High Bloods (36 page)

In spite of the pain from his bloody lip McQuarrie managed an ironic chuckle.

“You’re going to put a werewolf in this truck? That’s an old joke.”

“Heard it. Mal may be a werewolf, but she’s
my
werewolf.”

McQuarrie had recovered from getting his teeth chipped. Or at least thought he was clearheaded.

“I’d like to find out how you’re going to pull this off,” he said. “But I think I should get off here.”

Without haste he opened the door and put a foot out on the running board and jumped.

But he had misjudged the speed at which we were traveling. Also he jumped straight out instead of in the direction we were going. Momentum whirled him around twice in a running, stumbling attempt to maintain balance. The wind against him, with its velocity, might have kept him from nosing down in a flat sprawl. Instead he was sideswiped by Raoul Ortega’s big flashy machine.

McQuarrie sat down hard and was getting up slowly when the oncoming pickup truck drove straight over him. Those massive chrome radiator guards can be lethal. Either the driver wasn’t able to see McQuarrie through the swirling dust and with my six-pack of halogen lights full in his face, or his reflexes were a little slow after the happy hour preceding the
mal de lune
.

Ortega’s motorcycle wobbled but stayed upright; he poured on the speed and shot up to the left side of my truck. I saw the shotgun in his right hand. I thought it was more to scare me than anything else but I tromped the brakes again and ducked. Half of the windshield turned into a blizzard above my head.

Cautious is as cautious does, Pym always liked to say.

The pickup trailing Ortega’s Harley loomed when I glanced up. If the driver hadn’t seen McQuarrie in time, there was no way he was going to miss a mirror image of his own vehicle squarely in his path. He veered hard left and straight into the wingtip of the Mitchell bomber, which took out the windshield, sheared through the cab, and demolished the smaller rear window, splattering the driver like a blueberry pie flung against a white tile wall and probably killing both of the shooters who had been standing and braced in the bed of the pickup.

Tonight’s
mal de lune
, I thought in a giddy, near-hallucinatory moment, was officially FUBAR. For another instant I had a sense of World War II flyboys in their leather jackets and cocky flight caps lined up along the spine of their bomber and laughing
indulgently, but that image disappeared when I was distracted by a bloom of light like a desert rose beneath the impaled pickup.

Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition, wasn’t that what they used to say? I’d never been in a war, but this night’s confrontation would do.

Raoul Ortega had accelerated past me following the buckshot-blowout of my windshield and was bearing down on Mal Wolfgirl. His left arm was raised and away from his body, shotgun extended.

Buckshot
. Another sportsman.

The miserable bastard shot Mal Wolfgirl. In the back, from less than thirty feet away.

Mal went down in a cowering hairy bloody heap, but her head came up and her eyes blazed as she watched Ortega make a cautious wide sweep around her. Then he turned his sexy chromed superbike in her direction, a single bright eye lighting up Mal as she jerked her head toward him and red froth sprayed in the wind.

For a few seconds he sat on the Harley with one foot down, gunning the engine as if he dared her to come bounding after him. I don’t think he was paying attention to me. He might have thought I was busy picking glass out of my eyeballs. Or bleeding to death.

When he lifted his foot and raised the shotgun again I screamed something no one could hear, yanked the big pickup around in a 180, and drove straight at him.

That kind of challenge Ortega didn’t care for. He didn’t like it that I had a gun too. When he saw the muzzle-wink and his headlight blew up, leaving him with only a few small running lights, he forgot about finishing off the wolfgirl and drove his bike between a torpedo bomber and a C-47 transport parked close to each other on the line, ducking low in the saddle to clear the right wing of the bomber.

I had no room to maneuver and took the same wing half off as I followed him, losing my rooflights. The flight line was
quickly behind us; we were in terrain laced with arroyos hidden by manzanita and sagebrush, all of it so dry a spark from the exhaust pipe of either machine could ignite it. I glanced back once but didn’t see Mal Wolfgirl. Maybe, as hurt as she had to be, instinct had made her seek shelter in the dark.

Both Ortega and I had power to spare. The pickup I drove was equipped for desert running. His Harley couldn’t cope with the loose desert drybed for long. He was already enjoying a clumsy ride. He had to change his tactics or take a breakneck spill. And he had the shotgun.

We had traveled no more than half a mile into the full force of the harsh wind when he steered his bike down into a narrow arroyo. I couldn’t follow. All I could do was block the arroyo at my end and hope that there was no way out for Ortega except on foot.

I killed the pickup’s engine but kept the lights on. The wind slackened long enough for me to hear Miles Brenta coughing and moaning in the bed of the truck. I had been too busy for a while to give him any thought. It was a small miracle that bouncing around back there hadn’t finished killing him.

I also heard werewolves, some distance behind me. A howl was answered by another even farther away. No surprise if the Hairballs on the loose already had attracted desert-dwelling rogues. I heard shouts, saw gunflashes along the flightline. The pickup that had driven into the Mitchell was a pyre, smoke rolling sky-high with the wind.

What I didn’t hear was Ortega’s Harley. With no way to drive out of the arroyo he’d shut the engine off. All I saw of the bike was a red speck of taillight some three hundred feet away and deep in the brush-thick arroyo.

The wind picked up again with its moaning sweep and dust devils like small tornadoes, but where I was crouched beside the truck the mesquite around me barely trembled. There was no movement in that part of the arroyo illuminated by the truck’s
headlights. From where I was with the blue-steel Uzi I could still make out the Harley’s taillight.

Miles Brenta thumped in the bed of the truck and made a pathetic low noise that was almost like the yowl of a run-over animal.

“Well,
jefe
,” Raoul Ortega said chummily on the CB radio, startling me with the nearness and clarity of his voice, “what we do now?”

I wondered if McQuarrie had loaded tracer rounds as the first feeds in the Uzi magazine: helpful for homing in on a loping Hairball in the darkness. Maybe I could have burned Ortega out of his end of the arroyo.

But I did nothing, only waited.

“But maybe you don’t want to kill me,” Ortega speculated. “Because, you know, I have the
amuleto
like you say. I don’t mean she is with me now. But arrangements have been made. I go down, she goes down. And all the rest of them. The seesters. The Mission of Arroyo del Cobre. Soch a shame if that old place is destroyed one night. It have historical value, no?”

We both listened to the wind a little while longer.

“What am I worth to you dead, amigo? Nothing. The cost is too great. So why don’t you back that truck up out of there and we go our separate way.”

This time he didn’t give me the chance to respond, if I had wanted to. The speculation was back in his voice.

“Or maybe you no in condition to drive. What a shame.”

More than my physical self had taken a pounding during the last forty-eight hours. The sixth sense that had almost always looked after me was AWOL. I was crouched there like a dummy, eyes fixed on the taillight and picturing Ortega also sensibly crouched away from his machine with the cord of the CB mike stretched to its limit, shotgun in his other hand, waiting for his own instincts to plan his next move for him.

But handheld CBs were commonplace, particularly in areas where wristpacs lacked range, and it was more than likely Ortega
had been chatting me up while circling slowly toward me with the wind in his face, shotgun ready.

I brought up the muzzle of the Uzi, turning at the same time. He spoke to me again, but not in his radio voice.

“
Buenas noches
. Put down the chatter gun.”

I set the Uzi on the running board, otherwise not moving. I assumed he wanted to talk some more, enjoy his moment. Or I would have been dead before I knew he was there.

“
Mira me
,” he said.

I let out a breath and looked up and around. He was standing in the aura of a sidelight on the truck, above me and about eight feet away. Both hands on his shotgun.

“Just leave Elena alone,” I said, and added with a bitter taste in my mouth, “please.”

I could see nothing of his face inside the protective hive of his headgear. What I saw reflected on the face shield was something he wouldn’t have noticed with his head tilted down, his eyes fixed on me.

“
Por supuesto
,” Ortega said graciously. “But your other one—
mucha mujer
. I will look her up. Take good care of her for you,
jefe
. So—now you can die.”

He should have punctuated his last statement by blowing off my own helmeted head, but maybe he was enjoying himself too much. Or he wanted to hear me scream for mercy, the way some of the condemned will do. That would’ve been worth waiting a few extra moments for. The death scream.

Which turned out to be Ortega’s.

The werewolf that was still partially Miles Brenta leaped from the bed of the truck and dragged Ortega to the ground. A load of buckshot put a hole in the door but above my head as I grabbed the Uzi. Ortega was getting to his feet, hurling the crippled wolf-thing away from him, when I trained the Uzi on his midsection and emptied the box. He never got off another shot.

The virus in the blood that Ortega had pumped into Miles
Brenta had only half done its work. There was hair and there was beast and there were the human eyes of a dying man as he got to his feet, a human broken arm dangling, fingers useless.

“My turn,” he said. His voice calm, not pleading.

The Uzi was empty. I dropped it. And slowly reached for the 9-mil Sig on my belt.

I don’t know how long I drove around the desert looking for Mal. But the sky was lightening in the east when I had a glimpse of a naked female body half hidden in sagebrush.

The wind had died down. I got out of the pickup and walked slowly toward her, saying her name. But she didn’t respond until I put a hand on the back of her neck.

I took off the parka and dressed her in it. Then I sat on the ground holding her for a few minutes. ILC helicopters came and went in the distance. I watched them with sore eyes and thought about being alive. Dawn thoughts.

“It was so stupid!” Mal sobbed, clinging to me for what warmth I had to give her. “I thought it would be, you know,
fun
to be that big and powerful and scary. Most of my friends were already Lycans. But I don’t want to be a werewolf anymore! Luvagod, isn’t there something that somebody can
do?
”

I kissed a salty cold cheek, smoothed her hair back from her forehead. She shuddered in my arms, fetched a hopeless sigh, and closed her dreary blue eyes.

“I’m not giving up,” I said.

I got to my feet with her; somebody else could have built a house in the time it took to pull that off. Mallory cried in pain and I was mindful of the double-aught silver pellets embedded more than skin-deep in her back.

Last of the Beverly Hills werewolves. I carried Mal to the battle-worn truck and laid her on her tummy on the backseat and drove slowly toward the pall of smoke above the old warplanes
on the flight line. They were just a hazy vision now of what had been indomitable in an old war, in another time. But all wars ended, faded from memory. The latest war, against a tiny virus casting its malevolent spell from an unknown fortress deep in the brain, also would end. Because it had to.

I just didn’t know how, or when.

t eight o’clock in the morning I dropped Mal Scarlett
off at her mother’s house in Beverly Hills. She was wearing church barrel-casual and old running shoes and was wobbly on her feet. But halfway up the walk, as the front door opened, Mal put a hand on my arm and looked up at me with a wan smile.

“I’ll be okay the rest of the way.”

She continued to the front steps. Ida Grace had come outside. I saw Duke in the foyer of the house, not looking too bad off.

All’s well that ends well—until the next time, when it probably won’t. So went my thoughts, but then it had been a long twenty-four hours and my mood demanded hot black coffee.

Mother and daughter looked at each other for a few moments. If either of them said anything I didn’t hear. Then Ida put an arm around Mal to guide her into the house.

On the threshold Ida paused and looked back at me. There wasn’t enough expression on her face for me to tell what was going through her mind.

Then she nodded.

Probably all the thanks I would ever get from Ida. It was enough.