High Bloods (3 page)

I did what the old-time flyboys call a “Mongo Flip” and came down a little off balance, staggerng backward as I pulled my compact .45 from its quick-release holster. As Artie’s head finished its trip down his desk and made a streak of red on the nearby wall beneath a horror show of a Francis Bacon painting, I shot three times through a jet of blood from Artie’s toppling body, the shots counterpoint to the screams from Artie’s girls.

If you’re going to drop a werewolf stone-dead you shoot it through the heart or pineal gland. With silvertips. Otherwise you’ll just annoy it. I missed the vital spots but the impact of high-velocity silvertips jolted her just long enough to allow me
to scramble farther away—but only marginally beyond her leaping distance.

The she-wolf looked at me with rapt eyes that I found vaguely familiar. I hit her again dead center on the breastbone, which may have deflected most of the slug away from her heart. The she-wolf shuddered but didn’t fall.

She howled then.

No matter how hardened you believe yourself to be by the terrors of combat or by the experienced hunter’s realization that his dangerous prey might now be stalking him, when a werewolf howls, literally in your face, you pee like an infant in its diaper. No matter how many times you may have heard it, how many of them you’ve managed to kill, you can’t help yourself.

Werewolves are half wolf, half human, with powerful jaws. And something a little extra to stupefy the senses: that nauseating fecal odor. But a ghostly imprint of humanness lurks in their hairy faces, particularly around the eyes. If you have to kill or be killed, that startle reaction to the imprint can be distracting for a fatal instant.

I wasn’t likely to be distracted, or miss again.

But before I got off the killshot something winked in the air past my head. The blade of a silver throwing knife sliced into the monster a notch below her jaw, cutting off the howl she was raising.

The impact of the knife jolted the she-wolf. Pain flared in her yellow eyes. I sensed her losing interest in killing me, and eased the pressure of my finger on the trigger.

The she-wolf looked up, then leaped straight off the floor and caught the frame of the shattered skylight with one hand.

“Kill her!” Beatrice shouted at me.

But I didn’t fire again. The she-wolf pulled herself up through the skylight space and swung out into the moonlight, already struggling and woozy. But she was able to bound away. A string of
werewolf blood fell from some jagged glass into the corrupted air of the loft.

I hadn’t finished her off for a couple of reasons. One, she had so much silver in her hide she wasn’t going to last another hour anyway. And two: if she died before she skinnydipped then she couldn’t tell me some things I needed to know, and fast.

“How do I get to the roof?” I yelled at Beatrice.

But she was already running past me, veering from the body of Artie Excalibur that was bleeding out and destroying the value of his rare carpet. Artie had always liked nice things. Probably there were worse places to die, although I would’ve preferred not to have
my
head thirty feet away, eyes still open and watching it happen.

“Follow me!” Beatrice yelled back.

“Where do you think
you’re
going?”

I voiced Sunny Chagrin’s ILC call sign on my wristpac.

“That knife cost me five thousand and I want it back!”

I couldn’t blame her; the price of silver was now close to four thousand an ounce, in Beverly Hills Free Zone dollars, when you could find any for sale.

Beatrice had given me a little time. Somehow our she-wolf, an undiscriminating killer like all of them, had rationalized her situation and chosen to get the hell out of there. Showing any sort of reasoning ability or discretion was aberrant behavior for werewolves.

Besides silver there are other methods of defense against them, all problematical. Animal tranquilizers or anesthetics sometimes made werewolves a little giddy, but that was all. Wolfsbane temporarily befuddled the youngsters. Essence of wolfsbane in a spray bottle was a useful item, which we all carried in addition to our choice of firepower. But unlike junkyard dogs, werewolves seldom let you know they’re around. There are those people who believe in spells, symbols, and incantations to keep
werewolves away from the home place. It has been a thriving quack industry for decades.

Sunny answered. “What’s up, R?”

“We’ve got a Hairball on the roof of Excalibur’s. Artie has lost his head. The Hairball is toting silver and should be powering down.”

“Wha—? A Hairball? Are you fuckin’
serious?
”

“We were nearly nose to nose for a few seconds. I want de Sade’s and the immediate neighborhood iso’d. Roll the wagons, but no Zippos. We need remains, not ashes.”

I sprinted after Beatrice, who was jumping nimbly up a spiral of iron stairs to the roof. Couldn’t fault her for courage. But if the she-wolf still had any fight in her, Beatrice’s head could roll too as soon as she set foot on the roof.

I caught up to her and grabbed her by her Peter Pan tunic before she could stick her head out into the night.

“What are you planning to do, take her on bare-handed?”

“Okay,
you
go first.”

The building was oblong in shape, with a fire escape to the alley behind it. As soon as I reached the roof in the misty moonlight I heard the monster clattering down the fire escape. Mid-roof there was a trio of TRADs—for Taser Remote Area Denial—on their tripods, but for some reason none were operative. If they had been, the she-wolf would have been bouncing around the intersecting force fields like a shaggy tennis ball.

I pulled Beatrice up after me.

“Did Artie deactivate his TRADs?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Why would he do that?”

We ran to the fire escape just as the she-wolf made it to the alley between a couple of Dumpsters. She paused long enough to look up at us with eyes that shone like isotopes. I aimed my .45 to hobble her, but she was off like a streak. She jumped twelve feet
from the alley to a barred window of the four-story apartment building next door, tore the bars out of the concrete, and disappeared headfirst inside, smashing through the window.

“This can’t be happening,” Beatrice said, licking her lips as if she were about to be sick. “Can it?”

We heard screams from inside the apartment the she-wolf had invaded.

“I guess it can,” Beatrice said, still licking, her face momentarily blank from shock. Then she turned her head and threw up violently.

I raised Sunny again. She was breathing as if she were coming our way at a dead run.

“The Hairball’s gone to ground,” I said. “Montmorency apartments. How far away are you?”

“Block and a half.”

“Get the PHASR out of the Humvee. As long as the bitch is alive I want to keep her that way. Sunny, you’ve got the atrium entrance to the building.”

“You haven’t explained how—”

“I don’t have any answers. Maybe she’s just one of Nature’s little anomalies.”

“We hope and pray. How do you know the Hairball is a she-wolf?”

“Because,” I said, “she doesn’t have a dick. Swell pair of boobs, though.”

“Oh, ha-ha. R?”

“What?”

“Don’t go in there after her. Wait for—”

“I’m closest, Sunny. And children may be sleeping in their beds. They don’t need a nightmare like this one.”

“So be a macho asshole. And good luck.”

I went over the parapet to the fire escape and began climbing down. Beatrice finished retching and followed me.

“Go back,” I told her.

“If I stop moving I’ll shake myself to pieces. I’d rather be with you. Maybe I could help. And I still want my knife.”

I wasn’t going to get into the condominium the way the she-wolf had managed. The screams had stopped abruptly. But lights were coming on in the building. It was quiet now. Not a good quiet. My closest point of entry was the underground parking garage, locked down behind rolling gates. I headed for it. People were congregating at either end of the alley, attracted by the screams. I heard sirens; they were eight or ten blocks away.

I used my electronic jimmy to decode the key card access lock outside the gates. They parted slowly.

The building’s basement garage was a single floor. Two slots per occupant was the norm in a condo like the Montmorency. I went down the ramp with my .45 in hand, Beatrice close behind me, our footfalls echoing. The lighting was barely adequate. The garage looked nearly full, chockablock with expensive sets of wheels, some of them wearing customized dust shrouds.

I took it slow getting to the stairs at the front of the building. Beatrice reached out to touch me a couple of times. Maybe to tell me she had my back, or just to reassure herself.

There was a small elevator next to the stairs. I started up to the lobby level, then heard the elevator’s whine. My hair may have gotten a little whiter. I backed down to the basement floor, bumping into Beatrice.

“Stay put,” I said. “And don’t give me any sass.”

In the alley outside, police vehicles screeched to a stop within a few seconds of each other. They would be SoCal Sheriff’s deputies; the West Hollywood substation was nearby.

The elevator stopped. The door opened. I drew a bead with the .45.

There she was, overwhelming the small space inside, a foot planted on the crumpled remains of some unlucky soul. His gore dripped from her jaws.

We stared at each other.

Midway in the garage a deputy worked the slide on a shotgun while the other cast his light on our little tableau. The silver hilt of Beatrice’s throwing knife gleamed at the base of the she-wolf’s throat.

“Keep back!” I warned the uniforms. Not that they were eager or equipped to rush into the fray. To the she-wolf I said, “Be a good girl and don’t give me any more trouble.”

But her eyes were glazing from trauma as she came limping out of the cabinet-sized elevator toward me. She was bent over and making sounds of distress. Slowly she lifted her head again and tried to glare at me. I heard a ghostly, burbling voice.

“Piss… in your face, Wolf… er.”

She choked then and coughed up a gout of blood. I heard the start-up roar of a powerful engine close by. Talk about ghosts. A gray-shrouded SUV with only a view slit at windshield level on the driver’s side burned rubber leaving its space and barreled straight at me.

I had two blinks of an eye to throw myself from its path as Beatrice shouted a warning. I collided with a concrete pillar, left shoulder and the side of my head. I slumped to the floor with my field of vision full of sparklers as the SUV panic-stopped between the she-wolf and me.

The automatic in my hand felt as heavy as an anvil. I could barely lift it. What physical effort I was capable of went into crawling away from the path of the shrouded SUV. From the size of the tires, the shape of it, I figured Navigator or Escalade.

The driver gunned his engine as if he were thinking about making another run at me.

I crawled a little farther behind the pillar. The garage echoed
voices. Flashlight beams overlapped on the walls of the garage. I rolled over onto my back like a whale rolling over on the ocean floor. My head throbbed and I tasted blood on my lower lip.

I raised my head but couldn’t locate the she-wolf, and every passing second without knowing her whereabouts chilled my blood a degree lower.

There was a scuffle of feet on the side of the SUV away from me. A door slammed shut. Then the SUV burned rubber again. It was instantly pedal-to-the-metal and heading for the exit, taking hits from a couple of Remington police models, which slowed it not at all.

I made it to my knees in time to see the SUV scatter Socal-West sheriff’s deps as it drove up the ramp, demolished the back end of a cruiser parked in the alley, and roared away.

Beatrice appeared cautiously from behind another pillar. I looked at the dead guy in the elevator. His head was where it belonged, meaning the she-wolf had only eviscerated him, a next-favorite target of the breed.

But the Hairball was nowhere to be seen.

How the hell?

Beatrice kneeled beside me. She gently wiped my bloody lip with the back of a wrist. Sheriff’s deps were everywhere, some of them throwing down on me. The garage reeked of cordite and werewolf.

The confused deputies were yelling at me to put my gun down, as if I were a deranged felon.

“ILC!” I yelled back. “Anybody see where the Hairball went?”

“She’s in the SUV,” Beatrice said.

I didn’t see how she could be. But I took Beatrice at her word and barked at the uniforms, “Get a stop on that SUV!”

All they wanted was for someone to act like he was in charge. I gave them a look at my shield and they backed off respectfully. I tried moving my shoulder. Sore, but the collarbone wasn’t broken. Beatrice, grimacing, helped me to my feet.

“Take a look around upstairs,” I said to the uniforms. “There could be other victims.”

“Or other Hairballs?” one of them said.

“What you saw is not what you think you saw,” I told them, the best Official Denial I could come up with on short notice.

“The hell it wasn’t,” another dep muttered, but none of them seemed too sure. I told them to get moving. They preferred action to uncertainty, and three of them went running up the stairs to the lobby. A fourth deputy looked into the elevator, then placed a coroner call.

“How did the Hairball get into an SUV that was wearing a dust shroud?” I asked Beatrice.

“Some sort of Velcro thing, you know, like a tent flap? On the left side over the rear door. Zip, they were out of the vehicle. They grabbed the—the Hairball and pulled her inside. She didn’t resist. She looked half dead. Bloody all over. And she still has my—”

“They? How many?”

“Two big guys. Ninja dress. Black hoods. I couldn’t tell you much about—”

“Hey, hero!” Sunny Chagrin called to me. Still sounding out of breath.

I looked around. She was toting the big-ass PHASR (Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response) rifle from our department Humvee. The rifle uses laser beams to cause temporary blindness, even in werewolves.