Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) (14 page)

“Sure,” he
half-growled, “everything’s fine but I just can’t find her. If she checks in,
have her call me?”

“Are you
Nick? Does she have your—”

“Yes and
yes,” he said, cutting her off. Did he have time to be polite?
No
. He scanned his phone contacts as he
scrolled. Who else could he call? Well, there was DiSanto. He hadn’t checked in
recently.

The younger
cop answered on the third ring. “Yeah, Nick?”

“Dee, you
have Jessie with you? Are you here right now? At the casino?”

DiSanto
sighed. “Uh, no, I’m not there any more. I came back after you called, but then
Lori got hold of me and said she had some list for us but it was too long to
retype into email or attach, and—”

“What about
Jessie?” Lupo’s patience was wearing thin.

“Yeah, ran
into her a while ago, right after I got there. She stopped by while I was
canvassing some of the security folks. We talked about her disgruntled
applicant theory. Oh, and she managed to talk that reporter friend of yours,
Ashley, into leaving me alone – I owe her just for that.” His voice wound
down suddenly – apparently he had finally gotten Lupo’s frantic vibe.

Lupo wanted
to scream. He kept his sudden pit-of-the-stomach fear under control. Or he
thought he was controlling it. “
What was
Jessie doing here?
”

At this
point he didn’t need a ghost to tell him something was wrong.

DiSanto
hesitated. “Uh, she checked in with me, seeing whether her theory was holding
up. She got Ashley to back off. Then I went back to talking to some of the
security guys. Little while after that I saw her sliding some cash into one of
the slot machines. She waved at me, like, saying
I’m okay
. I had to split, so I waved back and that was it.”

Lupo felt
his own face twisting unnaturally. Jessie
gambling
?
That was weird. She'd always made fun of what she called the
casino zombies
. She enjoyed analyzing
the lyrics to
The Turn of a Friendly Card
,
one of their shared favorite Alan Parsons Project concept albums, and as it did
not paint a positive portrait of gambling in general, he would have figured
feeding a slot machine was the last thing she would do. On the other hand, she
had
been hanging around the new tribal
casino that had just begun operating next to her hospital. She’d been getting
meals in its restaurants, and the concert line-up was starting to excite them
both. Maybe she’d started to mess around with the slots on one of her breaks or
lunch periods. Maybe she was softening on the smoke and the zombies.

Lupo shook
his head, knocking out the irrelevant thoughts. Fact was, she didn’t seem to be
around, not at home, not answering, not showing up. She wasn’t missing exactly,
but then where had she gone? Why no phone contact?

Where the hell are you?

“Fuck!” he
said with an unintended growl.

“Nick, take
it easy.”

“It’s easy
for you to tell me to—”

“What?”
DiSanto’s tinny voice piped up from the phone. “Nick?”

Damn that
familiar voice! He’d responded out of habit, but it had taken a couple beats
for him to realize that it wasn’t DiSanto he had heard. He looked around again,
but there was no one there.

Sam’s voice
said: “You have to stay calm. I think she’s fine, but I can’t be sure… I’m
getting some sort of danger vibe. You should calm down and listen.”

“Never mind,
Dee,” he barked into the phone. “Keep an eye out for her.” He disconnected
before DiSanto had a chance to respond.

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
mattress 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.