High Bloods (33 page)

I don’t know what it was about his observation that triggered the warning in my mind:
why indeed?
But it inspired a closer look at the parking lot as we descended again. Twelve feet from touchdown.
Eight
. Momentarily the winds were muted or absent. I recalled the small red arming eye of Stork McClusky’s incendiary grenade and was puzzled, wondering why I should be seeing it again, a solemn red blinking behind the cab of the truck parked nearest the helipad.

“Zeke!” I yelled to the cockpit. “Get us off the deck now!”

There was probably a second’s indecision on Zeke’s part before his hand on the collective reacted and sent us soaring. But it was just enough time for the heel of the left skid to break the laser beam crossing the asphalt at a height of about four feet from the helipad to the big rig.

We rose straight up. Fast, but not fast enough. I had time to click on my safety harness. Then the fulminating black and orange, volcanolike cloud from the trailer truck exploding below caught up to us, engulfed the fuselage in a dazzling fury. There was a sensation of breathtaking compression and great violence. Shrapnel slammed through the metal skin around us. It fouled the steering and obliterated the electronics. My brain glowed with a fierce white light.

We all might have been screaming. I don’t know. I know that we continued to fly, beyond the certain death of the subsequent fireballs from the other two rigs. The rotors had to have been damaged, but they didn’t break apart.

Miles Brenta had been sitting opposite me; I didn’t see him. There was a jagged hole toward the back of the helicopter where a window had been torn out. I saw the face of Ulrike, pale, young, uplifted, illuminated like a Madonna by churchlight. She
coughed and blood ran from her mouth and she lowered her gaze apologetically to me, coughed up more blood and died. I felt a terrible wrenching sadness, aware that I probably wouldn’t be far behind her.

The helicopter shook and flailed the air and I was very frightened. But, instead of breaking up, we autorotated. Hit something in the dark with a grinding crash, rebounded, fell again, tumbled down a hill or the side of an arroyo. The terrific jolting blacked me out.

When I was conscious again I smelled smoke and heard the crackling of fire. I wasn’t strapped to the leather chair anymore. I didn’t know where it was. I was lying faceup. I saw a few stars and heard the keening of the Santa Ana. I had dirt on my mouth. I heard voices. There were flashlights in the darkness.

One of the beams centered on my face. I raised a hand weakly in protest. The toe of a heavy boot nudged me in the ribs on my right side, which is how I learned that at least two of them were badly bruised or broken. My short scream attracted more attention.

Someone kneeled beside me. The light was still in my eyes. I turned my head, tasting blood along with the dirt. A white handkerchief appeared to float through my limited field of vision. Pure alcohol or 150-proof liquor stung my nose. Dirt was brushed from my face with the tequila-soaked handkerchief. It stung my dry lips. I licked a few drops. Tasted pretty good.

Breathing was an ordeal. I managed to speak to my samaritan.

“Is everybody dead?” I remembered Ulrike, who probably had taken some hot hard metal in vital places.

“
No todos uno.
” Not everybody. “But you lockier than most, hombre.”

He laughed then. I was the joke and the punch line. I was the butt of his humor.

“Rawson.
Como el gato, no?.
”

In the dark behind him another man snickered.

I knew then who I was talking to, he who had solicitously cleaned my face.

Raoul Jesus Ortega.

He placed the mouth of a bottle of tequila between my lips.

“Drink now,” he said. “It relax you. Soon you feel no more pain.”

r. RawSON,” the girl’s voice pleaded. “Mr. RAWSON
! Wake up! Get me out of here!”

Someone was always inviting me to have a friendly drink, I thought. Or two. Or in the most recent instance damn near a full fifth of tequila, whatever amount I hadn’t been able to spit out. I was going to have to learn to choose my drinking companions more carefully.

I lay on my back, barely conscious, throbbing with pain and very goddamned drunk.
Why couldn’t someone shut the brat up?
I thought. She was disturbing me. All I wanted was to catch a few winks and when I woke up again maybe the squirrels using the squeaky exercise wheel in my head would have stopped.

“Mr. Rawww-son!” she wailed again. “Please! It’s almost time! Luvagod, help me!”

Time for what?
I thought.
Don’t be cryptic. Out with it, girl
.

“Where am I?” I muttered.

Wherever it was, there was a metallic resonance, a sort of hollow drainpipe effect when she screamed at me again.

“We’re in an AIRplane!”

“Oh. Okay.” But I missed the sensation of flight, the drone of engines.

“You sure?” I said witlessly.

“An
old
airplane! There’s a lot of them parked here! Would you please
look
at me?”

So I rolled my head toward the sound of her voice. Which confirmed by the feel of rivets in steel plate that I actually was lying on a deck. Airplane. Submarine, maybe: because I had the sensation of being submerged, drowning in gloom. And we were moving, intermittently rocked by big gusts of wind. The Santa Ana. I had memories—of trucks blowing up in cataclysmic sequence and knocking a big helicopter around in a fiery sky until it crashed. The face of a lovely Nordic girl who never knew what hit her. There was sickness in my mouth, the back of my throat. Tequila had never been my drink of choice.

“I
hate
the wind! It’s been blowing like this all day! It’s driving me crazy!”

Complain, complain. My eyes felt as if they’d been spray-painted shut. I forced the lids to open, blinked away the sticky mucus until I was focusing. The light was very bad, just a brownish yellow stain from a single dim old lightbulb. Flying dust and bits of desert mica pecked at the skin of the fuselage. There was a steady low hum inside. The air was moving in drafts. At least it was breathable, piped in from a mobile APU.

I saw her crouched a dozen feet from me. Leaning forward in a hampered, crippled attitude like a street beggar. In the poor light I saw strain in her smudged, pretty, vapid face.

“Told you… I was coming, Mal,” I said.

“What? You never told me anything! And you’re certainly no good to me the way you are! I WANT OUT OF HERE BEFORE THEY SHOOT ME!”

I tried to move my hands. They felt swollen and they tingled. They were fastened tightly together at my waist. I couldn’t raise my head high enough to see what my hands were restrained with.

“How long have you been here?” I said to Mal. Just to keep the conversation going while I figured something out.

“I don’t know! A couple of days! But it’s almost time! I can feel it! The moon. It’s about to
happen
to me! They’re all here already! The hunters with their guns! They came in a couple at a time to stare at me. Like I’m a filthy animal! And I heard them laughing outside when they got into their trucks. Making bets with each other about who’ll be the one to kill me!”

“It’s not going to happen, Mal.”

“What’s going to stop them? I’ll hair-up soon. I itch all over!” She sobbed. “They cut out my Snitcher! All they gave me was a local, and they didn’t stitch the wound up. It hurts, I think it’s infected.”

This was a girl who needed a champion. Invulnerable in the flesh. But every move I made resulted in spasms, knife-edged pain. In movies the hard tough capable hero, ignoring contusions, a broken bone or two, and maybe some gunshot wounds in nonvital places, would cleverly free himself from his surly bonds and carry off the grateful damsel on his back while machine-gunning a dozen bad guys on his way out.

All in a day’s work. All I could think about was how badly I needed to take a pee.

“Mal,” I said, “is there some way you could—”

“I’m as close to you as I can get! I’m chained up. So are you! We’re both chained to ringbolts in the floor and somebody will be coming back soon! Probably the tall greaser with the beard. He said when it got dark he’d come for the other guy!”

“What other guy?”

“He’s all the way back there! Unconscious. Or maybe not—I did hear him groan a couple of times. But I know he must be in bad shape. He looked dead when they dragged the two of you inside. They gave him blood.”

“Blood?”

“Do you have to repeat everything I say?”

“You mean like a transfusion?”

“I guess so. Now
please
think of something. Tell me what we’re going to do!”

I made an effort to sit up, heard the rattle of a chain behind me on the deck. The pain in my left side was ferocious. I couldn’t breathe very deeply. My hands were getting numb. I flexed my fingers, trying to restore feeling. I was secured at the wrists by one of the notched plastic temporary restraints cops used. Hands below my waist and back to back, putting strain on my arms; my shoulders ached.

“You can’t move at all?” I said to Mal.

“J-just enough so I can use my b-bucket when I h-have to,” she said, burbling with tears.

I saw the bucket referred to. I got slowly to my feet, rocked a little. The old fuselage of whatever aircraft it was resounded with a dull
boom
when struck by heavy gusts of the Santa Ana. My feet weren’t shackled, which helped me keep my balance. I thought dimly that this oversight might turn out to be unlucky for someone.

I had about six feet of chain. It allowed me to move closer to Mal where she was kneeling, hunched on the floor with her hands together the way mine were tied. Her shirt was torn, her denim shorts filthy, and there was about her a faint odor of fleshly corruption. Her eyes were feverish. I felt sorry for her, but sorry didn’t get it. What I wanted, had to be, was fired up, mad as hell. I wanted adrenaline. But my blood was sluggish; my brain was on a long slow-burning fuse.

I slid the slop bucket closer with one foot, fumbled my zipper down, and began relieving myself. Mal watched. The sting of urine in the stale air made her sneeze.

“Luvagod,” she said after a minute or so had passed. “I didn’t know anybody could hold that much.”

I zipped up again. “Can you stand?” I said.

“Yes. Why?”

“Just do it,” I said.

Mal was barefoot. She wore the same type of fancy tooled-leather biker’s belt I had on, with snap-fastened pockets, a lot of studs and steel loops double-stitched to the leather.

“Let’s see how close we can get to each other,” I suggested.

I raised my bound palms-out hands toward her, shoulder joints popping audibly. She did the same and shuffled toward me, chain clinking behind her. I advanced another foot or so. We touched hands, kept straining toward each other. She had more slack than I did. When she was close enough I raised my arms higher and brought them down on either side of her head, resting them on her shoulders. Her hands were bent limply against my chest, elbows spread wide. Our foreheads came together. Mal felt feverish to me. We stayed like that a little while, saying nothing, just breathing, in a kind of helpless but loving communion. She breathed through her mouth, breath quickening gradually.

It’s a bizarre biological imperative: the human species can be battered, dirty, terrified, trembling at the abyss, and still desire to mate. That was what was happening to us. There could be no consummation. But lust was useful; it caused the fuse in my brain to burn brighter and faster, gave me the first mild kick of adrenaline I needed to survive.

“How are your teeth?” I asked her.

“I have great teeth.” Mal’s eyes popped open; she studied me. “What the hell do you—oh. Like, chew through the plastic stuff?” She thought about it. “Yeah. Maybe I can. Then you’d have your hands free.” Her eyes widened a little in anticipation of the hell to pay once that much of our freedom had been achieved.

I had to disappoint her.

“Won’t do us much good. I’m still chained to the floor.”

She grimaced.

“Fuck.
What
, then?”

“I need to get free of the damned chain. Nothing’s going to budge that ringbolt in the floor. The weakest point is where the steel loop is sewn to the belt in back. Probably double-stitched, but if you can chew through enough of it I think I can yank myself free.”

“Let’s do it!”

We were face-to-face still, but our bodies were nearly two feet apart. I sensed for the first time a strangeness about Mal, a spoor of wolf. Her eyes looked different. Full-moon eyes shading from Delft blue to a yellow-gray. She licked her lips, smiled at me.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “It’s a great idea, R. It’ll work.”

“Yes,” I said. “But we’d better get started.”

The trick was to put my back to Mal and for her to have enough leverage to gnaw away at the tough saddle-stitching. She slid away from me and went down on one knee. I tried to twist myself all the way around but the chain pulled taut. I ended up standing a little better than sideways to her. Mal’s long fingers and broken nails scrabbled against my slick khakis, groped higher. I twisted my head until the muscles of my neck burned to look down at her. Mal’s teeth glinted and her jaw seemed to have a new, prognathic thrust; but the light was barely there and my perspective was distorted.