Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) (10 page)

“Nah, I like
to keep my money. Buy things that make me and my family happy. Watching wheels
spin and numbers flash is for suckers.” He chuckled.

“Not what
your bosses would like to hear, I bet.”

Charlie
laughed too. “No, probably not. So what do you think’s gonna happen next? More
vics?”

“Right now
I’ll bet he likes his new name. Like a comic book supervillain. Thanks to those
idiots on TV. He’s rolling it around in his mind, getting comfortable with it.
Then he’s gonna do what he can to make it splash all over again.”

“So we don’t
have much time.”

Lupo sighed.
“No, I don’t think we do.”

But I’d like to be wrong
, he thought.

JESSIE

She barely
remembered entering the mothership. It was like having been kidnapped, sucked
up on a tractor beam like those old sci-fi movies Nick watched when she was
sleeping. She would hear him laugh and chatter to himself like a kid on a
playground, reciting dialogue back at the screen and chuckling when he beat the
actors to it. She’d feel all safe and snuggled even alone in bed, knowing he
was in the other room and enjoying himself. Those movies – she’d probably
seen more of those than she thought, because she sometimes got up and silently
went to watch while leaning on him, enjoying the feel of her body on his
– had always struck her as over-the-top silly. But now it was almost as
if she had closed her eyes in the bright parking lot and then opened them and
she was in the center of all the action, and it wasn’t silly but disorienting.
For a second or two she swayed with a vague sense of dizziness.

The
electronic drone was playing here too, a never-ending C-major chord, soaring
over the jingles and TV theme songs and the canned sound of virtual coins
dropping into metal baskets. Apparently these were the sounds of all modern
casinos, and when she heard coins drop nearby, she watched a winner just punch
a button and wait for a claim ticket to squirm its way out of a blinking slot.

Where’s the romance in that?

A claim
ticket instead of coins seemed disappointingly mundane.

She watched
the winner, an elderly man almost too stooped to walk, fight his way across the
hindering carpet, cane clutched tightly, to another beeping slot machine into
which he slid his winning ticket. He started to play, his face almost devoid of
emotion.

Jessie
watched a little longer. He was clearly not getting much of a charge from
playing, and while she stood nearby she never did hear the jangling coin sound
again, until he stood up and walked away – minus a ticket, or presumably
any money left on it.

Joyless
.

That was the
word she came up with.

She shook
her head and moved on.

LUPO

He parked as
close as he could get to the crime scene without blocking the way and let his
badge do the talking at the perimeter. He ducked under the tape and barreled
past a couple barriers, to where another portable screen kept the crime scene
from the growing crowd of gawkers. He nodded at a uniform he recognized and
said into his phone: “DiSanto, you have to get back here.”

“You gotta
be shitting me, Nick, I only just left. I barely managed to nap twenty
minutes…”

Lupo told him about the dead croupier.

“Ah, fuck,”
his partner moaned, but then he grumbled: “All right, all right… I’ll get my ass
in gear.” DiSanto loved his clichés.

Lupo
surveyed the area and said, “I think we got a loony who's wearing a hard-on for
the casino. He’s not hitting anywhere else, sticking around here almost like
he’s taunting us. Daring us to catch him, using that crossbow to make every
news broadcast…”

“Yeah,
sounds right
, this sick guy loves the
attention,” DiSanto sighed deeply into his phone. “But
we’ve been checking
for disgruntled workers, and y
ou know, reported misconduct and all that
.
Nothing so far. He might as well be a ghost. Or he’s just not connected to the
casino thing at all.”

“Yeah,
there’s that possibility too,” Lupo said. “But get
this
, though. Jessie drove down last night—”

“Yeah?”
DiSanto sounded as if he were smirking.

“Get your
mind out of the gutter, DiSanto. Your mother wouldn’t approve.” Lupo paused a
beat. “Well, maybe, knowing
you
she
would…”

“Okay, okay…
You mean you found time to do something other than…?”

“Better just
stop right there, bud.”

DiSanto
chuckled.

Lupo ignored
the leering laugh. “I keep telling Jess she should switch careers, be a cop
instead. She’s always got good instincts and she had a good thought. What about
disgruntled
rejects
?”

“Huh?”

“That’s what
I said. She meant, anyone who couldn't
get
a job. Tried to, but got rejected. I’ve got them trying to make me a list of
recent interviewees.”

“Okay—”

“And I’ve
got Charlie Bear requesting the same from his old employer up in Watersmeet.
There may be other casinos we should talk to, but I figure we should be
concentrating on these three for now. See if they’ve shared some information.”

“So maybe
the guy’s pissed off at casinos who stiffed him on a job he wanted and he just
decides to start offing other hourly workers? Here?” DiSanto sniggered a
little. “That's your theory? Or Jessie’s theory?”

“Listen,
Chuckles, call the Great Northern and get them on it. You know, if any name
shows up on more than one of these lists…”

“What if
it’s only two out of three?”

“Good enough
for me. I’d try to get a warrant based on that. Even a desk jock like that
idiot Killian
in IA
would have
to admit a single name that popped up a couple times would be worth owing a
favor for…”

DiSanto
paused, then: “So you want me to – what?”

“We’ve got
two
vics
now.
I bet this
guy’s just warming up.
Maybe we can predict the next target. I don’t really buy the random argument.
Maybe they’re random in a specific way, you
know, but they’re both
here
. Not
other random locations. No, there’s some connection. He’s targeting casino dealer-types,
people who handle money
. Might be subconscious, but there might be
something there. Plus if it’s worth it for him to take a risk hanging around,
maybe it implies he’s not done, and maybe we can use that to get him.”

“Okay, on my
way.” DiSanto sighed. “I didn’t need any more sleep anyway.”

Lupo turned
and surveyed them. They’d gathered to gawk and he didn’t blame them, but he was
getting an itchy feeling. The thought might have been nibbling at the edge of
his consciousness, until it reared up and bit him. He’d just told DiSanto the
guy was taking risks…

Could it be?

Sometimes
the Creature’s senses overflowed.

Could this asshole be back here already, soaking
in the atmosphere? Watching the spectacle? Enjoying it?

That would
take some guts.
Or insanity
.

Lupo slowly
scanned the faces arrayed nearby. All ages, races, types. About an equal number
men and women. But they were different from a few minutes ago…

Some faces
he had registered before had since then moved around, and some were gone, moved
off. Others were the same. A few avoided his gaze, but most were too busy
trying to gawk to bother with him. Still, he felt watched.

Fuck, does our guy have the balls to hang around
at the scene and watch the show?

DiSanto had
hung up, but Lupo kept his ear to the flat phone, pretending to listen.

There
.

Was that
young guy shifting his gaze away from Lupo’s whenever they were about to meet?

Caucasian,
slight of build, wearing some kind of dark hoodie. Well, that made him a
criminal right there, didn’t it? In some people’s eyes, anyway.

Lupo slid
his eyes over the guy quickly and spotted two more hoodies in the crowd. One
was a woman. He dismissed the woman, a sexist bias he acknowledged, but this
kind of perp was almost never a female. Crowd was probably thirty people,
two-thirds males. Probably they were mostly casino customers side-tracked by
the rotating lights at the crime scene. People wear hoodies all the time…

Only a
couple of them held his gaze a few seconds before turning back to stare at the
spectacle behind him. He half-turned and realized the ME’s people had unfolded
a gurney and the crowd was humming a little in expectation. There was a body to
see, after all. They mostly seemed to have lost interest in Lupo.

He turned,
splitting his attention between the crowd and the clean-up going on behind him,
forgetting all about pretending to talk on his shut-down phone.

When he
looked up again and scanned the crowd, the younger guy in the dark hoodie was gone.

Shit
.

He tucked
the phone in his pocket and followed his hunch.

THE ARCHER

He felt the
tingle when the cop’s eyes moved over him.

It was like
a spark, zapping his skin sharply, and then it was gone.

But no, the
spark actually lingered, and he felt a flush spreading across his face. It was
unintentional, but he almost panicked. Would the damn cop notice?

Is that cop seeing inside me?

He wasn’t
psychic or anything, but the flush was the tip of a feeling that washed over
him and made him uncomfortable. Made his skin itch. As if the cop could nose
out his guilt just by glancing at him.

But that’s ridiculous. Isn’t it?

A couple
times he averted his eyes from the big cop’s gaze just as they were about to
meet. He pretended to be really interested in the crime scene techs. Well, he
was
really interested. He was enjoying
the circus his action had set off, that he actually had
created
. Like
art
. Sure,
he was taking a chance sticking around here to watch. Didn’t they say criminals
always returned to the scene of the crime? Who said that?
They
did. What the hell
was
he doing here, just inducing a painful boner? But he figured it also worked in
his favor – would a criminal
really
return to bask in his crime when everybody expected him to? Most people would
say no.

And yet,
he
had done it. He was a criminal, he
was willing to admit it.

Was he
out-thinking them, or would they out-think him? But they couldn’t, could they?
He was
The Archer
. The name was
fitting him better and better. And he
did
have a boner.

Still…

Maybe best
to head on over to the casino, pretend to be a customer and move along before
some pimply kid in a too-big uniform told him to get going…

He melted
away from the crowd even as the number of gawkers increased when the casino
disgorged a group of depressed gamblers and they spotted the activity nearby.
The Archer faded through the approaching curiosity seekers and entered the
casino from one of the remote corner doors, allowing himself to be barraged by
the stale smoke stench and hypnotic slot machine symphony he loved so much.
There was nothing better in the world, which was why he had wanted to make
working in a casino his life.

Until the bastards took it all away from me.

Blacklisted.

Unfit to be hired at any state tribal casino, and
by extension, probably nowhere else. These fuckers shared information like
anybody’s business.
So much for
privacy
.

He could
barely contain his rage.

A conspiracy. Against
him
.

He stood
inside the doors and took it all in, loving it – and at the same time
hating
it so much that he wished he
could detonate himself with a terrorist vest and take it all to hell with him.
If he had been wearing one, he had no doubt he would push the button and enjoy
the final nanosecond's knowledge that he was melting all these people and machines
and haters into slag.

He smiled,
looking back at the reflected squad car strobe lights lined up near his latest
handiwork.

Striding
past the first rank of slot machines and toward the center of the vaguely
circular space, where one of the already crowded main bars was located, he
began his search for a new target. Did it have to be here? Yes, for maximum
impact he couldn’t afford to wait, to drive to another casino. They were too
far apart. He wanted to strike again, soon. He wanted to be visible. He wanted
to be discussed, He wanted to be hated.