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

by W. D. Gagliani

  Sweating, Franco led them back to their cabin and they repeated the maneuver with the second steamer, this one more ungainly by the occupant’s greater girth and volume. However his steamer trunk made straight for the bottom as well, and Franco grinned at the thought of a job well-done.

  “Now we will need to meet this woman across the corridor,” he said to the garrulous crewman.

  “This I cannot provide,” said Havlav, stroking his flabby neck nervously. It was obvious he was frightened by Franco’s intensity and single-mindedness.

  “Not today,” Franco said mysteriously, “but tomorrow is another one.”

  Havlav made sure he was no longer needed, then with a wave he stepped out of the cabin and stalked away down the corridor, leaving them there staring after him.

  “He could be going back to betray us,” warned the priest.

  “I think not,” said Franco.

  Just as he shut the cabin door, the door across the way opened with a little crash.

  A voice reached him just as he was about to turn away.

  “Young man, will you help me a minute? I need a man’s touch.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lupo

  He rolled, breaking suddenly so as to take the shooter by surprise, and for a few feet he went unchallenged, but then he heard and felt the familiar slap and he felt the wind of the slug as it passed only inches above his head.

  He propelled himself harder and rolled some more, disregarding the sharp debris and gravel below him, until he reached some kind of brush or undergrowth whose leaves had fallen.

  Another shot just overhead told him he was still in the shooter’s sights.

  Where the hell was he?

  There was no higher ground nearby, no hills or drumlins here.

  Then the thought hit him like a brick in the head.

  Was the guy in a fucking deer stand?

  That would explain why he couldn’t get himself under cover. He feinted in one direction slightly, awkwardly, with his battered body, then rolled in the other. Sure enough, another shot and the wind from another slug seemed to part his hair.

  The sniper was playing with him.

  He was good enough, that was obvious.

  So the guy could have shot him anytime, but he was choosing not to. The next shot kicked up gravel bits that cut Lupo’s face painfully, but he barely felt the pain because he was too busy rolling again, hoping to surprise the bastard. Another shot just behind him urged him to roll faster, but he was blind and he had no idea anymore where the hell he was in relation to the cottage. All he knew was it wasn’t the sloping side, which would have forced him to roll toward the small lake behind the property.

  Lupo’s sides were heaving with the strain of rolling, blindly, from place to place. He gasped with the combined stress and pain of all his cuts and bruises, and he blinked as rapidly as he could, but he could neither see yet, nor force a change.

  The Creature could only watch from inside, as helpless as Lupo himself.

  Jesus Christ!

  He forced himself to his knees, cringing for the shot to come, but none came. So he forced himself to his feet and stumbled farther into what he thought was the thicker part of the wooded area.

  No shot.

  Maybe the bastard was done? No, more likely he was getting himself to another position. Another tree stand? Had somebody seeded the woods with tree stands? At this point, Lupo wouldn’t have ruled out anything.

  He tripped over a root or a branch or something and he ducked, in case a bullet headed his way, but none came.

  He would have hated admitting it, but he’d been shoved around like a pinball and he wasn’t at all sure where he was, or how far he’d come from the cottage. Earlier he might have been able to determine something by the sun’s heat on his face, but not now that the sun was either gone or sinking.

  Maybe he had left the shooter behind.

  Lupo decided to head as straight as he could, rather than continuing the zig-zag routine. Otherwise he could be here forever, and frankly he doubted he could survive in the woods without the Creature to bail him out.

  He picked up the pace, feeling less of the silver in his wounds. He’d never had so much silver damage, and now that the pain was fading—or at least becoming more manageable—he wondered again about whether he was learning something important about himself. But getting killed in the process wouldn’t help, would it? Ignoring the vestiges of the burning pain of the shrapnel and whatever else had happened to him, he tried a trot, realizing that the odds of tripping were also increasing.

  Lupo’s breath came more rapidly now, and he started to sweat despite the cold. Trying to keep his feet heading in a straight direction, he gasped with the effort…

  Crack!

  Another shot. He ducked instinctively and his feet tripped over themselves and he went flailing into some bushes that scraped his face and hands and could have taken out his eyes if he hadn’t been lucky.

  Goddamn it to hell!

  Another shot whizzed overhead. This one he felt, and he rolled again to make himself a smaller target, crashing through the brush that had caught him as he fell.

  The ground was still frozen and he landed hard.

  Rabbioso

  He was in a tree stand, one of a series of them his man had spread through the woods around Lupo’s cottage. Each was bugged with a tiny transmitter and he had a locator app that made it easier for him to find them, although a scrap of red cloth affixed to a nearby branch for each also made them visible to someone who was looking. Plus he had the night-vision sight on the rifle.

  Rabbioso watched Lupo blunder about not far away, knowing now that almost certainly the cop had been blinded by the explosion.

  It was accidental, a wonderful coincidence for which he couldn’t possibly have planned, but which was making his day now.

  The big cop was in bad shape—clearly the shrapnel had worked, to some extent. There was something different about Lupo. Even though Rabbioso had not intended the silver shrapnel to kill the cop, it should have injured him more. A lot more grievously. Somehow his body had taken the punishment of the blast and the silver, and he was still therefore a supremely dangerous opponent. But the wild card, the joker in the deck, was this new fact—that Lupo was blind.

  And that, my friends, is what I call karma.

  His powerful FLIR night-vision sight had shown him enough to determine that the blindness didn’t seem to be related to a physical wound.

  Ho ho ho, what have we here?

  What gift have you brought me today?

  He hefted the Sig rifle and sighted on Lupo with the FLIR sight. It would feel good to splatter his brains in the woods, yes, but it was too simple. Making him suffer some first was a good way to feel better—his own body still ached from the wounds the cop had inflicted that night not so long ago. If he could bring Lupo even a fraction of that pain, even a tenth of the suffering he had had to do, to suffer through, then it was all worth it and later on he could always splatter his brain all over Eagle River if he so wished.

  How long before that moment came he wouldn’t know until it was nigh. Would it be boredom with the game? Would it be anger? Mercy?

  No, not mercy.

  No fuckin’ way.

  Rabbioso had spent the last few years avoiding his boss’s obsession with the past, with blood feuds and made-man ceremonies, with vendetta best served cold, and all that movie and TV show crap. But now that the shoe was on his own foot, he saw that there might be something to linking today with the past. He’d never wanted revenge this badly, lusted for revenge to this degree. But he’d given in to the feeling that he needed revenge, and it also dawned on him that if he wanted his takeover of the Bastone family to be complete, he would have to do something more spectacular than hire an accountant. No, he needed a mechanic, and he was good enough to be his own mechanic.

  This would cement his standing within the family organization and, most likely, carry him easily to his rea
l agenda—the takeover of the tribal casino.

  Yes, it was still on the agenda.

  After Lupo, it was the entire agenda.

  He sighted again just past Lupo’s head and squeezed off a shot, enjoying the cop’s reaction as the bullet splattered into the trunk of a large pine just behind him.

  This blindness really was a gift he’d had no right to expect.

  Run, Lupo, run.

  Today, you.

  Tomorrow, your friends in the tribe.

  Especially one friend.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Franco Lupo

  On the Freighter Zeniča, crossing the Atlantic Ocean

  December 1945

  She was magnificent.

  There was no other way to describe her, certainly not in one word.

  Franco had wandered across the corridor, ignoring the whispered protests of Father Tranelli from behind him. He had killed dozens, and had just thrown the remains of two men into the ocean. What had he to fear from a mere woman?

  But even as he thought that, he realized that he might well need to fear her, for her call had instantly galvanized him and he recalled that he had thought of little else since he’d caught that one glimpse.

  Now he crossed the Rubicon between them and then suddenly he was in her cabin and she was turned away, hunched over her luggage. He admired her from behind, barely understanding the primal sensation of lust that took control of his every function and reduced him to some sort of stuttering fool.

  “Y-yes? Did y-you c-call for h-help, Madame?”

  “Madame?” she exclaimed in a lilting, dramatic voice. “Madame? I think not, young man. Now step forward and help me unbind this bundle of clothing!”

  She turned as she spoke and now faced him, and he could finally see her clearly.

  The first impression was that she was tall, very tall, and lithe like a tiger or a jaguar. She wore not a dress, but riding jodhpurs tucked into shiny black leather boots that reached almost to her knees. She wore a suede shirt tucked into the woolen khaki breeches that accentuated two of her best physical features: her waist, which was small and shapely, and her breasts, which were full and pointed and widely-spaced. Franco imagined he could see her nipples, dark and bloated, thrusting behind the suede.

  “Don’t just stand there staring, help me with this bundle. Someone else tied it for me and I can’t loosen it for the life of me.” She spoke Italian with some kind of slight accent he wasn’t sure about.

  How had she known to speak Italian? But he and the priest had spoken in the corridor, and likely she had overheard.

  Now his eyes had traveled up and down, taking in the rest of her.

  She was magnificent.

  Franco wasn’t a virgin. In his travels since what had happened to his father, he had experienced moments of lust and release with various prostitutes as the city’s normal economy had crawled back up from the underground. He had been with women often enough to accept that he was considered handsome, and he had certainly benefited from this knowledge. He’d lain with women of various types, but this woman in the cabin across from his was as sophisticated and beautiful as an international film star. She could have been cast in any of those giant, colorful American movies his parents had enjoyed before the war had robbed them of the joy.

  Besides her lusty, full woman’s body, her face was the very portrait of beauty. Lustrous raven-black hair fell in waves over her shapely neck and shoulders, framing wide-set eyes of the brightest green Franco had ever seen. Plump, red lips below a perfectly straight, long nose gave balance to her sculpted high cheekbones.

  Franco was smitten.

  He snapped out of his shocked silence when she snapped her fingers, lips curling in a mocking smile. Her teeth were movie-star perfection, to go along with everything else.

  “Hello, young man, I need your help this century, not the next!”

  Franco blinked and moved to help her, struck speechless by this incongruous presence on the shabby, decaying steamer. She should have been traversing the ocean on the Queen Mary, if that ship’s troopship days were over.

  “Si, certamente, con piacere.”

  Together they untied the tightly-secured bundle of clothing and then she was hanging dresses and coats and a fur or two in the cabin’s wardrobe, recruiting him with a smile that might have led him straight to hell without a single regret.

  She continued to smile as his rough and calloused hands—hands which had strangled and stabbed—struggled to grasp the delicate materials without dropping. Or creasing.

  When they were finished, she shook his hand. “Grazie mille, young man. I appreciate your help very much. If there is anything you need, feel free to ask me.”

  For a moment tongue-tied by the feel of her warm and shapely hand over his, he smiled shyly and blurted out, “Why don’t you join the passengers and officers for dinner?”

  “Well, young man, if the rest of that company is as charming as you, then I will certainly give it some thought.”

  He felt heat and realized to his horror that he was blushing. He shook his head as if the sluggishness would clear, nodded once again, and slowly backed away from her presence.

  She followed him and swung her door closed as he stumbled into his, finally managing to open the latch and nearly trip his way inside.

  With Franco’s cabin open, there was a moment in which the woman, Franco, and Father Tranelli caught each other’s gaze. Suddenly tense, Franco turned and nodded, closing the door before the priest could address their neighbor.

  “What time?” she asked as the gap tightened.

  “Eh?”

  She smiled. “What time do they serve dinner?”

  “Ah, eight.”

  “I shall see you there soon, then.”

  As soon as the door was closed, the priest was on him. “Sei matto?” Are you crazy?

  Franco stammered, “We don’t know if she is one of them?”

  “And we should try to find out in some other way, not by inviting her to dine with us. Or going to her cabin alone. Are you being pulled along by your dick? I thought you were supposed to be efficient, not crazy. Corrado was wrong about you…”

  Franco snapped. He grabbed the frail priest by the lapels and propelled him against the nearest bulkhead so suddenly that the priest gasped out all his breath, his eyes widening.

  “You are crazy,” he muttered when he could speak.

  “Just stay out of my way!” Franco growled. “You are here because I am too kind, or you could join our old friends in the steamer trunks. Plenty of room in the ocean…”

  They stared at each other until Tranelli lowered his gaze. His lower lip trembled, but he gave no satisfaction. Finally Franco blushed and released him, then turned away.

  He wondered if the woman was still out in the corridor. If she had heard the commotion.

  Mostly he wondered what lying with her would be like. His groin was painfully distracted, and Franco stripped and crawled into his bunk, turning away. The day’s events erupted in his brain and he was lost to sleep almost immediately, those bright eyes in his mind and a ghost version of those soft lips on his.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Heather

  She jogged toward the main door to the lobby of her building, still tingling from the sex and the kill.

  Damn, what a cocktail!

  There was someone in a parked car a few slots from the glass and steel doorway, and she slowed to determine who it might be.

  Enemies abounded these days.

  He was slouched down in the seat, trying to keep below window level, but her eyes were sharp, her senses honed and accustomed to predators and attackers. She’d had plenty of reason to beware shadowy people in parked cars.

  She swerved toward the deep shadows near the building and crouched to avoid being large in his mirrors, then crept closer to the car’s rear. It was a nondescript Ford and she didn’t recognize it.

  She sniffed the air, but as usual the human nose wasn�
��t as sharp as the wolf’s. She considered a change, but it really wasn’t a good idea on the sidewalk in front of her building. In an emergency, really.

  She stood tall and approached the driver’s side like a cop on a highway stop.

  And she did surprise the driver, who had been focused on the doorway. Her lights were blazing, so he’d likely assumed she was home.

  In one angry, swift motion she grasped the handle and swung the door wide, leaning in to startle the driver.

  It was Rich DiSanto.

  He jumped and leaned back and away from her sudden attack, but she was already reaching for his jacket’s lapels and dragging him bodily out of the car. She’d always been strong, and the wolf side of her contributed some extra power—Nick Lupo had told her his own reflexes and strength had improved enough to get him through the police academy at the top of his class, rather than where he belonged, at the bottom. She’d chuckled then, but now the extra brawn helped as she yanked the protesting cop out of the car in a neat turn of the tables, and tossed him onto its side panel hard enough to dent it.

  “What the fuck are you—”

  She slammed him again. “Well, if it isn’t Robin to Nick’s Batman!” She whispered mockingly, “Young DiSanto, are you here doing surveillance? Undercover? How did that work out for you?”

  He would probably have responded, but the majority of her weight was jammed into his back and he was cramped up against the car and barely able to breathe.

  She held him there until she sensed he was about to turn blue, then suddenly released him and backed off, and he fell toward her and slid to the cold pavement. He half-lay next to his car, now, coughing and gasping for breath.

  “Well?” She restrained herself from kicking him. If she’d done so, it would have been only to make a point, because she really rather liked this young cop who knew her secret and had still cheated on his wife in order to fuck her. Often and in every possible position, for about a week.