Then he turned to where the voice had come from. That other voice. Sam’s voice.
“Goddamn it! If you’re real, then why don’t you make yourself fucking visible…”
“I’m still new at this, Nick. Let’s see – what about..?”
First nothing happened, but then a light image seemed to fade in a bit, close enough to Lupo to touch. The cop tried, but his hand went through the shimmery figure. He pulled it back, expecting it to tingle or something, but it didn’t.
Lupo had always professed being open-minded to the possibility of supernatural phenomena. After all, what had he himself become, if not a supernatural phenomenon? As far as he’d been able to learn, the great majority of people went through life convinced that werewolves were monster movie and comic book stuff, not something real and very dangerous. No, if he was skeptical about this manifestation of his old friend Sam, then what could he be about himself?
But you know you exist… what if this Sam Waters voice is just in your head? What if it’s just you, making voices or performing an impression for some bizarre psychological reason? What if there is no reason, but you’re simply starting to unravel? Going nuts? You know, bonkers?
He almost wanted to laugh maniacally, just to make the whole thing fit his image of the crazy business. A Mel Brooks comedic version of insanity. He caught himself.
“Time’s running out, Nicky. Jessie might not be in trouble… but I don’t know, she might be. There’s something going on, something bad for someone you know. If you are aware of Jessie’s whereabouts, then I’m not sure why I am here…”
Well, shit!
Was Jessie in trouble?
He had no indication that was the case. But… then again, where was she? Why wasn’t she answering her phone? She’d come here to the casino and then disappeared. What was he supposed to make of that?
Lupo decided he had to play the hunch. Whether it was really Sam’s ghost, or his own subconscious toying with him for some obscure reason, did it matter if it was just like a hunch – one of many he often had that panned out? He could always hash it out with a psychiatrist, but right now wasn’t it better to find Jessie – since she was actually missing – and worry about reasoning later?
He tried calling her number again, then his home number. Goddamn voicemail.
So now what?
“Check for her car, Nick. You know she talked to DiSanto here at the casino and then she seems to have disappeared…”
Of course, her car.
He dialed Charlie Bear and asked him for help using the parking lot cameras to find Jessie’s car. “It’s an old Nissan Pathfinder, black.” He recited the plate number.
“I’ll patch this through to all my people,” Charlie said. “Give you a call when we locate it. Just a matter of time. We have a lot of cameras…”
“Great, thanks.”
Lupo hung up, wondering if he was overreacting. He turned to check on his new-found ghost, but he was alone. Maybe he’d always been alone. He now wondered if he preferred to be alone.
THE ARCHER
They were outside a service entrance, and his van was parked right there. It had an official-looking Casino Security tag propped onto the dash, and apparently the van’s presence had raised no eyebrows because of it. He’d snatched it from an official vehicle days before.
“This way,” The Archer called over his shoulder, and led her toward the curb.
“I’m pretty sure the crime scene was on the other side of the building,” the woman said, uncertainly. He sensed she was slowing.
“It is,” he said, “but it’s a long way from here and I was going to drive you.” As he talked he opened the side of the van, hoping her uncertainty would last a few more seconds. Hoping his answer would keep her from noticing the van wasn’t new, or very official-looking.
“Oh, okay,” she started to say. The volume of her voice faded and her words slowed as a couple of inconsistencies in his story finally threw up some red flags, but by then The Archer was whirling around to face her and the stun gun was out from under his jacket where he’d been concealing it, and he was zapping her at the base of the neck.
She emitted a strangled croak and her body jiggled with the current, her arms and legs suddenly limp and useless. He used the momentum of her forward lean and his own motion and tossed her onto the floor of the van like a sack of rotting fruit.
Then before she could recover he zapped her again until her eyes rolled up into her head and when he pulled the stun gun off her skin she was out of it, at least briefly, and he was immediately sliding the door shut and circling the front of the van. He flicked the driver’s door open and swung into the seat and seconds later the van was leaving the curb.
The woman lay behind the front seats, incapacitated, but not for long. Didn’t matter, he wasn’t going far.
He drove slowly to avoid suspicion. Too many cops around.
His groin hurt with the intensity of his excitement.
He enjoyed the ultimate joke, pulling into a dingy rental warehouse barely two blocks from the casino, just off the mostly industrial Canal Street.
No way would the cops imagine The Archer’s lair was tucked within a stone’s throw from where he’d been doing his mischief. Why, he was the purloined letter, hiding in plain sight!
He chuckled as the oversize garage door swung down, rattling, behind him.
The woman was groaning, so he crawled over the seats and when she opened her eyes and started to gather her muscular arms for a strike, he zapped her again with his ready stun gun, then pulled a black flour sack over her head and flipped her over, using a thick zip-tie to handcuff her.
She swallowed with obvious difficulty and grunted. “Why—? Who are you?”
He could barely hear her through the sack.
“I’m The Archer,” he said. A bit melodramatic, he decided. But he liked it.
He liked it a lot.
PREY
She could barely breathe in the black cloth sack that covered her head. It was musty and smelly, and rough on her skin as if it had dirt sewn into the fabric. Or if in its life it had carried dirt and soil. She tried to breathe shallow breaths, but the tendency to inhale too fast made her dizzy. She had to be careful not to make herself pass out, or end up asphyxiating accidentally.
Whoever the guy was, he didn’t intend to kill her –
not yet…
Shut up! she admonished herself. Stay calm.
Breathe.
There’s a thousand cops here. They’ll find you.
Will they?
Maybe The Archer didn’t intend to kill her (yet, she added), but the outcome would be the same if she didn’t take control of her breathing, she knew that much.
She worked at it, coming close to panicking and messing up the shallow breathing that barely satisfied but needed to be done, and soon she was breathing almost normally. She drew shallow breaths carefully, trying not to inhale the cloth.
She had no idea where he was or what he was up to. The van was stopped, in fact it hadn’t traveled very far at all, and she was alone, lying on her stomach on its floor. She struggled onto her side, almost in a fetal position, her head feeling the roughly ridged metal floor of the vehicle.
She heard the side door slide open and tensed her muscles, not knowing what to expect. And expecting the worst. Pain.
Instead there was a hand softly caressing her head, a sort of comforting feeling. She forced herself to keep from recoiling.
Was it someone else? Maybe she was about to be rescued?
Then the hand hardened into a claw and grabbed her clothing along with another claw-like hand, and she was manhandled off the van’s floor and dumped like a half-filled sack on some kind of mattress. She barely had time to start crying out when she was grabbed again and rearranged on the mattress, which was then dragged across the floor – concrete? – and when the dragging stopped she felt a wall on one side of her curled body. The hands dragged her to her feet on the mattres
s thing, and then pinned her to the wall.
There was a thick, soft surface that kept her from smashing painfully against the wall, but the claws quickly manacled her wrists to the wall – or whatever was mounted in front of it. Like handcuffs, she noted.
Jesus!
Why?
She tried to speak and ask the question, but the Archer’s body butted up against her hard and shoved her into the wall. She grunted and kept her mouth shut otherwise. She was deathly afraid of instigating a sexual attack.
She was clear-eyed and experienced in the ways of the world she operated in, and she’d always known and understood the dangers posed by such megamaniacal criminal types, but that had been theoretical knowledge. Classroom stuff. This was different.
She told herself this wasn’t even close.
But she had to remain positive.
I got this.
Then she admonished herself: I do.
Because she wasn’t completely sure. Being manacled to the wall wasn’t much of a position of strength…
Then unexpectedly The Archer ripped the sack off her head and she recoiled, blinking hard, trying to adjust to the interior lighting. Everything around her slowly resolved into a picture she could make out.
Some kind of dingy warehouse. Exposed brick, cracked cinderblocks, i-beams, stained suspended pipes like fat tentacles overhead. Ragged wiring strung to dusty, rusted-out boxes. Not just dusty, but covered in cobwebs. And…
Finally, the Archer himself, now stepping back away from her. He’d been just a blob in her vision.
She forced herself to stay calm and observant.
The Archer…
Youngish, nondescript. Not ugly, not handsome. Just there… he reminded her of one of those serial killers who were so bland, they could pass for anyone anywhere, just faces on the street. A thought which was bad enough on its own.
But also he had a crossbow cradled in his arms.
And she looked down at herself and what she was leaning against that she felt on her back.
Oh shit.
A paroxysm of shivering not at all connected to temperature seemed to flow from the center of her heart to every one of her five extremities at once, like a rippling wave of energy. Her breath seemed to be snatched right from her chest and she gasped…
For she was manacled to a large and lumpy archery target. In fact, she was positioned right in front of the colorful concentric circles of the bull’s-eye, as far as she could tell. She looked up, her vision going fuzzy. She blinked again, trying to clear it, but her eyelids were gummed with sand.
He smiled at her.
His eyes were insane.
She opened her mouth to scream, but he was ready with a dusty, filthy rag and he stuffed it into her mouth and she almost choked.
LUPO
He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow. He felt his head expanding as if preparing to blow up.
The fear struck him so suddenly – so fiercely – that it left him light-headed. Helium in the brain. Where had he heard that? Didn't matter. Blood didn’t seem to be flowing everywhere it was supposed to flow. His hands tingled, veins throbbing with marching ants.
Deep within himself he sensed rather than heard the Creature rumbling a low growl. He suppressed it. The group around him had stopped talking, was looking at him with puzzled curiosity. His ears cleared and he heard Charlie Bear saying, “… do you? Hey, Lupo. Lupo! Is this the car you were looking for?”
Shit.
Jessie...
Jesus Christ.
He nodded before they could ask again. “Yeah. She’s my... yeah, it’s Jessie Hawkins. My Jessie. I mean, it’s hers.” The words tumbled out, tripped on each other, and collapsed into silence. He’d recognized the Pathfinder immediately. What was it doing here?
He hadn’t expected her to come to the casino. But he should have. She was bored, what else could she do? She’d even started to like that damn casino up north, though they had always opposed it, hadn’t she?
But why come here, why now? He wanted to scream obscenities, open his mouth and let out the fear and frustration in one long keening wail.
“Think he’s got her? The fucking Archer asshole?” DiSanto said. He’d returned yet again after Lupo’s frantic call. His edges were definitely frayed, the sleeplessness making his eyes appear gummy and his face gaunt. His clothes were mangled. But there was still a sharpness there, the same quality that rendered him a deceptively good homicide cop.
Lupo forced himself back to rationality, peered through the SUV’s side window. Jessie’s phone was on the seat. “I dunno. Maybe she just left the phone…”
“Forget that,” said Charlie, as he swiped off his own phone. “I’ve got a witness who saw someone get tossed into a van. We’re checking now on timing. Our building cameras didn’t pick it up, but this guy just happened to stick his nose out a secondary door in time to see it happen. Van was parked in a no-zone but it had a casino tag on the windshield. He planned ahead.”
“Goddamn it!” Lupo roared. His fist pounded the Pathfinder’s hood and just barely avoided crumpling the metal. He felt coarse hair sprouting on his back, and a growl rose up his throat. He willed himself to calm down or he knew he would change right here. Rage caused involuntary changes, he’d learned the hard way, and he was damned close right now. “Plates? Your witness get the tags?”
“Sorry,” Charlie mumbled, shaking his head. “He was too rattled. We’re lucky he got anything at all. But everything helps and I have eyes on the camera data from all over. We have hidden cameras he may not have spotted, a bunch of them down a ways in each direction. If he drove past any of them we’ll have him.”
“She’s not far, Nick…”
“What?” Lupo whirled. “Who said she’s not far…?”
He saw the blank looks just as he remembered his problem. His problem. So he wouldn’t think: Voices in my head. Just what I fuckin’ need right now.
“I’m more than just a voice,” said the figure of Ghost Sam. Now he was standing in the middle of the group, but no one saw him.
No one but Lupo.
“You need to listen, Nick. I sense Jessie’s not far from here. If you look, you can find her. But I don’t think she’s in any danger…”
Great, his own personal ghost telling him the most important woman of his life, his world, was missing and yet not in danger. Well, that’s settled, what more do I need to know?
Now what?
The annoying ghost whispered into his ear. “You know what you have to do. You just refuse to do it. But you don’t have any choice.”
Lupo erupted: “Damn it!”
Then he caught himself. His hands and feet trembled. How could he hide his freak nature when everything was leading him to shift? How could he do that here, and what good would it do? He tried breathing long breaths, calming his ride-along Creature as best he could.
Charlie made a sympathetic face. “We’re doing everything we can, as fast as we can. I have some great guys watching the camera feeds—” He stepped closer and Lupo felt a slight stab of heat, like… like the proximity of silver. It wasn’t painful, not really, but it made him uncomfortable and he stepped away, as if Charlie Bear had encroached on his personal space. The sensation was weak, but definitely packed a sting.
“I know, I know,” Lupo said, trying to pretend he was calming down. Playing down the outburst, and also the sudden jab of silvery pain that he felt up and down his skin when Charlie suddenly edged closer again as if about to whisper into his ear too...
Fuck! Lupo stepped away again, fast. Still feeling the stinging sensation but more manageable. Must be wearing a silver chain or bracelet. Some kind of a pendant under his shirt, something with silver in it.
Suddenly Lupo desperately wanted to get away from these people and change. Maybe his annoying ghost was right. He wanted to test his sense of smell. It had worked for him before, but it was hit and miss at best. Sometimes it was just too overwhelming, the stream of scents, and
he was like a drunk in a tub of cheap gin.
If the ghost – or whatever that image of his old friend Sam really was – happened to be right, then maybe he should be finding a place to drop his clothes…
“Listen, Charlie, you text me if your guys spot anything. I’m gonna go looking around on my own. I have a feeling… a feeling she’s not that far from here. Like the fucker’s hiding in plain sight, thumbing his fuckin’ nose at us.”
“Nick,” DiSanto began.
“Dee, I want you to get on that list -- we need a name and if we’re fuckin’ lucky, an address.” DiSanto nodded. But then started to object, and Lupo interrupted him. “My thing’s just a gut thing, not likely to do much. It’s gonna be the cameras or your lists that get him. I just need… to do something. On my own, you know?”
“Okay, Nick. I get it.” But it was plain he didn’t.
Fuck…
Charlie said, “You got it, Lupo. I’ll text if we get anything, like any hits on the van.”
Lupo nodded, touched the big man’s arm, felt the heat again and flinched, then broke through the group of cops around Jessie’s car. If he didn’t get out of there he figured he would just double over and puke. He already felt her loss, as if she was dead. He already imagined life without her, and his head swam again, and his vision blurred. The coarse hair grew and retreated under his clothing, making him itch uncomfortably. How much of this was him, and how much was whatever silver Charlie Bear had on him?
He stumbled to the corner of the building, rounded it, and found a service tunnel entrance with a row of green Dumpsters lining one side.
Ghost Sam was right there with him. “Hurry, Nick. You’re running out of time.”
Fuck, I am Hamlet.
Lupo sprinted to the darkest part of the alley-like opening, praying it was one of those blind spots. He found an alcove behind some heating and cooling ducts and shucked his clothing as if it were on fire.
It was time to do something.
He’d deal with the ghost situation later. It sounded ridiculous to him even as a thought.
Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) Page 10
