She was not really sure why she found him so damn intriguing. He’d been a werewolf long before she had, but he’d been so tortured about it, his life so fucked-up, that she was interested despite herself. He was damned good-looking, that was sure, but he hated being a creature, as he called it. Hell, she’d loved her new life as soon as she’d figured out the basics. She’d especially embraced the enhanced libido, the genetic multiplier of her already outsized sex drive. She’d taken the other stuff, like the eating of raw, live meat, as purely entertaining or at worst necessary.
An anchorwoman colleague of hers had once accused her of being a Maneater, like the song she’d said. Heather laughed aloud now at the memory. Hell, she’d proven her right!
In a certain weird way, running into Nick Lupo through the Wolfpaw and casino case, in which she’d been bitten by one of the mercenaries—the lovely Tef, whose body she had drilled with silver slugs before Lupo’s inner creature had torn him apart—had brought her this new life and lifestyle. From what she now understood, besides expanding all her appetites, the werewolf gene also extended her life, and therefore her youth and beauty.
She had to admit, the slowing of her aging process wasn’t anything to sneeze at. It was a gift only superheroes got. Not that she was anything like that. She was way too interested in herself.
But Nick Lupo was, in a roundabout way, the reason she was now a beautiful wolf whose ecstatic howls filled the night wherever she happened to be. And whose frequent sex partners benefited from the raw animal lust she now brought to everything she did.
She could still taste that fake cop. She licked her lips—no need to stop for a snack now. He’d been like a drive-through.
She chuckled deep down in her throat.
Things were looking up again.
Heather wasn’t the type to let grass grow under her feet, as the old saw went. She’d had to take a break from television work, but she had great credentials and she gave great interview, and she wasn’t averse to fucking a prospective boss.
No, she’d get back into television whenever she chose to. All she had to do was smile, maybe whistle…put your lips together and blow, as another blonde bombshell had once uttered in a different context.
Her book project was about to get an infusion of insider information. Her imminent meeting would add weight to her already scandalous history of Wolfpaw Security Services, one that she hoped would hit the bestseller lists given the company’s very public implosion. Even though she couldn’t tell the world the truth about Wolfpaw and its werewolf mercenaries, or for Christ’s sake their origins, they’d been involved in so much everyday crime—as the congressional hearings had shown—that she didn’t need to embellish, and the rest of it could stay buried for now.
She sensed that the world was better off not knowing about werewolves, but sometimes she was careless. She’d learned her lesson, but then again she had always tended to be carefree and she was likely to let the worrywarts like Lupo take care of things.
Right now, she was only interested in herself, her book project…and Nick Lupo.
The satellite DJ cued up Genesis, “Tonight Tonight Tonight.”
She drove on into the night, reminiscing.
And looking ahead.
Chapter Six
Rabbioso
“You wanted to see me?”
He closed the study door and stepped inside his boss’s inner sanctum. He had almost said boss, but just in time remembered that this particular boss insisted he never wanted to hear the word. Made him sound like a thug, he said on rare occasions when he was willing to share his thoughts.
Of course, all evidence pointed to the fact that he was a thug, but there were thoughts best left unexplored.
And right now he wasn’t sharing any of his thoughts. Don Bastone’s face was half-turned toward a wall-hugging flat television on which naked bodies entwined amidst groaning and moaning and the grunts of animal sex.
Rabbioso wasn’t thrilled that the Don’s tastes ran to the wall-to-wall porn he seemed to have on wherever he set up camp. He was happy, however, that both the Don’s hands were in full view and not in his lap.
“Yeah, Robb. Sit, sit. Have a drink.”
Rabbioso was also not happy he’d somehow become the vaguely distasteful Robb. He did stand at the cherry-wood side bar and pour himself a stiff straight Bacardi, though, swirling the gold liquid in the snifter. He’d developed a taste for rum when working in South America. Now he sat across from Don Bastone, who was finally driven to mute the action on the screen and reluctantly turn away.
The Don’s current top lieutenant wondered what made a man need to wallpaper his world with carnality. As usual, he wondered but he didn’t want to know. It was safer that way.
The rum warmed his insides after the cold desert run. The liquor masked the taste of blood still in his mouth. He waited for the boss to speak.
Bastone poured himself a white vermouth and added a generous slug of vodka, a poor man’s martini in a water glass. He just liked it that way.
He was a handsome man with salt-and-pepper hair, but he was getting paunchy because he’d given up his previously active life when he succeeded to the family patriarchy. He was too young to be old-fashioned and he was too old to be a renegade, so he’d settled in as a sort of spoiled prince. His watery eyes reminded Rabbioso of those one might spot on a strait-jacketed inmate at some asylum. He always wanted to keep that in mind.
“That little problem, it’s taken care of?” said the prince.
“Oh, yeah, definitely a done deal.” Rabbioso swished some rum around. “No one will find him, don’t worry.”
The prince leaned forward over the desk. “I’m not worried. I expect success.”
“Of course.” Rabbioso nodded. He knew his place. At least for a while…
“How long you been with me, Robb? And how long you been back?”
Rabbioso thought, carefully. “With you twelve years. Took two, two and a half years off. Back two years now.”
“How was the desert, Robb, when you were out there?”
He wanted to say, It was dry, asshole. But instead he said, “It was a fucked-up mess in more ways than I can count. But I made a lot of money and…served my country.”
“And killed a buncha people, right?”
“I killed some.” Keeping it vague was always best.
Bastone made a there you go gesture with one soft hand. “See, that’s…what do they call it? Street cred. Am I right? Am I right?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s what they call it.” He sipped his rum, waiting to see where this was going. He could kill Bastone in about thirty seconds, but it wouldn’t help him in the long run. The family would never stop seeking revenge. The Don had brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, and several male children all chomping at the bit to make their bones. Revenge would look good on the resumé. Rabbioso would end up regretting it, even if getting his jaws into the bastard’s guts would have felt fine indeed. For the moment, he preferred playing the fawning underling.
“You have it,” the Don mused, continuing on his own path. He sipped his so-called martini. “My father had it. My uncles have it. Hell, my grandfather had it. Street cred.” He looked at Rabbioso again over the rim of his glass, where the liquor touched his lips. “Do I have it, Robb?”
Fuck.
This was dangerous ground. Bastone was like an overgrown child. Petulant and self-involved, entitled, easily aggrieved. Not at all like his father and uncles, who were hard men and not soft at all. Their street cred came easily.
He wanted to tell his boss that if you had to ask if you had street cred, you didn’t have it by a long shot.
But he didn’t pause very long. To do so would have been no different than giving the wrong answer.
“Sure you got street cred. I’ve heard people mention your name in a whisper because they’re afraid someone’s gonna report to you. Your men know you’ve gotten your hands dirty.” It was true, he had gotten his hands
bloody on several occasions, but it hadn’t gone well. Still, he’d proven he was perfectly capable of ordering the torture of men, and had. It wasn’t really street cred, but if he thought it was, then who would have argued?
“Good.” The prince sat back, apparently satisfied.
Rabbioso wondered what this was about, but he was willing to wait for the little prince to get around to telling him.
They drank in companionable silence for a few minutes. Rabbioso loved the golden color of the rum and savored the taste. Bastone sipped noisily, probably not even realizing he was making a face, not enjoying the taste at all. It was a grown-up drink, and the Don didn’t qualify.
Part of having street cred was not making faces when you don’t like something, Rabbioso thought. There were all sorts of things connected to having real street cred, and Bastone had very few of them.
The Don sipped again but didn’t make a face. Getting used to it. “You know besides the Old Italy, I have interests in a couple other casinos here in Vegas, right?”
Trick question?
“Yeah, the Western Round-Up and the Patrician.” Both were recent startups and doing well, if not spectacularly. In the constant reinvention of the Las Vegas skyline, one looked like an old-fashioned Rat Pack-era casino and the other was vying for some of the Wynn’s clientele by aping its forward-looking architecture. Bastone was silent partner in both ventures, and had a small percentage of some other small off-Strip operations.
“But I don’t have anything back home.”
“Right,” Rabbioso agreed, not sure where this was going.
“I would like to have something going back home, something to increase my street cred. You follow?” The Don stared at him across the desk.
Rabbioso knew the Bastone family had started out in Atlantic City before the old Don had spread out west. But in the sixties the old Don had resettled in the Midwest and made an effort to at least look legit, leaving behind the old-fashioned rackets—drugs and prostitution—for a full-on attack on the gambling world. With operations in both A.C. and Vegas, the family fortune had been made by the seventies. The problem was that the new Don, Prince Gus, apparently wanted to somehow increase his family’s profile for the feds.
“Sure,” he said. “I guess you have a new expansion picked out?”
“That’s what I like about you, Robb,” the Don said. “You get it right off the bat. Can’t say the same for everybody who works for me.”
Rabbioso sipped his rum. It was always best to let the prince do the talking.
“One area that’s been untapped by those of our thing,” the Don started, meaning the cosa nostra, a term few people used these days with the possible exception of feds in tiny puke-green offices, “is those fuckin’ Indian casinos. That’s like fruit ripe for pickin’.”
“I think there’ve been some attempts to get in there, in the tribal casinos,” Rabbioso said carefully. “But they got a Regulatory Act watching over them, and it’s a bit tougher than just buying in.”
“Who’s talking about buyin’ in? I’m thinking of musclin’ in. And I got just the place in mind.”
“Okay.” Rabbioso figured the orders were coming now. He finished his rum, savoring the pleasant burn down his throat.
“Since my father built his house in Milwaukee, I kept a foot in that state. As you know…”
The Don had a mansion on Milwaukee’s fashionable Lake Drive, where he spent half the spring and summer, most years. Behind the wall it was an armed compound, but from the street it looked like a woodsy lot with an oversize Tudor nestled among the trees. Circular drive, guest house. It was a fortress.
“I had contacts in the state lookin’ out for an opportunity last couple months. And one has been brought to me, a new operation on a reservation next to Vilas County up north there. Not far from Eagle River, you know, where I go fishin’ few times a year. Got a great muskie there once. Fought like a bastard.”
Anyway…
Rabbioso said nothing. He wished he’d poured a bigger rum.
“Anyway, I’m actively lookin’ to expand in that area, I have a contact on the ground, and a couple guys are there to get things off on the right foot. You know Johnny—” Rabbioso nodded “—and I’m sending you over to do some additional ground work.”
“Huh, okay.” Rabbioso thought fast. Eagle River, why was that familiar? He hadn’t been fishing with the Don, maybe that was while he was…away. In the desert, as the boss put it. “Whatever you want.”
“Have another drink,” said the Don. He seemed to be in fine spirits.
Rabbioso did so, relieved he had something to do. He looked around the office, the inner sanctum, that few of the men got to see. That mounted fish up there, maybe that was the muskie the Don was talking about. It was a large fucker, shaped like a barracuda. There were bookcases full of books the boss probably didn’t read. There were toys and gadgets lying around, like a telescope and a lighted globe. There was some tasteful art somebody else had probably picked out. It was an office like what the Don thought a rich guy’s office should look, not so much one that reflected his tastes. Except for the TV and the 24/7 porn. That was the boss’s taste. He got ready to hear the rest of his sentence, hoping he’d get off lightly.
He sat and took a long taste, and the Don continued.
“So I got somebody there and he found me a house. Sent me some pictures on the computer today.” He flipped the flat monitor around a little so Rabbioso could see.
It was a huge two-story log cabin with two wings jutting out from the main house, a wide stone chimney rising from the middle, a pyramid-like center with wide-open glass panels right up to the green steel roof, a wraparound veranda and a basketball court-sized deck starting from the end of one of the wings and wrapping around the rear. Looked like a house-sized garage lurked out back on the left, too, with maybe an all-season pool enclosure. It was like a skiing chalet pumped up on hormones and steroids, a millionaire’s fancy getaway in the mountains—except there were no mountains in northern Wisconsin, just some rolling hills and a lot of woods surrounding cold lakes shapes like fat fingers.
The damned assignment was looking better every second.
“Nice place,” he said evenly.
“It’s an oversize shack and they want two-and-a-half mil for it, the vultures.” The Don smiled like a shark, all teeth and no lip. “But it was worth five and the dipshit actor who owned it had his career tank and now it’s a fire sale. They’ll take my lowball, don’t worry. I’m movin’ in, maybe about a month. You’re going in early with a squad, lay some ground work, get some stuff done.”
“What stuff?” Rabbioso’s attention was slipping. He was trying to remember why he should know Eagle River, but he was also seriously loving the idea of letting the wolf run in those woods. You got tired of the desert, and he’d had plenty of that the last few years.
“There may be a spot of trouble with the tribe. Some people there will be all for our partnership, others will not. I need you to help smooth things with those who may not be in agreement. Pretty much up to you how you accomplish that. I pay you to troubleshoot, so troubleshoot. I want you to do pre-emptive troubleshooting.”
Rabbioso was intrigued. “Give me the details and I’ll pack a bag.”
The Don smiled the lipless smile again. “I’m sending you and the muscle by car. Take longer, but you can bring your…tools. Pack two bags, one long and heavy. Figure on heading out tomorrow. Oh, and take this new kid Tony. After your stuff is done, leave him somewhere in the desert, okay?”
The Don laid out more details, and now Rabbioso’s attention was focused.
He’d always been task-centered.
He saw the house photo still up on the monitor. Those woods were calling him.
Bastone had switched his attention back to the garish screen and unmuted the picture. Orgasmic groans and screams emanated from the action, which—as far as Rabbioso could figure—had never let up for the length of his stay. How do those gu
ys keep from popping?
Suddenly he couldn’t wait to get going, pack up the car and get out of the desert for a while. Away from Bastone and his weird ways. The little prince was acting more irrationally every month. Rabbioso almost made a face, but caught himself.
He wanted to hunt.
Two birds with one stone.
Jessie
The itch took her in the middle of her later shift.
The rez hospital was suffering an uncharacteristic lull at the moment. Bar fights were down, domestic battery was probably still level but no one was reporting any (not that that was unusual, really), and the flu epidemic had apparently peaked for the season. She had only a handful of patients and they were all comfortably tucked in and content.
She was just done with her second rounds this shift and had stopped for an iced tea in the cafeteria when she had a flashback.
A flashback?
What else could you call it?
The hospital was really an oversize clinic, though some rather impressive equipment like a GE MRI machine had been purchased recently with funds partly raised by the tribe’s flourishing casino. But the cafeteria reminded her so much of the food court located in the heart of the casino, the lights of which she could see blinking erotically through the window…hell, she was almost certain the design of both spaces had been done by the same architecture firm, if you could call any food court space design of any kind. But as she sat with her tea and the lights caught her eye, the itch started in her fingertips and crawled up her hand, wrist, forearm, and suddenly she was scratching her shoulders, hugging herself as if she were cold.
Goddamn it, it was a kind of flashback.
The shivers started a few minutes later.
She hadn’t told Nick about this, not about the fact that sometimes this happened to her despite the therapy, despite the meditation. Despite the willpower she’d been able to bring to bear so often to so many other things.
Jessie was strong. Nick always told her so. She’d always been able to do whatever needed to be done.
Whatever needed to be done.
Wolf's Cut (The Nick Lupo Series Book 5) Page 6