Wolf's Edge (The Nick Lupo Series Book 4)

by W. D. Gagliani

  The door stopped suddenly, and Lupo did indeed glimpse a body lying in a bloody pool, its chest and belly sliced open. But he could see its hands, and they were male hands.

  Killian.

  He heaved a sigh.

  He stepped in, covering the interior of his apartment with the steady pistol. There was another damned body, rolled up in a carpet. After he cleared the rest of the place, finding no trace of Jessie, he closed and locked the door and checked his two guests.

  Killian. And Marcowicz.

  The enemy wolf had done Killian, obviously.

  Marcowicz had been tortured.

  Either they knew something, or they were just meant to complicate his life.

  He knew the building’s super pretty well, and he knew there were several utility carts stashed in the basement. He brought up one of them and loaded in Marcowicz. Then he sacrificed a brand new blanket Jessie’d bought when she moved in and did the best he could with Killian. There were bloody splashes all over, but they were inside the apartment.

  He should have called in. These murders were cold-blooded and infuriating, and he was in over his head.

  But fuck, how else to play it?

  It was well known in the department that he and Killian hated each other, and Marcowicz had probably blabbed about his problems all over. Who’d believe someone had killed them and left them in Lupo’s place just to be difficult? He’d be in handcuffs in an hour.

  He wiped his brow and stood panting, trying to clarify thoughts in his mind.

  He shuttled the bodies down into Killian’s car, then called DiSanto and asked him to meet in a couple hours.

  Lupo locked up, then drove to where he thought he could keep Killian and Marcowicz on ice. Not too long, but he could make a few calls. Favors were owed him, by some not so nice contractors. There were a half dozen freeway ramps under construction out on the west side. Put the two together?

  The worst part would be trying to explain the disappearances. And pretending to look for the missing cops. Lupo wouldn’t shed a whole lot of tears for either of them, but this business was now officially out of hand.

  He wiped his brow, kept to the speed limit, and drove to the temporary gravesite.

  Jessie still didn’t answer her phone.

  Then he took a call from the nursing home.

  He reached the hospital an hour after the initial call.

  DiSanto had met him, asked no questions—though he wanted to—and dropped him at his car. His partner had also covered for him at headquarters, where they expected some reports he didn’t really want to see from the ME. Bakke was making some noises about his task force head never being around, but following leads was a fairly good excuse.

  The hospital smell he loathed immediately lanced into his brain. An artificial flower potpourri valiantly tried to cover it, but couldn’t. The stench of decay, deterioration and death lurked beneath the cloying syrupy-sweet. He saw a blank-eyed family in obvious vigil sitting uncomfortably in the lobby. Add desperation to the stench.

  “We had to send her, Mr. Lupo,” the home’s administrator had told him on the phone. “I think it’s time. She’s been in and out with her mind the whole last week, and she insists the pain is unbearable. She refuses to eat and her organs are shutting down. We can only do so much here at the Courtyards, as you know.”

  He was barely aware of the nurse’s gaze as she sized him up. She pointed down the hall and smiled sympathetically when he asked for his mother’s room. His mind was cold and blank, or he might have appreciated her interest. It seemed as though the moment was here, much as he had dreaded it the past two years.

  His mother had been residing at the assisted living facility of the Courtyards since Frank Lupo had died down in Florida, when she had begun sliding steadily and inexorably into dementia. The cancer had come quickly, recently, and completed the job of destroying this once fiercely independent woman. A woman who had been able to withstand Frank Lupo’s tough love.

  She lay dwarfed by the bed and the monitors, tubes and cords enveloping her slight form like a science project gone awry. She was a ghost of herself, her body already morphing from life to death. Her eyes were closed but there was motion below the lids.

  He knew the administrator was right. It wouldn’t be long.

  “Ah, Ma,” he whispered, “I’m here.”

  She stirred but didn’t awaken. Quietly he slid a chair closer to the bed and found her hand on the white linen covers, grasping the gnarled fingers gently in his. She had fed him and clothed him with this hand, changed his diapers and occasionally even slapped him when he was deemed bad (but those times were few, and she never slapped hard…he always suspected she was protecting him from harsher punishment by his father), and now her skin was turning to lifeless rubber. Closing his eyes, he caressed her hand and forearm up to where the IV fed her nutrients, and feeling her sluggish veins under his touch made dampness squeeze from between his lids.

  He sat with her almost an hour before she stirred. He’d turned off his phone—let’em leave voice-mail, dammit—and he had pulled the room door shut for some privacy from the scurryings outside. The nurses seemed to understand his need for quiet time. In the near dark, her eyes opened suddenly, and she recognized him immediately.

  “Ciao, tesoro,” she said. She’d always called him a “treasure” when he was little, and she’d never broken the habit.

  “Ciao, Mamma.” He couldn’t break habits either.

  “I knew you’d come,” she whispered.

  “I always come,” he said, sounding defensive despite himself. Tough to spend time with her when his phone buzzed at all hours.

  “I know, I mean this time. I don’t have much…time, you know.” She coughed, and it was as if her lung walls vibrated inside her. Pain wrote new lines across her features.

  “Don’t say that, Ma,” he whispered.

  She squeezed his fingers with hers. “It’s okay. It was a good life. But I want to tell you a story before it’s time for me to join your father.”

  “Ma,” he began, settling into his child’s role again, and she shushed him with a small smile on the features pinched by pain and disease. Was this her dementia kicking in? So far, she sounded more lucid than she had been in a week or two.

  “Let me finish. I have to get this out—it’s been in my head a long time.” She sighed. “And I never know what’s going on in here. I can tell I’m not…not right. Like your uncle, remember?”

  He did. Did dementia run in the family?

  “There are things, Nicolino, things about your grandmother…and your father, that you do not know. I think it’s time you knew some of them, before I go away.”

  The pressure of her hand increased on his, and it was so sudden he thought the moment had come, that death would steal her away before she could finish, anyway. Before he could say goodbye.

  But she sighed and said, “It’s a little pain, but it’s starting to leave me.”

  “We don’t have to talk now,” he said. But he knew it had to be, and he was intrigued.

  She shook her head slightly, almost imperceptibly. “We do have to, Nicolino.”

  It was what his grandmother had called him. Nicky was a diminutive of Nicola, which wasn’t really his name, either. He’d always wondered who had chosen Dominic. Everybody always preferred Nicholas.

  “Your grandmother,” she said. “It’s about her name.”

  “What about her name?”

  She made a gesture with her other hand, indistinct in the dark room. “More than just that. She wasn’t my mother.”

  The shock made him doubt his ears.

  “Cosa?” he said. What?

  The dementia, he thought. It’s back…

  But she looked so aware.

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I swear I am all here. Whatever is wrong with me is not clouding my mind right now. It might not last long, but…”

  She emitted a long, labored breath. Decades of smoking had taken their toll
even before the cancer. “I need to tell you. Your Grandmother Saltini was your father’s mother. She was a Lupo.”

  Lupo started to take his hand out of her grasp. “Shhh,” he whispered. This was too much.

  Her fingers moved more rapidly than they had any right to, snatching his hand before he could pull it away. Her eyes shone brightly in the darkness. “Listen to me! She pressured your father when you were very young. My own mother, well, she died while you were still a baby. So Maria made him—both of us—swear never to tell you. And your grandpa, my father, she made him swear too. He was a gentle man, but weak, and he went along even though he didn’t like it.”

  “But—but why?” Lupo couldn’t believe it. This sounded like something out of General Hospital, not his real life. But then, various aspects of his life weren’t terribly likely either, were they?

  “There were…reasons. They made sense at the time. Many things happened to us when we were children in the war. You know, your father told you some stories.”

  Frank Lupo had, mostly stories of trouble he and his friends had gotten into. He had talked about the Allied bombings, about the various occupation forces and some soldiers who had befriended him. Possibly, Frank Lupo had had very little idea how many stories his mother had told young Nick. Or how she had suddenly stopped talking about the war when he had reached a certain age.

  “But what were the reasons? Why would she make you deceive me like this?”

  Her labored breathing reminded him that she didn’t have long. The call had implied she wouldn’t last the night, yet now she seemed strangely energized, as if baring her soul had carved out more earthly time. Lupo wasn’t sure whether to be thankful for knowing these strange truths, or to be annoyed. But to be fair, could he be annoyed for something that had happened three or four decades earlier?

  “You remember your grandmother. She was a…forceful woman. She had very strong ideas. She had lived through some very tough things, along with your father, things she would not speak of very often. There were dark things between your father and his mother—secrets they shared—that they would never divulge to me, or to anyone. I don’t think they ever talked about them even between them. They were simply buried, but we all knew they were there.”

  Her voice faded and she lay, breathing with difficulty, rallying her strength.

  “Ma, you should rest now,” Lupo said, once again caressing her arm. Then he touched her face and felt the wrinkles there, and—for a second—they all disappeared, and she was the lovely woman his father had married. He wondered what his father would have said if he were here now. Or what he wouldn’t have said.

  She smiled her motherly smile. She’d always done that when he disappointed her in some way, or when she disagreed with him.

  “I’ll rest soon,” she said. “Don’t worry. I wanted you to know about this…this deception because I never liked it. And I wanted to tell you that your grandmother left a letter…for you.” She sighed, paused to breathe again.

  She continued. “I think maybe she wanted to explain what happened and why, but I don’t know. I kept my word. I never opened the letter.”

  Lupo kissed her forehead. “Thanks, Ma. I’ll— Where can I find the letter?”

  “I put it with my important documents. It’s unmarked, sealed. Yellow edges by now, it’s so old. I’m not really sure it was meant for you, but I can’t imagine who else she would have wanted to confess to. We didn’t discuss it, and then she was gone so suddenly, still young.”

  His grandmother had died while he was in college, when she was barely seventy.

  “I think your father wasn’t happy with the deception, Nicky. I think they felt they had to do it, for some reason they wouldn’t tell me. It was all about things that happened back in the war, when your father was almost killed right at the end. Nicky, I’m glad you’re here.”

  “It’s no problem, Ma,” he said. “You know I like spending time with you.”

  He leaned over to kiss her forehead again.

  “Ma?”

  And he knew.

  Unburdened, and in his company, she had been released.

  He touched her face and kissed her skin, which seemed colder already, and let the tears come.

  It seemed death was his only friend today.

  Later he remembered she had called him Nicky, and the memories tumbled together and laid out events he hadn’t thought about in many years.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Nick Lupo

  1968

  Nicky sat with his grandmother. His hands were splayed across a Spider-Man comic book, a really great one in which Spidey was manacled to the center of a huge tank rapidly being filled by huge faucets. The Kingpin sure looks like he’s gonna win this one! But Nicky knew the big villain didn’t. He knew because it was probably the tenth time he’d read this episode.

  It was Saturday and Nicky knew he was gonna have to start working on his grandma if he was gonna get to watch Creature Features that night. Grampa would gladly watch it with him, but there was no way Grampa would go against anything Grandma said.

  Grandma gave all the orders, earned most of the money, and kept both husband and grandson in line with the proverbial velvet-gloved iron fist. Nicky often spent several days at a time with his grandparents because his mother worked long hours and his father was away months at a time, but he enjoyed his stays.

  His grandparents—especially Grampa, a gentle man with a soft voice and an artisan’s hands—indulged his every whim. Except letting him watch scary movies. Nicky couldn’t understand why Grandma was so against the movies he liked best, but he often managed to enlist Grampa in schemes to participate in illegal television watching while she worked, napped, or shopped.

  Grampa enjoyed the old Universal horror movies as much as Nicky did. For him it was a treat to sit with his grandson, sipping from a never-ending glass of sweet red wine and thrilling to the antics of heroes and monsters.

  Westerns were good, too, but they had Grandma’s stamp of approval and therefore proved pedestrian for the young boy who much preferred the forbidden over the mundane. Grampa helped Nicky disguise his television habits so as to avoid Maria Saltini’s anger. Nicky often thought of his grandfather more as an older brother, one who needed protection despite his own better instincts.

  “There’s a monster movie on tonight,” Nicky whispered, speaking their Italian-English hybrid. Grampa made a slow, deliberate shrug and tipped his head once, briefly, toward the door through which his wife could be seen, seated in the old armchair with sewing needle and thread engaged in the art of prolonging the life of yet another pair of men’s socks.

  “Do you wanna watch it?” Nicky persisted.

  “Va bene.” All right, the elder Saltini whispered. “But we’ll have to look innocent. She worked today, so she’ll be tired tonight. If we don’t say anything, it will be okay.”

  Nicky knew that, for Grampa, staying up late to watch a movie meant a few more illicit sips from the bottle. There was nothing wrong with a little complicity—that way they both got something they wanted. Nicky nodded and they shook hands. The boy’s tiny hand was buried in the old man’s calloused but gentle grip. His janitor’s job had worked the delicateness out of his hands, cleaning toilets somehow eroding the artistry a benevolent God had seen fit to bestow on him in his youth.

  Nicky had not noticed this change in his beloved co-conspirator, play partner and friend, but he knew that Arturo Saltini was no longer happy. He didn’t know why, really, but there had been much whispering coming from his grandparents’ bedroom in the last few weeks, and they didn’t realize that the old vents brought the sound right to his headboard. But if watching a monster movie with his grandson and a glass of wine could make him happy, then Nicky was happy, too.

  “What are you children whispering about in there, eh?” His grandmother’s formidable presence hovered in the doorway.

  “We are praying,” Grampa said with a sideways wink at Nicky.

 
“Amen.”

  The bond was strong, and the conspiracy held. In the silence that followed, Nicky turned another page of the Spider-Man comic and waited for Grandma to object. She knew full well they weren’t praying—neither the Saltinis nor the Lupos were particularly religious, though all had been raised Catholic.

  “I can just imagine what kind of trouble the two of you would get into if I wasn’t here to watch over you!” Grandma held her arms akimbo, and she wasn’t smiling. “What are you reading?”

  “Spider-Man,” Nicky stammered. This was an unexpected development. “It’s my favorite.”

  “Let the boy alone, Maria,” Grampa began, but Grandma cut him off.

  “What about your homework?”

  “It’s Saturday!” Nicky retorted, his voice rising despite his attempt to control it. “I can do my homework tomorrow.” His voice became timid again.

  “Half today and half tomorrow,” she relented. “No Spider-Man until after dinner.” She held out her hand and waited until Nicky placed the comic into her palm.

  Nicky saw the displeasure cross his Grampa’s face, but then he was out of the room and collecting his satchel—which he knew had cost them a lot of money. He felt guilty, listening to the urgent whispering as the argument raged. Grandma won, as he knew she would, and then he was buried in vocabulary and spelling exercises.

  After a huge dinner of screw-shaped pasta and chicken simmered in tomato sauce, Nicky eyed Grandma warily when she lowered her arthritis-wracked body into her favorite green cloth armchair. She released a contented sigh and settled back to watch Mannix even though the dialogue was too quick for her to catch fully. The images helped her relax and soon she was asleep, lightly snoring while Nicky and his grandfather enjoyed the end of the show.

  Mannix was cool, Nicky thought, always getting his man and all, but he wasn’t as cool as James West and Artemus Gordon. And he couldn’t even compete with the best of Creature Features. That theme music, the fog, and those human-beast paws stalking the night!