Wolf's Blind (The Nick Lupo Series Book 6)

by W. D. Gagliani

  “I feel a little like, what did you say, the world has tilted on me. Yeah. But I’ve been through enough bad shit, I guess, that ultimately I can sort it out.”

  “Okay,” he said. “The main thing, it’s dangerous to know me, to know about all these things that have happened. It’ll make you a target at some point. Right now, like I said, I suspect that Barton is here not only for the bus shooter task force. Every time I walk past him he gives me the stink-eye. I’ve caught wind of something going on, but nobody seems to know what. This guy Roman is creepy as hell, and I’m sensing he’s going to shake things up. I don’t know what Ryeland was thinking, but he might not have had any say…watch out for him.”

  “You gonna tell me everything?” Colgrave interrupted, fixing him with her intense stare. He wasn’t going to walk out of her office without having given her something. No way.

  “I got a little time, then I’m heading up north for a day or two. DiSanto’s more in with the task force than I am, anyway. It’s like they decided to split us up. Isn’t that what you do to schoolboys who are just too rowdy together? Anyway, I’ve got some thinking to do. Some of this stuff goes deep into my family history, and—”

  “I have a meeting in a while. Should be my last one to paper over that clusterfuck we were in on up in Eagle River. They want to know what else I have on the Bastone family attempted takeover of the tribal casino.”

  “Shit, I thought that was done.”

  “Not quite, but fortunately I have got some stuff, because they were moving in—they terrified the board and worse. We have enough testimony and statements to make it all stick pretty well.”

  “But now they’re on the run, right? I mean, we don’t have to worry about Bastone.” Lupo looked pensive.

  “Bastone didn’t die, more’s the pity. He’s in a private hospital and probably will never fully recover. A bunch of his thugs are ashes. Others ran.”

  “Like that Rabbioso guy.”

  “I’ll put a BOLO out on him, but it sounds like he’s a slippery one. Turns out he had some military and contractor background.”

  Lupo was stunned, and didn’t seem to be faking it. “What? No kidding?”

  “He’s one of…you said he’s one of the wolves, right?”

  He looked away, as if revisiting the scene of the gunfight. “Oh, yeah, that he is.”

  “Well, there you go. Some loose ends.”

  He sighed a long sigh. “Always the loose ends.”

  Colgrave checked her watch. “Meeting coming up, but I have some time now.”

  “Me, too.”

  “So, talk,” she said.

  And he did.

  Marla Anders

  The sounds of Christmas played almost subliminally from her office PC’s speakers. It was the first Narada Christmas album, and even though it wasn’t anywhere close to Christmas, she couldn’t help it—she wanted the music on rotation year-round.

  Maybe it was an atheist’s way to marry the religious and the secular in a package that offered positivity and hope rather than anarchy and desperation.

  Whatever.

  I have to stop analyzing myself.

  She flipped the pages of her day planner, spread out on the only flat surface of her desk (after brushing some crumbs out of the way). She wasn’t one to use her computer calendar. She didn’t trust the police department computer system, figuring they were recording her keystrokes, looking at her browser histories, reading her email, and generally peering psychotically into her business because they considered her business theirs. She couldn’t prove it without a lawsuit—and that was probably not enough—so she simply tried her best to bypass the ways they employed to spy on her.

  There was probably a bug or a camera in her office, but if there was she hadn’t found it yet.

  Paranoid much?

  Or was she?

  She expected her views would diverge from the police hierarchy’s more often than they would not, so she had no trouble believing they might monitor her sessions in some way.

  She shrugged and continued to flip pages. Marked a page in the planner, then another.

  She had several open dates, but hadn’t been able to pin down Detective Nick Lupo long enough to get him to sit across from her again.

  And she really wanted him to.

  He frightened her in some way she couldn’t have explained or put into words at all. There was an aura of danger around him, of course. She’d heard the swirling rumors of misdeeds and investigations, and also those of heroics and above and beyond the line of duty acts. The commendations as well as the occasional wrist-slapping. The gas leak that had blown up both his apartment and part of his neighborhood.

  Bad news seemed to follow him like one of those proverbial dark clouds.

  Yet he was fascinating, and if she had to admit it, there was something very compelling about him. His intense gaze, his serious demeanor sometimes poorly papered over by a crazy and cynical sense of humor. Of course, all the detectives were cynical and dealt almost exclusively in sarcasm, but he was different. He seemed to bear burdens no one could possibly understand.

  She was certain he was seeing something, something that should have made her question everything she had ever believed in. Hell, that wasn’t new—she often found herself questioning some tidbit of supposed fact. Because she herself knew some things, had seen some things…

  But there was more.

  Not only was she sure he was seeing something, but she knew she was herself seeing something again, like the old days, and that it had to do with Nick Lupo.

  Frustration grabbed hold of her and she smacked the pen down on her desk, from where it promptly bounced off and landed somewhere on the carpet.

  “Shit!”

  She got up and went searching. The pen was near the door, which she had closed. She cursed again, then went over and bent to retrieve the incidental javelin. As she did, she looked through the slightly open blinds spread across the window near her doorway—down the hall she saw Nick Lupo walk into Sergeant Colgrave’s office.

  A strange shiver of…something…slithered up and own her spine. She wasn’t sure what it was, but the thought of Colgrave buddy-buddy with Lupo bothered her in a way the same thought with Rich DiSanto, Lupo’s partner, did not.

  She wasn’t jealous, though.

  Ridiculous.

  She barely knew the guy. She was a recent hire, a transplant from Cleveland, even though her family had been from nearby. Had inherited him and his problems from the previous psychologist attached to the Milwaukee PD, the guy who had disappeared. What was his name? Marco-something. His disappearance was still an open case, getting colder by the day.

  She had to wonder about that.

  Was anything about Lupo clear and completely aboveboard?

  She wondered when knowing him was going to complicate her life. At the same time, she wondered when she could sit down with him, face to face. It was a strange dilemma to be in. Her gut told her to run from him, but something about him made her want to be on his side. He seemed to elicit love him or hate him vibes from people.

  So what does that mean about how I feel?

  She shrugged it off. What about this whole ghost thing? What did it mean?

  Her playlist, the whole New Age Christmas album, suddenly stopped in mid-song and restarted.

  She jumped.

  That was…weird.

  Then it stopped again and restarted but within a different track.

  It wasn’t a CD. It was a playlist in her iTunes, and it really wasn’t supposed to behave that way.

  Then it stopped and restarted within yet another track.

  She stared at her PC. Another message or a glitch?

  She opened her laptop, avoiding the PC altogether, and sent Lupo another email he would probably ignore.

  Why? Why was the weirdness starting again, just when she thought it was in her past?

  She knew instinctively it had to do with her grandfather, and his whole world—which
wasn’t her world, not really, but it had occasionally intruded on hers. It had been a while, but now that she was here, her antenna was up and receiving, and she had no idea why. It had to do with the new job, and with Nick Lupo. No way to know why, but she thought if she could dig into her past and Lupo’s, there would be some sort of connection. That had to be it, didn’t it?

  All she could do was wonder when it would all be made clear to her.

  Part of her wanted to know, but the other part was frightened.

  She remembered more than she wanted to.

  Much more.

  Chapter Four

  Lupo

  After he had awakened that morning he found he couldn’t stop thinking of Jessie and the issue that had grown between them since they’d survived the apocalyptic pitched battle at the Bastone compound.

  Make me a werewolf, she’d said while in his arms, shortly after both had survived having been close to dying.

  They had retreated to her cottage on Circle Moon Drive after the circus that had been the aftermath of the battle, in which Lupo had managed—not that he was sure how it had worked, it had been a fluke—to turn the Wolfclaw drones against the Bastone family thugs had abated for the time being. There would be more questions later, and more lies to tell, but for the moment they had turned to each other…

  He saw it as if it were a movie clip, as if he could enter both their heads simultaneously, and now he relived it in that very same way.

  She slowly peeled off most of his ruined clothes and when his bruised and battered body was revealed to her she had lowered her face and gently kissed all the places he had suffered one of those bruises or wounds. Her lips caressed his skin and left behind heat whenever she moved on to a new place he’d tried to wreck himself while handling both enemy groups and, at the end, attacking those who would do her harm. She had much to thank him for, and she set about showing him her gratitude, though her own experience had brought her close to torture and death or worse…

  She pushed him toward the sofa and even though the air was chilled and normally they would have started a fire in the great old brick fireplace, she set about providing the heat they needed with her flesh and her love. He was exhausted and when his legs touched the sofa he let himself be maneuvered into sitting, lying back into the well-worn leather as she edged closer, sinking to her knees and resting her head on his lap as his hands stroked her hair. They were a mess, but at that moment nothing else mattered and she slowly unbuttoned what was left of her top and slipped it off so her skin could touch his. She felt him respond to her closeness and warmth and she leaned back enough to have room to grab hold of his loosened pants and pull them away from him and down past his ankles. His hands still on her hair, she kissed him through his briefs, enjoying the rough manly smell of the sweat and adrenaline cocktail that had squeezed from his pores.

  When his manhood began to rise along with his pent-up desire, stoked by the close call of that day’s deadly encounter, Jessie reached under the white cotton and gently but firmly grasped his thickening shaft. He shifted on the sofa and she felt his excitement. His cock straightened in her grip and she started to pump it with one hand, while bringing her face closer to its length. She leaned in and kissed the hardening tip, then licked it tentatively while one hand continued to massage it and the other reached into his briefs and cupped his testicles.

  When he groaned, she looked up and saw that his eyes were closed. With a lustful smile, she slowly engulfed the tip of his cock with her wide open lips. She let a string of saliva drool onto his hot flesh and began to suck him slowly down her throat. His hands tightened on her head, mashing her ears and attempting to control her tempo, but she ignored him and followed her own drummer, swirling her tongue below and around his glans, eliciting more groans and a tighter grip. Her lips slid down his slick hardness to its base and she felt him growing even larger inside her throat before sliding most of the way back off him, leaving behind the wet heat-cold of her saliva. When she looked up her eyes locked onto his, and she swallowed him again, her hands tenderly massaging his balls as she worked her lips up and down his length. His fingers were threaded through her hair, guiding her as she pleasured him with her lips and tongue, taking him down her throat until she could feel him beginning to burst. Then she pulled away and smiled when he stared at her in mock horror. But by then she was standing and dropping her ruined jeans around her ankles and kicking them away, and before she could even rip her panties off he had lifted her onto him, sneaking past the thin cotton fabric and finding the center of her pleasure, entering her with one solid thrust. It was her turn to groan as he filled her and began to stroke upward, and she moved with him, both of them rocking on the sofa and making their own heat born of friction and lust, love and need, and a sense of survival to be celebrated, for they had both come close to death.

  She positioned her feet on the sofa around him and lifted herself up, almost leaving his flesh behind, but then levered herself down again, continuing the pumping motion as he grasped her body to him and met her with his willing flesh, reaching way up into her so that she felt his girth filling her. Her lower lips grasped him tightly, holding him inside her as he pumped more furiously to fulfill them both. Their lips met first, and then their tongues as she tasted the metallic tang of his residual adrenaline and he tasted both her lust and himself on her tongue. She cried out her pleasure into his mouth as he increased the speed of his thrusting, his shaft spearing her swollen flesh while her nether lips swallowed him whole. When she felt him ready to burst, his shaft hardening even more and the tension becoming almost intolerable, she unstraddled him in one deft move that would hurt her sore body later, and simultaneously knelt between his thighs and swallowed him with her hungry lips, feeling his hot seed spilling in jets against her throat and palate, swallowing rapidly to keep him to herself and sliding up and down to milk his last drops of precious fluid. The she licked him clean, drying his flesh with her tongue as his grunts quieted down and she felt him begin to shrink in her mouth.

  He pulled her up onto him again and kissed her deeply then, and they shared their slaked desire until their bodies had ceased to vibrate.

  “We really have to face certain death and torture more often,” she said, as she nestled her head into his neck. His scent was pleasantly musky, and she thought she caught a scant trace of the wolf, the Creature inside him, which was always not so far below the surface. Especially when they made love, or—more accurately—had animal sex.

  “Yeah,” he chuckled. “We don’t do this enough. And by this I mean get blown up, shot at, mauled, and almost r…” His voice faltered.

  “You can say it,” she whispered. “Raped. I was almost raped by those two thugs. If it wasn’t for you, I would have been…”

  His face was a sudden blend of sadness and rage. “It makes me crazy that because of me you get dragged into these…things. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be a lot better off.” He still held her closely, but she could sense he was pulling away.

  That Catholic guilt. She often taunted him about it because he’d been raised Catholic, but his parents hadn’t been very religious, and at eighteen he had distanced himself from the trappings of his nominal religion. His usual retort was that there wasn’t anything wrong in feeling guilt if you had done something to feel guilty about. She always let it go then, because he seemed about to switch from guilt to anger. Nick Lupo was a conflicted soul, if not a religious one. And his triggers were sometimes raw and not so deeply buried.

  “Stop saying that,” she said gently, trying to get them back to where she wanted them to be. “If it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t have just shared—what we just did.” She made a sound with her throat when she said it.

  “Did you just purr?” he asked. “Did you?” He pushed her head away just far enough to look at her closely, and they both laughed.

  “I think I did,” she said. “And I think I have every right, Mr. Lupo. If you treated every material witness like this…”<
br />
  “Yes?”

  “You’d have more people wanting to give statements, I’ll say that.”

  “LOL,” he said, and it was so unexpected that she burst out laughing.

  Maybe the moment had been defused. The moment that could have turned dark.

  Did she want to go there now? Did she want to revisit what she’d asked him earlier?

  And she went there, though she knew it would probably not end well.

  “Why can’t we discuss you making me a werewolf?” she blurted out. “If I was, maybe I wouldn’t be the weak link that always causes you trouble at the worst times.”

  He was quiet a seemingly long time. “Let me remind you that after that time with the Martin Stewart gang of idiots, it was you who saved me. And it wasn’t the first or only time.”

  She had a stubborn streak. She knew it, and she forged ahead anyway. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we would be in better position to, to fight these bastards—” She spit out the word. “The bastards who want you either dead or strapped to a dissecting table in some madman’s lab.” Her voice began to rise. “Don’t you see that you wouldn’t have to worry about me as much, and I could be on the same level as them and you, and it would be better for both of us and everyone we know, like your partner. And that cop, Danni Colgrave. And remember what happened to Tom?”

  He winced. She didn’t know everything about Tom Arnow. This was dangerous ground.

  And the best way to step off the land mine was to blow up prematurely.

  So he did. “No, Jess, no! I’m not going to bite you in order to make you a werewolf! I’m not going to take the chance I’ll kill you instead, and I’m not going to make you a target for every silver-loaded gunman in the country. I’m not going to—”

  “Don’t you think a regular bullet would kill me just as dead?” she shouted, falling out of their embrace to lean over him, her control lost, her afterglow dissipated.