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

by W. D. Gagliani

  “Please come in,” he said, stepping aside and closing the door, noting that no one was loitering in the hall. She smiled—a mite sadly, he thought—and then visibly put her training and experience to work. He smiled too. “I’m glad you could come.”

  She wore a leather skirt barely covering her coltish thighs and a gold lamé blouse cut dramatically low. Her hair displayed the studied disarray that appeared to be accidental but wasn’t, and her makeup was exquisitely done. Dr. Freiburg stared at her lips, perfectly shaped and nicely glossed in a fresh, hot pink with sparkles that caught the overhead light when she smiled. Her lower lip was full and delicious, and the doctor wished he had more time.

  “My name is Stacey,” she said, her voice sweet and melodious. She was among the best, that was certain.

  “I know,” he said, nodding. “I requested you. That is, I think it was love at first sight…”

  “Oh? Have we met?” She scrunched up her cute nose in concentration, biting her lower lip.

  “Yes, we have.” He waved her toward the side of the foyer and saw her notice the loose hundred-dollar bills in the fruit bowl. There were five, her specific price for an all-nighter. She smiled, more seductively this time, because the money was reassurance and because he was doing everything right. Cops couldn’t put out money without possibly facing entrapment charges, so he must be on the up and up. These thoughts flickered in and out of her eyes, and then she turned to him and leaned close.

  Dr. Freiburg met her lips with his and crushed her face to him, feigning passion. He would have felt passion for her, had he not been strapped for time. The locale was also not of his choosing, so he lingered in the embrace, inhaling the scent of her and the feel of her lipstick on his lips, enjoying her probing tongue.

  When she tried to pull away, doubtless to begin the doctor’s engagement, or perhaps to start removing her clothes, he clutched her all the harder. He watched her eyes widen with surprise, then flash quickly with fear, and then his hands were around her throat like pliers, cutting off her air supply. His thumbs found her larynx and he applied pressure until she began to turn blue under her off-season salon tan. She pushed against him and smacked at his face with her arms, but she was already weak and all she managed to do was knock his glasses off. Her legs gave out from under her. She tried to swing at him again. Her tiny purse raked across his forehead, but he never loosened his grip and he stared into her eyes as she went from surprise to fear to panic and, finally, to half-unconsciousness. Her attempts to breathe resulted in convulsions, which he contained by slowly lowering her backward and to the hardwood floor, straddling her struggling body and holding her air passage tightly shut until she collapsed completely and he felt her throat give. Her eyes rolled up into her head and he continued applying the pressure for minutes, squeezing with determination, driving her loose-limbed body downward below his own until he was certain she was gone.

  Her lipstick streaked her chin now, her tan pale in death. He wished he had the time, for he was quite aroused by now, even though he had not used his favorite blade. But he couldn’t afford blood here, not now.

  He waited and waited, but her breathing never resumed.

  When the phone rang, as he had expected, Dr. Freiburg explained that the escort he had hired had not shown up, and he would not be calling this service again.

  He carefully folded her into the huge freezer. “Uncle meet Stacey,” he said, chuckling. Frost almost obscured the old man’s features, but his wide-open eyes seemed to be measuring Stacey’s beauty. “I’m sure you two will have lots to talk about. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Uncle! Enjoy your new friend…”

  Martin had a little trouble closing the door, but some manipulation of her left arm did the trick and he left her in the old man’s frozen embrace. He would have loved meeting her in a photo booth and letting her go down on him as the camera rolled, but he had to assume that by now the cops had considered watching most mall booths. Unless they hadn’t found his previous greeting yet. Or maybe they had found her but weren’t saying.

  In any case, Stacey Collins could finger him, so she had to be removed from the board. Chances were no one would look in Dr. Freiburg’s deep freeze, not until well after Martin was long gone.

  Martin whistled a tuneless melody as he cleared his foyer and prepared for the next step.

  Buck

  Buck Benton had earned his nickname after slicing open three other men’s faces with his old Buck knife. The tag was inevitable. Three men in one day, even if it had been years before, when Buck was still in his twenties and spry. He loved his knife, and never went anywhere without its scarred leather pouch on his belt. The knife’s weight was comforting, riding there on his hip. It was a friend a man could count on, even more than his buddies. It never laughed at you, or called you names when you went to piss out all the beer you had drunk. It never called you stupid, or told others of the dumb things you had done while drunk.

  Buck savored the smooth way the blade swung open under his thumb—old-fashioned but sturdy and worn smooth where his thumb and forefinger had so often caressed its metallic sheen. He gloried in the feel of it, and had added to his own legend willingly by using the smoothly worn weapon whenever the chance presented itself.

  For instance, that very morning.

  Insults were often lost on Buck, since his schooling had ended one day in the seventh grade when the police had come to greet him and offer him some educational alternatives. Juvenile corrections had been less interested in correcting his lack of intellect than his budding sense of social injustice. Even then he had begun to hone his lightning-quick response to any slights—real or imagined—and being called a shithead certainly applied, yessir, and he had dealt with that problem.

  The dink who had called Buck a shithead today was a fat-ass two-bit lawyer, an ambulance-chasing bottom feeder stuck in a one-point-five-horse dump of a town. Yes, Smiley R. Jamieson might have done well in a city big enough to pay him little attention, but here he hadn’t done so well, was in fact barely tolerated by the locals. So when he snorted the word shithead in reference to an admittedly unoccupied and unemployed Buck Benton, the latter felt he had more than enough reason to unlimber his weapon and commence amateur surgery upon Jamieson’s features.

  Buck’s efforts to that end were interrupted not by a benefactor, exactly, but by another complainant looking for the honorable Mr. Jamieson, who saw in Buck’s knife attack the opportunity to draw blood for his own satisfaction. The new player quickly gauged Buck’s intentions, plainly written as they were in the thin lines of Mr. Jamieson’s blood, which ran down into his withered collar while Buck prepared to slice again.

  Harve Billings, Jamieson’s visitor, speed-dialed Sheriff Bunche’s number on his cell phone even as a startled Buck grunted in surprise at the interruption, widened his nostrils, and smashed through Jamieson’s first-floor window to take off down the street.

  The wounded lawyer flopped and rolled on the worn carpeting, emitting a loud series of squeals.

  Billings took the opportunity of Jamieson’s currently noisy indisposition to rifle through the lawyer’s files, a stack of which lay invitingly on the cluttered desk, even as he described the lawyer’s attacker over the phone. On the floor, Jamieson continued to scream and spray blood.

  While Buck’s description—hardly necessary, since everyone in town knew of him—was read by the dispatcher to a cruising Sheriff Bunche, Buck himself was already availing himself of the complete bar services of Jerry’s Pub and Grub, which had just opened for business that day.

  Jessie

  Jerry’s Pub and Grub was coincidentally Jessie Hawkins’s destination for a quick lunch. She was on her way to meet her tenant, who would be up today. She steered her Pathfinder into the gravel lot at the same time as the sheriff’s own four-by-four squad car, a brand-new TrailBlazer.

  So Jessie was present when Sheriff Bunche slapped cuffs on Buck’s bony wrists, his thin voice reedily exclaiming his innocence even
though fresh lawyer blood stained both his denim work-shirt and the blade of his knife.

  Not one to waste an opportunity, Sheriff Bunche immediately turned to Jessie. “Doctor, can I ask your professional help in visiting our wounded victim over at his office? I got an ambulance on the way, but they been running slow lately.”

  Jessie nodded. “I have a bag in the truck.” Further preparations for her tenant’s arrival would have to wait.

  When they reached Jamieson’s office, where Billings seemed to be standing guard over the flabby lawyer’s bloated corpse, Jessie glanced out the broken window at Buck, who was handcuffed and chained in the backseat of the sheriff’s truck. He was looking right at her with vacantly hostile eyes and an open-jawed grin that nearly unhinged her even though she knew she was safe.

  That one local I don’t want wandering the streets at night, she thought. Here or on the reservation.

  Then she turned her attention to the lawyer, who was apparently not dead at all, and who had begun groaning and wheezing. The ambulance—late, just as Sheriff Bunche had assumed—pulled up outside as she bent to examine Jamieson’s wounds. Now Jamieson was crying and muttering incoherently.

  “—walked in just as that creepo was cutting Mr. Jamieson here with this huge knife,” Billings was saying. “I scared him away, then I called you and tried to keep the patient comfortable.”

  Jessie couldn’t see the results of any attempt to keep the lawyer comfortable. He lay where he had fallen, his back soaked with blood and his face slashed to ribbons. As far as she could see, his eyes had survived the brutal attack, and that was in itself a small miracle. She opened her bag, donned latex gloves, and set about checking him for serious damage.

  Jamieson still whimpered softly, and she handled him gently while dabbing at his wounds, which appeared to be shallow and clean.

  By now the paramedics had entered and, seeing her already on the scene, unlimbered a stretcher nearby. She supervised their efforts in loading the heavyset lawyer onto it and walked along as they wheeled him out to the lot, whispering and holding his hand—which felt somewhat like a dead carp. He was in shock, mostly blubbering helplessly and staring through widened eyes.

  Sheriff Bunche left Billings for a moment and spoke to her quietly as the medics loaded their burden into the back of the ambulance.

  “How is he, Doc?”

  “He’s in shock. His wounds are relatively minor, but they are painful and will take a long time to heal. He’ll recover, but he’ll need a good plastic surgeon to repair the muscular and nerve damage.” She glanced at Buck Benton, who was staring at her through the four-by-four’s window, the tip of his tongue protruding from between his yellow teeth. She shuddered, fingering the faded line of the long, jagged scar that curled around her left ear and across her neck to disappear into the darkness of her hair. “Was he definitely the man?”

  Bunche seemed not to notice her gesture.

  “I have the knife bagged,” he said. “The lab in Minocqua will have to confirm it, of course, but the blade’s still slick with blood. I doubt Jamieson cut himself shaving.”

  Jessie shook her head. The blade that had done the cutting was long and curved, exactly like Benton’s Buck knife, and she would most likely be able to identify it from the wounds in Jamieson’s face. Buck Benton’s career as a thug would come to an end if she had any say in the matter.

  As the ambulance pulled away, they went back into the building. Bunche pointed at several manila folders Billings held in one hand. “So what are those?”

  “Files I was bringing Mr. Jamieson, Sheriff. I guess I’ll have to hang on to them now.”

  Jessie stood looking at the stained flooring, and at the window, and Bunche and Billings’s conversation became a low buzzing drone. From outside, Buck Benton scrunched up his features so that he resembled a wrinkled gorilla, alternately gloating and leering at her, and then sticking his bloated tongue out and wagging it obscenely, his eyes spinning around in his sockets.

  She frowned and turned away, leaving the building and entering her SUV. She saw Buck start laughing uncontrollably.

  The inside of her Pathfinder suddenly reeked of decaying copper, and she realized she was still wearing the latex gloves, which were encrusted with Jamieson’s coagulating blood. She stripped them off carefully and dropped them in the trash bag she kept in the back. The smell was pungent, and she rolled down her window.

  When she drove past the sheriff’s truck, Benton appeared to be laughing hard enough to choke. She felt a shiver trickling down her back and tried to forget his distorted features.

  To clear her mind, she reminded herself that her favorite tenant would arrive soon. There was that to look forward to, at least. She was glad she had finished clearing his driveway earlier. She popped an Alan Parsons CD into the slot and hummed along as she drove back toward Circle Moon Drive. She’d have to make do with something from the fridge for lunch.

  Jessie’s father had bought a half-dozen lots on what would become Circle Moon Drive over a half century before, when land was cheap and plentiful and the nearest neighbors were likely to be ten miles away. There was no town then, just a jumble of county roads wiggling along the shoreline of the dozens of long, narrow lakes and the short channels that connected them. As often as not, the roads formed jagged boundaries between white people’s land and the various reservations created in the latter part of the nineteenth century to get the Indians under control somewhere whites wouldn’t have to worry about them. Circle Moon Drive had been nothing but a dirt road servicing two dozen parcels of wooded land, almost all of which overlooked either a lake or a narrow, tree-shaded channel. All six of Mason Hawkins’s lots overlooked such a channel, so that at night sitting at one of his campsites would be pitch-black because of the tree line on the opposite bank. By the time Hawkins had built three of his six cottages, others had purchased lots on Circle Moon Drive, and a small union of friends had begun to take cocktails together and watch the sunlight slowly disappear behind the uninterrupted line of pines just across the channel.

  Jessie had grown up in the woods around their land, burying treasures here and there, secreting tiny boxes of meaningful trinkets in each of the tidy wooden cottages that sprang out of the gentle hillside that rolled to the banks of the channel, now dotted with the piers of other hidden properties.

  Now that her parents had retired to the big city, closer to the hospital for which Mason Hawkins occasionally consulted, they had left their remaining four cottages to her management. She supplemented her meager reservation salary by living in one cottage and renting the other three. All were winterized, so she could usually find renters for each season or even the entire year. She ran an ad in several local papers year-round and so always managed to catch at least a few short vacation rentals. Painters and writers often used the still-quiet area, the rustle of the water in the channel, and the slurp of boat wakes against pier supports, to give their work a less urban feel.

  One cottage was currently unoccupied, but two couples from Milwaukee were to drive up soon and spend a week lazing. One was rented by a writer she suspected had written his last book, for he seemed to spend his days bobbing on his rented pontoon boat, moored and in no danger of going anywhere, a blender full of some icy drink always in hand. The last cottage was tucked into a grove of middle-aged jack pines and nearly hidden by undergrowth her oldest tenant would not let her clear.

  “I love the shade and the solitude,” he always said whenever she mentioned the subject. He was not old, this tenant, but he had rented from her the longest of anyone, so she thought of him as the “oldest.” The rough barrier of wild ferns and overgrown alpine currant bushes occasionally insulted her sense of order and cleanliness, and she would itch to just go ahead and clear it when he wasn’t there to stop her. But then she would realize two things that always stopped her—first, as her oldest regular tenant, he deserved a little slack, and second, he was the only tenant who wanted the place year-round even when he couldn�
�t use it, and who was willing to pay more than market price for her to do the necessary upkeep inside and out. Short of clearing out the old brush, of course. He’d made her put the promise in writing, half seriously and half in jest. Jessie knew very well that for what he paid her in rent he could have bought a newer, larger cottage of higher quality than hers, so she bit her tongue and allowed him to dictate when it came to “his” place.

  As far as she could tell, he used the place for all of a few days a month, not necessarily weekends, and occasionally a week or two in the summer. Sometimes a few days over deer season, when so many other cottages in the area went to the hunters who streamed in not only from Milwaukee and Green Bay, but from all the southern and southwestern cities. Given the money he forked over in half-year increments, and his dark good looks, how could she avoid letting him walk all over her? Hell, she rather liked it, she joked to herself.

  Jessie smiled as she parked the Pathfinder in front of his garage. She thought of it as his rather than hers, and that was symbolic of how long he had been her tenant.

  She shivered a bit, thinking of his arrival, of his looking at her with that dark-eyed intensity; some sort of tragic and horribly sad events in his life giving him an almost poetic look, as if he routinely fenced with his soul and often felt the piercing of his heart as the thin blade slid into his body.

  She shook her head. Such a romantic fool. Where did she get that? Surely not from her father, the crotchety old res doctor.

  She sat for a moment and inhaled the clean, woodsy air. The freaky emergency involving that fool Benton and the lawyer had made her feel tired and sluggish all of a sudden. This was no way to prepare for Nick, whose presence always livened up her life, despite his frequent and sudden disappearances even when he was in residence. If she hadn’t known that he was a police detective, she would have suspected criminal activity. Such were the mysterious ways of life in the North Woods. An hour farther north and you’d be in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; not much farther than that in Canada, and the history of the area included plenty of criminal activity of the smuggling kind. Not to mention the Chicago gangsters who had all owned or frequented retreats in these woods. Some had even hosted shootouts against the much less politically correct police of the past.