High Bloods (7 page)

“She only calls when she needs more money.”

“But she hasn’t—”

“I do not encourage Mal to visit either. We have nothing to talk about. Except, perhaps, her father. Whom, I suppose, she misses. They were always—she adored—”

Ida seemed suddenly dazed. Too much vitriol was bad for aging hearts. There were a couple of crystal decanters on a low table in a part of the orangerie that contained a well-lighted reading corner and bookshelves of first-edition classics. I poured a snifter a quarter full of Armagnac and took it to Ida.

She found the fumes bracing; her eyes began to clear.

“Stop waving that under my nose,” she snapped. She unclenched her hands, took the glass with a look of surcease and drank, her eyes closing as she did so. Then she breathed deeply and looked at me.

“Why don’t you have one too?” she said grudgingly. “I feel shameful, drinking all by myself at this hour.”

So I poured another shot. Seemed the right time for a strengthener. And some codeine to dodge the headache.

“I don’t suppose you can find her,” Ida said casually.

“Mal? We’re looking, but—”

“Once that sensor is no longer embedded beneath her clavicle it can be difficult. I, ah, suppose.”

Something in my glance disconcerted her.

“I learned about that watching a television program.”

“Oh.”

“I’m quite fond of the Discovery Channel.”

“Sure.” I wanted to talk about Elena. The fact that she was passing for High Blood off-Observance was neither the best nor the worst news I’d had since her disappearance. I was only glad that she was still alive.

“How did she look this morning?” I asked Ida.

“Elena?” Her expression softened almost impalpably. “As lovely as the day she had to leave me.”

“Hard to believe.” I was familiar with the ravages done to the human personas of werewolves who haired-up at each full moon.

“True.” There was something malicious in the frankness of Ida’s gaze. “How does that feel?”

“Like a kind of death.”

“Good. You never deserved her, you know.”

Not a topic for argument. Not now, anyway. “Why was she here? Something special about this day?”

“I’ve told you. Elena just turns up. I never know when that may be.”

“But today was different from the other times. Because today she also paid a call on me. Except I wasn’t there. What’s going on? What did she have to say to you, Ida?”

“Nothing that would be of interest to you. Her visit was brief.” Ida paused. “I asked her never to come again.”

Like all poor liars—or those forced into a lie—Ida Grace spoke with an excess of conviction.

I didn’t believe her. But there was no point in challenging her either. I finished my Armagnac. One of the mastiffs got up from the orangerie floor and went outside to pee in the garden. Two hummingbirds were visiting the feeder near the open door.

“Might I get back to work now?” Ida said with an edge of sarcasm. She was watching the tiny hummers, the speed of their
wings like flashes of pale fire against the deep green backdrop of photinias.

“Thanks for your time, Ida.”

I was giving up too easily; Ida knew it. That worried her. And if she was worried, it meant that next time I was going to see Elena and not just the vagueness of her doppelgänger haunting my house. I very likely would be seeing her soon.

Before I returned to Beatrice I ordered twenty-four-hour surveillance on Ida’s house and on Ida herself.

On the short walk to my own doorstep I tried putting together some vague pieces of information I’d heard or intuited during my half hour with her.

There was what I considered to be the urgency of Elena’s visit and her desire to see me—by climbing over the eight-foot wall in our secret place to my backyard. Which could have meant she didn’t want her biker escorts to know where she was going. And she wasn’t just taking a nostalgia trip. Elena had startled the half-awake Bea in my bedroom but said not a word to her.
Hey, sorry, kid; just wanted to say hello to R
. And she had left no message for me, either.

I now had good reason to believe that Mallory Scarlett was actually missing, in the bad sense of the word. It was a good bet that her Snitcher had been surgically removed. Elena knew that, and, I thought, she must also know why. Was Mal just another hostage for ransom, and had Elena been dispatched to pick up a gym bag full of money from their mother?

But I couldn’t believe Elena would have any part in a kidnap plot involving her sister.

If it wasn’t a kidnapping for profit, then it was something else that might have to do with a much larger sum than they could hope to wring out of an old lady. Even a Beverly Hills old lady.

Something much worse.

I took pity on Ida then, because it appeared both of her daughters were in some sort of jeopardy—estranged from their mother, of course, but still embedded deeply in her heart and soul where the good times and special moments remained, no matter how crushed she was by emotional hardship.

When I walked into the kitchen where good things had been prepared in the double ovens, Beatrice smiled shyly at me. She’d made huevos rancheros and guava popovers. I realized I was starved. We sat outside in the courtyard where the morning glories were just folding up for the day. I ate a lot and drank two cups of fresh coffee. My headache, or Ida-ache, had dulled down. Bea only nibbled while I finished telling her about Elena.

“You probably know from Artie that there is a major black market in the blood business.” She nodded. “The big profits that used to come from the drug trade now attract the same racketeers to bootleg blood. Probably more than half of Off-Blooders can find themselves desperate to ensure a continuous supply. At any price. Particularly if they’re a rare type like AB negative. A prosperous man such as Artie Excalibur must have had two or three blood cows for his exclusive use.”

Beatrice nodded again.

“A woman in Thailand and a Danish avant-garde composer. I oversaw all of the purity evals for Artie. Each of his High Bloods receive a hundred thousand a year for their donations.” She looked confused, frowning. “What does this have to do with Elena Grace?”

“Before I became a deputy director of ILC SoCal I worked undercover busting gangs who peddled tainted or artificial blood in bulk to Offs lacking Artie’s bankroll. People who couldn’t be all that choosy about the source of their refills, couldn’t afford the rigorous screenings to detect a thousand and one viruses that
could kill them in a few days. A risky way to live. So was the work I was doing. Especially when there was another Intel guy willing to break my identity to the wrong people to improve his career prospects.”

Beatrice folded her lower lip between her teeth, afraid of what she imagined was coming next.

“Elena didn’t know about my double life, of course. She trusted me in all things. I trusted myself to keep her safe. But I should have stayed away from her until I was rotated out of our bloodleggers unit.”

“You were in love, so—” Beatrice shrugged. “You had to see her.”

“Yeah. I had to see her. In little hideaways here and there. But after I was betrayed, four members of the gang caught up to us at a bed-and-breakfast near Ojai. I killed two of them. The other pair kicked my head in”—I tapped the slight indentation on my forehead beneath which lay a silver plate—”and were pouring gasoline on me when an off-duty CHP interrupted their play. They got away with Elena. She turned up three days later on a foggy stretch of Carillo beach, barefoot, half naked. They had raped her repeatedly. The one who spoiled her blood was a cousin of the gang leader, who hadn’t showed up for my barbecue. I guess he planned to watch the DVD later. Anyway the rogue Lycan invited for the fun was named LouLou Morday.”

“Oh God. So awful.”

“I was in a coma for ten days, in the hospital three months. Spent more time recuperating at my mother’s lodge up at Big Bear. Talking to the squirrels until I could recognize the sound of my own voice. I forced myself to walk until I could manage a mile without my right foot starting to drag. I had the kind of headaches steel-toed boots can give you. I still do. More months passed without a word from Elena. She never came to the hospital. Of course for a long while she was in miserable shape herself.

“Ida held me completely responsible for the attack on her daughter. She wouldn’t tell me where Elena was. It was Mal who tipped me that she was in a psychiatric clinic in Canada, near Banff. With all of my resources at ILC I still couldn’t get in to see her. So once I was ninety percent recovered and hoping for the best for Elena’s sake, I turned to other matters.”

It must have been the look on my face. Beatrice said, “You don’t have to—”

“Why not? You want to know me, this is part of it. First I tracked down LouLou Morday and fed small chunks of him to a flock of wild geese. Until there wasn’t much left that was essential to his continued existence.”

Beatrice swallowed hard and got up quickly from the table, went to a far corner of the courtyard and made gagging sounds. Nothing came up. I guess it was for the best she hadn’t eaten much breakfast.

“I was a little upset with him,” I explained. “As for the guys who fled that night with Elena, a routine spike job was enough for them. By then I’d mellowed.”

“What’s a—No, don’t tell me.”

Bea got her composure back and came slowly to me. She stood behind me and put a hand lightly on the back of my bowed head. A blessing of sorts. My overheated blood drained slowly from my face.

“The gang leader, the one who planned to watch my immolation in the comfort of his Woodland Hills rec room with a bowl of popcorn and some cold brew, him I haven’t been able to lay a hand on. His name is Raoul J. Ortega. He is, I’ve been told, important to ILC Intel. They want him alive and working at his game, whatever it is currently. But someday Raoul J. Ortega will be expendable to ILC. Raoul and I both know that. Knowing may give him some anxious moments. Because I can wait, and I’ll never forget.”

“And you never saw Elena again?” Beatrice said after a few moments.

“Only once,” I said.

Because Artie Excalibur’s office on Santa Monica was a crime scene, Beatrice said she could probably use her home computer to access Artie’s business files and compile a list of associates.

Before I dropped her at the Radcliffe, a forty-story tower on Rexford where she had a one-bedroom apartment, I took from the safe in my home office a set of three throwing knives and showed them to her. The knives were Japanese-made, Damascus steel with laminated silver; each edge could cut through a railroad spike.

She studied the knives on dark blue velvet with her low, two-note whistle of appreciation.

“These are finer than anything I could hope to own,” she said with a trace of wistfulness. “Priority hunk. The workmanship is
so
gorgeous.”

“Want to try them?” I said.

Outside we crossed the arched red bridge over the koi pond to a sunlit expanse of lawn where there was room to throw at a scarred old piece of upright timber.

Beatrice was fast on the draw, her motion as deft as that of a conjuring magician. She whipped the knife from the quick-release scabbard that she wore midthigh and fired it underhand at the target. Like a fast-pitch softballer but with no windup. There was only a glint in the air, then that solid
thock
a second later as the blade bit deep into dry old wood.

She worked up some perspiration throwing each knife several times from a distance of eighteen feet. All of her throws were in a painted target area less than six inches in diameter.

I tried it Beatrice’s way a few times to see how difficult it was. It was damned difficult. I was out of the money every time and a little embarrassed by my ineptitude.

“You’re very good,” I said.

“I know. If you’re going to tote one, better know how to use it.” Her eyes were alight with the pleasure of accomplishment. “My father taught me.”

“What does he do for a living, travel with a circus?”

“No. MERC. Twenty years of it. All those places where egomaniacs were putting on wars that are largely forgotten. Now he aqua-farms salmon in Oregon. About half his moving parts are pross. I don’t get up there often enough to visit him. But my stepmom spoils him rotten and I think he’s a happy man.” She whistled another low tune, sounding mournful. Then she looked up at me, possibly with a touch of nerves.

“How old are you, R?”

“Forty.”

It may have been a happy surprise. “Oh—that’s not so—I was thinking maybe—”

“Both my parents were white as doves when they were about my age. It’s a family-gene thing.”

“I’ll be twenty-four in a couple of months,” Bea said.

“Big for your age.”

She laughed and gave me a shove. She might have been relieved that I wasn’t a well-preserved fifty. She was going to use a handkerchief to blot her face when I stopped her.

“I like your sweat,” I said, kissing her.

When we took a break from kissing she said regretfully, “I suppose we have to get going.”

“There’ll be tonight.”

“Yes? That had better be a promise.”

With a forefinger Beatrice sketched the letter
B
on my cheeks.

“There. You’re branded. Glam rustlers beware. They’ll have to get through me to get to you.”

“Armed and dangerous. Which of these knives would you like to have?”

“You can’t be serious! Each of them must be worth—”

“Right now they’re only taking up space in a safe drawer.”

“Well, then—” Bea looked them over again with an eye toward acquisition. “They’re all choicely good.” After a few moments she decided. “This one. The balance is exactly right for my grip, it might’ve been made for me.”

Silver is too malleable to take a sharp edge. But the Japanese master craftsmen seamlessly melded carbon steel with razor edges and tips to the pure silver blades that meant sayonara for werewolves.

“Does this mean we’re engaged?” she said, a hand on the hilt of the knife she slipped into its scabbard. Then, with a quick look at me, “Just kidding.”

I felt a little better now that she had a weapon. I hadn’t said anything and maybe Beatrice hadn’t thought of it, but whoever had sent the out-of-phase Hairball Artie’s way might have had two victims in mind. By sheer chance I’d been there, between the she-wolf and Bea. But if Bea as Artie’s Girl Friday knew or could find out something about Artie’s business dealings that represented a threat to the perpetrator—