Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) (6 page)

“Which leaves us exactly nowhere. Maybe with a random
killing.”

“And probably more to come,” DiSanto nodded. “I’ll drive.”

Lupo tossed him the keys.

After
leaving DiSanto at his own car, Lupo sat in his aging Maxima, sweating. The
Creature sought a release. The smell of blood had awakened the monster inside
–
his
monster – and Lupo
had fought hard to keep him under control, not ever sure he could manage. It
was a constant fight, especially when the Creature became insistent.

He watched
as patches of coarse hair sprouted and retreated from the backs of his hands as
they rested on the wheel. The full moon was only a few days away, which made
its call harder to ignore.

After all
these years, he could still feel the fucking silver disk and its inexplicable
hold on him. He could still feel himself on the brink of losing all control. He
forced himself to process his information, trying to distract the Creature. As
a tactic, it was marginally successful, but always worth a try.

He thought
of Rosskov and the apparently senseless murder. Unless someone was jealous of
her female lover?
No, didn’t feel right
.
Another woman wouldn’t use a crossbow (his own experience aside – Jessie
wasn't typical! And she was a dead-eye with the crossbow…). Would a jilted guy
feel so hateful that he’d want such an unusual revenge? Maybe he’d run her down
in his car, or beat her with a baseball bat. Neither was very endearing, but
the crossbow spoke of a very specific purpose. Brutal, both less personal and
more personal at the same time.

Penetrating…
He thought about it.
Phallic?

A knife was
also invasive, a rape of flesh, and even a bullet could be considered to be of
a similar nature, if you were thinking about the subconscious.

Yet, a
crossbow was so damned atypical.

Specific purpose.

The thought
of specific purpose brought back Charlie Bear’s face. Lupo let his mind wander
away from the murder weapon. Maybe the guy was just a typical hunter-type who'd
put his hands on the nearest weapon and had no specific reason.

But now Lupo
wondered about Bear’s apparent interest in
him
.
The security chief appeared curious and inquisitive, beyond what was necessary.
Was it just a turf thing between the casino jurisdiction and the city? But that
didn’t make sense, because Bear had seemed willing to cooperate, even share the
duties.

He shrugged,
swallowed a growl, and rolled down his window. The fall evening was turning
colder, and the scent of walking humans nearby – as well as smells from
nearby restaurants – made his stomach rumble as much as that of the
Creature. The pizza from earlier seemed to have curdled down there, too. He
shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

He made his
decision. There wasn’t anything more he could do tonight. Tomorrow there’d be a
preliminary autopsy report if he applied some pressure at the ME’s. He doubted
there would be anything new. Drug use, maybe. But even that wouldn’t mean much.
There wouldn’t be DNA from the killer, unless he had been in contact earlier,
and if he had, why not kill her in a more personal way? Was all this merely
misdirection?

He headed
for the lake shore and turned north on Lake Drive.

Driving the
winding curves past mansions, both the visible and the tucked-away ones, he
thought of Jessie. What she was doing right now. He would have given anything
to be in Eagle River with her. He’d go out for a run, letting the Creature have
his head, then come back to the cottage that had been hers but which they now
shared, and the sex in front of the fireplace would have been both tender and
primal, as he came down off the near-sexual high that was the Change.

He felt his
clothing begin to bind, his human skin begin to itch. It was the moon calling,
though a few days from full. But it was also the blood scent still tickling his
nostrils.

By the time
he reached Doctors Park, a square of 50 wooded acres blanketing the bluffs
overlooking Lake Michigan, he couldn’t wait to tear off his clothes and inhale
the cold night air. As soon as he’d parked the car in a dark spot, he leaped
out and stripped, cold at first but then his inner temperature was taking over
and warming him from the inside, and he tossed his clothes in back, and slid
his holstered Glock under the seat. He positioned a police card on the dash to
avoid being towed by an over-eager patrol cop or robbed by some transient,
locked the door and ditched the keys in the shadows behind the rear tire, then
turned toward the woods.

The cold
lake breeze ruffled his longish hair and made his bare skin tingle.

He felt the
tingle inside, too.

He turned
his head and listened to the sound of the breeze in the trees. It was a
passable facsimile of the same sound up in Eagle River. Except at the end of a
couple mile run, there he would have had Jessie to welcome him home.

Here he
would have the ghost of Tanya Rosskov.

He grunted.
Could he live with her ghost?

Could he
live with any of his ghosts? The number was growing, wasn’t it?

No, he had
to find whoever had killed her. But before that, maybe the motive would help.
There had to be a motive, even if it wasn’t obvious. Find the motive, then see
who fit it best.

He walked
toward the trees, enveloped in their long shadows. The three-quarter moon
peeked out from behind racing clouds. Then he started to run, a long-limbed jog
that took him into the tree line and as he reached the canopy of branches he
focused on visualizing the Change, feeling it arrive –
ready!
– altering his DNA in rapid
steps that first gave him a quick spurt of fur growth along his back and
spreading down.

And as usual
–
it’s a fact, Jack!
– he
was over just like that and the Change took him.

He landed on
four legs, his huge black paws connecting with the ground and the pine needles
instead of his two bare feet. The almost painful stab of multiple scents rushed
into his flared nostrils like ammonia, but turning pleasant once his flesh
became accustomed to the onrush.

And so the
Creature was set loose in this small pocket forest.

Immediately
the Creature which was Lupo began to make sense of all the different threads of
scent, noting that the strongly rank smell of coyote was slathered all around.
It made a small growling sound, dismissing the importance of those scavengers,
and noting instead that the warm blood of a group of deer was calling and
currently overriding everything else.

Deer were
constantly on the move between the various parks that dotted the lakeshore,
many of them residing mainly in the nearby Schlitz Audubon wildlife center,
where they were mostly safe. But they tended to roam, especially the young
bucks, and it didn’t take them long to make their way from the Audubon Center
to the sprawling acreage of Doctors Park, where the woods carried less scent of
human visitors.

The Creature
loped along the invisible threads, separating their scents until it knew it was
following one specific male deer, a young buck.

Then the
Creature slowed, came to a halt, and put its nose to the cold ground.

It edged
forward until it was close to a tiny cleared area in the wooded park, looked
up, and there was the buck. Standing like a statue, head facing the spot
occupied by the Creature, but unable to see it. The buck’s nose fluttered,
attempting to identify the danger he sensed. His muscles tensed, ready to flee.

The Creature
crept forward, eyes on the buck, planning the route of its approach. Lupo gave
over command and let the wolf’s instinct lead.

When the
buck turned his head slightly in the other direction, the Creature broke cover
and leaped almost half the distance to its quarry.

Lupo felt
the thrill of his ride-along, a feeling that never failed to envelop him even
after all the years he'd hated what he became. There was no denying the primal
satisfaction of the hunt, the kill, the hot blood spurting between open jaws.
He lusted for that feeling. If he were honest, sometimes he lusted for it as
much as the Creature.

The buck
grasped his situation a fraction of a second too late and suddenly burst into a
desperate run.

With Lupo
aboard and fully conscious of the bloodlust, the Creature gave chase, cutting
through the buck’s zig-zags as if clairvoyant, predicting them with uncanny
precision.

In less than
thirty seconds it was over. The Creature leapt, leading the buck by a couple
feet, landing on its back and bringing him down with a bone-crunching crash,
jaws closing on the exposed neck and tearing it open even as the beast buckled
beneath the savage charge.

The Creature
feasted on the warm meat. It ripped into the carcass, the cooling blood
staining its muzzle. Lupo’s control over the Creature faded further as it ate
its fill, his connection faltering. Its instinctive bloodlust took precedence
and jostled his awareness farther back. This was the beast’s moment, and Lupo’s
perspective was unnecessary, even if he felt his own lust sated.

After the
Creature was finished with the mauled carcass, it allowed Lupo back in. Then
the wolf howled its satisfaction.

Moments
after the long echo had faded, a series of ragged, mewling howls came as
response.

Coyotes
.

Wolves don’t
normally frequent county parks, but coyotes were well-known and recognized. At
his own pace, Lupo and the Creature sauntered away from the fresh kill, giving
the pack of rangy coyotes the green light. The disliked scavengers, cowards
that they were, waited for the wolf to cover some distance before advancing on
the ravaged remains, pushing and shoving and snapping at each other in
preparation for their sloppy-seconds feasting.

The coyotes
would take the rap for the deer kill, if someone stumbled on it. Anyone who
heard the Creature’s howling would reconsider, knowing there weren’t likely to
be any wolves this far south. Up north in Wisconsin, wolves had made enough of
a comeback that they were about to lose their protected status. The state
assholes were talking about holding sanctioned hunts. But coyotes were
everywhere, and Lupo’s Creature’s occasional kills in county parks would always
be attributed to them.

Back near
the car, the Creature checked for encroachment by anyone, smelling the breeze.
Then Lupo forced a reverse Change and stepped out of the trees on two feet. His
metabolism was hot-wired by the fresh meat and blood, and so he barely noticed
the deep chill that had set in. Once inside his car, he dressed in awkward,
jerky movements and sat a few moments.

Thinking of
Jessie.

If he’d been
up in Eagle River, right about now he would be slipping under the covers, his
hot skin and heightened desire waking her. They’d have fierce, animalistic sex
by the light of the fire, then let their skin cool while they embraced,
preparing for another longer, much more tender bout of lovemaking.

He missed
Jessie. She brought him back so easily from the primitive, instinct-driven
 
mentality of the Creature. She reminded
him that he was still, at core, human – despite the price the Change had
exacted from him over the decades. He missed her point of view, too, knowing
that if he explained this new strange murder to her, she would have some
perspective he hadn’t yet considered.

Tomorrow he
and DiSanto would ramp up their efforts, because deep down he knew that this
guy would strike again. It was stamped all over the first murder. The reason
was important, yet somehow irrelevant. This was a guy at the start of his
spree.

Lupo groaned
as he thought of Griff Killian, the Internal Affairs guru from New York who
seemed to have developed a hard-on for him. Ever since the strange and damn near
unexplainable killing of Julia Barrett, the police department’s psychologist
who’d also begun to suspect that Lupo had a secret life, or at least a secret,
Griff Killian –
sounded like a beer
ad!
– had begun sniffing around Lupo’s friends and acquaintances. And
he’d been at DiSanto, too, Lupo knew, even though Rich hadn’t mentioned it.

Barrett’s
killing weighed on Lupo, more than he expected. The woman had despised him. But
she wouldn’t have been killed in such a horrific way if she hadn’t been
obsessed with proving Nick Lupo was crooked.
Or something
. It was hard to say what she’d wanted to do, other
than just take him down. For its own sake, he guessed.

So it wasn’t
his fault she’d fallen from the hands of a serial killer into those of other
werewolves, but she wouldn’t have been in that position if Nick Lupo had never
entered her life. It was an old story.

Fuck
.

When the
thought process started, it went on no matter how he tried to shut it down.
Dark thoughts always acted with impunity when it came to his conscience.

He drove
home, hoping for a few hours’ untroubled sleep, but feeling as though more
tortured ghosts were swirling around his head. There was only one person who
could chase them away.