“Well, Barton and I are trying to keep an eye on our valuable Nick Lupo, but he’s a marked man—first Wolfpaw, then Wolfclaw, and now…”
“Yes, yes, I know. We’ll just have to make sure there’s always a guardian angel around him.”
“That is so Catholic of you,” Corrado said.
“When I have to be, I’m a man of many faiths.”
“Indeed. Barton has a bead on the bus shooter—a sad story, that, very sad. He has no choice but to bring it to an end, or more innocent people will die. It’s another how do you say, side effect, of the mess Wolfpaw made in the Middle East and here. But once Barton resolves it, he will have lost his excuse to stay here and keep an eye on Lupo.”
“You and I will have to do. Barton will be a call away. Your DHS has much sway.”
Corrado said nothing, but nodded slightly.
“You’ve made direct contact?” Ari asked.
He barked a low laugh. “Oh, yes. It was not pretty. And those camera things you supplied, they worked perfectly, but Lupo was enraged—he almost killed me, I think. My connection to his father saved me. But he knows about me and what I am—he figured it out because of my age, and how I do not look so old as I am.”
“Sometimes paranoia is just a warning they really are out to get you,” Ari said, not entirely appropriately.
Corrado sighed, then sipped his strong, sweet coffee. “Your father would be proud,” he said.
Ari nodded once, clipped it. Looked away.
“I hope he’s close to ending all Middle East conflicts, where he is.”
Ari inclined his head as if praying. “Thanks.”
Notoriously atheist in his views, Ari was a reflection of his father. “Once you die, you’re gone,” Yaacov had often said. “Everything else moves on, you don’t. It’s annoying to think about it.”
Now Corrado said, “It’s good you inherited your father’s conviction. Me, I’m not so sure. I go with all ways. How do you say, I hedge my bets.”
“A wise approach, perhaps.”
Corrado sipped again as the waitress brought Ari’s aromatic coffee. “You might as well bring me another,” he said to her. When she was gone, he said, “We are any closer to the final goal?”
Ari’s face clouded. “No. It took many years before we were able to convince anyone to look, and now that we do look we are unable to find. They have had many years too, to hide in plain sight. Their infiltration is more insidious than we knew.”
“Yes, insidious,” Corrado said, pensive. “At least we know they have had much dissent within their ranks.”
“Which is being taken care of. Soon there will not be any.”
“I worry about that.”
“You know for years my father suspected. He was a laughingstock within the intelligence community.”
“No more?”
Ari half-smiled. “No more a laughingstock in some quarters, but it does him no good, does it?”
Corrado shrugged. His coffee came and they sipped amicably, the older man and the younger man, who together knew a secret that would explode through the world news if it were revealed. It was a secret that, together with the existence of shapeshifting humans, would change the course of humanity.
They had pledged to wipe it out without allowing it to be shared with the world. But the odds continued to stack against them.
Now was the time, and Corrado told Ari what he’d been worried about. “Nick Lupo’s missing.”
“What?” Ari put down his cup. “When were you going to tell me?”
“Right about now, when the caffeine is surging through your veins.”
Ari smiled with his mouth, but not his eyes. They were killer’s eyes. “Details?”
Corrado explained Barton’s intel. Despite his joking manner, he was very concerned indeed.
“So you think it’s the mob? Nothing at all to do with our, eh, operations?”
“If I were a betting man, I would say the odds are even, but I have a feeling it’s a home-grown problem, as they would say. That bastard Rabbioso, he escaped the firestorm Lupo caused, and now he runs the Bastone family. I think the current problem is caused by him and his desire for vendetta. A fine old Italian word, wouldn’t you say?”
Ari nodded. “Indeed. Anything I can do? I have resources…”
“No,” Corrado said. “Better to let it play out. Lupo has a good team around him. I think he can get himself out of trouble, and his team can help. And our little problem is on hold, is it not?”
Ari nodded. “We believe that dissent you speak of may be over soon, perhaps even as we speak.”
“They’re moving this quickly?”
“It only seems quickly to us, I think. The snake has many heads, but one is in charge of all the others, and occasionally it cuts off one or two. But soon they grow back.” Ari finished his espresso, sucking out the last drops daintily. “Much too soon they grow back.
Corrado nodded. It was true.
He wondered whether they were taking care of what was left of their problem right now, as Ari had suggested.
He shivered. Even at his age, knowing what he himself was and what he had done, he would not want to be there when they took care of their problem. Chopped off one of their heads.
Soon they shook hands and went separate ways as the weak winter sun rose above the buildings of the Third Ward.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Marla Anders
She had driven most of the way following her own jotted directions, feeling a deep sense of déjà vu, because she remembered her youth and spending some time with her grandfather up in the woods, the reservation, the poverty and the hopelessness all around them.
Her grandfather had always seemed like a man from another time, but not altogether old-fashioned. He had seemed plugged into the earth, plugged into nature (more like Nature with the capital N), plugged into his people’s heritage. Not at all the way he was portrayed at the end, a criminal, an evil man, mastermind of evil, dark plots against Indian values. He was derided for his beliefs, but then he was banished for whatever he had actually managed to do. She barely remembered him, but what she did remember was not the way the stories made him sound.
Things were said about him, things she had blocked out of her tender mind. Things that, if they were true, would have made her love him less. But because she had blocked them out, she had continued to love him. Even after he was gone, something he had done—given to the tribe, maybe—had been controversial. Elders had fought over him and his legacy, whatever that was.
But he had been connected to Sam Waters, a man who straddled the white world and the Indian world in a way so few managed—somehow ending up respected by both. She knew little about him except what she had heard, but she knew he was dead.
And yet here he was, sitting in her car’s passenger seat. He didn’t seem to cast a shadow on the Altima’s upholstery, but still he was visibly seated.
“I still don’t know what this is about,” she said. When she glanced over, he had flickered out, so she looked like she was talking to herself. Then he came back, as if the connection was spotty.
He said, “There’s a place, Nick Lupo is going there right now. I can see him…when you don’t see me, I am there.”
“But he can’t see you? Has he seen you?” She remembered her notes, even those she wasn’t supposed to have.
The apparition ignored her. “This place, it is a boys’ camp long since closed for its last season. Nick has been here before, a time of strife. It is important that you reach him before he leaves this place, and before the one who hunts him succeeds.”
“I’m driving as fast as I can,” she said. Indeed, she had made great time. She was passing through Antigo, a short way south of Eagle River. She had slowed due to the speed laws of the tiny town, but she edged the responsive car faster and faster, and when she reached the edge of town she opened it up and there was a roar of agreement from under the hood.
It was a straight sho
t north now, U.S. 45 through Pelican Lake, then Three Lakes, then Eagle River.
“You will turn off when you reach Three Lakes,” said Sam Waters.
His ghost, or whatever he is.
He flickered out, then came back into focus.
“You must hurry,” he said.
It freaked her out a little, the way he came in and out like that.
He had convinced her she was the only one who could save Nick Lupo. If she hadn’t been a sensitive, maybe even a psychic receptor, she would have taken ibuprofen and gone to bed. Or maybe a good Cuervo margarita, one of her weaknesses. With salt, damn the bloating.
Hell, if she’d had the margaritas before the strangeness occurred, she would have thought it was the booze. But she was stone cold sober. Maybe she didn’t want to be.
The road sped by under her, and the ramrod pines and other evergreens hugged the shoulder. The car was almost roaring now, and she fought the wheel a little, feeling it start to elude her control. It wasn’t slippery, fortunately, or she would have planed right off and into the deep ditch that lay at the feet of all those trees. If a deer loped out of the woods now, she was dead.
Then the sign told her she was almost there, and the apparition came and went, came and went, and then he pointed. “Cautiously, turn here.”
She didn’t ask, she just did. He pointed straight, then left, then along a winding road with the occasional cottage hidden in the woods on one side, then right and close to some kind of water—a river, a channel, a pond or lake, she didn’t know, and she followed his lead. She was parallel with the water, not iced over as winter’s last gasp was milder than average, and she caught glimpses of its surface, and then she saw a clearing or a parking lot carved out of the forest and graveled but shot through with holes and dried weeds, and she was turning under an old-fashioned faded wood and iron sign that still stretched over the road, though lopsided, its paint cracked and peeling.
Camp Ojibway, For Boys, it read. She could barely make it out.
When she couldn’t take the car any farther, she stopped and left it, door open and its engine ticking like some kind of IED getting ready to blow, and followed the path the ghost of her grandfather’s friend showed her.
Crack!
She jumped at the shot, but didn’t slow down.
Crack-Crack!
Jessie
“He went into that campground!” DiSanto pointed at the overgrown parade ground surrounded by ramshackle cabins and a much larger long-house with a collapsed roof. Several flagpoles leaned unsteadily in front of that building.
Jessie stopped to look. It was Camp Ojibway, long ago dubbed Camp O-Jew-Boy by the anti-Semites of the area because it had operated mostly for Jewish families. She remembered it well, not only its operational days, but also when the Martin Stewart gang had taken her and Nick had rescued her just before one of the redneck psychopaths could rape her.
She hefted the Remington. “Have to get there, Dee, he’s in trouble.”
From what she could tell from that glimpse, Lupo was stumbling around and had crashed into a wall, bounced off, and continued drunkenly out of sight. She had no idea what was wrong, but he didn’t look in control of his movements.
Wounded? Blind?
Maybe.
Then she saw someone else.
“Look!” she said in a loud whisper.
He was climbing down from one of those deer stands—they’d spotted a few more while following Lupo’s trail.
She wasn’t sure, but she thought it was indeed that Rabbioso guy, the mob guy who had been here on the ground for the Bastone family invasion. He was handsome in a roguish way, and she’d liked him a little when they’d met briefly. He might even have saved her life, but now the story was different and she saw that he was carrying an assault rifle. He was stalking Lupo, following barely a minute behind. As they watched, mesmerized, Rabbioso stopped and put the rifle to his shoulder.
“Noooooo!”
She couldn’t help it, she shouted and Rabbioso stopped and turned, looking for them. Too far away for the Remington, she could only stare as he turned and raised the rifle again.
Crack!
He paused, glanced at them, then leveled the rifle again.
Crack-Crack!
The gunfire took barely two or three seconds, but the echo lived longer as it bounced through the woods.
Beside her, DiSanto said, “Shit!” and let go with a burst from his MP5. But it was like splattering lead—and silver—at random, because it didn’t affect the shooter. He was just too much out of range.
They had to get closer.
She gripped the Remington with a vice-like grip and stalked off toward where that murderous bastard Rabbioso had just been, intent on defending her man.
Nothing would get in her way.
Rabbioso
Goddamn them!
The crackle of full-auto fire made him half-duck, but as he did he realized he was well out of range of whatever the cop was carrying. Maybe a fucking submachine gun. He might be too far right now, but they could close the gap fast enough. He couldn’t very well go back to his last tree stand.
He had no idea how those two had managed to find him and Lupo, how the hell they managed to show up right now, right when he was about to finish it. He had been so patient, he could taste his triumph like a fine vintage or fresh and bloody cut of human meat.
Fuck! Anger surged as he realized he was no longer in the hunter position. He could still fight them off, but the odds had just shifted. He could kill Lupo—now he wanted to kill Lupo immediately—but then he would have to fight off those two raging assholes.
What were the chances they were as loaded up as he was?
His hands were seared from carrying the silver-loaded rifle so long, but he had learned to control his pain back when he’d earned his stripes in Wolfpaw. He knew he was different, special, and now he was certain Lupo was, too.
Yeah, he wanted to kill Lupo once and for all, but ever since he’d bounced off that cabin wall, he had managed to disappear among the camp’s other dilapidated structures. He could be anywhere, and Rabbioso had those two on his tail now.
He had no choice. This was no longer a solo first-person shooter.
The radio was clipped to his harness. He was nearly breathless. “Come in, Matty. I need covering fire here at the campground. Tell Brujo to leave my guy to me, but he’s got a cop and a woman, both armed. It’s open season, man. Over.”
The radio crackled for a split-second. “Got it, boss,” Matty said. “Heading in now.”
“Ten-four.”
Rabbioso picked his way carefully over the cluttered gravel incline, which was slight and probably led to the water of the swift, black-looking channel, avoiding half-buried roots and other winter debris. He tried to keep as many tree trunks as he could between himself and the two meddling assholes, but they seemed to have figured it out and were starting a flanking maneuver of their own. They were keeping even with him and so he had to keep moving.
Annoyed, he thought about dropping his rifle and clothes and tearing after them as a wolf, ripping out their throats and then taking his sweet time catching up with the strangely powerless Nick Lupo…
But then he decided against it. He had lost visual contact as the bastard cop must be weaving in and out of the two dozen cabins as if he’d figured out where he was. Rabbioso still wasn’t sure why the cop hadn’t done the obvious.
Why is he not defending himself? Why isn’t he a wolf, fucking stalking me?
He had assumed it was a reaction to the explosion. Lupo has seemed blinded, as well as wounded by the shrapnel he had included in the little surprise IED package his man Jacko had left. Whatever it was, Lupo had not been able to effect a change, and apparently he still couldn’t.
All the more reason to catch him and kill him with my bare hands, up close and personal.
He tapped the Gerber Mark II combat knife hanging upside down from his sling.
He wanted bad
ly to feel the blade entering Lupo’s goddamn neck, to open his mouth and tap the spurting spray of hot blood even while keeping his human form. He didn’t have to beat Lupo as a werewolf…he would beat him man to man.
But first, he gave directions for his team to swat the niggling mosquitoes who had started to buzz around his ears.
Marla Anders
She was running into the old campground, aware of the ruined cabins and their collapsed roofs.
The ghostly apparition who had led her here seemed to hover before her, showing her the way like some bizarre version of the Dorothy’s Scarecrow. The thought reminded her how silly this would all sound if she told anyone, but she knew too much from her own life had edged into the strange—not to say definitely supernatural—and she was a willing receptor.
Besides, she’d heard the shots. Something was happening, even if she wasn’t sure what it was.
She felt the same sense of urgency shown by the ghostly shape that shimmered in her path. She had no idea what she would find—would it be too late for Nick Lupo?—and she had only a scant idea of what to do if she came under fire.
But she gripped her own Glock.
Though not technically an officer, she had the training and the permit, and she wasn’t stupid. She knew the sound of a high-powered rifle when she heard it.
She transitioned from a badly frost-wedged, crumbling concrete path to a widening parade ground, a pebbly, pocked expanse that spanned from one irregular row of cabins to the other. A longer lodge-style log cabin, probably the office, kitchen, mess hall, and equipment storage lay across the way, forming a large U surrounding three sides of the parade ground. However, she saw that footpaths on either side of the large cabin converged at its face, also spilling into the inside of the U.
And someone was stumbling crookedly down one of those side paths, heading almost straight for her.
She came to a sudden halt, kicking up a spray of gravel, and raised her pistol.
It was like a scene from one of those silly zombie movies, except it didn’t seem quite so silly right this second.
Her finger slid from outside the trigger guard to inside and brushed the trigger itself. Only a small amount of pressure would fire the weapon.
Wolf's Blind (The Nick Lupo Series Book 6) Page 21
