Their faces were covered by some sort of hoods. One was wearing an old-looking leather jacket, the other a blazer or suit. They looked like small-timers, hired muscle. They grunted with each blow. When they stopped, they were panting.
Every nerve ending in his body was afire, it seemed, but he had all his teeth and they hadn’t broken skin anywhere that would be visible even though he knew they’d actually kicked him at least a dozen times. He’d piss blood for a few days, if they didn’t start again.
The bigger of the two, the one in the suit, grabbed William’s lapels and yanked him into a sitting position.
The two stood over him and he realized they hadn’t spoken yet.
“Chair,” the larger one said. The other one, in the leather, went to the dining nook and returned with a kitchen chair which he set between them.
William blinked as he watched them. He wanted to ask Why? but it was pointless—he was certain he was about to find out. And he was certain he already knew.
“All right, Mr. Tree Walker,” the one in the suit said. He’d caught his breath after the exertions of kicking a man in the ribs repeatedly. “Or is that Treewalker, one word?” He turned toward his companion, Leather, who was standing by like a loyal assistant. “Interesting name. I wonder where it comes from.”
Leather shrugged his uncaring.
“It’s just so…native. So where does it come from, Treewalker?”
William pondered very briefly. Not playing would get him beaten again. Playing might not. He played.
If I can get to that Glock, though…
He swallowed the sharp pains throughout his torso. “One word. My family worked in the logging industry as far back as anyone remembers.” He paused to catch his breath. Talking hurt more than he would have imagined. “They used to run the logs down the rivers to the mills. Guys would walk on the logs when they jammed up and the name stuck.” His voice hitched as something sharp jabbed something soft inside him.
Fuck.
“That so?” Suit said. He turned toward his assistant. “Hear that? They walked on trees. Precious. That’s one of the things I like about this area. You know what another one is?”
William said nothing.
Suit lashed out with his foot and caught him in the very same place something was grinding into something else and he couldn’t help it. He screamed.
“You know what another one is?” Suit repeated.
“No,” William said, his voice a croaking whisper. “What is it?”
“That’s better.” Suit smiled without humor of any kind, and wrestled a strand of oily hair back over his skull. “The other is that there’s a place to gamble up here in the middle of Fuck-All Wisconsin, and it’s run by this pissy little band of fuckin’ Indians, taking money from poor people on food stamps and getting’ rich enough to live in places like this.” He waved at their environment. “But see, I like that. I like it and I want it to continue. My boss, he wants it to continue. It’s set to continue, except some people want to stand in the way. I hear when that happens, places mysteriously burn to the ground. So people shouldn’t stand in the way.”
He kicked William again, enough to drive that jabbing right through his brain. Or so it seemed. He curled up like a poisoned insect and hoped they’d stop with the kicking. He was sweating furiously now even though all his extremities felt cold, wondering where this was going. He didn’t like the chair.
Every breath was like fire in his chest, his liver, his gut.
Suit swept back his hair again. “Another reason they shouldn’t stand in the way is that…”
He snapped his fingers. Leather went around them and outside, returning with an aluminum briefcase, which he set on the chair.
He really didn’t like the chair.
“Another reason is that when people stand in the way of progress, they stand to lose somethin’, know what I mean?”
Suit opened the briefcase with two snaps of the locks, then took out a blue metal cylinder with a brass nozzle and set it standing on the chair seat.
Propane torch.
Fuck, no.
Suit’s eyes widened. “Ah, you recognize it? Good.” He took out a hacksaw and set it on the chair next to the torch.
William was measuring the distance to that damned drawer. His Glock might as well have been on another planet. He was so wrecked up that he’d never get up and make it past them to get to the damn drawer.
Suit took the hacksaw in one hand. “Are you right-handed?”
A red haze flowed down from William’s forehead and covered his eyes like a veil.
“Are you right-handed?” Suit asked again. “Tell me or I’ll assume it doesn’t matter to you.”
“Left!” William croaked out.
“Good. Take his right hand.”
Leather jumped to it.
“Noooo,” William groaned through the pain. He’d assumed the guy would be mean enough to go for the dominant hand and lied, but it had backfired. The guy was mean enough, and he hadn’t bought it.
Leather stretched out his right arm and knelt on it, starting another line of pain. His hand lay helpless on the floor, curling uselessly as if it could run and hide.
Suit took the hacksaw and bent down. When he lay the metal blade onto William’s squirming wrist, William screamed long and loud, and they let him. Waited him out. When he ran out of voice, the stabs all over his insides doing their own screaming, he was reduced to sniffling and snorting, words tumbling out of his mouth with saliva and snot mixing and running down his chin.
Suit made one cut and William’s skin parted like pork fat, blood bubbling into the wound and running out in a hard trickle that started to pool on the tiles.
William struggled, but Leather’s weight on his arm, plus the damage they’d done to his insides sapped what was left of his strength.
He prepared for the next cut.
He’d seen plenty of torture in his time, and he knew what would happen next.
Suit leaned in low and whispered in William’s ear. “Do you remember what I said about standing in the way of progress? Do you?”
William’s eyes streamed tears. “Yes,” he said, his voice cracking.
“What?” Suit said, leaning onto the hacksaw so it bit into William’s wrist again, drawing more blood.
“Don’t,” he whispered, desperate. “Don’t. Stand in the. Way.”
“Right. That means don’t make a fuss about the merger, see?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The merger. Stop messing with things you don’t understand or appreciate. Okay?”
“Uh…yes. Yes!”
“Break a finger,” Suit said, and Leather grabbed William’s pinky and bent it back until they all heard the snap of bone like a twig.
William screamed.
“Okay, let him go,” Suit said. Leather stood, removing his weight from William’s arm so that the blood went rushing back in. Of course, so did the broken finger’s pain.
“Consider that a down-payment on the real event.”
Suit collected the torch and the hacksaw and snapped closed the briefcase.
“I want you to know,” he said, leaning close to William’s head, “that I was all for making this a real message. But I was told to give you a chance to rethink your position. If you don’t, my friend and I will be back. And my briefcase.”
He stood and kicked the chair across the room, where it crashed into the flat television and knocked it off its stand.
“Get some pressure on that wrist. Have a nice night.”
Suit and Leather stalked out, leaving the door open.
William lay on his floor, bleeding, for a long time before he tried to stand. When he did, he passed out.
Chapter Ten
Heather
The bursts of suppressed gunfire still rang in her ears, but now they were the wolf’s ears, too, and every tiny sound was magnified. She heard the approaching shuffles and slid as far as possible into the SUV’s shadow.
&nb
sp; She held the wolf ready, her muscles rippling and a low growl gurgling from deep down in the throat.
Sure enough, three masked men dressed entirely in black approached the Volvo, bulbous submachine guns held at the ready. She figured they’d probably take out any passersby who chanced upon them. They didn’t seem prepared to talk their way out of anything—it would be death they dealt. Two of them flipped Wineacre over like a broken doll and patted him down while the third stood guard. They shook their heads and one of them swore. Then one of them scanned Wineacre’s Volvo with some sort of device, perhaps an advanced metal detector that could tell the difference between the auto metal and a foreign body. Again, a shake of the head and a curse.
Heather had figured she could hide here in the shadows until they left, but they seemed bent on locating whatever Wineacre had held. They must have seen her duck away, figuring they’d shot her. And they didn’t even care to check on her. They were damned sure of themselves. What they weren’t sure of was whether he’d had the flash drive on him or not, and whether he’d managed to get rid of it.
Which meant they had to make a quick search of the nearby parked cars, perhaps finding the keybox she’d attached to the Explorer.
She made the wolf wait patiently, but its muscles thrummed under the skin and fur as it eagerly awaited liberation. Drool dripped from its fangs.
Two of the gunmen started to check between parked cars in each direction while the third stood guard.
The one heading right for her would reach her in seconds. She gathered the wolf beneath her for a lunge.
When the gunman poked his head and gun muzzle just behind the Explorer’s rear bumper, the wolf leaped out with a long growl and knocked him onto his back, its paws smashing into his chest. Before the guy could get off a scream, Heather’s lupine jaws ripped out his throat and voice box, and he died with a gurgle in a shower of blood.
Only seconds later, the wolf was swallowing up the few yards between it and the sentry, who was only then whirling around.
Time slowed to a crawl, but the wolf darted like a flash of light through the molasses of the background.
The sentry brought the MP5’s suppressed muzzle up, slugs already exploding out in a deadly stream, but the wolf was both quick and impervious to lead.
Heather felt slugs tearing into and through the wolf’s body, splattering cars and buildings alike, but whatever magic made her heal in minutes also masked the pain, and when the wolf’s crimson-dappled jaws reached the gunman its fangs first tore his face off and then, even as he screamed while trying to bring the gun to bear, ripped out his throat as well.
The third gunman started sprinting toward them and raised his own gun, but then put on the brakes as if he’d had second thoughts and reversed his course, heading for a break in the row of parked cars.
Unfortunately for him, Heather’s wolf had had much practice bringing down running prey—in an early phase of her new life she’d arranged to make an occasional hunt and meal of a homeless vagrant—and now the wolf’s four paws ate up the distance and caught the last gunman before he could dive into a waiting car…
The wolf snapped its jaws around the guy’s right leg as he ran and tossed him aside easily, his head smacking the side of a parked car with a sickening crunch. His body came to rest against the curb in a heap, his head dangling loosely off the broken neck.
Despite the guy’s obviously terminal state, the raging wolf leaned in and bit through the guy’s throat, swallowing as much hot blood as possible in the gush from his torn jugular.
In doing so, Heather was surprised to see that the guy was a woman when her long hair came undone…but the wolf was hungry and, the three killers now dead, it ate a quick snack of hot flesh before heading back to the Explorer.
Heather visualized herself back in human form and seconds later she was groaning with the sudden sharp pain of the several bullet wounds that stitched across her torso.
She fell to her knees, scraping them on the cracked sidewalk, and nearly fell over.
Fuck!
She’d been hit more effectively than she’d realized.
Her body screamed as her human form suddenly absorbed the trauma of the damaged tissue and bone.
And now she saw that a few shocked passersby were beginning to cautiously approach the scene, their eyes focused on the naked woman groaning amidst the carnage.
With a cry of frustrated rage—and excruciating pain!—Heather snatched up Wineacre’s keybox from below the SUV, the remains of her clothing and bag, and staggered to her feet, bashing into the Explorer’s side and reaching out to break her fall before regaining her balance and running for the alley that opened up nearby.
Shouts followed her and then sirens approaching quickly from the east.
She stashed most of her things in a doorway two blocks away, then changed into wolf form and bounded toward a wooded lot behind a row of well-kept Tudor houses. Immediately the pain lessened as the healing process began to work on her wolf’s body. She would heal in human form, too, but the wolf was optimized for healing and after stumbling a few steps, she disappeared into the small urban grove and found hiding shadows.
Heather hid there as her wounds healed, grateful the shooters hadn’t been armed with silver slugs. Clearly, they hadn’t been expecting any werewolves. Just a ruined human being as a whistleblower, an easy target for the hit team.
She’d had enough of silver eating her up from the inside. Lead was like pellets from a kid’s gun by comparison.
Screaming sirens seemingly by the dozen approached the neighborhood, heading for the crime scene. Though the guns were suppressed, they’d caused plenty enough loud mayhem. The place would be swarming with uniforms and detectives in short order.
She had to get back to her car before cops started logging plates, looking for witnesses or perps.
And she hoped to hell she’d killed the bastards.
She was starting to believe the world had enough werewolves.
Heather ordered her wolf alter ego to bide its time. But her heart was racing, and she wondered just what she would find on that flash drive, once she got back to her laptop.
For now, the magnetic key box was safe in the wolf’s jaws.
Lupo
It was a large space, about equal to a medium-size room, and it had a light switch. Lupo flicked it and a caged light bulb in the near corner lit up and threw a shadowy cone of light over the room’s contents.
He sensed Ghost Sam’s presence behind him but the elderly Indian didn’t say anything at all.
Lupo closed the door so any visitors wouldn’t notice the light.
The walls were lined with cheap, battered file cabinets. Tucked between a dozen tall cabinets was an ancient government-style desk, a gray hulk that jokers always compared to Communist-era office furniture. Stacks of cardboard boxes, some of them water damaged, teetered here and there throughout the open floor space, making a maze of the room. More boxes were piled atop the file cabinets and leaned over, threatening to spill their contents.
“Jesus Christ on a stick,” Lupo muttered. The place was cluttered and dusty, musty-smelling and somehow gave off what he might have called bad vibes.
“It’s almost like an office,” Ghost Sam pointed out unnecessarily. “Did you know your father came here?”
“No,” he said absently. “No, I had no idea.”
Lupo stepped up to the nearest file cabinet and pulled open a squeaky drawer. It was stuffed to bursting with old stained manila folders with a fine layer of dust coating their top edges. He plucked one out at random with a range of dates, labeled Giuliano, M., Comm., blew the dust off, and saw what appeared to be a set of diary pages on ancient lined paper. Handwritten notes in Italian seemed to be a sort of activities record, in chronological order. The dates at the top of the page were August 1962. He shuffled through the loose pages. There were entries for 1959 to 1962 in this folder, far as he could tell.
He squinted in the weak light. And scanne
d the last sheet in the folder, also dated August 1962.
Arrivato 21:09, cenato con Martinelli, T., nido protetto, att. 23:35. Successo.
Apparently Mister Giuliano had arrived at 9:09, dined with someone named Martinelli at a protected nest, and something had happened at 11:35—something successful.
Lupo tapped the paper as he thought.
Given the date, the abbreviation Comm. Probably not committee. No, Lupo thought it more likely it referred to communism. So who was a communist? Not his father—he’d hated communists almost as much as he hated Nazis.
The abbreviation Att. could refer to attention, but if this was what he thought it was, then it could also refer to attentato, an attempt—an assassination attempt, perhaps? If so, then it had been successful.
Lupo navigated between stacks of boxes and crossed the storage room, chose another file cabinet and pulled out its lowest drawer. Kneeling, he blew some dust off the folders and picked one at random from the middle.
The date stamped on the cover was 1946. Inside, three sheets of yellowing paper with tiny fountain pen notes. This one bore an Italian name, Rosso, F. But in parentheses there was Franz Rosch, Ausch. noted nearby. Lupo felt a shiver. Auschwitz, most likely. This guy was a German soldier. He flipped through the pages. SS stood out in a short paragraph with which he had difficulty. The writing was neat and cramped. It was a young version of his father’s hand, he was certain. Locations, times.
He set the folder down on the open drawer and took a long breath.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
He’d forgotten Ghost Sam, who seemed to be looking over his shoulder even though he was too far away.
“This guy was in the SS, stationed at the concentration camp. Changed his name and stayed on in Italy after the war. Probably would have got away with it. But… Looks like my father hunted German werewolves after the war.” He pursed his lips. “Maybe later he switched to communists.”
“Communist werewolves?” said Ghost Sam.
“Well, why not? At this point, who’s to say how many there might be everywhere?”
“There is one other possibility, Nick…”
Wolf's Cut (The Nick Lupo Series Book 5) Page 10