High Bloods (6 page)

“I shot her. Not fatally. But she’s missing. I doubt that there’s much chance she’s still alive. If my silver didn’t do it, then whoever drove Chickie away from de Sade’s has finished the job, maybe after she skinnydipped.”

“Somebody had the stones to put a werewolf in his car? Reminds me of the old joke.” Assuming I had heard it, he went straight to the punch line: “‘
Thought it was the best pussy I’d ever had, until she told me she’d bikini-waxed her face.’
” Johnny squeezed his hands together so hard some color appeared in his cheeks, a mild pink flush.

“It was an SUV,” I said. “Chickie was low sick by then, from the last look I had of her. Right now she’s either in the upper Mojave under a pile of rocks or marinating in a dump. I hope we find her, although by the time we do there won’t be a trace left of whatever they programmed her with.”

“Program a werewolf? Last I heard, they don’t take direction.”

“Chickie did. I’m reasonably sure. Any idea of who might have found Artie expendable in their scheme of things?”

Johnny shrugged.

“He was in and out of some deals, always with a profit. Had a savvy eye for the next good thing, little start-ups that need cash bad. There’s a lot of competish in those areas of investment. Artie couldn’t crack an egg with his punches anymore, but his footwork was still fancy. Never stepped on any important High Blood toes that I know of.”

“His word was his bond?”

“Good enough for me, yeah. He put me into a couple of real moneymakers. Wind turbine leases. That biodiesel utility company in Camarillo. Artie was big on saving the planet.” Padre smiled cynically. “Maybe he thought there’s gonna be somebody left to enjoy it.”

“When did you see Artie last?”

“Our Thursday-night game. Upstairs at the Redondo casino he has a piece of. Two tables, regulars only, twelve or fifteen of us, depending. Kind of a who’s who in SoCal, you know?”

He seemed pleased to be including himself.

“Miles Brenta one of them?”

“Doesn’t gamble. Says he has no card sense. Poker would be the only thing he’s not good at. I think he just prefers fast toys and hunting dangerous game for amusement.”

Johnny glanced anxiously at the table where proposals were being floated without him.

“Listen. About Chickie. It’s a tragedy. A great loss. Maybe what you find out, you could keep me in the loop? Like a daughter to me.”

His look of compassion for the presumably departed Chickie was enough to bring tears to the glass eyes of a stuffed moose head.

“Aren’t they all?” I said.

When I pulled up in front of the house on Breva Way I sat in the Humvee looking at a bed of red, white, and purple china asters, letting my mind slack off while my brain continued humming dependably along, putting out its steady twelve watts of electrical energy, impulses lighting up the glowworm cellular network that makes up the human—and animal—nervous system.

It took a little while before I consciously realized I was trying to connect with something. Like another energy field from another mind that lingered on the periphery of psychic recognition, a spirit not unknown but unnamable in the bright, suddenly creepy silence of early morning.

Human, animal, both? My internal séance, as they usually are, was unnerving. I broke it off and went into the house.

The washing machine was going in the laundry alcove off the kitchen. I found Beatrice in the courtyard wearing one of the dragon kimonos that were in most of the bedroom wardrobes, including mine. She was drinking coffee. The hand that held the cup still wasn’t all that steady. Other than the pewter coffee service there was nothing on the table but a shiny steel cleaver from the kitchen’s cutlery rack.

She looked around at me with a troubled face. But she relaxed her grip on the cleaver.

“Someone was here,” she said. “She scared me so bad I nearly freaked. I guess you didn’t have the time to tell me you had an ex-wife. Of course you didn’t. We’ve barely talked at all. But you would’ve told me sooner or later, wouldn’t you?”

t had been more than a year since I had seen or spoken to
our closest neighbor, Ida Grace. She had lived alone in the next house up the canyon road since her daughter Mallory had gone Lycan at age seventeen and earned her banishment from hearth and home and the unforgiving wolfless society of the Privilege.

The loss of Mal and perhaps advancing age had turned Ida into a recluse whose household needs were met by a complement of service staff, particularly a houseman named Duke, who put on his chauffeur’s cap whenever Ida ventured outside the walls of her brick colonial house, usually for medical reasons. She occasionally visited the gallery on Canon Drive that exhibited her paintings or the vet who looked after her dogs. She owned a white Maltese and two Neapolitan mastiffs, the only breed I knew capable of taking on a werewolf with some prospect of survival.

These days Ida’s social life seemed to be limited to a weekly visit from a Buddhist priest. But I was convinced that during the earliest hours of his morning there had been another visitor.

Although it was still early, Ida had breakfasted and was at work on a painting in the orangerie/studio semidetached from the main house. I hadn’t expected Duke to receive permission to
bring me around, accompanied by the mastiffs, although I had stressed that it was important and not a social call.

Mal Scarlett had been the surprise offspring of Ida’s second marriage, when Ida was fifty-one years of age. Mal was born two weeks after my father died. Now at seventy-four Ida was spare of motion, finely eroded, but still erect. She had put down her sable brush just as I walked into the glass-walled orangerie. She stared at the canvas on her studio easel, ignoring me.

I made myself at home on a two-piece wicker lounger and waited to be acknowledged. She was, as always, painting butterflies and hummingbirds and big splashy crimson flowers. The garden outside was filled with all three.

“I thought maybe by now you would’ve taken a whack at abstract expressionism—like Jackson Pollock’s stuff,” I said, just to get the conversational ball rolling.

“Those paintings are as ugly as bug guts on a windshield.”

Ida turned then, slowly, with a certain arrogant tilt of her head, looking at me as if I were an afterthought. She had a butch haircut and a tough flat face, the ashen lack of expression that of a martyr who has long since squandered all of her passions but one. I thought she probably despised me, but that was nothing compared to how she felt about my mother.

She had a smudge of blue oil paint next to one flared nostril. I helpfully pointed that out to her. Ida sniffed contemptuously and glared at me.

“Well, then. Is she dead? Is that what you’ve come to tell me?”

“Pym? No. I don’t think so. Although she’s been out of touch for a while.”

“Still searching for the magic cure, is she?”

“The secret of immunity she thinks is out there, just one more isolated, dawn-of-history tribe away.”

“So if she
isn’t
dead, this is going to be something likely to spoil my day,” Ida said, with an understated smile of malice.

“Ida, why don’t you let up on Pym? She didn’t steal your husband. I don’t think she slept with him either. They did go off together on an expedition. He admired—”

“
Admired?
Worshipped her, you mean. He was utterly spellbound by her fame. As for the sexual relationship you deny—my husband may have been a weak man, but he was damned attractive.”

“I think he just wanted to accomplish something worthwhile in his life.”

“Pitiful,” she sneered. “Off on a jaunt, cavorting through jungles, hoping to discover—himself. I told him more than once. Only in relentless self-appraisal can one fashion character strong in purpose, touched by grace.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “you just may drive yourself to drink.”

She studied me, something heavy in each of her dark eyes, like unshed tears lethal as mercury. I had been momentarily pissed at Ida, but I relented.

A fly buzzing near her unfinished painting distracted Ida. She swiped at it with her right hand, then began searching through a tall jar of brushes on her worktable.

“I suppose the real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons,” she said. Quoting Jean Renoir.

Before she could decide I wasn’t worth any more of her time I said to Ida, “Where’s Elena?” My pulses were racing.

Her back was to me as she selected the brush she wanted. I couldn’t tell by her reflection in one of the tall orangerie windows if there was a change of expression. But she might already have had a premonition of why I’d come calling, and had prepared herself for the question.

“How should I know? I suppose if she cared to see either of us she would have, years ago.”

“Bullshit, Ida. Elena was here. Around sunrise. Maybe she called you first. You know I can find out. But she also came to
see me. I wasn’t home. She gave my houseguest a good scare. Elena’s spoor was all over my bedroom, in the garden, right up to the wall between our properties.”

Ida turned to glare at me.

“Sorry,” I said.” ‘Spoor’ is Wolfer talk. I should’ve used a different terminology. Still, what Elena left behind was as obvious to me as my own face in the mirror. Her specific energy pattern. Vibes. You know.”

“More of your vaunted ‘Sixth Sense’?” she said, with an attempt at a sneer.

“It’s nothing that all other human beings don’t have. I’m just better able to tune in to the electrical fields connecting living minds. Or dead ones, in some cases. The newly dead.”

Having selected the brush she wanted, Ida changed her mind about going back to work and put down her palette.

“There are seven gateways into Beverly Hills,” I reminded her. “They’re all monitored. Profilers, Snitch readers. Even though Lenie’s not a registered Lycan, I won’t have to go to any trouble to learn where she came in and what name she’s using. So stop stalling me.”

Ida crossed bare arms over her fin de siècle painter’s smock, as if in response to an inner Arctic chill.

“I hadn’t seen her for many months. She always—she shows up unannounced. Fugitive. A little frightened.”

She
was
a fugitive. As are all rogue werewolves. But I didn’t press the point with Ida, because I’d seen a moment of anguish spark in her desolate eyes, grief for a once-beloved child.

“Elena was alone?”

“No. She came with two—friends, I presume. On motorcycles. Bikers, is that what they’re called? They wore identical jackets, a lot of silver around their necks, piled on their wrists.”

“Were they Diamondbackers?”

“I wouldn’t know. The dogs didn’t like them. They kept their distance while Elena and I—Diamondbacker?”

“For the snakeskin tats they all have on their backs.”

“Is that a club, or something more sinister?”

“They’re the worst. Since all drugs were legalized they’ve made their livings by snatching celebrity Lycans for ransom. Or else they’re werewolf killers, claiming the fat bounties some High Bloods are willing to post.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said unconvincingly. “I pay little attention anymore to what goes on out there.” Ida nodded, agreeing with herself, with the propriety of her reclusive life, while she looked around at small beautiful objects on display in her orangerie, favorite paintings, the walled garden outside that protected her secular nunnery. “Does it really matter who she is with, what sort of life she leads now?”

Ida was giving me a headache. “Here’s the reality. If Lenie’s passing herself off as High Blood, she couldn’t be in with a worse crowd.” Although I couldn’t figure that one out, what Elena’s motive might be in running with Diamondbackers. “I’m not the only animal psychic around. If I can sniff out a rogue werewolf off-Observance, there are others who can do the same. Maybe in one of the Diamondbacker chapters. You don’t want to know what they’ll do to her if—”

That was nearly too much for Ida.

“No! I don’t want to know! Because for seven years she has been as good as dead to me. Do you think I get any pleasure from her surreptitious little visits? Oh, she tries to put such a good face on her tragedy! Her efforts only serve to remind me of who she was and what I hoped she might become in spite of the iniquities of a maddened world. But there can be no hope, neither for Elena nor for Mallory—although Mal, if she possesses any self-awareness apart from vanity, must know she has gotten just what she deserved.”

One of the mastiffs responded to her shrill tone with an anxious whine. Ida seemed momentarily as blind as the Sphinx, half buried in stifling drifts of old angers and recrimination.

“Speaking of Mal,” I said, “she went off-line early Saturday morning.”

Ida blinked a couple of times. She was lightly misted with perspiration around her eyes, at her temples.

“Oh?” she said vaguely.

Other than her eyeblinks she didn’t move or betray any comprehension of what I was talking about. But the heavy beat of a pulse in her throat told me she already knew about Mal.

“Have you spoken to her lately?”

Ida roused herself from her sere purview and returned to form.