Wolf's Cut (The Nick Lupo Series Book 5)

by W. D. Gagliani

  Of course, Rabbioso would have brought down the deer himself if hungry enough, but doing so with his legs and jaws alone he did not consider the same as using a weapon such as the rifle this hick probably carried.

  There.

  Trying to cross a thicket without snagging his clothes or making too many sounds.

  Rabbioso’s night vision was sharp, his wolf was still hungry, and the human was carrying a rifle and a spotlight. He’d just flicked it on seconds ago, but had apparently spooked the group of deer before he could freeze them in the light. He was mumbling curses under his breath, making sure that no other nearby deer would stumble on him.

  Clearly a high-IQ scholar.

  Rabbioso stalked him, knowing his own slight sounds would never reach the human’s ears.

  In minutes, Rabbioso was in position. When the human crashed his way through scraggly autumn underbrush, his light flicking on and off—either as a signal or as pure stupidity—the wolf was in the nearby shadows, his black coat hidden within.

  The human half-tripped, stopped, looked up…and froze.

  The wolf growled a warning out of pure enjoyment.

  The human gasped, dropped the spotlight—which broke with a tinkling of glass—and attempted to deploy his rifle. Unfortunately the full body weight of the giant wolf was just about to reach him, and when it did the snarling animal planted its paws on the chest and flipped the human’s body onto its back.

  The single scream was a gurgle.

  Rabbioso tore out the bearded man’s throat and let the blood gush in an arc, from which he drank like a fountain, his fanged jaws curled up in a sort of smile.

  Later, when his thirst was quenched, the wolf nosed through the dead man’s clothes and his fangs tore into the stomach, releasing the main course.

  The wolf slurped through the rest of his dinner.

  When he was sated, he howled and enjoyed the echo of his melancholy call.

  He listened, but there was no response.

  New wolf in town.

  He ate more, just because.

  By the time he left the body, it was barely recognizable as human.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jessie

  The downtown section of the rez wasn’t very large, but several new buildings including her hospital and the casino gave the two-block stretch the look of a bigger, wealthier community. Work had begun on a small central square, a park and meeting area, and a sort of commons. Only a couple blocks away the homes and apartments were still dilapidated and rundown, but here one could almost imagine that the tribe’s luck had really turned. She was sure it was turning, but it would take time to really help everyone.

  And certainly not if the mob was horning in. She shook her head. She might well be wrong and the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Like the song.

  Bored with the cafeteria offerings, she left the hospital for a quick meal at a diner located in a new building nearby. The casino lights tempted her, however, and she stopped at the midway point and hesitated.

  Casino food or diner?

  She shrugged. As she started toward the casino, she saw someone she recognized. It was the thug with the slicked-back hair. He almost hadn’t popped out at her, as she was seeing him for the first time in sunlight, but it was definitely him. He sauntered past her in the opposite direction, clearly not recognizing her.

  He really only looked at my ass.

  She waited for him to pass, ignoring him, then stuck her nose in a souvenir shop window until he was farther away.

  She knew Nick would have a fit if he knew, but she had to find out what mission this guy was on. She followed him as unobtrusively as she could. He seemed arrogant and unused to watching his back, so she had no trouble.

  He walked to the Main Street General Store, where he bought cigarettes and stood around a few minutes until he was joined by another guy who approached from the parking lot. She hadn’t noticed him pull in, but he came out of some SUV. The new guy was wearing a canvas safari-style jacket and it looked good on him, not a fake but like one he’d actually taken to Africa or somewhere exotic. His hair was sandy and surfer-long, and he wore one of those attractive three-day stubbles on a face that was cut right out of a teenage heartthrob magazine, albeit one ten or fifteen years old.

  Hell, he looks like a young Bruce Campbell.

  She watched a fair amount of movies and television with Nick when they weren’t rolling around in bed, so she knew the actor Bruce Campbell’s look very well. So in her mind, he was now not-Bruce.

  She couldn’t hear him, but he stood close to the slick-hair guy and they chatted while Slick smoked. The new guy waved his arms a lot, reminding her of Nick.

  Italian?

  Sure, it was a stereotype. But Nick always made her laugh by pointing out all the usual stereotypes he himself, and his family, had fit in neatly. Just because it’s a stereotype, he would say as he waved his arms over his head, doesn’t mean it isn’t at least based in truth.

  The two thugs—and she couldn’t help herself, she was thinking of them both as thugs now—kept talking long enough that she entered the souvenir shop, said hello to the owner, then hung out near the front so she could keep an eye on them. The slick-hair guy was pointing down one street and then another, definitely giving not-Bruce directions. So, not-Bruce was new in town.

  They broke up about ten minutes later, their conversation having gotten heated a few times, but resolved on friendly enough terms. Slick-hair guy went off in one direction and not-Bruce in the other, but not back to his car.

  Jessie waved at the shop owner again and rushed out, trying to decide which one to follow.

  Based on the way he’d controlled the conversation, she went with not-Bruce. He walked without care, having no reason to suspect she was following. There weren’t many shops to browse, but she didn’t have to worry as he seemed to have a clear-cut destination in the direction opposite of the casino.

  She shadowed him but tried to appear aimless, while keeping an eye on him at all times.

  Jessie was surprised when he entered the new library, a long building with a high-peaked corrugated roof. She made her way inside and hovered close enough to the information desk to hear the librarian direct him to the microfilm machines across the large room. She knew the librarian so she hovered out of sight, ducking into a section of magazine stacks and hiding in the shadows as the not-Bruce guy turned on the charm and got help with the machinery. The librarian brought him several reels in boxes, and he set about scrolling through and reading.

  Not typical, she thought. Mobsters don’t read, do they? Or was she profiling?

  Impatiently, Jessie paged through every magazine on the racks as she waited for the guy to finish whatever he was doing. He was methodical and quick, very competent. There was an air of capable menace about him, bottled up and suppressed but crouched there, in the background. He scared her, though she wasn’t sure why. When he finished, he left the reels and waved at the librarian as he left. The woman was busy with a patron, so Jessie took the opportunity to quick-step over and check what he’d been so occupied reading. He’d left a reel on the machine, so she switched it on and saw the Madison newspaper account of the “crime spree” recently perpetrated by the three unemployed Wolfpaw mercenaries.

  Shit.

  The other reels were the local papers as well as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from the same time period.

  The guy was researching them.

  Now she had to tell Nick.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Franco Lupo

  December 1945

  The cafés under the huge arched portici of the storied Via XX Settembre in the center of Genova’s old town, near the harbor, had stacked their outdoor furniture when the weather turned chilly and the rain tended to spit out of a gray sky almost every night, but their interiors were busy with pre-Christmas traffic.

  Franco sipped an espresso while standing at a ledge in a café that seated twenty but whose clientele this
evening probably numbered a hundred. Bodies were jammed close together and Franco had to keep shifting slightly on his heels to see his quarry.

  The tall blond Aryan should have stood out, but as there were numerous large ships in harbor, some of them Scandinavian, anyone would assume the tall man in the pea coat was one of the sailors off his freighter while the holds were filled. Franco had been tipped to this particular man by one of his informants, the few who were left who would talk to him. In recent months his information stream had dried up, and he suspected that Corrado and his thugs had something to do with it.

  After they’d so ignominiously smashed him on the back of the head and dumped him in an empty portside warehouse, he had considered tracking them down and smashing a few heads himself, but he hadn’t been able to find them. They’d gone to ground very effectively, though he knew Corrado’s group still stalked werewolves—the occasional newspaper report of a strange murder never failed to set off bells in his head, especially when they occurred near the harbor or in the caruggi sector of the Old Town. The narrow twisting lanes, paved with ancient cobblestones, were perfect for ambushes…Franco had done the same himself.

  The Aryan was mostly ignored by the bustling clientele that included several uniformed officers of the Allied occupation troops remaining in the garrisons, but Franco kept one eye on the man himself and another on anyone nearby who might also have been interested. The tall sailor drank an espresso laced with lemon and grappa and munched a slice of street focaccia, the local salty flatbread. Franco snickered. As a werewolf, surely the Aryan would have preferred fresh meat. The fact that he was lying so low indicated there was a purpose to his circuitous route this evening. Now he tilted the tiny cup all the way up, slurped the last of the strong coffee, laid it on its saucer and pushed it back toward the barman. He dropped a bill on the counter and made his way to the door, squeezing between oblivious customers.

  Franco bristled when the Aryan brushed past him. He imagined he could catch the wolf’s scent on the man, but in reality he just smelled of stale sweat and bad ship’s cookery featuring the more plentiful onions and potatoes. Still, his informant was rarely wrong, and Franco had developed a knack, a seventh sense—as he thought of it—that told him there went a shapeshifter. Maybe it was because the man’s features were vaguely lupine.

  He slugged down the still hot coffee and rattled the cup as he abandoned his post and hastened toward the door so he wouldn’t lose the man in the evening foot traffic.

  Though rain still slickened the streets, strollers stayed dry under the high romanesque arches of the venerable shopping district which was only just then beginning to reawaken after years of neglect and austerity. The Italian people were resilient and their innate lust for life forced memories of its war-torn cities to begin fading under an umbrella of hope.

  Franco followed the Aryan down a length of the Via XX Settembre toward the Piazza De Ferrari. Perhaps he was attending a meeting—Franco decided to see where he went, before drawing the dagger and exacting his brand of revenge.

  Sure enough, the Aryan was proceeding along a zigzag route that took him ever closer to the porto antico, the old harbor, and then he slid into a rain-washed vicolo of the caruggi and stuck close to the shadows afforded by the narrow lanes.

  Franco clutched the sheathed Vatican blade under his coat. It seemed to give off a sort of heat that made his fingers tingle, but he knew it was his imagination. Perhaps a werewolf in human form would feel the tingling while the dagger was sheathed, the tingling being much preferable to the scorching, skin-melting agony the presumably holy silver-plated blade could bring both user and victim.

  The Aryan strode through the thinning evening crowd ahead, oblivious to his tail. Franco had become adept at blending in, and as a teenager still, it was not so difficult to appear aimless and harmless despite everything that had changed him. He bobbed and weaved through the few legitimate strollers who were left, noticing that the composition of those walking the streets was now changing to include prostitutes in search of johns and johns in search of company for the night, or an hour. Ladies called out to Franco upon catching sight of him, a strapping lad with wild hair and such a serious face, but he ignored them. He hoped their calls didn’t alert his quarry, but the tall Aryan continued on his way—apparently well-acquainted with the twisting lanes. Wherever the guy was going, Franco now wondered if he himself would be able to find his way back out of the old city sector. Fortunately, the cold winter evening breeze off the Mediterranean was impossible to miss. If nothing else, he would reverse his steps and then keep the wind on his right instead of left. Unless the winds shifted, of course.

  Franco shook his head in frustration. Pay attention. Don’t lose the man.

  Passing shuttered shops and the occasional bullet-riddled wall, Franco finally saw the man knock on a door set under a brick arch. Someone let in the Aryan after a few moments’ questioning, and Franco knew he would have to wait. There was no good way for him to pass whatever test might be thrown at him by the bouncer, whoever he was.

  He looked around. There was a dingy trattoria across the way and he spied a few tables inside the window. He entered and saw that there was no other clientele. He scraped the bottom of his pocket and ordered a slice of focaccia with onions and a glass of cheap wine. Then he took up vigil in the window, waiting to see when the Aryan would leave.

  Of course, he realized that the man might have given him the slip by leaving from a rear stairway, but Franco was confident he hadn’t been spotted.

  He chewed the barely passable, almost stale flat bread. No wonder there was no clientele, he thought. This place was a dive.

  Waiting, he cast his mind back.

  Franco had changed after his father, Giovanni, had succumbed to a German werewolf’s bite and had been banished by Corrado’s partisan brigade. It seemed only old Father Tranelli, the drunk Jesuit who had acquired the Vatican blades, had felt some sympathy for the young family now left fatherless. Of course, he didn’t know Franco had been the one to put his own father out of his misery.

  Now Franco wondered whether he was wasting time chasing an innocent man. Well, innocence was relative.

  He’d investigated a dozen such cases and had simply faded into the shadows when he had established that these former German enemies were now harmless. Though he might have craved revenge for other reasons, he now had limited his life’s work to only those straggler Germans who fit the profile.

  Those who were more monstrous than even the evil SS and Gestapo troops. For even those dreaded uniformed troops wouldn’t eat their human prey.

  Suddenly the door opened and the Aryan exited, carrying under one arm a thick packet.

  Franco swallowed the last of his bread and weak wine, thinking of it as a sort of communion, and quickly followed his quarry.

  Apparently they were still headed for the harbor, and Franco remained invisible but doggedly on the trail. When the Aryan selected one of the narrower slips, bordered on either side by a cracked cement pier and dilapidated warehouses, Franco instinctively followed. There was little work or traffic on the pier, but plenty of cover existed and he was able to keep to the shadows. Shortly, they reached the rearmost of three medium-tonnage freighters docked end to end. Only one had smoke swirling up from its funnel, signaling its likely imminent departure. Its strung lighting burned bright in the winter haze, delineating the ship’s railings and its gangplank.

  The Aryan climbed the angled gangplank after a quick check of his surroundings. Franco slipped into the shadows and watched as the German, satisfied, climbed up to the deck.

  As the tall one crossed the cluttered deck, Franco took his short opportunity and scampered up the rusty gangplank until he was aboard. He saw the Aryan disappear into a doorway hatch set into the rear of the superstructure.

  Porca fortuna!

  If he didn’t follow, he’d never be able to find the bastard again.

  He ducked to lower his profile, but he needn’t have wo
rried. The deck’s clutter cast plenty of shadows he was able to exploit as he moved from crate to bale to stack of chains and finally reached the same hatch as his quarry.

  He twisted the heavy latch, dreading the sound, but it was freshly oiled. He slipped inside, where the continuous throb of the ship’s engines finally caught up to him. A long passageway stretched out in front of him, its paint peeling and half its lights burned out. Closed hatches lined both sides of the corridor.

  Now, where the hell…?

  Suddenly he was grabbed and pulled into an interior companionway he hadn’t spotted behind him. He twisted, fighting for his life, and broke free momentarily, and then both he and his attacker slid down the sharp-edged metal stairs.

  Pain erupted from a dozen spots all over his body, jabbing cruelly, and then with almost no chance for time to register, he ended up bunched at the side of the rail. Below him the stairs continued.

  He shook his head to clear it, but the pain intensified. But when he looked, he knew that if he’d rolled farther he might well have broken his neck.

  There was a groan, coming from nearby.

  His attacker!

  Franco rallied his screaming muscles and tried to stand. Then he came up with the blade, ready to fight.

  But…the voice was familiar.

  Franco felt an almost brain-crippling sense of surprise, and for a second he forgot the already bruising pain.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jessie

  His voice was immediately comforting, even if it was only on the phone. Truth be told, she still tingled at the way they’d tangled themselves together—and apart—so much in the time they’d had together. So at first, she just keyed in on how safe the sound of his voice made her feel, even if he was now hours away.

  “Hey, sexy,” was what he said when he picked up.

  And she hadn’t even sexted him anything yet. She’d been known to do that occasionally, a woman most likely too old to be messing around with selfies, sure, but what was wrong with having a little fun, even at her age? When she no longer looked good enough, she’d quit. In the meantime, when the mood struck—so did she. And Nick had always appreciated the special touch.