Wolf's Blind (The Nick Lupo Series Book 6)

by W. D. Gagliani

  Outrunning drones was possible, but not easy. Not easy at all. And getting harder by the day. He’d learned the hard way. He knew he’d just been lucky. And luck wasn’t anything to count on for consistency.

  He wasn’t afraid of them, whether they were Wolfpaw or whatever name they chose to call themselves now, but he didn’t want innocent people in his building hurt because of him. Maybe they were still called ODESSA, like in the Frederick Forsyth novel he had read as a kid, The ODESSA File. Pretty good movie, too, with Jon Voight. His father had seen it but made no comment, even though the legendary Simon Wiesenthal himself was a consultant.

  What must have gone through his head when he saw the movie about Nazis escaping from Europe? When ODESSA wasn’t even close to being a figment of someone’s imagination, because most of the research had been accurate?

  Did Frank Lupo burn with hate for Nazis or werewolves?

  It was clear why he had hated the Nazis, but his own father—Nick’s grandfather—had become a werewolf. And Frank Lupo had killed his own father in cold blood.

  Was that why he had a Beretta shotgun always loaded with silver shot and slugs?

  Would he have killed me too, if he had found out I was turned into a werewolf by our neighbor, Andy?

  Lupo thrashed on his bed. He couldn’t turn off his brain.

  If Jessie had been there, she would have known how to keep him from thinking too much.

  Although Jessie was becoming a part of his many problems now. Not intentionally, not maliciously, but her impassioned request for his bite reminded him of all those cheesy horror movies about vampires tortured by the choice of whether they should turn their lovers or not.

  Why are they always vampires, he thought. Why not a goddamn werewolf once in a while?

  Christ, I’m rambling through a catalog of my complaints and fears when I should really be sleeping.

  What was Corrado doing right now? Lupo wondered how much he could trust the old man. No matter how slick-tongued he was—the man had made a living deceiving pretty much everyone around him, and those he didn’t merely deceive he killed.

  Lupo had no doubts about Corrado’s efficiency as a werewolf killer. He could see it in the hooded eyes, the set of the jaw. He could only imagine how efficient he had been as a young partisan commander, ruthlessly killing Germans by slitting their throats or stabbing them from behind. But what kind of mental tug of war went on in his head?

  The sad thing, Lupo realized, was that Corrado’s tug of war probably didn’t look much different from his own.

  Christ.

  So now should he suddenly believe everything Corrado had to say? How in the hell was someone who had been barely out of his teens during the war now involved in whatever high stakes game these cult-like secret groups were playing? How much was Corrado not telling him? And not for the first time he wondered how connected the old man might be, and connected to whom.

  He was still tossing and turning, which was the way he often chewed at cases until answers popped into his head, primarily when he stood in the shower under a hot spray after a night of little sleep.

  He still couldn’t figure out how Corrado had been able to find his firearms in order to sabotage their firing pins. Lupo had gone to great pains to devise ways to hide them, such as hinged flaps hidden under bookcase shelves.

  With sleep still eluding him, he padded into his living room after pouring himself a generous shot of B&B. He licked his lips at the thought of the sweet golden liquid and the way it would burn pleasantly down his throat. It was a go-to in the chilly North Woods air, but he enjoyed it anytime, anywhere.

  He glanced through a shelf of movies on DVD. He was streaming a fair amount of his entertainment now, but he still had a good-sized collection of titles, some of which had belonged to Sam Waters. Like the complete Bond series. Lupo passed over those now—too many memories.

  My problem is I’m too sentimental, he thought. At least, too sentimental for a werewolf.

  He sipped the golden brandy and Benedictine concoction and let it pleasantly warm his belly. It might help him settle down and sleep. Half-heartedly, he searched through his streaming choices on the large television, but nothing caught his eye.

  Fuck, I can’t even have insomnia the right way…

  He had the sound turned way down, preferring the company of his own thoughts, so he was able to hear a soft rustle out in the hall.

  Almost no one else could have heard it through the armored door, which he had installed after the recent raid on his place, but his hearing was much better developed than non-werewolves. It was one advantage of his condition he had learned to use.

  Silently, he made his way to a set of bookcases and reached under a shelf, flicking a latch that opened one of his hidden flaps, which dropped down and put a compact Sig Sauer into his hand. He’d replaced the firing pin in this gun, too—Corrado had been thorough during his exploratory visit.

  He kept the pistol decocked with a round in the breech, ready to fire, so now he carefully padded toward the door. He’d had the door made especially for his purposes, without any gaps between it and the casing and jambs which meant it wouldn’t reveal his shadow to whoever lurked out in the corridor.

  It might be a neighbor, though whoever it was he had stopped making the rustling sound.

  Lupo undid his locks as quietly as he could, then pulled the door open in one quick move. He leapt into the hall, pistol extended in front of him as he checked both directions.

  There was no one there.

  But there had been someone there, Lupo would have bet on it.

  He considered forcing a change so he could bring to bear the Creature’s olfactory senses, but it was too dangerous to give the wolf this much freedom in a building hallway when anyone could come up the stairs or off the elevator, or open a door. He tried to taste the air, to see if he could pick out the intruder’s scent, but it was hopeless. He’d had limited success getting full use of the Creature’s nostrils when not wearing his wolf shape.

  He tucked the gun into his waistband and retreated into his place.

  Was he just overreacting, or had someone lurked outside his door?

  Goddamn it, what the fuck is going down?

  He really could feel it in the air—something was gathering, preparing to strike. A new plot, a new group, a new enemy. An extension of the old enemies. Could he ever get out? Could he ever kill the snake’s head, or would he forever chop off chunks of the body just to watch them regenerate as his own foot had done?

  He flung his hands up in a sort of Italian shrug of surrender, a gesture typical of his family’s heritage, and muttered a Genoese curse. He couldn’t pronounce it as well as his father, but it amused him.

  He froze, his hands still extended outward.

  He stared past his right hand and noticed something he hadn’t seen before. Either a spider, or some kind of a black fleck in the corner of the cornice molding, just below his ceiling. It didn’t move, so maybe it wasn’t a spider. He went closer and then he could see it didn’t have legs, so not a spider.

  What the fuck?

  Lupo pulled one of his dining chairs closer, a solid old mission style piece that would hold his weight. He positioned it under the fleck, which still didn’t move, and popped lightly up onto the seat. His face only inches from the fleck, understanding washed over him. And rage.

  Fuckin’ thing was a pinhole. Wanna bet there’s a camera behind it?

  From his perch he examined the other corners he could see. Diagonally across from him was another fleck.

  The bastard Corrado had video-bugged him, literally.

  In a rage he made his fingers into claws and pulled off the corner, which was just loose enough, stripping a section of the cornice right off the painted drywall. With a tug he ripped the whole section from the wall and tossed it to the floor. The camera was tiny, but he saw the reflection of his lights on the lens.

  He flipped off whoever was watching or recording, feeling the heat
of his rage.

  Still fuming, muttering to himself, he grabbed a hefty MagLite from a closet and went on a hunt through his place. He found five more flecks, and behind each one was a camera. A long screwdriver smashed each of the lenses, then reached in and pried out the electronics. He snipped the wires, although he was sure they were all sending to a hidden wireless transmitter. At some point he would bust through and yank that, as well.

  Rage washed over him yet again as he thought of the times he and Jessie had had sex in various rooms. And positions.

  Jesus fuckin’ Christ.

  He had a bone to pick with that fucker, Corrado. Another bone.

  He wondered if it had been Corrado out in the hall, or one of his henchmen. Or if it had been someone else. Another player in this game?

  He was starting to lose track of all the players. As soon as he neutralized danger from one direction, something arose from another. He’d have to warn Jessie—maybe Corrado had bugged her place, too. It wasn’t unlikely, if the old man wanted to keep an eye on him, literally.

  Lupo stalked the halls of his place. It wasn’t so much that he felt violated, as people do when they’ve had a break-in, though he certainly did…no, it was that he felt weak and easily outplayed, outmaneuvered. Predictable.

  And he began to see that the game board was expanding. Whenever he thought he knew the boundaries, the limits, the way it all fit together, that was when something would show him he was wrong, he really didn’t understand anything.

  Finally the emotional and physical fatigue slowed down his anger enough that he thought he should try to rest.

  After shutting down the TV and lights, he lay the Sig on his nightstand and flopped onto the bed, ready to fight the demons of insomnia.

  Surprisingly, he slept. In his sleep, he thought he saw the lurking visitor. But by the time he awoke the image was gone from his memory.

  Colgrave

  Whenever she ran into Nick Lupo she felt a strange tug between cool and warm that left her puzzled and exhausted. Ever since she’d witnessed what he was, never mind the existence of more of them, she had a hard time reconciling between how attractive he was and how utterly frightening at the same time.

  It was a complicated feeling, but then she’d always had complicated feelings. Her father’s abuse had scarred her, but the scars hadn’t become obvious to her until she’d been in a position to help others. She had developed a reputation for being a by the book cop, but no one really knew how off the books she had sometimes been during her career, and how not at all by the book she was willing to go when the situation called for it.

  But clearly Nick Lupo far outstripped anyone or anything she had been involved with.

  Well, maybe not that thing with the Serb’s gang that Rich Brant had dragged her into…That had even caused nightmares, some of which lingered still. But even those nightmares paled in comparison to those she was having these days and nights. Lupo starred in most of them, as both monster and hero. She took comfort in knowing he wasn’t the worst of what she had seen.

  Now when she saw Lupo she experienced that bizarre blend. She felt her eyes narrow and her lips tighten in an almost angry set, but she also felt tingles down below, and it was the tingles that worried her.

  So when Nick Lupo knocked on her office door, the whole gamut of feelings splashed through her chest and she had no idea whether she smiled, grimaced, or gave him a blank look.

  “Do you have a minute?” he said, leaning in.

  She hadn’t spotted him coming her way. If she had, maybe she would have closed her door. But then again, no, she knew she wouldn’t have.

  “Yeah, come in.”

  His bulk seemed to dwarf the doorway, but it was only an illusion. There was a physical quality about him that belied his generally low-key persona. He looked like he could be a bully, but he wasn’t. Although when pushed, he had a temper that could erupt like a volcano from his old country.

  Right now, Nick Lupo looked weary and fatigued. Like a man who couldn’t sleep.

  She waved him to one of her chairs. He closed the door, then took a pile of folders from the chair and placed them on a corner of her cluttered desk. Finally he sank into the chair, dwarfing it.

  “What’s up, Lupo?” She shivered a little, saying his name. She knew what it meant, in his old-country language, and she knew once the images she’d seen came back to her they wouldn’t stop coming.

  And yet…

  And yet now she wanted to talk to him. She’d avoided it since the incident.

  She had barely managed to paper over the mess they’d made, by lending her Organized Crime task force stamp to the confrontation up in Eagle River, even though she hadn’t been there. Her report, combined with Lupo’s and those of a couple of malleable members of the tribe’s elders council, had done the trick for Ryeland, but just barely.

  So now that her career seemed to have been saved, she did want to talk to him. But she felt fear—in some cases knowledge can be a terrible thing, and she rather wished she didn’t know some of what she did.

  DiSanto didn’t seem to have a problem with Lupo, or the knowledge that his partner was an impossible creature. Monster! a little voice in her head shouted, but she quelled it. No, DiSanto had seemed rather lackadaisical about it all at the drone house, as they referred to the mysterious structure they’d destroyed in their paramilitary raid. Although DiSanto wasn’t looking too good these days either. In fact, if she thought about it Lupo’s partner had been looking a little ragged himself after they’d returned. Were they working on something, some other off-book deal? She shrugged off the thought.

  Lupo was weighing his words before answering, like a man who’d learned to be careful. She paid close attention to him.

  “So, how are you dealing with…you know? All the stuff you witnessed?” Lupo leaned forward in the chair. He seemed forever poised to act, but she sensed that it wasn’t always the best thought-out action. The law of unintended consequences?

  She barked a laugh. Couldn’t help it, really.

  She said, “This is the first chance you’ve had to ask me?”

  “I’m letting things set.”

  “Like an omelet? You sure did break some eggs—I’ll say that much. It’s a wonder I’m not locked up screaming in some gothic sanatorium.”

  He chuckled. “Don’t go all Irish on me, Colgrave.”

  “I should go all medieval on you,” she said, but didn’t smile.

  “Yeah, well, it wouldn’t be any worse than some of what I’ve had to live through all my life. So have at it. But when you’re done, please let’s get on to what we’re doing here.”

  “What are we doing here? I thought whatever we did was the end of things. The Bastone family hierarchy took a hit, the drone people—whoever the fuck they were—are gone, and all is right with the world. Well, not all…”

  “That’s the point, Colgrave. My sources tell me the Bastone family is regrouping. I didn’t stop their chief enforcer, our infamous Joseph Rabbioso, from getting away. Wounded, but word has it he’s healed up.”

  “How could that be? From what you said, he was—” She stopped, eyes widening. “Oh, shit, you mean he’s—?”

  “Yeah.” Lupo nodded.

  She sighed. “What else?”

  “We don’t really know much about the drone people, and you guys did a number on the house, so there aren’t many records. We got one body identified, thanks to Wilson—”

  “The reporter woman we, uh, that we rescued?”

  “Yeah. Body was Lansing. He was a high-ranking general—on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So now what?”

  Lupo frowned. “So now we have to figure out if this hydra has any more snakes growing.” He tilted his head at the door. “But we also have to keep this Homeland Security asshole Barton off our backs, and this new Internal Affairs guy, Roman, out of my ass. I think he’s planning to crawl up there and
ream me out with a camera like a living colonoscopy.”

  “Because of Griff Killian’s disappearance?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And do you know something about it, Lupo?”

  He didn’t like it. He made a face. “I might,” he said, after a long pause.

  “Oh, Christ,” she said.

  “But I didn’t kill him,” Lupo added.

  “Holy fuck, but so you know he’s dead…”

  “Yeah, and I also know how that looks. But they wanted it to look that way. I just barely managed to get out of that trap…”

  Now it was Colgrave leaning forward, intense, sweating. “Do you realize what you’re saying?”

  “Oh yeah, I realize it. And there’s a lot you don’t know.” Lupo sighed. “A lot, lot.”

  “Does DiSanto know all of it?”

  “He’s my partner. I had to let him in. But there are some things even he doesn’t know.”

  “So where does that leave me?” she asked, twisting her lips in a grimace. “Was I ever going to hear any of it?”

  “I’m here now, aren’t I?” Lupo sighed again. “I figured you needed to hear it from me.”

  “It’s about time.” Colgrave caught herself heating up and lowered her voice.

  “I know.”

  “I’m having fucking nightmares, Lupo. Pinpoint headaches. I’m not getting any sleep, and when I do it’s like…like…” She ran out of words.

  He nodded. “I get that. But you clearly didn’t want to talk. I waited until I thought you were ready.”

  “How did DiSanto take it? When you first told him?”

  “We showed him. He took it about as well as he could have. Someone else we knew took it like a punch in the gut. Sat down on his ass like the world had tilted on him.”

  “Was that the sheriff? What was his name?”

  Lupo’s face was sadder than she expected. He said, “Yeah, Tom Arnow. He was our first outsider, and he wasn’t very receptive. DiSanto was raised on all that comic book, horror movie stuff. I guess he was just better prepared to handle it. You could drop him in the middle of a True Blood episode and he’d be able to fit right in. Not Tom.” He shook his head, then paused. “What about you?”