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

by W. D. Gagliani

  Rabbioso approached the royal blue, two and a half-million dollar aircraft. The long, lean chopper sat with its rotors already spinning. At the controls was Matteo LaMano, who looked awfully young inside the flight suit and helmet. But Matty’s father had been Manny “The Hand” LaMano, one of the best-trusted lieutenants of Gus Bastone’s old man, and the only member of the old guard Rabbioso had held over. Now that half the better guys had been slaughtered in the compound firefight—a real fuckin’ massacre—Rabb had gone back to some of the older guys and elevated them in his new hierarchy.

  The only great thing Gus had done, between viewings of whatever kinky porn trend he’d been into at the moment, was sending Manny’s son Matty to flight school and buying this fucking great Italian-manufactured helicopter, of which they’d just recently taken delivery. It had been Gus’s bright idea, the solution for traveling quickly from the Madison airport to his new Eagle River compound, but they hadn’t had the time to get it all squared away before Lupo had blundered through the family like a fucking chainsaw.

  Rabbioso had just purchased a new property—which would become a “compound” soon enough—but he was royally pissed off that he’d had to do it with Marina’s okay and signature.

  Still an outsider.

  Well, fuck that, and fuck her.

  He nodded to Matty as he climbed into the chopper’s luxurious interior, a long case in one hand. One of his men, Alonzo Brujo—a rare Hispanic among his more traditional colleagues—followed him, also carrying a long composite case. Rabbioso had begun styling himself as an Indiana Jones type man of action recently, mostly leaving behind his more Vegas-inspired mobster look of bowling and Hawaiian shirts for calfskin boots, sheepskin coats and leather flight jackets, and black jeans for ops such as this one.

  “Take us up, Matty,” he said once he’d fixed his headset into position.

  “You got it, boss.” Matty was young, but he’d been raised old-school in the old ways, by a father who’d beaten into him how the system worked, who was in charge, and why. He knew his place, despite his ability to handle the bright blue flying machine. He flicked his controls and the two Pratt & Whitney engines purred, speeding them upward vertically like an elevator, banking around in a tight turn that took them northeast over rolling glacial hills within minutes, leaving the Midwestern charm of Madison behind.

  Inside the main cabin, Rabbioso and Brujo set about opening their cases, breaking out the weaponry Brujo had brought along. The cases held two black SIG556xi tactical rifles with expensive FLIR infrared sights already mounted.

  Brujo was grinning.

  “What?” said Rabbioso.

  “Man, I fuckin’ love Cabela’s.”

  “You bought these at Cabela’s?”

  “Well, yeah. This is Wisconsin, everybody’s packin’. Those deer don’t stand no chance, man. Where you want me to get shit like this, a back alley in Minocqua?”

  Rabbioso bit down on his first response. “I assumed we would send some weapons overland.”

  “Overland meanin’ by car? Boss, all that transporting state to state is fuckin’ hairy these days.”

  “We’ve done it before.” Rabbioso took a breath. “Okay, okay, forget it, help me get this stuff ready.”

  He was miffed. Didn’t seem normal to off a cop with totally legal hardware.

  Of course, he wasn’t exactly planning to off him with this. Still…

  “Rifles are sighted in and ready to go, boss.”

  “Got the special ammo?”

  Brujo grinned again. “Nothin’ but the best for this pig, huh?” He dug into his jacket pocket and took out several 5.56mm 30-round magazines for the Sigs. “Guy liked makin’ them with the silver and all.”

  Rabbioso nodded. Once again, he was tempted to bring some of his top people—like Brujo—into the fold. But no, he’d wait for the right moment. And when was that, really? Not now, just as they were about to go up against a werewolf. There would be time enough for that. This was between him and Lupo.

  “These babies’ll punch through anything,” Brujo was saying.

  “Yeah, I’m counting on that.”

  Soon they were approaching the new family compound, and Rabbioso wondered how soon he would get to play with the new hardware. When they landed, Brujo handed him a phone.

  He thought: The eagle has landed.

  Jessie

  It was earlier than she expected, but getting dark already.

  She finished her rounds at the reservation hospital, where she was chief administrator and almost always on-call as physician, and felt the pull of the flashing neon lights across the parking lots, but this time she fought it. She fought it and won, because she found herself instead walking to the hospital cafeteria for a snack, not using her hunger as an excuse to head for the casino.

  The building itself had become a nightmarish memory. Too much death, too many good people, too much crime… The casino had been a curse after all, just as Sam Waters had predicted. Sam’s vote against its construction had been part of what had driven so much of the calamity that had befallen their lives, so much of the evil, the crime, the death. She wondered what Nick was doing right then. Something routine and boring, she hoped. She feared for his life, she really did, but an anger simmered below her fear and the love, an anger that sometimes bubbled up in a splash of acid she could taste in her throat.

  Nick Lupo, homicide cop and werewolf.. How many people could say that and mean it?

  But the days when some sense of wonder came along with the words were long gone. Now there was anger and weariness, and the bitter taste of jealousy.

  Where’s Heather Wilson right now?

  She really didn’t want to know, but she couldn’t help let that thought bubble up to the surface, too.

  That bitch.

  Entering the cafeteria, she chose a corner table and dropped off her clipboard and iPad, then headed for the only open counter. The food choice was dismal by now, and the casino certainly seemed more attractive right then, but her need had passed. The therapy was working. What she needed was therapy to combat jealousy.

  The tired attendant recommended the lasagne, and she nodded, but uncertainly. After a short wait, what she got was a far cry from what Nick would have produced during one of his late-night kitchen extravaganzas. It looked like something out of a dented box on a sale shelf from the worst grocery store in town, but she added dry garlic toast and a wilted iceberg salad with dressing in a plastic tub, and a bottle of water. Talk about a downer.

  She sat and nibbled at it, thinking of Nick and where they were going. Where their relationship was headed.

  Make me a werewolf, she had said. It had surprised even her.

  He’d been hurt, tired, vulnerable. He’d nodded, hadn’t he, and they had embraced. But then he had reneged on the promise.

  “It’s not a promise,” he said, when they argued about it. “I was exhausted. I didn’t think it through. I just nodded. I don’t want to subject you to a life like mine.”

  Damn him!

  What did he know about her life? Maybe her life was shit as it was, and being like him would be the perfect way to fix things.

  And that goddamn bitch Heather wouldn’t have an advantage anymore.

  Lupo

  Lupo pulled up to the cottage and felt the usual contradicting emotions. The small cabin was filled with fond memories of Sam, a place where they had managed to become close despite their differences—nights spent watching good bad and medium James Bond movies, making funny comments while drinking their way through a dog-eared ‘New York’ bartender’s guide.

  Sam Waters had unexpectedly left his beloved secluded cottage to Lupo. It had shocked Lupo to no end that a man who had once been ready to kill him, to empty a few silver-loaded shotgun shells into him, had thought so much of him by the time of his death to write him into his will. The place was just inside the more remote portion of the rez and could barely be found, though it had been found one time by some very bad guy
s, who had tainted the place with the slaughter of Tom Arnow’s family.

  Afterwards, Lupo had cleaned most of the bloody gore himself, using the brutal tragedy to initiate some updates from Sam’s very rustic décor to include a modern kitchen, a larger pantry, more comfortable beds in the alcove off the main room and in the master bedroom/loft, and soft leather furniture and even a 55-inch Samsung LED television.

  Sam would have loved Thunderball and For Your Eyes Only on that screen.

  He pulled his Mustang into the new detached garage that he’d also recently built to replace the dilapidated old structure, then hiked across the gravel and weed driveway to the house itself.

  After talking to the old man who had been his father’s friend, or at least collaborator—Corrado? Could it really be him?—he had felt penned in. The city was on pins and needles, as were the cops. DiSanto had been sucked back into the DHS-run investigation of the bus shooter case that had everyone frightened, but the new Homicide head had kept Lupo out. That guy from Homeland Security, Barton? (Other cops called him Hart-Bart behind his back, but Lupo knew his name was Stephen H. Barton.) In his experience, the man was a better cop than most DHS agents. But Barton seemed to be inexplicably interested equally in Lupo himself as much as the bus shooter, who had gone quiet after his last dramatic outburst which had left so many dead and wounded.

  Whenever Lupo felt penned in, he headed for the North Woods. Eagle River wasn’t as pristine a paradise as it had been when Lupo had first started coming some twenty years before. Trees fell by the acre to so-called progress, and so Lupo had begun to cherish the small legacy Sam had left him.

  Lupo had bypassed telling Jessie he was heading north.

  He told himself it was just because she was working hard—not only running the hospital, as she had been, but also serving on the elders’ council. They’d convinced her to take a seat after what had happened to Davison and Bill Hawk and although she had always opposed the casino and hotel project, she now found herself inextricably involved in its affairs, even if she wasn’t running it.

  Lupo shook his head, thinking about the speed with which all this had happened.

  They’d barely managed to hold off the attacks of the Wolfpaw backing group, the secretive Wolfclaw—couldn’t they ever get off a theme?—and the goddamn Bastone family, who wanted a large slice of the tribe’s casino profits. It had taken a stroke of luck for Lupo to manage to cancel out two opponents by using Wolfclaw’s drones equipped with Reaper missiles. It hadn’t been a sure thing. If he’d been as much a gambler as Jessie had become, Lupo would have bet the house against himself on that one.

  And the drone command house…who had warned them to clear out before the raid DiSanto and Danni Colgrave conducted there?

  And where was Heather right now? Had she managed to heal from her terrible wounds?

  There were so many questions still swirling in his mind. He reached the back door and took hold of the knob.

  Overhead, he heard a flight of Canadian geese. Late, he thought, without looking up. They usually vacated earlier in the season.

  When the door swung open under his hand, the explosion took out the cabin’s entire rear wall and hurled him across the wooden back porch.

  Debris washed over him, a deadly wave of projectiles.

  If his eardrums hadn’t been bleeding, the last sound he might have heard would have been that of frightened geese somewhere above, scattering across the gray sky.

  Chapter Eight

  Jessie

  Her meal finished, such as it was, she dragged herself to her old Pathfinder and sat in it while the food settled. The cafeteria’s version of lasagne left a lot to be desired, and she was now quite educated on what a respectable lasagne should taste like, thanks to Nick Lupo’s peevish irritation at what restaurants tended to offer.

  “Damn the mozzarella,” he would say, scraping it off. “It should be Parmigiano-Reggiano and maybe a little ricotta, and the rest of what people think should be cheese is really supposed to be a béchamel—flour, butter, and milk—not this gummy pizza cheese! Don’t get me started…”

  But if she did get him started, he’d also mention that the layers of pasta should be much thinner than what most places served, and there should be more of them. “It’s a lot more delicate to have a dozen thin layers as opposed to three or four thick pasta layers stuffed with cheese and meat. The meat sauce should be a delicate ragu’—though my family always made it meatless and I got used to it that way.”

  Jessie smiled at the thought of Nick’s outrage when it came to what he considered poor Italian food. It was one of the things she loved about him.

  Yeah, love, she thought.

  Even though he was so difficult at times, she really couldn’t see being with anyone else. His passion for everything made him special, but sometimes it all translated into a deep sense of stubbornness that could be infuriating, too.

  Take her request, for instance.

  Although part of her was terrified at the thought of becoming a strange creature, a werewolf, something she once would have laughed at the notion of believing, now she really did think it would save their relationship. She already knew what he had to go through, and she had decided she was willing to make the necessary sacrifices…and the necessary adjustments to her lifestyle.

  More meat in my diet, she thought, and mostly rare. But instead of hurting her health, it would be the basis of a whole new approach to diet. And rare steaks were one of the ways Nick kept his wolf side away from hunting humans.

  Though deer and rabbits in the wild…well, they were sacrificed to the wolf on a regular basis, on hunts in and around the reservation and the nearby national forest. Could she live with that?

  Yes, she had decided she could live with that, especially if her transformation checkmated the bitch Heather out of the equation.

  But stubborn Nick Lupo had first agreed, then started to waffle on whether he would do it. As if he didn’t want to share his ‘gift,’ she sometimes thought. But then she would remember how much hell it sometimes put him through, and she realized that in his mind, at least, he was watching out for her.

  She sighed.

  Didn’t make it any easier.

  She burped, surprising herself.

  God, she thought. Too much garlic in the so-called lasagne.

  That was another pet peeve of his. There’s always too much garlic! he would have cried out in frustration.

  It made her smile as she started the Pathfinder and put it in gear, then nosed it out of her administrative parking space and toward the street. She tried to avoid looking at the casino, with its rows of blinking lights and neon strips, but the glow was just too powerful. And the draw. She felt the urge to pull in gaining strength, but at the last second she turned right onto the road that would take her away from the temptation of the slot machines.

  A black Expedition followed her onto the street.

  That’s funny, she thought.

  She saw him in her mirror, but hadn’t noticed the SUV in the hospital lot. She wasn’t used to anyone leaving when she did, so it startled her a little. As did the fact that she didn’t recognize it, when she had a tendency to know most of the vehicles on the rez.

  Must have intended to pull into the casino lot but instead parked in the hospital’s. The two surface lots were basically side-by-side, and the casino brought in plenty of non-rez cars. Hell, half the rez women worked in the casino, but couldn’t afford to spend their money there as customers. Though even she had to admit the pay was rather awesome compared to pre-casino days. She’d learned a lot since they’d convinced her to sit on the board, and now they wanted her to run for the chair. Well, she was definitely ambivalent, but there was a lot of good she could do from within. She shook her head. So many decisions to make.

  What about this now? Was it a problem?

  She drove slowly. The Expedition followed a few car lengths behind her, matching her speed. Its windows were tinted completely black, so
she couldn’t see anyone.

  Jesus, she thought. Am I ever paranoid!

  Or was she?

  Ever since Lupo had called up those demons from hell, otherwise known as Wolfpaw—in all its evil guises, and God knew there were many—nothing much would have surprised her.

  She could play this game. Maybe not a few years ago, but now she definitely could.

  She slowed and took a sudden right onto a wooded lane, no directional, turned off the ignition, and watched the mirror.

  The Expedition sped up and roared past, apparently frustrated with her hogging of the road at such low speed.

  Well, that’s more normal for this area!

  She pulled back out after a few minutes, figuring she really was paranoid. The road was clear ahead of her and she drove on, heading home but at the last second she decided to take a roundabout way, making a large loop but ending up at her Circle Moon Drive. It was a sort of private cul-de-sac in which her cottages were arrayed on the shore of the channel between Catfish and Cranberry Lakes, with much wooded acreage between them. She noted that Lupo’s place was dark, and she felt a stab of loneliness. His rental of that cottage as his getaway had begun their relationship, but now she wondered if he planned to be in residence again anytime soon.

  Wolfpaw had come crashing into their lives, with its army of sadistic warrior werewolves, and he hadn’t been the same. The deaths of Sam Waters and Tom Arnow had hit him hard, harder than she’d suspected, and he seemed to carry the weight of the planet on his broad shoulders these days. Even when he was around, they were so rarely carefree. And last time they’d almost died at the hands of the werewolves and mobsters and, according to Nick, the drones some secret group had hijacked. She wasn’t sure about any of that, or even how in hell they’d managed to cover up the truth afterward.

  She sighed, and put on a nice tea from Portland she’d discovered recently, Boyd’s. It was a dark, rich color and its flavor matched without bitterness. It was the best-tasting tea she’d ever had, and she lusted for a large mug doctored with a good slug of rum. Nick had taught her that. She had always used brandy, but he’d come along with his predilection for rum in both tea and hot cocoa, and she’d never looked back.