High Bloods Read Online Free PDF

sure.”
    “She’s a biologist?”
    “Anthropologist. I didn’t catch your last name, Beatrice.”
    “Harp. Like I could be playing right now if you hadn’t paid such a timely call on Artie.”
    “From where I saw it, you would’ve done a first-rate job of defending yourself.”
    Beatrice didn’t say anything, only shuddered. She was still holding back a lot of fright and anguish. She began to lick herlips again. I put down the window on her side to let the night air stream in.
    “I don’t think there’s much I’ll be able to tell you,” she said. “I mean—a motive. And since when do werewolves bear a grudge? Artie lived under the radar anyway. Always careful. Didn’t make enemies.”
    “That you know of. I’m not so much interested at this point in the motive for his killing. What concerns me is that someone may have learned to control and direct the murderous impulse of a Hairball.”
    Beatrice looked at me. We were both thinking the same thing.
    “Maybe that’s the motive,” she said.
    At this time of night there was almost no traffic except for the near-silent glide of monorail trains and the automated Pacific Electric MagLev transit system. Few vehicles other than those used by tradesmen or others for official use were allowed on the streets of the Privilege. Requirements to own a private vehicle were strict.
    Of the 28 million population of SoCal, about a third resided in the Privilege. Of that number nearly one hundred percent were High Bloods. I say “nearly” because we can never be completely sure. LC disease was always only a few careless moments of ecstasy away.
    Private residences had become nearly nonexistent south of Sunset Boulevard. More than three hundred condominiums of thirty stories or better were jammed into the twelve square miles of the walled city, just enough room between them to allow for swaying in an R-8 earthquake. Anything stronger than that and much of the Privilege would, in less than sixty seconds, become a very large tribal burial mound for extraterrestrial archaeologists of the far future to puzzle over.
    I turned right off Sunset at Benedict Canyon.
    Breva Way was a serpentine road through a much smaller canyon like a barranca, with acacia-covered bluffs above it. The homes were tucked away from the road behind hibiscus hedges, pepper and eucalyptus trees, high brick and stone walls covered in roses or bougainvillea thick enough to conceal the coils of razor wire. The still air was redolent with the rich, dark, stinking fertilizer the gardeners spread over emerald lawns.
    A private patrol pickup truck came slowly toward us. I blinked a code with my lights, because the Humvee had no ILC decal on it.
    “You live around here?” Beatrice said. “I’m impressed.”
    “No, you’re not,” I said. “Anyway I’m just house-sitting.”
    I don’t think she believed me. “What possessed you to become a Wolfer? It’s less dangerous skydiving with an umbrella.”
    “
Faute de mieux
,” I said.
    “‘For want of anything better,’” Beatrice translated. She didn’t believe that either. When she looked at me this time she was able to smile. “Oh, yeah. Just a tough guy with the heart of an idealist.”
    “Maybe I think civilization is worth saving,” I said. I stopped the Hummer to key in the code that opened the gates of 141 Breva Way. “What do you want from life, Beatrice?”
    “To go on living it.”

3
    hose were the last words Beatrice said to me for quite a while, although she did favor me with a low, two-note whistle on her first look at the layout as we drove toward the house at the rear of a three-acre lot on a curving drive paved with brown river stones set in concrete.
    My mother’s house was Japanese, a three-thousand-square-foot
minka
, or farmhouse, with an entrance pavilion that enclosed a garden of raked gravel, more smooth round stones, and bonsai banyan trees.
    My father had inherited tens of millions of oil money, which I suppose kept