“The priest had no right to tell you anything. I have a volunteer—me. I will take his place and make the delivery.”
“Corrado, we need you here—”
“Shut up, Father.”
The priest stomped away. He looked defeated, old, and perhaps a little drunk after all, now.
“Listen to me well, Corrado. I am going to seek out the captain and report my arrival with the package. I will follow his directions, and I will see where they take me. Then I’ll get off the ship and report to you. You’ll have lost nothing.”
“Not true—you still will have cost us the operation.”
“They are desperate to get their people out of Europe. Every seaport is bleeding ex-Nazi bastards. I hear things, so I know they’re also funneling refugees out of Napoli and Venezia. Let me work on this route, and I’ll give you the information as soon as I have it. If they kill me, you’re no worse off than you are now.”
“Thanks to you,” Corrado muttered.
“That may be,” Franco spoke patiently. He was used to having his way. By now he had become a wise manipulator of men.
“Va bene!” All right! “It’s done. Wrap up your package and get up to the bridge, if you can find your way.” He kicked the courier’s remains. “The priest will help me with this garbage.”
Franco climbed back up the stairs to the main corridor above, reasoning it led to the crew’s quarters. They’d be returning any time now, so it was imperative he fool the captain and get the information he needed now. He found the crew’s empty quarters, based on the number of bunks and naked pinups tacked to the bulkhead. Down the corridor was another staircase, which he climbed in order to find himself in a similar corridor above. These cabins were most likely officers and the few passengers that might occasionally travel from port to port in the relative anonymity of a small freighter. Quickly, he checked them. They were empty, but…
He stared at the small stack of valises and trunks in one cabin. Could the person who owned this luggage be the cargo? Could it be a Nazi werewolf? Perhaps the payment delivery was from a third party, an organization. Perhaps Corrado hadn’t told him everything.
Since when had Corrado told him anything of importance?
He turned to leave the cabin, but the door opened and two men entered. They froze in their tracks, staring at their visitor.
Franco smiled. “I am the cabin boy,” he said in Italian. “I have just brought your luggage. Need anything else?”
The two men stood, their stares turning to smiles.
Cold smiles.
“Franz, I think the captain has provided a snack.”
“Indeed. Very thoughtful of him, I dare say.”
They were speaking accented Italian so he could understand. Their accents sounded German or Austrian to Franco. He’d heard enough of them to know.
“Thank you, young sire. You didn’t bring our bags, as we had them delivered earlier, but you’ll provide enough sustenance for tonight.”
Franz and his friend were unbuttoning their shirts, still smiling.
Franco smiled too, pretending stupidity. His hand held the Vatican blade behind his back. “Let me help you with that,” he said, approaching the two. This confused them and they stopped, perhaps thinking he was about to offer a different kind of service.
By the time he reached them, their surprise had turned to suspicion. Their fingers became claws and their faces went through the loathsome transformation to long, savage snouts full of snapping fangs.
And by then he was drawing the glowing blade, parrying Franz’s lunge with the silver edge even as the jaws reached out for him. The blade reached its target before the monster’s gaping mouth could come close enough to bite him, and he was grateful for his coat sleeves protecting him from the first swipe of the claws.
The monster’s scream cut through his hearing as the blade sliced through the side of its head like a cook’s cleaver, turning the monster’s flesh to charred gristle and piercing its skull. Franco knocked aside the mortally injured werewolf and pivoted to meet the other, whose jaws were now snapping near his face, its eyes rolling and changing colors like a child’s kaleidoscopes.
Franco and the incensed werewolf danced around each other for a moment and then Franco feinted left and the wolf didn’t buy the trick, its jaws barely missing snatching his arm. Only Franco’s experience allowed him to evade the grip that would tear through his clothing and shred his skin and muscles. He shoved the off balance half-man, half-wolf aside and tried to leap onto its back, but the monster shook him off.
On the cabin floor, right next to where Franco landed, the other werewolf had stopped struggling, its skull sizzling where the magical blade had carved into its brain. It was blurring, its limbs and head returning to their human mask, but it was dead.
The surviving wolf continued its shapeshifting, and the remaining clothing split along its seams as his body altering left him a more lethal four-footed wolf. The animal’s glowing red eyes focused on Franco and went right for his throat as he struggled to his knees.
Suddenly the beast’s lunge was halted—it was shoved aside and into the bulkhead, its body vibrating as slugs pierced its fur in explosions of blood and bits of bone.
In the cabin doorway stood Corrado, his legs spread wide, a smoking Mauser broomhandle pistol gripped in one hand like a duelist, brass raining down around his feet and rattling on the metal floor.
Franco looked at him gratefully, but then made his way to the werewolf, whose shrieks were fading fast. He singed the monster’s fur with the Vatican blade, then drew its length across the muscular neck, parting it like butter. Then he stabbed its belly and twisted the length of the blade and slit the beast open.
He turned away as the sizzling and burning of the organs began.
He’d seen enough of this kind of thing, and his nose was already filled with the terrible stench of corrupted flesh going back to hell.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he growled at Corrado.
“Protecting my investment. Nice silver slugs, no?” After watching both wolves return to their shapes as gutted, ruined humans, Corrado pulled a stripper clip from his pocket and reloaded the open-bolt pistol, stripping a row of cartridges into the box magazine. “You’re lucky I had not left yet.”
Franco nodded grimly. “Fine! Now get out. I’m going to make the payment. If these two were the cargo, then your work is done.”
“We still need to know what the rest of the transaction is.”
“What? Somebody pays, the werewolves sail away. Well, not these two. But what else is there?”
Corrado tucked the pistol under his coat. “The courier gets a package back. We need to know what that package contains. Then we might be happy enough to leave you to your little crusade of hate.”
“Va bene! I will bring you the package the captain gives to me.” Franco pushed him toward the door.
“I will be waiting. Send the priest. He’ll wait for you down here. He’s outside.”
“He has the other Vatican blade?”
“Indeed,” said Corrado. “Since you left with one of them, we had to go through hell to reacquire the other, and he has guarded it well.”
They collected the bodies and stuffed them with little ceremony into two steamer trunks they’d emptied of clothing and coats. Franco spit onto each mutilated corpse before closing and locking the lids.
Bastardi assassini!
After Corrado had left and the priest took up guard duty in the cabin, Franco finally made his way to the bridge. His stomach fluttered. He stood out on the upper deck a few minutes and let some of the sputtering rain wet him down. With his coat buttoned to the top and collar turned up, he appeared to have just arrived when he found the captain on the bridge, holding a hot mug and slurping some kind of dark, fragrant tea.
Franco wasn’t sure what to do or say, but he was willing to bet the captain was more in it for the money and there wouldn’t be much ceremony. Franco simply walked up,
nodded, and handed over the package of cash.
The captain stared at him harshly. “Where is the other one?” he asked in poor Italian.
Franco shrugged. “Maybe dead. They don’t tell me.”
The captain reflected a few moments, an eyebrow raised in doubt.
Franco gripped his own pistol, a small Beretta M1934 in his coat pocket, in case the captain balked.
They both seemed to hold their breaths. Then the captain sighed, put down his mug and pulled a small packet out of a satchel on the chart table.
“It’s nothing to me either,” he said. He tossed Franco the packet and stashed the cash in its place.
Franco nodded and started turning away. “What time do you sail?” He had no reason to care, but the captain glanced at his watch and said, “In an hour.”
Franco left the bridge without a look back. Down below in the corridor, he stripped open the package and poured out a stream of tiny uncut diamonds. Perhaps from Brazil, he wasn’t sure, but he did know that a dozen such stones fetched a huge price on the European black market. There were at least a hundred in the bag.
In the cabin recently occupied by the two illegal passengers, Franco pulled out the bag of diamonds and tossed it on one of the bunks.
“What is it?” said Tranelli.
“Well, let’s look.”
When the priest hunched over the packet, Franco swiped the Beretta across the back of his head once, driving the old man to his knees with a groan.
Coldly, Franco pushed the half-conscious man over onto his side, then quickly pulled rope out of his pockets and bound him hand and foot, relieving him of the second Vatican blade. Then he stuffed a wad of ripped undergarment into his mouth as a gag while making sure he could still breathe.
“Sorry, old man,” he muttered.
Later, when the ship’s engines increased their thrumming vibration, and the harbor tugs nosed the hull away from the pier, Franco stood at the rail out of sight of the bridge, huddling in his coat.
He wondered about the last-minute passenger whose trunks had been wheeled aboard mere minutes before the gangplank was rolled up. A sullen crew member had trundled a cart to the cabin across from Franco’s and a glimpse of pleated skirt and creamy-skin legs at the cabin door told him only part of what he wanted to know.
The priest had stopped struggling against his bonds. Franco now owned a wonderful new wardrobe thanks to the two fugitive Nazis. He was wearing a fancy parka he could never have afforded in his entire life.
The ship was bound for Buenos Aires. Franco wondered what he would find in Argentina, at the end of the journey.
He gripped one of the Vatican blades.
He was willing to bet he would find Nazi werewolves.
And when he did, he would execute them.
The closed door across the corridor called to him. The Vatican blade warmed his hand, and he wondered when he would meet the mysterious passenger.
He had time. The voyage would last three or four weeks.
And there were bound to be other werewolves aboard.
He smiled grimly.
He was just starting.
Aftermath
Lupo
Ryeland had aged a decade in days. He looked tired and rundown, and some of his great size seemed diminished. He had called in Lupo and DiSanto and ranted at them for fifteen minutes straight, mostly about how they’d wanted off the task force and then had also gone AWOL during the department-wide hunt for the bus shooter. Which was a dead end. No leads, hardly any evidence, no motive. Everyone was holding his breath until the next shooting.
“The DHS guys aren’t happy with you,” he said finally, running out of steam.
DHS hadn’t pulled up stakes yet, so there was plenty of shit to look forward to.
“I’m not too fond of them myself,” said Lupo. He was tired too, and hurting. “I still don’t get what DHS has to do with our shooter. What do they know?”
Ryeland shrugged. “They don’t explain themselves. Feds never do, and these are the worst.”
DiSanto said nothing. His return from the Minnesota raid had been greeted with less than appreciation at home—his wife was furious and suspicious. Lupo wondered what else had happened out there. Colgrave stubbornly wasn’t talking, and DiSanto seemed to have temporarily run out of clichés.
Ryeland said, “Yeah, well, I don’t like my cops going off the reservation, I’ve told you that before. You work for me, for the city, for the people. You’re not in business for yourselves. You don’t run your own department. This isn’t L.A. I need you to use your experience for everybody’s benefit, not just your own.”
Lupo wanted to nod and agree and step away to call Jessie to make sure she was still all right.
She’d just learned the tribal council wanted her to run in opposition to Treewalker in a special council election, and she was considering it. Lupo hoped she would do it, thinking it would refocus her life and kill her addiction, even if she did have to spend more time in the casino.
Thinking of Jessie made him smile inside.
He’d almost lost her, and he realized how much she meant to him. Losing her would have gutted him as much as one of those damned Vatican blades. Despite their troubles, their bonds were solid and for that he was grateful.
Ryeland’s understanding of what had happened up north was primitive, but it would do—the Organized Crime ties had been vetted by Colgrave, and she’d taken responsibility (and some credit) for instigating the so-called probe, which had become an unintentional bloodbath. The cover-up extended to the tribe, who had been able to whitewash what had happened on their border due to some sophisticated crime scene interventions. Apparently a gas leak had destroyed the house and grounds.
Lot of gas leaks lately, Lupo thought.
Maybe now they could get back to policing. At least, he hoped so.
Now instead of insisting on the detectives’ agreement and then banishing them to some backwater routine assignment, Ryeland stood and went to open his office door. He waved someone in from the shadows of the hallway.
The guy who stepped inside the cramped office was tall and emaciated thin, with an angular face bearing serious pockmarks and long hair swept back like the scraggly beginnings of a pony tail.
“Detectives, this is Lieutenant Roman, our new head of Internal Affairs.”
As they shook hands, Lupo could have sworn he saw Roman’s eyes change color. Roman smiled a shark-mouthed smile, showing too many teeth. “Detective, I’ve read about some of your cases.”
Lupo shrugged elaborately.
Roman’s smile disappeared. “I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about.”
Uncomfortable silence settled over them.
Lupo stifled a rising growl, hiding it within an answering grunt. Suddenly he felt sure Roman was like him. And just as suddenly he knew Ghost Sam would be warning him about coming trouble on the homicide squad.
Bring it on, he thought.
Shooter
He wore a hoodie that obscured the top half of his face and cast a shadow over the rest. He carried one bag by hand and a backpack slung on one shoulder. He boarded the Amtrak train amidst the bustle of the station and disappeared into the passenger car, just one of dozens who melted into the pre-departure crowd.
Anyone who might have seen his eyes would have been disturbed, so he kept his glance lowered and his shoulders slumped.
In less than a minute, he might as well not have been there at all.
Marla Anders
The messages were very disturbing today.
First she’d put together parts of sentences from several magazines that shouldn’t have been spread open, but were. Then there were the library books and their sentence fragments. Last, the magnetic letters on her refrigerator—which she’d purchased to aid in the possible communication—had spelled out several cryptic but highly intriguing phrases.
The fact was, she was more convinced than ever that she needed to talk to Detective Lupo.
>
She thought she might have a message for him.
Lupo
He was sitting in the dark, feeling every ache in his body.
In his hands he held his MP5 submachine gun.
His elbows rested on the desk and he felt the blotter under them, wondering how recently his father had done the same, rested his arms on the desk.
Lupo had hoped Ghost Sam would keep him company, but the Indian was nowhere to be seen or heard.
Maybe he’s had enough.
Lupo was grateful, more grateful than his generally unreligious attitude usually allowed.
He was grateful that Jessie was home safe.
The few mobsters who’d survived the hellfire raid—probably including both Don Bastone and his lieutenant Rabbioso, if the DNA separation tests were accurate—were on the run, not interested in casino takeovers at the moment. That would have to be cleaned up. Time had been bought, but good people had paid the price.
Charlie Bear had paid the ultimate price. Lupo hoped there was something to that afterlife fantasy, because the big guy deserved to be at peace with his family in some version of paradise.
But he doubted it.
DiSanto was going to be fine, but once again knowing Lupo had cost him. And after what he’d told Lupo, there was some question about how fine, how soon.
Colgrave.
Lupo wasn’t sure what to think about Colgrave. She hadn’t spoken of her experience with the werewolves, whether she accepted what she’d seen. But he’d caught a strong vibe from her, and maybe there was something to worry about. She seemed to have taken to him. And she was magnificent…
But whatever trouble he and Jess might still face, he wasn’t ready to give up. Not after everything they’d been through.
Heather? Heather was still Heather. She would land on her feet, like she always did. Once they finished regrowing the chewed-off portions. But he knew firsthand that they would.
And the worst part: Who had warned the occupants of the drone house, and where had they gone to ground? The thought that the group Wineacre had uncovered—the group that called itself Wolfclaw—was still out there, still active, and still seeking to fulfill its nefarious agenda…it was almost more than Lupo could handle.
Wolf's Cut (The Nick Lupo Series Book 5) Page 29