Wolf's Cut (The Nick Lupo Series Book 5)

by W. D. Gagliani

  The seated men leaped up, their chairs toppling.

  But Corrado ripped Franco’s hands off his clothes and their blood mingled. “Shut up and listen, idiota!”

  His eyes bulged and Franco fleetingly thought the older partisan had gone insane in the few short years since they had last met. “Stupido, you were going to dance in there and, what, wave your dagger around? Slice off some cazzi? They would have eaten you and spit your bones out into the hall. There were too many in there for you to deal with…”

  He waved his men away and they sat, grumbling.

  But Franco wasn’t finished. He leaned forward and stuck his face into Corrado’s. “And you, you know blowing them up doesn’t work. Their fucking wounds heal!”

  “We are not so stupid, eh, bambino mio.”

  The goatee Corrado had always worn had filled out into a gray-flecked beard now and that, combined with his military greatcoat, gave him the look of a wild-eyed Bolshevik. Talon-like fingers gripped his chin and forced Franco to face the ex-partisan as he snarled, spittle flying.

  “We had two kilos of silver shrapnel in the bomb, you fool,” he said. “I know very well how effective that is in a roomful of werewolves. But you, you could have been killed by them if you’d stuck your nose in the door, or worse yet, you could have chased them off and now they would still be alive. Our bomb eliminated four—maybe five wolves. We can’t tell yet. The silver will make sure they’ll stay dead. None of those wounds are healing anytime soon. Capisci, Franchino? You would have made them chase you, all just to have your stupid revenge, eh?”

  Franco’s eyes shifted downward. He couldn’t take Corrado’s flaming gaze, the intensity of his hate for the wolves was so great. It seemed even greater than Franco’s own hate, but likely for completely different reasons.

  “Then why did you not try to stop me with reason? You must have been following me to find me just in time to keep me from botching your assassination attempt.”

  “Listen to me, you young fool,” Corrado spat out. “We would have talked to you if it would have done any good, but you were about to rush in there without any recon. Probably they would have torn you apart, but maybe there would have been enough time for you to get caught in our explosion—you would have been reduced to bits and pieces now being collected with a broom and dustpan…”

  The rest of the men in the room stayed out of the confrontation but remained wary. Franco knew he gave off hate and rage in waves. As hardened as they looked, he doubted they could have done what he had done since the war. But he didn’t know them and they were clearly loyal to the old partisan.

  He backed away from Corrado, his eyes still locked on the older man’s.

  “So you knew they met there, in that apartment?” he asked, his voice quieter, more under control now.

  “We knew. You killed one we were counting on getting alive, but I guess it doesn’t matter how they reach hell, or at whose hands. We could not have let him live very long, even though he had been useful to us before.” He paused wistfully.

  “Useful? You mean he collaborated with you?”

  Corrado smirked, then spat, “Don’t be ridiculous. He knew we would have killed him either way. No, this one had been useful without knowing it. We know whom to follow and when. If we didn’t follow some of the wolves with great care, we would have lost the lot of them. Sometimes infinite patience is the best virtue even if we would rather act in the moment. Anger and hate can be useful, but without some self-control they’ll get you killed. And then the fuckers win, no?”

  Franco nodded reluctantly. He chafed at lectures. He always had.

  “Let me join you,” Franco said.

  “No.”

  “I’ve proven myself!”

  “You can kill a wolf, sure, but you’re a lone wolf yourself. You don’t like rules, you don’t like to work with others.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  Corrado winked. “Sorry, Franchino, there is a point at which you can know too much. You have seen our faces, so you are almost there.” He winked at someone behind Franco’s shoulder.

  Franco started to whirl, his fists rising, but it was too late.

  He felt a pain in the back of the head, saw an explosion of fractured white light, then saw nothing but blackness as his head reached for the marble floor. And found it much too quickly.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Heather

  She had driven straight through to the southern outskirts of Milwaukee, right to a strip of crumbling independent no-tell motels she knew very well indeed. She’d sought anonymous safety here before. A quick cash transaction and she was barricaded in a second-floor room with hardly any floor space and a long streak of dark stains on the carpeting. She didn’t care, as long as she could power up her Macbook and take a look at Wineacre’s flash drive.

  She’d made a quick stop at a liquor depot—they were all over the place in the Milwaukee area, veritable warehouses of booze, and she was now indulging in a Scotch rocks, something for which she’d developed a taste after her initial werewolf bite. It took the sting out the butcher shop taste of human blood and gristle that lingered in her mouth after one of her wolfing experiences, as she thought of them. She didn’t need it now, but enjoyed the minor buzz it brought.

  Standing tall in her jeans and tight cotton top that played up her cleavage, she resembled nothing other than a gazelle in the wild.

  No, more of a predator than prey, she thought. Cheetah. Always on the move, always fast. Always looking good.

  She popped the drive into the laptop and double-clicked on the icon. It was an installer, and it did its thing and suddenly she had a no-nonsense directory up and started to click in, here and there, watching as windows popped up, reading some here, skimming there. She enlarged some document facsimiles so she could read signatures. There was a lot to read and look at, but she was getting the gist of it, when some kind of errant sound from the window made her paranoid’s sixth sense kick in and, despite figuring she had to be safe here, she took her Scotch to the window and peered through the rubber curtain.

  Across the wide parking lot, at the far end of the property, she saw two black SUVs with tinted windows pulling in and pausing just inside. Moments later they separated.

  Fuck!

  How, how did they track her here, and so quickly?

  Shit, after the glimpse she’d had of the Wineacre material, she had a good guess.

  She took the time to shut down the software, pulled the flash drive and stuck it in her pocket, then ran a program a hacker friend of hers had created for her. It’s guaranteed to destroy every fuckin’ byte on your hard drive and turn the computer’s insides into slag, he’d said. She’d commissioned it in case she ever had to make a quick exit and couldn’t be burdened with carrying any hardware.

  She peeked through the curtain and ascertained that a group of men in black was now starting to fan out at the far end of the lot.

  Taking only her leather jacket, her wallet, and the flash drive, Heather listened at her door for a moment, then slipped out into the deserted hall and was heading away from the commando group, down the stairs and out the back. There was a smaller parking lot back there, probably for staff, and then a narrow strip of scruffy bushes and trees struggling to survive among the fuel fumes, and she pushed her way through the greenery and found herself where she’d planned, at the farthest reaches of a truck stop crowded with resting semis and peopled with the bright-eyed clientele that usually signified artificial means of maintaining wakefulness. The heavy scent of bacon grease and fried chicken was a thick, noxious cloud. She ducked low and ran toward the parked trucks, some of them with lights on inside their sleeper cabs.

  As she ran, she unbuttoned the top three buttons of her top, making sure her chest was able to make a statement.

  Fifteen minutes later, after some quick and thoroughly enjoyable negotiations, she was headed out onto the interstate, seated next to a tall mountain of a man who smiled every ti
me his eyes roved past her cleavage.

  She’d told him she needed to get to downtown Milwaukee. She had always been heading there, of course she knew that even if she’d denied it, but now she had no choice.

  Far behind, Heather’s room was penetrated and her laptop hastily checked. Then it was skittered like a rock across a pond, cracking open its useless husk against the wall.

  DiSanto

  He shut down his phone a bit more abruptly than he’d planned and looked around to see if anyone had noticed.

  Louise, giving him hell again about missing a family event. It wasn’t his fault he’d drawn the double duty, but he supposed if Lupo had been back he might have been able to beg off early and make it to whatever it was—an in-law birthday? he’d forgotten—about which his wife was hassling him.

  So here he was, in essence covering Lupo’s ass again.

  DiSanto hated down time because it always led to dangerous, disturbing thoughts…

  His relationship with Nick Lupo had always been excellent, but he had to admit it had become complicated when he had been shown proof that monsters do exist after all.

  Nick Lupo was a werewolf.

  A fucking werewolf.

  He told himself that, once in a while, ever since the recent events that had led to the Washington, D.C., raid on a war contractor he’d seen on the news at contentious congressional hearings. He considered himself an open-minded individual, and he’d often bragged that he accepted the supernatural, but when it came down to it, he probably had been a complete skeptic.

  Until he’d watched a naked Lupo run toward the trees, then suddenly blur and come down running on four paws instead of two legs. Somehow, in some fucking bit of supernatural something DiSanto couldn’t possibly understand he’d turned into a large black wolf, and he’d looked over his shoulder at DiSanto and the others and fucking howled…

  DiSanto snickered. Wasn’t it funny how he’d run out of clichés to use that day, at least for a short while.

  He’d come to terms with it since then. He rarely referred to it, Lupo’s wolfing out, and certainly not where they could be overheard. He hadn’t confided in Louise, his wife. She was already on edge about the job and how it had become more complicated since he’d been partnered with Lupo. She wasn’t a big Nick Lupo fan, not Louise, nossir…

  Matter of fact, she’d disliked him almost from the first.

  Which reminded him about something. DiSanto had often wondered why Lupo’s two police psychologists had come to such strange ends. Julia Barrett—well, she had hated Lupo and tried to catch him red-handed, but had run smack into a serial killer. That was at least explainable, if fucking bizarre.

  But what about Marcowicz? What was his first name? DiSanto hadn’t liked the weaselly guy all that much, and he knew Lupo had suspected him of betraying his confidence to Internal Affairs. And then he’d disappeared, just up and vanished. Presto!

  Which was bad enough, but Marcowicz had disappeared at exactly the same time as the department’s top IA cop, Griff Killian, a dogged ex-New Yorker who had also seemed to have it in for one Nick Lupo.

  DiSanto had these thoughts often these days.

  Those guys hated Lupo. They got in his way, or caused him grief. Then they…disappeared.

  Sure, department scuttlebutt went all over the map.

  They’re a gay couple and eloped to get married!

  One killed the other and then took off.

  And other highly unlikely scenarios.

  But then there was: They were offed by a dirty cop and buried somewhere.

  DiSanto couldn’t be sure about Marcowicz. He was a wimpy therapist no one had really liked and who had raised few eyebrows with his going missing. People just figured he’d snapped, or dropped out. Run away from someone or something.

  But you couldn’t say that about Killian.

  That guy was a pit bull if ever there was one. He should have had denim scraps hanging from his snout from all the bad cops he’d chased and caught and convicted. He had been convinced Lupo was dirty and had gotten in his face, when he wasn’t busy stuffing it with those disgusting frozen burrito gut-bombs he used to stockpile in his office.

  He’d been after Lupo. And then he had disappeared.

  DiSanto glanced around the near-empty squad room. He put his feet up on his desk and leaned back, wishing he didn’t have these thoughts.

  Nick Lupo was a friend. Hell, a good friend. As well as his partner. And a fucking hero cop with a buttload of commendations who had helped more folks than DiSanto could count.

  But why did people who crossed him just…disappear?

  Or what about that gangbanger who’d been shot down in his car? Why did that also cause him the occasional paranoid episode?

  DiSanto wasn’t sure what had happened to that Wolfpaw CEO, either. Suicide, they had ruled. And it made sense. But only he, DiSanto, knew that just before the fatal gunshot Lupo and someone else he wondered about—that hot television reporter—had confronted Schlosser.

  He didn’t want to have these thoughts, but he did have them.

  Too many big coincidences?

  What had they said on Seinfeld, that infinite source of quotable lines?

  There are no big coincidences and small coincidences, there are only coincidences.

  And Ian Fleming had written of coincidental meetings that “the third time is enemy action.”

  And, for the record, DiSanto believed that there are big coincidences. And those were the ones that worried him.

  DiSanto shook his head. He was veering away from the focus of his worries.

  He knew damn well that Lupo was a good guy, but his life was undoubtedly complicated by the whole wolf thing, and DiSanto wasn’t sure his friend and partner was always in control. Both Lupo and Jessie Hawkins had alluded to these difficulties, and DiSanto remembered well that on the day they’d shared the secret with him she’d held a silver-loaded shotgun at the ready.

  Just in case, she’d said.

  Every month or so DiSanto fell prey to some of these thoughts and he wondered why.

  The squad phone bleated the annoying tone. Lupo kept changing it to the one he knew DiSanto hated the most. Despite his guilt-inducing thoughts, DiSanto grinned as he picked up the call.

  His grin faded as he listened.

  “Holy fuck,” he muttered.

  Other phones were starting to ring, the few nearby hands plucking up receivers, then grunts and curses following as other units heard the news.

  A minute later he dropped the phone and looked for Lupo in the squad room. Nope, not back yet. So now what? Roll without his partner, or try to track him down?

  He’d have to check with the lieutenant. He grabbed his coat.

  Not much reason to hurry, from what he’d been told.

  It was going to be a long night, and he might well end up handling it alone.

  Sometimes Nick Lupo seemed to be willing to juggle way too many balls. Or were they grenades?

  When he got into his car, he belted in and then dialed Lupo.

  Where the fuck was he?

  Lupo

  He was in the Maxima, Ghost Sam seeming to float in the seat beside him, when his phone played the theme he’d given DiSanto’s number: the red phone from Our Man Flint.

  “Yeah, Dee,” he said after he scooped his iPhone off the passenger seat, killing the comically annoying, insistent bleat.

  “Nick, I know you’re probably still too far away, but, man, we got a bad one. Remember that bus shooting?”

  Lupo didn’t bother to tell his partner he’d already gotten back. He hadn’t planned on going to work at all. “Yeah, I remember. That was, uh, Bilick’s case, right?”

  “Was. Man, this one’s so bad there’s already word Ryeland’s gonna put together a task force. I just had a call about that. Remember, they had dick since that shooting went down, what, about a month ago? Six weeks? But today the shit really blew up. Looks like a half-dozen dead on a downtown bus and a shitload mo
re killed and hurt when the bus went out of control and crashed the bus stop.”

  “Ah, fuck. You figure it’s the same guy?”

  DiSanto hissed through his teeth. “Seems likely, doesn’t it? I guess it could be a copycat. Either way, it’s an escalation. This is all-hands-on-deck stuff.”

  “Okay, I’m heading in.” Lupo started to edge to the next exit. “Meet you at the scene?”

  “I’m rolling now. It’s Water and Wisconsin, so I’m almost there already. Uniforms closed both streets down for about a half-mile. EMTs are starting to clean up the wounded. Just heard the TACs guys finished their sweep without findin’ anything, and forensics is on their way. It’s just us now, the ghouls.”

  “All right, see you there.”

  “Yeah. Sorry to ruin your afterglow, man…”

  “Yeah, later,” Lupo growled.

  You don’t know the half of it.

  DiSanto wasn’t as annoying as he had been back when they first partnered up on the gang task force, but now and again, even though he had graduated to homicide full-time, he went back to his early ways. But despite all that, Rich DiSanto was a good partner, a good sport for covering up some of Lupo’s problem areas, and a dead-eye with his Glock and most other weapons.

  All in all, even though Lupo gave him hell just because, he respected the hell out of his partner for having handled the knowledge of what he called his condition with some kind of grace and open-minded acceptance.

  Sometimes he could see in DiSanto’s eyes a kind of veil, as if suddenly he was reminded that this thing called a werewolf existed in his once-completely science-based world. When that happened, Lupo felt a little like an insect pinned to a board.

  But he’d been forced to share his secret with two men in recent times, and while Tom Arnow was gone, DiSanto was very much around and Lupo had no idea how he could manage without the younger man watching his back on occasion. DiSanto was a lot of things, but unreliable wasn’t one of them—in fact, he was the opposite, reliable to a fault. Lupo realized one of his greatest challenges would be to get Dee to see that occasionally they’d be forced to do some things off the books.