an accident scene within BHPD’s jurisdiction.

By the time I had walked back uphill to the hotel the driveway was filling up with paramedic and EMT buses. I grabbed an EMT named Barbara as she stepped down from the back of her bus with her medical bag and marched her into the lobby where I’d left Duke Sanborn.

He was still conscious. “Chest pains?” the girl asked. Duke nodded. Barbara fed him baby aspirin, popped a nitro tablet under his tongue, put him on high-flow oxygen, and began attaching him to an EKG monitor. Efficiency was her game.

Duke was on a nonrebreather and couldn’t talk to me. He rolled his eyes toward the tote I’d left on a chair.

“Ida’s okay. So is her money.” I interpreted the second question in his eyes. “Mal? That’s what I’m going to find out next.”

I left Duke in the hands of the EMT and caught up to Lew Rolling. He was wiping off his shirtfront with a handkerchief soaked in club soda.

“Bad day to leave your Geekers somewhere else,” I admonished him as we went outside to the pool terrace. I handed over the pair the dead boy had been wearing and explained what had gone down. “Trace the serial number and find out who these were issued to.”

“You think we have a bad apple?”

“Yeah.”

There was a lot of milling around on the terrace, but only a few guests were trying to leave. Most were just catching their breath. There were a few cases of nerves, some loud and angry voices. The hotel manager was an old hand at dealing with the obscenely rich. He had the serving staff handing out brandies and ice wrapped in towels. Lawyers on the guest list probably were thinking about fat lawsuits and those doctors on hand were helping with the elderly who required more than a stiff shot to keep that other foot out of the grave. A few models were sitting
on the edge of the runway, either looking sullen or nonchalantly touching up their makeup. The band was playing again. “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.” Catchy. Don’t get serious. It’s so mysterious.