By Blood We Live (24 page)

I realised I still had my socks on, so I pulled them off. Underneath the raging sort of enrichment I was deadly tired. Obviously I couldn’t see the daylight, but I could feel the four hours the sun had already been up.
We can stay awake
, Stonker had explained,
but it’s not much fun.
It wasn’t. There was a dry, hard ache behind my eyes. It was like the blood couldn’t settle or knit properly until I slept and let it. Until I stopped watching it.

The harder it is to condemn.

That was the thing keeping me awake, of course. Like a snake trying to unknot itself. A blood snake jerking and writhing. It had happened to him. Shouldn’t that make a difference? Didn’t it?

You keep wriggling like that you’re gonna make me come.

I turned and rested my face against the cold of the porcelain. It felt so good. That was something you could say about the world, that some things didn’t change, that if you were hot it was nice to feel something cool against you.

T
HERE WERE CALLS
to make en route. I have relationships with people such that when I call, they answer. Even in the early hours. They answer because each of them carries a phone on whom I’m the only person who calls. For some humans money and a dedicated phone makes any relationship possible.

First, Olly Maher, of the Amner-DeVere International Private Bank. He wasn’t asleep. He was at a party of what sounded like restrained indulgence. There were glasses clinking. There was music playing. Bowie from the live
Ziggy Stardust
album. “My Death.” Hardly party music. But this, I reminded myself, was the twenty-first century.

“Norman,” he said.

I was on the hands-free in the VanHome, heading east on the 10. Ontario Mills. Hotels and retail parks. Neoned slabs and slivers that reminded me of the days when there was nothing but dust and sage scrub and giant wildrye and mallards quacking with a kind of dour introversion on the river. You blink, you miss it. A long time ago, in a cave, in the darkness, I’d said: “Why?” and the voice had answered: “Someone must bear witness.”

“Justine Cavell,” I said. “I need to know as soon as she uses any of the cards.” She has half a dozen, and only one of them is Amner-DeVere, but that presents only modest difficulty to Olly.

“No problem,” Olly said.

“You call me anytime, day or night.”

“
Day
or night?”

I’d be sleeping with the cell right next to my ear.

“Day or night, Olly.”

“Will do.”

Next I called my girl at the FBI, Hannah Willard.

She
was
asleep.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. But even in the Jesus Christ I could hear her money-self waking up, eyes wide.

“Two people,” I said. “First, Dale Schrutt. Or possibly Wayne Schrutt. In any case Schrutt. U.S. national, now resident in Thailand. Start in Bangkok.”

“Look,” Hannah began.

“Double,” I said. “Start now.”

There was a pause. “This has to be the last time,” she said. She says this every time. She says this for herself. Three or four more jobs like this, she knows, she’ll be able to quit the Bureau for good. She’ll be able to quit doing anything she doesn’t want to do for good. Which, by and large, is all any human wants. Or thinks they want.

“Spell the last name,” she said. Which I did. “You got anything else on this guy?”

“Spent some time in North Vegas. Nickname ‘Pinch.’ Lottery winner sometime within the last ten years. This is easy money, Han.”

“None of it’s easy,” she said. “This isn’t the movies. And the other?”

“Talulla Demetriou.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“
Again
?”

“What do you mean, ‘again’?”

I could hear her adjusting her position. Sitting further up in bed. She lives alone. She has a hard blonde face and an impatience with idiots. She’s waiting to be rich enough to really pick and choose.

“I mean I already found her for you. You lost her again?”

My foot came off the gas a little. Images tumbled: the Forum in Rome at night, torchlit, crowded and vivified because Cleopatra had entered the city that afternoon. Three soldiers with their sandals off at a bar’s outside table, drinking cheap wine from wooden cups. A pretty twelve-year-old girl with starved dark eyes huddled in the doorway of a Saffron Hill slum, her legs covered in syphilitic sores. A young woman with her clothes ripped and half her hair pulled out tied to a stake atop a pile of brush and firewood, the lantern-lit faces of a large crowd, some rapt, some jabbering, some bored, the terrible distinctness of teeth and fingers and eyeballs.

A car I’d nearly hit honked, protractedly.

“Explain,” I said to Hannah.

Pause. Recalibration. She was wondering if this would compromise my ability to pay her.

“Three years ago,” she said. “Alaska. You don’t remember?”

I remembered Alaska. The lodge. Talulla. Vali. But I had no memory of how I’d known she was there. The driver of the car I’d just missed, having stopped honking, realised he hadn’t vented sufficient spleen, and honked again.

“You traced her?”

“Yeah, and I don’t want to have to do it again. The woman has aliases like fucking Imelda Marcos had shoes. I don’t know who’s doing her IDs, but whoever he is, he’s the best in the business.”

I clamped my jaws together for a moment, let the fact sink in. You forgot.

“Be that as it may,” I said. “Same job. Do what you can.”

“For God’s—”

“Get me what I need and I promise you can retire.”

Silence. She knew enough to know I had it within my power.

“Call me as soon as you have anything,” I said, and hung up. Justine’s face flashed.
Just following her around gave you dementia and nearly fucking killed you. Some fulfilment.

I called my chief pilot and transportation logistics guru, Damien. He, too, had been sleeping. He cleared his throat. “Sir?”

“Has Justine asked you to prep the jet?”

“No, sir.”

“Nothing about flying to Thailand?”

“No, sir.”

“What about Detroit?”

“No, sir. I haven’t heard from Ms. Cavell since you were … Since we got back from Europe.”

Since you were doolally. Since chasing that werewolf gal nearly killed you.

“Listen carefully. If she contacts you, you are to let me know immediately. Without her knowing. Understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

“She may want to fly at short notice,” I said. “But
do not
go anywhere until you’ve checked with me. Make up a problem with the plane. But stay on the ground until I get there. Okay?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“I’ll be contacting Seth and Veejay with the same instruction, just in case. If you hear from either of them—anything unusual at all—you must also report it to me straight away. I know you’re fond of her, Damien, but you have to trust me, this is for her own protection.”

“Sir, if she comes to me in person, do you want me to keep her with me?”

“Not by force. And in any case, you wouldn’t be able to do anything like that. Not anymore. Just call me straight away. Delay tactics only. Understood?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“We’re going to be travelling soon, one way or another. You up to snuff?”

“Absolutely, sir. You can count on me.”

“Good man. Everything all right in your world?”

“Peachy, sir. Couldn’t be better.”

“Call me as soon as you hear anything.”

“Standing by, sir.”

Very well. She wasn’t going to Thailand first. That made Vegas favourite. She wouldn’t go to her mother.

Not yet.

N
ORTH
V
EGAS TOLD
me she’d been here but I’d missed her. I nosed the VanHome around for more than an hour before I caught (windows down, the city’s smells a stadium crowd I was searching for the one beloved face) the first strand on the ether, a psychic stink like the odour of cordite after a gunshot.

Elusive, though. I had it and lost it. I stopped the VanHome and got out. Urban deadspot. Three empty, garbage-strewn lots between an out-of-business repairs garage and a cluster of one-storey homes that were barely more than shotgun shacks. A small freight trailer lying on its side, covered in graffiti. A couch reduced by weather and fire to its rusted sprung frame. A butchered space-hopper. A defeated army of filthy plastic carrier bags. One gets used to these occasional anti-oases in American cities, with their inexplicable inhabitants and remains (I once saw a live parrot sitting in the mouth of an abandoned tumble dryer) but even I was surprised when I noticed the horse.

Not least because it had taken me this long
to
notice him. He limped out of the shadow by the overturned trailer, took a half-dozen unsteady steps, then stood, trembling. He didn’t appear to be tethered.

He didn’t move when I approached him. (Not knowing, quite, why I was approaching him. Except at the soft insistence—Lash-enriched—of the air around me, that even in its reek of engine oil and human shit
said
to approach him.) It was very quiet. One of the street lights buzzed. I was aware of time, of wasting valuable seconds and minutes in which Justine’s trail could only be cooling—but I couldn’t help it. My practical self was working through the understandable questions:
How could a horse be …? Whose …? Surely a permit … And not even tied … How could …?
While the rest of me had accepted the moment’s obscure gravity.

I couldn’t remember when I’d seen an animal in worse shape. Aside from his grotesque thinness and distended belly there were unhealed
gashes all over him. His left eye was swollen shut by a hot, delighted infection. There were maggots in one wound on his right foreleg. Sepsis oozing from another on his haunch. When I put my hand gently on his quivering neck, he urinated, a hot arrow of blood. Via an impenetrable association he reminded me of the old beggar man I’d seen on the drive at Las Rosas. I’d forgotten about that. The crutch, the grinning face, the cryptic remark: You’re going the wrong way.

“Shshsh,” I said, though the horse hadn’t, beyond his laboured breathing, made a sound. I rested my forehead against his muzzle. His shivering was almost a thing of disgust.

I don’t quite know how long we stood together like that, out of time. I was thinking of the scene in
Crime and Punishment
that never failed to wreck my heart, the milk-cart horse whipped to death by his driver, the crowd laughing, egging the driver on—but there was something else it reminded me of, something …

It didn’t matter. I fetched the pistol, a Glock 32, from the VanHome’s glovebox (Justine insisted on a gun in every vehicle) and drew his head down and placed the barrel in his ear. I worried for a moment that the noise would attract attention. But the area had already made it clear that gunshots weren’t rarities here. In any case, I was resolved.

His big skull was full of exhaustion. I embraced him, gently.

Then stood back and pulled the trigger.

I picked up Justine’s scent again thirty minutes later. West on West Carey Boulevard, south on Martin Luther King, west on Balzar Avenue. Warm. Warmer. Hot. Red hot. 1388. By which time I didn’t need her scar on the atmosphere. By which time the spilled blood was blaring.

Sunrise eighty-two minutes away. I wasn’t worried. The VanHome had a built-in blackout compartment. (Justine should have taken this instead of her Jeep.) I’d go to one of the underground casino lots. There was time.

I found Karl Leath as she’d left him (aside from the glut of circumstantial evidence there was no mistaking either my girl’s physical scent or its soul’s correlate), on his back on the bed, one pale and varicosed leg
hanging over the edge, bottom jaw missing, throat torn open. His eyes were wide, showing mostly whites. His tongue lolled, lewd and frank as an Aztec god’s.

“She made quite a mess,” a female voice said.

At the risk of redundancy, let me tell you I’m not easily startled. It had probably been a thousand years since anyone had given me a fright. But I’d poured all my consciousness into Justine’s slipstream and left none for what was going on in my own. Therefore I started—and turned.

“She’s new, obviously,” the vampire said.

She was standing in the bedroom doorway, hands by her sides. Tied back blonde hair, glacier-blue eyes, white skin and a full red mouth. Red, white and blue so vivid the Tricolour flashed in my memory. Dark jeans, riding boots, black leather motorbike jacket. All of which had seen better days. She’d fed, recently. The blood-glut’s throb came through her body’s aura of dust and gasoline and burnt flesh. She wasn’t alone. Someone else was in the kitchen.

It took me a moment—memory wobbled and flailed and wrenched itself back into balance—then I knew her: Mia Tourisheva.

There was history. Three years ago her vampire son, Caleb, had been captured by WOCOP and incarcerated. Talulla, held at the same facility, had escaped and taken the boy with her, saving his life. Which would have left Ms Tourisheva in her debt, had Talulla not done what she did next. What she did next was threaten to torture and kill Caleb herself unless his mother infiltrated the vampire cult holding
Talulla’s
son and helped her rescue him. Mia had had no choice. In the rescue operation that followed (I was there—Justine had filled me in—as Marco Ferrara) relations between the two women were further complicated by Talulla saving
Mia’s
life—and returning Caleb to her unharmed.