Wolf's Trap (The Nick Lupo Series Book 1)

by W. D. Gagliani

  Nick hoped the evening would bring answers, but it was as if the whole day had been leading up to something. Nick wasn’t sure he wanted to know exactly what.

  There was a crash as a crate or a stack of lumber tipped over next to the garage, and when Nick ran around to the driveway, he saw what he thought was a huge German shepherd slink into the thick bushes that lined the front of his house. Maybe the stray dog was responsible for the strange noises, not Andy. Maybe Andy was just trying to tell him about the dog. Nick looked down to where the cracked blacktop curled into the strip of grass parallel to the driveway.

  A big, blotchy bloodstain seeped into the crack, turning black and disappearing even as he watched.

  That dog’s hurt. Better stay away from it.

  Chapter Five

  Lupo

  The image of that man-made cave of long ago bright in his mind, now Lupo stalked another man-made cave—the mall service tunnel—his sharpened senses tasting the bitter darkness and its secrets. Old secrets and new intertwined like coiled serpents.

  There was little light here, but Lupo’s pupils dilated to correct for the lack. Nostrils flaring, he navigated by olfactory traces that he soon realized were evenly—or almost evenly—spaced partial handprints slopped onto the cinder blocks. The ink was blood, apparently from a second jar carried away by the perp.

  Corinne’s blood.

  Lupo snarled. The taunting was infuriating. He could sense that the guy was gone now. There were no eddies of active smells in the corners, or in the cracks between the low-hanging pipes and conduits above. He could just barely catch the tantalizing scents of the man who had bathed in her blood and used it to cloak his own scent. There wasn’t much there, except the clear understanding of maleness and evil, and Lupo felt himself losing control.

  Fight the anger, he reminded himself. Ride out the anger. Relax and visualize a peaceful scene. Often the quiet acoustic guitars of early Genesis could lull him to an English pastoral scene, and he used the way the notes and imagery blended together to calm down. The swirling synthesizer line and Mellotron choir that followed the last vocal part of “Entangled” reduced him to tears in the right circumstances, relaxing his muscles almost as if he had no control over them. The peaceful scene was there, in his head, brought to light green and golden reality by the music in his head. He tried to push himself physically into the scene.

  But it was too late.

  The first sign of the Change was an infusion of smells so great that it made his head spin. It was as if his nostrils had been securely blocked but now were thrown open like shutters. Suddenly, he could smell every blood cell in each handprint, and the varieties of dust layers, and each liquid or gas carried in every hanging pipe, and the copper in the wiring, and the rubber in the gaskets. The smell of recent fresh paint in the access tunnel was nearly intoxicating, and he felt himself gasping for breath.

  In his head, the lush, gentle music grew dissonant and painful.

  There was little time, and Lupo knew well enough by now that he had not yet developed the self-control needed to bring himself back from the brink. He frantically removed his clothes, hoping to shed this layer of useless skin before he damaged it beyond repair. First the shirt, a straitjacket that bound his arms too tightly as his muscles hardened and grew and changed. He ripped the fabric off his torso, already feeling the constrictions around his thighs. For a moment, he couldn’t help imagining himself as the Hulk—green and wearing clothes that always managed to be fashionably torn in all the right places.

  But there was no humor in his mind. He kicked off his shoes, quickly shucked his pants, and had just enough time to lay the pistol down on top of the pile before he was irreversibly over and suddenly his hands had become monstrous paws and he was galloping down the passageway, the scent of the guy strong in his nostrils

  —a familiar scent intertwined with the guy’s own strong one, curled around it and so achingly familiar—

  and the sharpness of the blood on his tongue, bitter blood that he craved and that he knew, deep in the recesses of his altered brain, he would soon taste.

  His paws scrabbled on the cold concrete, nails scratching out a lullaby pattern magnified in his sensitive ears, and suddenly images were entering unbidden into his head—images both clear and blurred, and which he realized he should not be able to understand.

  There was an image of an average-looking man, perhaps somewhat good-looking but still average enough to instill a sense of safety in others, in the ones he hunted, stalked. And killed.

  As Lupo ran on into the dim light, a part of him relished the fact that he was feeling more than mere instinctive responses to stimuli, that he was still somehow present in the creature as it ran, so that, in essence, he was two: this creature of the night, magical and free, and a human presence within the creature’s mind, or soul, which had retreated to a corner and could observe without affecting the creature’s instincts or actions. At least, could not affect instincts or actions yet, though he’d been trying for years.

  He heard the chase music, faintly, at the back of his brain. He was amazed to realize that he could indeed hear an instrumental passage, with its syncopated interplay between the synthesizer and the drums. This was the first time something as important to him as music—his favorite music—had crossed the divide between his two selves.

  Lupo felt as though in a dream he was running down a passageway, dreaming of another who was running down a passageway, as if he were watching a film of a four-footed creature running down the same tunnel, and then the three intersected and became one, and he knew that his own consciousness was manifesting itself from within the brain of the beast. And he felt the elation of knowing that finally, after so many years of hopelessness and failure, here was another chance to gain control over the actions of the beast.

  The Creature slowed, and Lupo brought his own senses to bear. The Mellotron sounds swelled and faded, and the music was gone. There was a fork in the tunnel, but the Creature knew which passage to take, and when Lupo ordered the Creature to follow his instincts, both were soon bounding down the new path.

  The bloody handprints had become less frequent, and the creature seemed to have trouble holding the scent in its nostrils between each signpost, as if his Change were fading in and out, but Lupo worked at exerting control over the Creature’s actions, spurring it on whenever it hesitated because the scent softened. Then the scent would swell and grow strong and the Creature growled, its muscles bunching as its hair stood on end and its lips curled tightly, displaying sharp rows of fangs.

  Lupo felt himself trying to soothe the beast from his perch in its mind, felt his control begin to manifest itself in the Creature’s quieting. The growl changed to a whimper as its nose worked at a loose pile of clothing on the cold concrete floor of the passage.

  Within the complicated scent was that of the perp—this Lupo knew, without understanding exactly how—and the now-familiar bitterness was again combined with the scent that the creature had smelled on each bloody handprint.

  Lupo willed the creature to sit.

  With another whimper, the creature settled back on its haunches and lowered its head.

  Lupo felt a rush of confidence, like an influx of chemicals, which made him visualize the creature as under his control. And then he felt that the creature was under his control. Something had happened in the tunnel, something that he had been trying to achieve for years. Always slight progress would be overshadowed by regression, a regression that Caroline had attributed to the creature’s magical origins. For who knew how a creature that by all rights should not—could not—exist would react to an everyday tied-to-the-physical-laws kind of limitation?

  Caroline had been right! Lupo felt the Creature—no, felt himself for he was the Creature—sitting at the proverbial end of the line.

  The scents mingled strangely here, in the clothes. Lupo concentrated, and he could make out three separate threads. No, four. There was the perp’s scent. Strong, mal
e, somewhat distinct from a separate male smell—the second thread—that also permeated the clothes. Then there was Corinne’s scent, made bitter by her fear and the pain. Here the creature—Lupo—whimpered. The incredible mind-numbing pain.

  And there was a fourth thread there, something faint and unidentifiable but unmistakably curled around the guy’s thread as if they were one, even though they weren’t. Lupo was puzzled, but his control over the creature was too primitive, too basic, to allow further analysis.

  Lupo flexed his new understanding of how it all worked, threw all his concentration into forcing a Change. It had never worked before, the Change always leaving him when it desired, allowing him no say in the matter. But now things were different; he had effected some kind of breakthrough, though he didn’t know how.

  He could feel it working, could feel his senses alter and his perceptions somehow spiraling back into those that Nick Lupo could recognize as completely his own. He felt the tingling again and the itching of his extremities, and then the coldness of the concrete was kissing his bare skin—his human skin—and he was just a man, sitting naked in a dark and dusty tunnel.

  On the floor, a pile of men’s clothes. Gray-green shirt. Bloodstains barely dried. Black pants. Scuffed shoes. A battered pager. The uniform of a maintenance worker. Lupo looked around. The tunnel was not a dead end. There was an emergency exit set into a corner, probably leading to the parking lots. He had slipped past them, probably not long before. Had changed his clothes here, then made his way to his vehicle while sirens stopped at the main doors. Had taken the time to taunt Lupo by name.

  Who the fuck is this guy?

  Lupo stood, leaving the abandoned clothes for the forensics team. There was no way the other officers could have missed the unlocked access door, Lupo now realized. The guy had still been there, had done his thing with the blood. Then he had gone back and unlocked the door, as if he knew Lupo would be the one to find it.

  His elation tempered by the death of his friend, Lupo quickly made his way back to where he had shed his own clothes. He dressed and reholstered the Glock, then walked through the door and back into the mall’s washroom area.

  Ben stood a few yards away, talking to a young uniformed officer.

  “I got something here,” Lupo said.

  “Hey, Nick, where were you?” Ben patted the uniform on the back and sent him away. “I been looking for you the last ten minutes.”

  “Busy.” If only you knew how much.

  The fourth thread. What was the fourth thread? Was his newfound control so tenuous, so imperfect, that he was mistaken?

  Minutes later, the access tunnel was swarming with cops.

  Ben stared at the wall, Lupo at his side. Lupo’s lungs screamed as if he’d run a marathon. One of the forensics guys stood with them.

  The bloody words seemed to glow in the darkness. Here’s one for you, Nick!

  “Fuckin’ Satanists!” the forensics tech whispered, staring in awe.

  Lupo turned toward him but said nothing. The guy was serious.

  “Nick’s another name for Satan—you know, Nick Scratch. Saw something just like this last year, in a graveyard in Green Bay.”

  “Yeah?” Lupo said.

  Chapter Six

  Lupo

  1976

  The strangeness of the day had translated itself into an evening ripe with weird shadows and sounds, lending the late-summer twilight a sense of foreboding.

  Nick’s father had grunted his acceptance of Nick’s efforts on the lawn, then sat in the dark brooding over something or other—Nick didn’t know what might have happened while he had wrestled the lawn mower out back—until Nick’s mother called them to dinner.

  The three ate quietly, watching a television documentary. Nick’s mind wandered. A song he heard often on AM radio thumped through his head. It was “Money” by a band with the weird name of Pink Floyd. He didn’t even much like the song, but he caught himself humming it all the time. He guessed that made it a good song, after all.

  Meals were always quiet in the Lupo household. Soon long shadows crossed the kitchen walls and floor, and then he was finished and on his way to bed, where he would read as long as he could get away with it, probably until his mother softly knocked on the door and warned him to turn off his light before his father decided it was too late to be awake.

  Nick’s single window overlooked the driveway, and the yellowish cone from the streetlight on Brady tinged his walls amber. He started to pull down the shade. His mother always opened it to let in light during the day, but Nick himself hated to see the oblong of light from the window at night, though he resisted the urge to confess that it was a fear of seeing monstrous shadows cross the window that drove him to close and lock the sash every night and pull the drape tightly down to the floor.

  He stopped, his hand on the shade.

  Shouts. From the street out front.

  Another fight?

  No, these were men, shouting in unison.

  He jumped as a howl cut through the late-August night. And another.

  Pain, and fear.

  But then the men shouted again, their voices rising as they came closer, and suddenly Nick realized that they seemed to be coming up the driveway.

  He saw them then, a dozen shadows carrying oversize flashlights and baseball bats, or could those long shapes be guns?—muttering loudly among themselves. Then they were past, heading straight back toward the garage, and he was tearing out of his room and into the kitchen.

  Frank Lupo stood in the back-door frame, rigid of back and also gripping something. In the shadows, Nick thought it was another baseball bat. Except the Lupos didn’t own a baseball bat. No, it was Frank Lupo’s prized Beretta shotgun, with its inlaid ivory filigrees, and Nick realized with surprise that his father was pushing shells into the breech. He never kept the shotgun loaded at home, and he always preached respectful handling.

  “Go back to your room,” Frank Lupo ordered.

  Nick thought he heard his mother crying in the master bedroom, which, in the way of older homes, was located right off the kitchen.

  “Your room, I said!”

  Nick retreated, and his father was on the back staircase, the Beretta at the ready in his hands. Nick could hear him opening the door and talking in low tones with someone, maybe one or two of the men Nick had seen in the driveway. But what was going on? Had someone committed a crime? Should he call the police?

  “Ma?” he half whispered from the darkness.

  “Oh, my God! Go back to bed, Nicky! Go now, before your father sees you. Please!”

  He almost obeyed then. He actually felt his feet beginning to turn. A slight forty-five-degree-angle turn would send him back in the direction of his bedroom and the closed drape, and nothing was going on that he needed to be a part of. Nothing at all. Just a gathering of old drinking buddies. But Frank Lupo had no drinking buddies.

  No, Nick could have obeyed then, but he didn’t want to. The oddness of the day’s events had made him curious, and he wouldn’t be cheated out of an answer now.

  As he negotiated the back steps, he heard a series of howls and growls from just outside the door, maybe one of the neighbors’ dogs out with the men, on a leash, tracking some criminal. Nick stepped into the darkness of his backyard, the sky a purple bruise above him.

  Another howl split the night, and the men raised their voices in shouts that Nick couldn’t make out, and he couldn’t tell where they were. It seemed they had gone around the house in the other direction, perhaps up against the south neighbors’ garage. Nick stumbled on something, maybe a garden tool, he couldn’t tell, and suddenly he was on his knees and facing the largest German shepherd he had ever seen.

  He flashed for a second on the shape of a shepherd slinking into the bushes earlier that day, traces of blood on the blacktop. Twin green eyes peered at him like emeralds in the gloom, he felt himself reaching out a hand to the dog as if it were a pup, and he realized the stupidity of what he wa
s doing, but he couldn’t stop himself in time. The dog’s eyes fixed on his, and then the huge jaws opened and snapped shut near his hand, which he was by then rapidly pulling back.

  The dog growled, low and deep in its throat.

  Nick stared at the animal, wondering as he did so why he wasn’t leaping for the safety of his own back door.

  The light was bad, late dusk finally giving way to real nightfall and the shadows deepening all around.

  Nick felt strangely fascinated by the animal, which in turn stared at him intently. He thought he saw slickness below the dog’s haunches, as if the beast were sitting in blood. Instinctively, he offered his hand again.

  This time the dog did leap, his jaws clamping on Nick’s outstretched hand even as shouts erupted from the corner of the house and voices raised in anger interrupted the animal’s concentration and it tried to come out of its leap sideways, Nick’s hand still clamped in its jaws like Lassie trying to lead him to the site of Timmy’s peril.

  Nick felt the skin of his hand tear roughly as it raked along the dog’s jawline. He yanked his hand back, feeling the sting then of ripped flesh and air settling on the open wound like water mixed with alcohol.

  The dog landed awkwardly on its four paws, then immediately leaped for the darkness of the garage’s shadow.

  Holding his hurt hand, Nick watched him go. Even through the pain caused by the dog’s iron jaws and sharp teeth, he felt almost no anger or animosity. He couldn’t explain it, but there was no urgency and no desire to scream for help. He realized then that he wanted the dog to escape its pursuers, even if he shouldn’t have.

  Hide between the garage and the Corrazzas’ properly, Nick thought, somehow instantly aware that the commotion closely followed the dog—the men had spotted it and were approaching quickly. Meanwhile, the dog seemed indeed to be heading for the same strip of darkness Nick had faced earlier. Maybe the shadows would be even deeper there.

  The knot of men followed, voices raised, brandishing weapons—all of them long guns.