His phone buzzed. A text popped up.
He read it. Charlie telling him his video guys had spotted the van turning down a stretch of South 19th Street that was a half mile away due south from the casino.
What the fuck good was that?
But the next text said the van did not show up on the same street a half-mile later, where they had one last set of cameras sweeping the intersection, and no other turn-offs or cross-streets. Charlie said they were gearing up to head there now.
He had to get there first…
Before he could put the phone away, another text came in. Christ, they’d found a cop dead in a bathroom stall. Herb Stanley from the plainclothes robbery division.
Goddamn it, had to be this fuckin’ Archer. No coincidence, no way.
Lupo hated himself, but he didn’t respond to this one. Now with a cop dead too, they’d split their forces and there’d be less chance they would find Jessie sooner than he could. He was already away from the center of the action, so his decision to ignore the note was easier. Easier on my conscience.
He quick-folded and hid his clothes and his Glock as well as he could, grateful this was an industrial area still, then ran naked away from the casino walls, bare feet on sharp debris he didn’t even feel, visualizing himself as a sleek, muscular black wolf.
And almost as a surprise even to him, he was overwhelmed by the strange sensation of his DNA realigning, or whatever it did, and along with the arousing tingling of his skin and genitals he also felt his legs and hands change and hit the pebbly ground as four huge black paws.
Just like that he was Over.
It’s a-fact-Jack!
And the sudden assault on his nose of a plethora of crossed scents was psychedelic, an almost painful jabbing of all his senses.
Lupo let the wolf get his own bearings, but then firmly guided – more like ordered – its legs to head down the street Charlie had mentioned. He would follow the road and try to determine where the van disappeared from the camera feed.
Guiding the wolf wasn’t easy, as what Lupo the human wanted didn’t always translate to what the wolf considered his needs. But Lupo had finally learned to accept his limitations and was getting better at making the symbiosis between man and animal work. In this case he worried about someone spotting the wolf, but he loped on, hoping anyone who did see him would think he was seeing a stray or guard dog, or a strangely large coyote. When he knew he was within sight of the crossroads where the van had not been spotted exiting the camera’s view, he slowed and took the only other option, an alley between various shuttered warehouse buildings – most in disrepair or outright abandoned.
Of course, the human Lupo thought. This guy’s hiding in plain sight because he’s not planning to stop his spree. Meanwhile, we might think he’s long gone from the area.
He stumbled a little, then slowed the wolf, the four paws scrabbling for purchase in the loose debris of the alley, and sticking up his snout to taste the air around him. Locked temporarily in the brain of the Creature, as he called his wolf side, Lupo wondered why it was taking him so long to master this… art. Decades in, he still felt unsuccessful, but now that he knew others existed he needed to learn faster, especially since he’d yet to find an ally among their ranks. Hell, they all wanted to kill him, it seemed. Sniffing with the wolf’s nostrils, he dismissed one scent and then another and another, and then he caught it – a slight hint of the familiar, a scent that seemed to have stuck to his nostrils. And then he was off again, trying to follow that one thread, but it was a confused mess of many humans’ sweat and a nightmarish soup of blended industrial chemical odors.
It might have been a familiar scent, but maybe it was altered, made much more pungent, and unrecognizable, by fear. Pure terror.
The wolf whimpered. Or maybe it was Nick Lupo’s own reaction he heard. His own fear. The wolf understood terror. The human riding along didn’t want to create it except in his enemies.
Part of his fear was that he simply couldn’t tell whether this was the scent he wanted. Only that it was familiar. He cursed the arcane filtering that kept the wolf and human sides essentially in conflict.
Now the fear stabbed through him like a blade. Even the wolf flinched.
Jessie, is it you?
He didn’t know how to pray while in the wolf’s brain, or even as a human, really, but he tried anyway.
CHARLIE BLACK BEAR
Christ, Lupo had flinched hadn’t he? Twice? Physically flinched.
The voice on the phone had asked him if he had any silver jewelry available, at hand. In his office, perhaps? Had told him what to do, and what to watch for.
Hell, I’m an Indian, he had thought. Of course I got some silver stuff.
But then he’d had a change of mind.
He had decided he wasn’t playing along with them, no way, whatever they wanted he was staying away from. He figured they were bluffing about his family. They had to be. They knew him, they had to know he would chase them down and kill them if they hurt his family. They were playing off his superstitions, expecting the whole secretive voice on the phone, creepy photograph from creepy stalker ploy to sell him on their serious intentions. Deadly intentions.
But they couldn’t be serious. Could they?
Nah, it was like something out of a mediocre movie. Like he was Michael Douglas or Tom Cruise, getting threatened by some unholy asshole holding a gun to his family’s head. That kind of thing didn’t happen in real life, did it?
Still…
He wasn’t sure why he had dug into his desk until he found the silver bracelet with the turquoise inlay his wife had given him a couple years ago, but he had and he’d chuckled nervously as he slipped it on. Then he’d rejoined his crew on the hunt for the Pathfinder that belonged to Lupo’s friend (lover?), and then Lupo had flinched. Twice.
Hell, he was an Indian. He knew what that was all about. Shit.
Now what?
PREY
The Archer was panting, staring at her with what she took to be lust.
“What do you want?” she said. Her voice was a frightening croak and reflected her own fear all too well. She tried to create saliva so she could ask the question again, but gave up and waited. A tremor rippled through her extremities and then numbness.
He seemed to be in some kind of a trance. A minute ticked by, then two.
She spoke again, with better result. “I haven’t done anything to you.” Trying to humanize herself, maybe. She hadn’t done anything, had she? She’d never seen him until he pretended to be a cop. What happened to the real guy? The cop whose badge he had flashed? She shivered in the clammy air. No, she knew what it was. Fear.
Definitely it was fear. More like terror.
“You’re just like the others.” His voice was soft, almost pleasant, like a polite waiter or bartender. “You see me, but you’re indifferent. I’m just a number to you, a player with cash in his pockets.”
What’s he talking about?
“Like Tanya,” he continued in that over-sweetened tone. “All she cared about was getting me to play longer, bet more.”
She knew he was talking about his – The Archer’s – first victim.
“All dealers want you to play,” she said. “It’s the business.” There was no point in pretending she didn’t know what he was talking about. “Is that why you killed the other dealer?”
He laughed. “Like I’m going to start explaining myself to you!” His tone was less sweet suddenly.
“Why are you treating me differently then?” She gambled that they were looking for her by now. If she could keep him talking… but not instigate his rage. If she could—
“You’re just another target to me, don’t you see?”
“Am I?” You’re pushing it…
“The same, but different. The others got me noticed. But you, you’ll really get me what I want. They won’t ignore me any more.”
He was nearly incoherent. What he said didn’t make sense. She kne
w he was about to continue, so she didn’t respond. Anything to keep him talking.
“Tanya was beautiful, but cold,” he said, his eyes unfocusing as if he were gazing at Tanya from a distance. “You – you’re even more beautiful. As soon as you showed up, I knew I was going to take you. I considered that other one, but there was something about you. You know those cops, they know you. You will make them all notice and remember. I want you… I want you very much…”
She trembled, the shivers running through her in waves again. He made it sound like sexual want. Like he was about to assault her. But then she saw that perhaps he wanted to own her, like a trophy. Was there a hunting thing there? She was a trophy? She stared at the hunting tip on the bolt in his crossbow. She didn’t want to feel that shard of sharpened steel rip into her flesh and organs, pinning her to the target.
Dear God, she really didn’t…
Was she over-analyzing? Maybe it was too much in her nature, dissecting facts, trying to fit them together. Maybe it would have been best not to do it, just this once.
She considered the double razor-blade-like tip. It would penetrate her, in a way that both was and wasn’t sexual. It was both personal and impersonal, wasn’t it? She wondered what his beef was with the casino, if he had one, and whether his feelings were hurt because the dealers were treating him like a number… whether those two things hadn’t somehow pushed him over the edge to where he was confused about what kind of revenge he wanted.
Then she reminded herself that it didn’t matter. She could analyze to the end of time, but she didn’t have till then. Perhaps she was out of time. He was building himself up – sexually? – to where he would rape her with a metal stand-in for his own penis. That’s what it was, but how could she avert this result while keeping him busy?
He tipped up the crossbow like an erection and her muscles tightened, waiting for the tearing, shredding, lancing impact.
She thought her bowels might loosen, and she didn’t care.
THE ARCHER
Enough talking!
This woman was beautiful and he wanted her. He had a boner bigger than any of the other people he’d killed had ever given him. But she was a talker. She was trying to get into his head. He’d been mesmerized by her lips as they formed words. Even after zapping her and tossing her in the van, head covered in sack, hair now askew, she still looked exquisite and he ached for her. That hair was a dark halo on the multi-colored rings of the archery target behind her. He would paint those concentric circles with her blood.
This was like Tanya, but ten times better. A hundred times. He felt as if he would truly own her.
His rage at the treatment he’d been subject to would be sated when The Archer took another life.
He raised the crossbow. He’d cranked it, so it was cocked and ready, a bolt in place. The bolt’s tip swelled in his vision and his head swam for a second, swam with the motion of the act. He felt the sexuality of it in his loins.
This was better than taking them from the van window. It was more personal.
He considered stepping closer, maybe even touching the sharpened tip to her exquisite skin. He wasn’t sure why, but the thought made him harder, and wet. Leaky. His breathing turned to panting. The bolt would nail her to the target, maybe even pierce her through and through. He swallowed a lump in his throat.
His finger brushed the trigger as his feet started to take him closer.
The woman’s eyes widened.
She knows what’s coming. She’s waiting for it.
He was awash in lust; it flowed like liquid fire in his veins.
He stepped closer.
The woman turned her head and closed her eyes.
Look at me!
He knew she wouldn’t, averting his gaze, until he touched her with his heat. Trying to make it less personal for him. It wouldn’t work.
He was only a few feet away now.
The savage growl took his attention away from his lusts and he stumbled, the crossbow wavering as he turned to see what—
Some huge animal had come from nowhere, left the ground, and was now in mid-lunge toward him, jaws open and teeth already snapping, its eyes spinning in a strange kaleidoscope spiral as they fixed him with a rage-filled stare.
“Arghsk—”
It was all he could manage, nothing more than a strangled sound.
They collided. He had no time to sidestep the hurtling animal. The massive jaws snapped shut on his arm, ripping and tearing through his clothes, and the crossbow clattered to the broken concrete floor.
He screamed incoherently as the pain of the animal’s mauling reached his brain. The Archer tried to pull his arm away, out of the monster’s jaws, but he couldn’t. Instead bright gouts of his blood sprayed into his face, into his open mouth, into his eyes, and when the arm was finally freed from those savage jaws, half of it was gone, sawn off like a piece of lumber in a table saw.
In shock, The Archer fell back and dropped to his knees, his ears filled with the growling and in the distance the screaming of the woman who had been his target. Crazed now, he scrabbled to find the rest of his arm or the crossbow or both, but he no longer knew what he was doing, and all he did was paint the concrete floor crimson Jackson Pollock-style.
The wolf leaped in at him again, forepaws crushing The Archer’s chest as it drove him to the floor onto his back, snout and maw spraying spittle and bloody bits of arm and shredded clothing.
The Archer’s eyes fixed those of the monster who was devouring his flesh. His voice was gone, his lungs collapsed, and yet they faced each other with equal rage. The wolf broke the stare first, its teeth suddenly ripping through The Archer’s throat, sawing and chewing skin, muscle, and tendon…
The Archer’s brain was unable to process what had happened, but the monster feeding off him had driven him over the edge of whatever sanity he might have had left and his thoughts were reduced to a mere mesh of fleeting images and impressions tinged with red.
And the woman was screaming, the sound fading in and out as his eardrums seemed to rupture at the same time, adding one more level of pain to all that which was already coursing through The Archer’s body…
And he thought he still wanted to kill her. He still wanted to make his statement. He started to spasm. But he wasn’t done yet, no he wasn’t.
PREY
She screamed as she watched the coyote or wolf or dog, or whatever it was, killing her attacker. She was trying to scare the monstrous animal away. Somehow she’d gone from fearing for her own life to fearing for the life of the pitiful being who’d been dubbed The Archer by people who stood to make money from his insanity. And she knew who they were. For she had dubbed him The Archer and given him his reason for being.
She shouted at the creature, but it ignored her and continued mauling the ordinary-looking Archer. It was a wolf – it had to be a wolf, for it was much too large and black to be a normal dog or coyote.
“Stop!” she shouted at the top of her lungs despite the dry mouth, then realized that it might well begin mauling her, if she attracted its attention.
Indeed, the wolf paused and she could see that its fur stood up stiffly on its back, bristled like a steel wool brush that seemed sharp enough to draw blood if she happened to stroke it in the wrong direction.
“Go away! Stop!” She made sounds that weren’t words then, shouting like a rodeo clown trying to distract a bull away from a stricken rider.
The wolf seemed to hear her and during the pause in its mauling of the screeching, spasming Archer, it backed away from its grim task, lowering its huge slavering maw as it stared at her, eyes still rolling in their wilding state.
“Get away!” she screamed. “Go!”
The wolf growled at her, the rumbling coming from down deep, and it approached her one step at a time, death in its gaze. Death and hunger. It ignored the screeching Archer and faced her squarely now, coming closer.
Its eyes glowed with some sort of evil light.
She fainted.
LUPO
The air around the wolf seemed to blur, forming a narrow halo. The animal stepped away from the mewling, bloody Archer, took several loping strides toward where she was chained to the target, and in an eye-blink it became Nick Lupo again. He was naked and sexually aroused. Over the years he had discovered (all too well) that the werewolf gene multiplied normal sexual response and libido exponentially. But even though his body was aroused, he himself felt nothing but horror at what the man curled up on the floor had done, and what he had planned to do.
Honestly, he wasn’t thrilled with what he and his Creature had instead done to the bastard, but he had to pay. He had to.
“Jesus, Jess!” he cried out, his mouth sounding cottony from speaking too soon. “Are you all right?” He reached out for her.
He thought he saw the ghostly figure of his friend Sam in the corner, but he ignored it. Damn hallucination. Had to be.
Lupo shivered, his human heart racing altogether too fast. After the DNA realignment his eyes changed color and stopped their strange spinning, although his vision was still slightly blurred.
His hands reached her unresponsive body.
She was crumpled over, chained in front of the archery target like in some bad circus horror movie. Her hair was a cascade over her face and his next thought was that she was dead. A freezing cold squirted through his veins and took the breath from his throat.
Numbed, he stared at her, looking for protruding bolts or other wounds.
But something was wrong.
A puzzled sound managed to escape his throat, a sort of grunted question as the details started to become clear in the dim light. Behind him, the Archer was still blubbering, his breath ragged and wheezy. He wasn’t dead yet. But he was dying. Of that Lupo had no doubt.
Lupo hadn’t reached Jessie yet, but now he cleared the last few feet in several quick strides, something beginning to register in his lingering blood-haze.
Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) Page 11
