High Bloods (20 page)

The bedroom had been turned into an office: standard rental stuff designed to take a beating. Gray steel, an eighth of an inch of padding on the chair seats. Nothing on the desk blotter but two landline scrambler phones and a micro recorder. Also a pair of hands under a fluorescent lamp, palms down. The nails were buffed. He’d always taken good care of them. He hadn’t much liked the jobs that required him to get his hands dirty.

He motioned with his right hand. I sat down in one of the chairs that faced him squarely and we looked at each other. Nothing was said. After almost a minute of that he nodded slightly.

“How about taking off the shades, Rawson?”

I took them off and put them into an inside pocket of my coat. I had left the fedora in the Rover. I was still wearing my pirate’s black do-rag. I kind of liked it.

“How long has it been?” he said in a disinterested, bored tone of voice.

“Not long enough.”

When Cale DeMarco smiled, which was rare, it was a thin-lipped effort that always ended up with him sucking at a tooth somewhere in his mouth, making a noise like a minor expression of skepticism, or disgust. So he was seven years older, bearded now, a square salt-and-pepper job. Some men grew beards when their hair began thinning out. He wore glasses with a heavy-duty black frame. He’d been promoted twice while I was still in rehab after being nearly kicked to death by Raoul J. Ortega’s Diamondbacker posse and now he ran it all: director of SoCal ILC Intelligence Division. The Head Spook. He had acquired the bookish, professional look that lent added distinction to his eminence. Just the right amount of high seriousness in his demeanor.

“How are the headaches these days, R?”

“How are your hemorrhoids?” I said.

His smile concluded with a sibilant
tsk
.

“I know you’ve never been convinced that I had nothing to do with—outing you.”

“No, I still like you for it,” I said.

“I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can say, is there?”

“No problem, Cale. Ortega’s going to tell me all about it one of these days. Then I’ll be back to see you. Speaking of headaches.”

DeMarco sighed a little and spread his hands farther apart on the desktop. He looked down as if admiring the quality of his manicure.

“That attitude of yours is why you were always dangerous to work with,” he said. “And one reason why you’re about to be replaced at ILC SoCal.”

I felt a pulse jump in my throat and my head was starting to throb under the tight do-rag. I don’t think much of anything showed in my face. But whatever he saw there caused him to sit back warily in his ergonomic chair.

“Oh well,” I said. “Down and out in Beverly Hills again. What do you have on me that you think will stick, or do I only get the particulars at Kangaroo Court?”

“I don’t mind telling you.” He had recovered his cool and gazed at me with a certain forbearance, as if he were counseling a backsliding drunk. His lips twitched a little and he made that sucking sound again. “Your clumsy, clownish actions at Angeltowne Livery tonight may have negated months of work on a vital investigation we’ve been conducting. I stress
vital.
”

“An investigation that involves Raoul J. Ortega? If it’s blood you’re after, there are six big refrigerators of it in an upstairs storeroom. Assuming Ortega is connected to the limo place in some documented way, then you should have enough to put him in Rocky Peak for a few years.”

“We’re not interested in Ortega’s bloodlegging activities. It isn’t illegal for any citizen to stockpile blood.”

“If he’s selling it and the blood is tainted—”

“Try proving he knows it’s tainted. We don’t have any plans to put Ortega away. Let it go at that.”

I stared at him. A few seconds’ worth of astonishment and disbelief, then naked hate that choked me like something malignant growing in the throat.

“What about Mal Scarlett? And maybe a dozen other Lycan celebrities he’s arranged to do their hairing-up at
mal de lune
shoots in the past?”

DeMarco raised a hand from the desk just enough to brush the suggestion of Mal away with two fingers, as if a fly had annoyed him.

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“The fuck. You know everything that’s been going on at Angeltowne for weeks! You know Sunny Chagrin dropped by looking for Elena Grace, and now Sunny is dead. Mal Scarlett was a prisoner upstairs, probably not the first they’ve held there, until only a few hours ago. Where did they take her, DeMarco?”

“Wayward Lycans are your responsibility.
Were
your responsibility. I personally don’t give a damn how many werewolves are slaughtered to raise the testosterone levels of Privilege bigshots with exaggerated notions of their prowess as hunters.”

He pushed his chair back because he knew I was coming for him, right across the desk. I was out of my chair and he had his automatic half pulled from the shoulder rig he wore, looking at me expectantly, with the arrogant satisfaction his kind feel knowing they own somebody, dead or alive. He would have had a half second’s advantage, and that half second might have been enough.

I exhaled, the blood in my head half blinding me. The door opened and the Greek kid named Paulo looked in and said casually, “Hey, easy, fellas. What’s the ruckus about?”

We both glanced at him. He was smiling, but with a hard
light in his eyes that emphasized the winner of our kill-or-be-killed session wasn’t going to have a chance to celebrate.

I wondered just who the hell he was, and who he worked for. It sure wasn’t Cale DeMarco.

The gloves-wearing woman walked into the room behind him. Paulo fetched the other chair for her and she sat erect with her back to the wall, looking us over, her hidden hands lying twisted on one thigh. The ash of her cigarette was about an inch long. Paulo gently removed the half-smoked cigarette from her lips. She didn’t look at him. Her eyes were on me. Paulo squashed the gasper on the wood floor and scuffed out the sparks remaining with the sole of a boot. Then he leaned against the wall a couple of feet from her with his arms folded. I was getting a crick in my neck looking around at them. I wondered if her hands were so useless she needed help getting dressed. Or undressed. And did Paulo in addition to bringing her a chair and fussing with her smokes do those chores as well? A very curious couple. I had the impression she found me interesting. But we all like to think we’re interesting. They had DeMarco behaving like a kid suddenly called to the principal’s office.

But he stopped fidgeting, joined his hands on the desktop, and took a firm tone with me.

“I want to know what you were doing at Angeltowne tonight. Why did you suddenly assault that Mexican in the men’s room?”

“Let’s get this straight,” I said. “I don’t have to answer questions about an ongoing murder investigation.”

“Ah,” he said, flicking his gaze at the impassive pair aligned along the bedroom wall. “So tonight was all about Sunny Chagrin?”

“The greaser in question,” I said, “kindly phoned me up when I visited Valdemar a couple of nights ago and told me where I could find the package they’d dropped off for me. ‘Dropped off’ doesn’t quite describe how Sunny came to be there on the terrace
of the house. According to the forensic guys, she was dragged across a cobblestone-paved auto court and down a couple of flights of stone steps wearing nothing but razor wire. The greaser in question Tasered me a few hours ago, then attempted to dump me under the back wheels of a tractor-trailer rig. Elena Grace bailed me out of that one. You’ll be happy to know she managed to do it without blowing her cover.”

I waited for his reaction. He sucked at a tooth that might suddenly have pained him and said slowly, “Elena… Grace?”

“You have her working undercover,” I said impatiently. Headache was causing my vision to blur. “Cozied up to Raoul Ortega for God knows what purpose.”

DeMarco looked again at the Greeks auditing us like a couple of Furies from an obscure tragedy that had no name.

I said, “And with every breath she takes she’s in danger of being killed herself.”

DeMarco paid me full attention again, and shook his head.

“Elena Grace? What would she be doing with—”

“An evil murdering son of a bitch like Ortega? Good point. He knows exactly who she is, who she used to be, what we meant to each other, and what she became after she was raped. I can understand how it might all work for Ortega—a demented exercise in power, an ego thing—keeping his former victim and now a rogue werewolf dangerously close to him. A game he enjoys playing. For now. What I don’t get is the leverage you must have used to persuade Elena to cooperate in
your
game. Because if there’s hate in her bones, it’s hatred of Ortega.”

I was breathing too fast. It was injury on top of permanent pain to think of Elena with the man who had ordered me killed, who was laughing at me from behind the wall of immunity he enjoyed, a wall provided by Cale DeMarco.

“Leverage… ?” DeMarco said. He looked exasperated. “Elena Grace has nothing to do with us, Rawson. Jesus. I haven’t spoken to her in years.”

I heard the click of a cigarette lighter and turned for another look at the Greeks on my periphery. This time I thought there might be a family resemblance. The gloves-wearing woman puffed on the unfiltered cigarette that Paulo held for her. I made a grab from memory, retrieved and placed her. Yes. There she was, looking at me the length of a wide echoing hallway that was all marble, old gold, frescoes, thirty-foot ceilings hung with chandeliers. A former palace, now a palatial public building. Late sixteenth century, maybe. I had been there on business. ILC business. She was the only woman in a group of men, ministry level from the looks of them. She’d been smoking there too. I was crossing that hall with all the Renaissance statuary to a curved flight of stairs when our eyes met. We may have looked at each other for about three seconds while I hesitated a step. I hadn’t learned then, or been curious enough to ask, who she was.

“You have a name?” I said rudely to her. I was fed up with the whole performance, for which she and the young Greek god-type seemed to have recruited me as an audience of one.

She stared at me unblinkingly through a blue cloud of expelled smoke. Paulo leaned on the wall again, agreeably holding her cigarette for her.

One of the sly phones on DeMarco’s desk played part of the
Godfather
theme.

“Rome,” I said to the gloves-wearing woman. “About four years ago, wasn’t it? But you were only wearing a glove on one hand then.”

This time she blinked.

Paulo smiled slightly and looked down at her and whispered something in Greek.

“
What?
” DeMarco yelled, or almost yelled, to whoever had called. He was exasperated again. I looked at him. He listened for a few more seconds, then slammed the phone receiver down.

“What the
fuck
did you do?” he demanded.

“The decent, humane thing,” I said. “There was a badly injured man in the men’s room at Angeltowne. I think he may have fractured his skull when he slipped and hit his head on the toilet. He also happens to be either a murderer or a material witness in a murder case. Which is why I notified ILC Medevac to transport him by helicopter to the prison hospital at San Jack Town for treatment. He’ll be guarded twenty-four/seven in ICU where Ortega won’t be able to get to him. Once El Gordo is on the mend and coherent there’s a chance I’ll get a statement from him implicating Ortega in Sunny’s death. Sorry if that blows up some shit of yours, DeMarco.”

“You have no damn idea of the trouble you’ve caused, how badly you’ve set us back! But that’s it. You’re gone, pal. You’re history where ILC is concerned. I’ll see to it personally.”

“Mr. DeMarco?” Paulo said, before I could react. “I have a suggestion.”

His words were polite, but his tone had an edge that denied politeness. It said,
Time for you to shut up and listen
.

aulo took his leave from the wall he’d been holding up
and seated himself on a corner of the gray steel desk, one foot on the floor. He formed a triangle with DeMarco and myself. His gold medallion glinted in the leak light from the gooseneck desk lamp. His face, turned to me, was sculptured shadow. DeMarco ran a hand over the top of his head where his hair was thinnest and looked about to say something to reestablish himself as the honcho of our little group.

The Greek gave an earlobe a tweak between thumb and forefinger and said, for DeMarco’s benefit but without a glance at him, “I think Mr. Rawson might agree that it makes sense at this point to release a report that his material witness in hospital lapsed into a deep coma and is surviving on life support. Thus giving Raoul Ortega temporary peace of mind.”

I grinned at him. “Did you say ‘thus?’”

“Cambridge,” he said. “I read medieval Middle European history.”

“Run across any references to werewolves in the good old stuff?”

“Some. But I guess my interest in the species is the same as yours: finding a way to survive them.”

“Okay. My material witness or whatever he is lingers near
death and there’s no hope for him. Sound about right to you, Cale?”