Wolf's Trap (The Nick Lupo Series Book 1)

by W. D. Gagliani

  While Ben examined the body further, Lupo turned toward the workbench behind the counter that spanned the width of the store. Several vises gripped weapons in various stages of assembly. A reloading press took up a third of the space. Lupo leaned over the workspace, which was illuminated by a magnifying work light, and felt the same heat-pain in his skin. His head spun.

  Shiny filings lay scattered on the flat work area.

  Lupo had no need to wait for analysis to know that the material was more silver. The lab people would confirm it, but his own senses were attuned to the feel of the element—just as popular myth would have it.

  He had no idea why his condition followed so closely the rules set forth in B-movies, but it did. He remembered well his first encounter with silver, on the day his mother had bought him a silver chain—all the rage in the seventies—and he had begged for her to exchange it for a gold one. She had been hurt by his irrational behavior, but would have been shocked at the lesions the silver left on the skin around his neck, lesions that took almost a year to heal completely.

  Why would a gunsmith work with silver?

  Lupo let the truth wash over him. He had suspected it since feeling the presence of the metal, but the workbench clinched it—as did the proximity of Rag’s reloading apparatus. A small smelting setup was probably on the premises, too, maybe in the back room. It had to be a professional setup, due to silver’s high boiling point. That silver had been used in reloading was obvious. A number of slugs had been either coated or filled with pure silver, then loaded into brass cartridges. They had been filed or notched then, to increase impact. A custom order. Rag had to die after filling such an eccentric order. And after providing an appropriate weapon with which to fire the silver slugs. Whatever else had the guy made off with—grenades? Submachine guns?

  Here’s one for you, Nick!

  This time his message was Rag himself, and the silver slug that had taken off most of his head. Lupo was sure of it. And there was no way he could tell Ben, or anyone else, because the only connection between Rag and Corinne was Lupo himself. And the silver.

  Beside him, Ben had turned his attention to the counter and was scraping the filings onto a sheet of paper. He wrapped it in a druggist’s fold and slipped it into an envelope.

  As the photographer’s flash turned the scene into a strobe-lit nightmare, Lupo wrestled with the facts. Someone knew enough about his condition to know that silver could hurt or kill him. And that someone had a grudge. Now, if only Lupo could figure out who.

  Before anyone else is killed, or he kills me.

  For the first time since he had acted against his father’s wishes and become a cop, he felt vulnerable to something other than his own bestial urges. For the first time, he felt as if a target was painted on his back.

  Lupo turned in early but couldn’t sleep.

  His tossing allowed him more than sufficient time to examine both his life and the case, this damned case, which was more than that—it was personal and it brought pain because Corinne was gone, and he had so few friends that the loss of one caused a huge impact to ripple through his life. He felt the selfish thought wrap itself around him like a blanket and allowed it—what else were sleepless nights for, if not for selfish thoughts we try to cover up and suppress in daylight?

  He felt the exquisite pain of his loss and let himself wallow in delicious self-pity. Sometimes it was therapeutic to allow such thoughts their space, letting them chip away at his stoic resolve when he could at least hide his emotions from others, especially other cops. But not Ben. No, Ben understood. Lupo was certain, and he felt thankful for a decent friend among the strangers with which he worked.

  Lupo had always been different, and the different attract few friends.

  Lupo flipped over and felt comfortable for a minute, letting his body sink into the mattress, but then his muscles tightened and signaled the end of this attempt. He gave up and lay on his back, watching the vague gray smudge of the ceiling hover above him as he started to go over the facts of the case yet again.

  The combination of Corinne’s murder, the gunsmith, and their obvious connection was one of the obstacles impeding his rest. That he couldn’t tell Ben or anyone else about the connection rankled too, but not as much. The identity of the murderer was his first concern since it had to be someone he knew—someone with a grudge, real or imagined, against Lupo himself. He scrolled through a mental film of faces—perps he’d arrested and convicted, one or two he’d shot with official justification and their angry relatives, the occasional fight, and the few personal grudges he could remember. Fact was, Lupo lived a solitary life. He’d avoided attachments—since Caroline, anyway—because of the unpredictable nature of his disease.

  He did think of it as a disease, and he always had. At least until recently, when faced with the possibility that he could learn to control his transformations. He’d so feared the lunar cycles and their effect on him that he had hidden himself away during the full moon—in his specially altered condominium apartment, or, better yet, upstate in Wisconsin’s sparsely populated North Woods, where he could allow himself to prowl the national forest and hunt with little chance of discovery.

  In the twenty years since he had become a cop, the only control he had been able to exert on his wolf’s form was an extreme type of suppression, which covered for him in emergencies, but for which he suffered almost un-endurable pain. His time at the police academy had been keen torture, as he had been forced to suppress the changes he called episodes almost right up until the full moon—graduation had been on a Thursday and the moon turned full on Saturday. He had become accustomed to the accelerating changes and minor episodes, such as inadvertent growls and sporadic hair growth, which occurred with alarming frequency during the last few days of his training. He had suspected, on the other hand, that his condition also increased his physical abilities enough to win him class honors in required tests—he found to his surprise that at lifting, running, jumping, and climbing, he was by far the best of the forty cadets.

  His childhood had never been particularly sports-oriented since his parents were Italian immigrants who didn’t much care for the strange American sports they saw. They never discouraged their son, it was true, but they never encouraged him either, and he had grown up blissfully unaware of baseball and basketball, enjoying only the calculated bursts of violence he saw on the football field (though not enough to risk true participation beyond the occasional schoolyard game spurred by the success of the Green Bay Packers, the best home team ever). Therefore, his newfound physical abilities had surprised no one more than the young Dominic Lupo himself.

  If only he could command it. But he could not, and he had often nearly run afoul of his father—whose silver-loaded shotgun seemed to shimmer in the gun cabinet. No, Nick knew from an early age that he was now a target—his father’s cure would also kill the patient.

  These realities had left him with little choice but to hide in misery and shame and read, read voraciously from endless library shelves on the occult in general and the phenomenon known as lycanthropy in particular. He knew now what he was, but he also knew that there was little he could do to change his fate—the sources, both fiction and nonfiction, seemed to agree that the only way out was death and that silver was a potent weapon against him in any form. And his mother’s gift—the necklace that had burned into his skin—had only proven the delicate balance between life and death by skewering his altered nervous system with such pain that he knew without a doubt that death would be only moments away in the presence of any amount of the forty-seventh element.

  The lesson had been valuable, helping to delineate his limits. A few years later, Caroline Stewart came along to help him discover more limits, and to point out more positive aspects he had never considered. And it had been Caroline who helped him decide to break with his father’s wishes and become a police officer. Then she had helped him cope with the pain of his condition during his training and rookie years.


  And he had repaid her love and trust by ending her life on a blood-soaked bed he could never quite forget—he saw it, felt the wet sheets, smelled the blood, whenever he closed his eyes.

  Lupo rolled over, watching the images come unbidden into his head—like a never-ending film loop playing in his mind whenever he let down his guard enough to let it begin by threading the spools of his stricken conscience.

  Caroline (“It’s pronounced Caro-lynn!” she’d said in class) was almost ten years older than Nick, and had already earned a doctorate in psychiatry and started a private practice by the time he stumbled into her at the state university where he floundered amid various courses dictated by his father’s wishes for his life, and where he studiously applied himself to one course—the psychology intro course that held his interest because it dealt with human weaknesses (of which he felt he had many) and because it was taught by the lovely Caroline Stewart.

  There was little doubt of Caroline’s beauty—every male student eyed her chestnut hair, wide expressive mouth, and dark soulful eyes with a combination of doleful adoration and undisguised lust. Nick Lupo was hardly an exception, but his questions into the duality of human nature obviously intrigued her, much to the envy of the rest of the men in the class, who viewed Nick as the one class member who was obviously headed to the place to which they all aspired—her bedroom. A frequent visitor to her tiny, cubicle-like office, Nick actually only aspired to be where he was—in the presence of an intellect who engaged him by helping him explore the questions he had. Still, the other aspects were difficult to ignore, and he also felt the sexual force pulling them together despite all logic and common sense.

  Though at first neither had acted on the mutual attraction, Nick’s course was set and his outstanding psychology grades demanded several follow-up seminars. He registered eagerly for any course she taught, and their bond grew until the inevitable happened and the whispers—which had never stopped—finally gained substance.

  On that day, Nick came to her office with the half-formed thought of confessing his problem. He had considered long and hard, deciding that if he could share his secret with anyone, Caroline Stewart had to be the one. She was patient and understanding. She was intelligent. She had spoken of a partial belief in the supernatural—or at least the paranormal—and had mentioned research she had done in the occult sciences. Given his condition, Nick thought, could a more open-minded person be found?

  He knocked on the door of her office, hoping no one would see him in the hallway. The building was nearly deserted, but he really didn’t want anyone to feed the rumor mill.

  “Walk in.” Her voice was slightly husky; as if she’d just awakened. Her male students loved this characteristic, and Nick was no exception.

  “Hi, Dr. Stewart,” he said as he opened the door.

  She tossed her hair and nodded him into a chair. “I’ve told you before, Nick,” she scolded. “You may call me Caroline. Okay?”

  He nodded. Maybe it was time he listened. “Okay, Caroline.” He tried out the sound of her name on his lips and rather liked it. “Are you busy?”

  She spread her hands over a pile of term papers, rolling her eyes. “Yes. But I need a break.”

  “Are those ours?”

  She smiled and nodded. “Don’t worry; I haven’t done yours yet.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not why I’m here. You remember some of those discussions we’ve had about duality. About repressing another self, a darker side of ourselves?”

  “I do remember. Interesting stuff. Quite a lot of research is being done now, with all those multiple-personality cases showing up on the news lately.”

  Nick paused, not knowing how to proceed.

  Should he blurt it out and let her disbelieve? Well, Caroline, it appears that I’m a werewolf.

  Yeah, that would work.

  Should he dance around the point, further gauging her position on the possibilities? How subtle should he be? How blunt? He chose subtlety.

  “What if I told you I have personal knowledge of a serious case, and that both the person and I would like you to examine him—or her? Would you do it?” He winced at the sound of his awkward lie.

  Caroline seemed not to notice. She tilted her head slightly and stared at him. “You mean step away from the theoretical?” He nodded. “Well, yes, I suppose I would. Though it’s highly irregular, you’ve hooked me pretty well. I guess I could try a diagnosis, if this person actually wanted to talk to me, and maybe refer him—or her—to the right specialist. Would that satisfy you?”

  He was thrilled at her interest. Now, how could he lead into his questions? How could he tell Caroline about a condition most people would consider a fantasy, something out of a cheap Creature Features movie, or one that Elvira giggled and mugged through the parts that brought agony to Nick’s soul? How did one approach something so bizarre?

  Nick knew that his grandmother would have believed. There was little doubt in his mind, because such things were not unheard of even in the north of Italy, where she had grown up and poverty was not as widespread as in the south, stories and legends entwined with truth and facts until the result became a whole new legend. Nick remembered how his grandmother had often spoken of the witches she knew who practiced in her hometown. He also remembered how her stories haunted him after Andy had passed his dark legacy on to him.

  Maria Saltini had seen things in her life. He had heard her hushed whispers to other grown-ups over the years. He remembered the story of a suspected witch who was forced by townspeople to attend holy mass in the village church only to break down into hysterical fits when given Communion, then spitting out the sacred host while shouting obscenities in French, a language she couldn’t know. He wasn’t supposed to have heard that story, of course, but he’d been sneaky.

  Grandma also told the story of a village witch who sold love potions and revenge spells, and what the Italian partisans had done to her when they accused her of betraying their leaders to the Nazi occupiers. They had “passed her around,” Grandma said, until she was torn and bloody, then they had decapitated her battered corpse and buried it in two graves filled with salt and holy water. Everyone knew that witches could transform themselves into other creatures, so you had to make sure they couldn’t come back to their bodies. While as a kid he hadn’t been sure what “passing her around” meant, he was sophisticated enough to let his imagination do the rest.

  But now this was Caroline Stewart, his young professor, who’d set aside her grading chores to grant him her entire attention. After closing the door to her tiny office—legs, touching as she edged past him to reach the doorknob— she faced him and he fell into her eyes.

  “You were saying?” Her voice was full of amused curiosity “About your friend’s case?”

  “Huh, yeah,” Nick stammered. “It’s a unique case, I’m pretty sure. This friend that I mentioned seems to be, uh, two entities. Totally separate personalities. One is human and the other—”

  His lips froze. How did one explain this?

  “Go on,” she prodded. Her serious attitude reassured him further, and he launched into a carefully edited version of his story. At least, as much of his story as he could bring himself to reveal.

  “My grandmother believed that all sorts of strange things happen whether or not people believe in them, and that sometimes strange things happen because people believe in them. Kind of like voodoo.” He stopped for a breath and waited for her to interrupt, but she didn’t. Reassured, he continued. “She—my grandmother—grew up in a mountain village in Northern Italy, where people were superstitious and very practical. They were Catholic, but they had no problem borrowing talismans and good-luck charms from other European cultures.” He glanced for a sign that she wanted to stop him, or interject. Her eyes were alert and focused on him and his every word, so he continued. “They were afraid of Gypsies because it was said they harnessed dark powers, but the people actually bought Gypsy good-luck charms and love spells and whatev
er else seemed to be a cure for what ailed them.

  “I heard her stories when I was a kid, even though I wasn’t supposed to. Stories about curses and horrible things that happened to people who dabbled in the forbidden arts.”

  He heard himself sound like a voice-over, but she didn’t seem to mind. She leaned forward slightly, her hands nestled in her lap. Her lips were parted slightly, provocatively, though he had no doubt she was unaware of it. He stretched back a bit, intimidated by her closeness. Her scent was intoxicating in the close quarters. The ends of his long hair brushed the back of his chair and he felt electrocuted, melted to the spot.

  “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been conditioned to believe the bizarre and the impossible, see? Like what happened to my friend—what I came to talk to you about.”

  He found her gaze too intense and let his eyes roam over her cluttered office instead. Her bookshelves reminded him of his own, every space filled with books facing every which way and the narrow space in front of the books cluttered with toys and knickknacks meaningful only to her. He liked that. The bottom shelves were obscured by stacks of books that would never fit.

  She waited for his eyes to find hers again. “Go on.”

  “My friend thinks—this is hard to say—he’s pretty sure he’s a werewolf.”

  Nick couldn’t stop himself from just blurting it out. And he couldn’t avoid cringing, either. It sounded ridiculous, even to him.

  To her credit, Professor Caroline Stewart didn’t laugh. “A werewolf… Let’s see if I can dig up something on lycanthropy.” She pushed her squeaky swivel chair toward one overcrowded bookcase and searched with a fingertip. “Here’s one book we can consult. How long has your friend been lycanthropic?”

  Nick squinted. Still no sign of ridicule. This was unexpected behavior.

  Nice, but unexpected.

  “Uh, since he was bitten by a German shepherd-like dog. Maybe three, four years. Is it… Is it possible?”