Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) (4 page)

He should
have gone to a bar, where he could watch the local news. There were plenty of
sports bars nearby where one of the screens would show his achievement. Unless
he went home, he was stuck with his imagination and the memory of how it had
played out.

He flashed
on an image of her sprawled on her back, driven into the ground, almost as if
she'd been staked. Hell, he bet she'd been nailed to the asphalt. He let the
feeling of that assumption wash over him, enjoying the visual his mind offered
up.

Then he
started the van and pulled out of the supermarket lot where he’d stopped to
calm his adrenaline high. He drove carefully from there, a roundabout route,
the crossbow now down on the floor in front of the passenger seat, under his
bunched-up windbreaker.

He wanted to
cradle the crossbow. Caress it.

Maybe load
it again.

Definitely
load it
again.

LUPO

He tried to
manage the TV media types who showed up first at the scene, but the crime lab
people had neglected to bring with them the aluminum-frame screens that would
defy the cameras. Lupo spotted an attractive Channel 13 reporter with whom he
had a good relationship from previous cases and called her over.

“Ashley,
how’s it going?”

She lit up
in a smile, softening her pretty but cynical news-face. “Lupo, what’s up? Word’s
out this was some kind of an unusual shooting. Everybody's clammed up about it.
Those guys…” she nodded at the casino cops… "are especially being
dicks."

He had
learned from experience that it was better to give the media something
relatively minor than to stonewall them, so he told her about the crossbow. His
case, his decision.

“What?” her
attractive eyes widened, eyebrows rising. “That’s weird, isn’t it?”

“Maybe a
little,” he admitted, “but this is Wisconsin. There’s thousands of hunters with
bows and crossbows in their garages. It’s a little strange because usually your
perp’d use a gun or knife to kill, but when you figure on the availability of
this kind of weapon… well, it’s a surprise we don’t see it more often.”

Bullshit
, he called
on himself. But maybe they’d go light on the sensationalism if he downplayed
it.
Fat chance
. But it was worth a
try.

“Anything
you can tell us about the victim?”

“You know I
can’t, Ashley. Not until next of kin.”

“Anything
at all
you can tell us?” She stamped her
foot in either irritation or cold, or both.

He smiled.
“I already gave you something. You’ll be the first to report the murder weapon
was a crossbow. That’s a good detail. We’re keeping some other details back in
case we get a rash of confessions.” There were no other details that he knew of
yet, but she didn’t know that.

She thought
about it, then nodded. “Okay, thanks, Lupo.”

“My
pleasure,” he said. And it had been.

She started
digging in her coat pocket.
Notebook
,
he thought, but it was a pack of cigarettes. She held it out to him, but he
shook his head.

“Fuckin’
things,” she muttered apologetically, lighting up with a grimace.

Yeah, he
understood how some things could turn around and control
you
. He could have told her stories. She winked at him, nervously
blew some smoke, then went off, back to the news van to get her report ready,
patting her dark hair into place. He wandered back to the knot of guys who were
stamping their feet to keep out the creeping cold.

JESSIE

She drove at
a steady 59 miles an hour to avoid Friday speed crack-downs and the occasional
car headed in the opposite direction. It was dusk and their harsh lights raked
across her windshield, making her squint.

For the last
two hours, she’d been scanning the side of the road nervously. Thinking she saw
shadows pacing her from the cover of the tree line. She shook her head, trying
to dismiss the fear. The only way to conquer it was to give it no weight.

Those Wolfpaw bastards are dead.
She made it into a mantra.

The shadows,
if they were there at all, receded.

For a while,
she drove without fear.

On her iPod,
her “up North” music played in reverse. If she did it right, she’d reach
Milwaukee at about the beginning of the
Gaudi
album. Right now, she was enjoying Woolfson’s lyrical paradoxes in the title
track of
Ammonia Avenue
.

She could
relate to the concept of asking for truth and then questioning the answers.

How much had
she
questioned the truth?

Nick had
been devastated not only by the death of Sam Waters, who had become his friend,
but also by the revelation that there were more of his kind, people –
humans
– who could turn into
wolves. In fact, his whole world had seemed to shift slightly to the side,
turning everything into an out-of-phase copy of itself. Almost like they had
crossed into a parallel universe.

His kind
…

Of course
the existence of his
kind
had turned
her
world upside down, too, but by the
time she’d had to face it, the situation had called for quick faith and little
questioning. His “kind” were an incredible, impossible addition to her already
complicated life. And they weren't bound by the full moon like in the movies,
either. No, they were fully capable of changing at will. Was it any wonder she
found herself drifting sometimes?

Even Nick
hadn't known the extent of what he could do. All those years spent denying his
abilities had made him shun them. He was catching up now, however… he’d been
given no choice.

A screaming
horn jolted her back to earth and she corrected the very real
drift
that had almost taken her over the
center line.

Maybe it
hadn’t been such a good idea, driving down so late in the day.

Especially without calling
, a voice whispered in her head.

Shut up
, she told
the voice.

She wondered
why she’d done this. Maybe to catch Nick in something?

She
dismissed the charge.

Need a drink
and a bathroom, she thought and promised herself a stop at the next wayside.
There was one near New London. Ten minutes away… Five…

Impatience…

There it
was, nearly hidden between two rows of trees. She flicked the turn signal.

Not long
later, a quick stop under her belt and slapped a bit awake by the chill in the
air, she was back on the road and letting the playlist take her into Milwaukee
County, where the traffic was nearly overwhelmed by a plethora of
eighteen-wheelers barreling down the freeway in clumps.

She kept
herself awake and alert by wailing along to the music.
Standing on higher ground
, the song repeated.

But… was
she?

THE ARCHER

He had
watched the big shaggy-haired cop talking –
flirting?
– with the news-chick. He knew he was taking a
chance, hanging around the scene of the crime, and didn't they turn that into a
cliché, like, fifty years ago? So, wasn't
 
hanging around the crime scene actually better than being obvious in
some other way? Wasn't it the least likely behavior for a guilty party to
exhibit?

    
Trying to think it through almost made his
head spin, so he just sidled up to the crowd behind the barricade the cops had
thrown up across the street, and he blended in. Which wasn't hard to do,
because he
was
one of them, one of
the masses, one of the poor saps who surrendered their puny dollars to the
great machine that was the Indian casinos.

    
Fuck, he'd been on the inside, and then they
fucked him in the ass and dumped him. And from then on all he could do was lose
his shirt like the rubes, while the fat cats got richer and fatter. Indians or
whites, it didn't matter.

    
He'd been good enough at his job up in Green
Bay, but he was limited – he'd wanted to be a pit boss, but there was an
unwritten rule that you had to be a member of the tribe for that perk.

So he had
petitioned to be recognized as a member, but something had happened with his
status and the records of the state foster system, and he'd found himself more
closely related to Aunt Rose than he wanted to be. His tribal records, if they
ever existed, were lost.

He
    
clenched his fists at
the thought of it now.

He had
begged and pleaded, petitioned, hired an attorney he couldn't afford, lost him,
then hired another, and another, always losing and sinking lower into his
already bottom-of-the-barrel demographic, until the casino had just fired him.
There was a clause, he had learned that non-tribal employees did not have
tribal protection, and of course they were not unionized, so he was out of a
job and his petition dropped.

At about
that time, his anger stoked, he had taken up drinking and caught some trouble
with the local law.

Then the
Eagle River casino project had finally gotten over that mess with the serial
killer and it had been built in record time once the bulldozers finally came.
Yes, the Archer had watched that huge building go up in its new location like a
circus tent and he had applied for a dealer's job.

And he had
been turned down.

Again,
because of his non-tribal status.

Fuck them,
he'd said, but taken a less responsible, non-dealing job. A service job.
Maintenance, a glorified janitor. Hell, not even
glorified
, he
was
a
janitor and swabbing the bathrooms was part of his daily routine. But in his
head, he kept hearing the voice:
Fuck
them, Fuck them, Fuck…

There was a
spot of trouble, nothing too serious, but still…

And then the
move to Milwaukee, where yet another tribal casino had given him the brush-off.
Barely interviewed him, the fuckers. Looked at him with smirks on their faces,
glanced at computer screens turned away from him.

He was in
the system, red-flagged.

Fuck them
.

Now he
watched the news-chick jawing with the cop, and he should have been pissed off
at the cop who was trying his best to catch him, but instead the chick herself
became the focus of his ire. All he could think about was that chick, getting
her job because of her looks.

And that
damned roulette croupier, getting his job because he was black. He wasn't the
only one, but he represented the problem. He sure as hell wasn’t an Indian, but
they were hypocrites and made up rules to suit them.

And Tanya,
his favorite blackjack dealer, because…
My
God, she was something to look at!
He’d stared at her in awe. But she had
brushed off his advances, looked down her long Russian nose at him, laughed in
his face and dealt him cards that robbed him of his dignity at least as well as
her accented words of disgust.

He kept
going to her table to strike up conversation, but she kept shooting him down
with insults. She'd finally pointed him out to her pit boss and he'd been
forced to retreat before they marked him. He felt the eye-in-the-sky cameras
follow him his every move on the casino floor. Or did he?

He had
applied here, too. Here in this fucked-up city at this piece of shit casino
they hadn't cared about his lack of tribal credentials. Here they'd cared that
he was an unattractive male, and not a minority. He couldn't prove it, but
they'd as much as admitted it to his face, smirking at him as if he'd been subhuman.

Now his eyes
bored into the news-chick's face, but she was not a sensitive and didn't feel
him pushing his disdain at her. Didn't feel him propelling his missile-like
hatred
.

The big cop
looked around as if
he
sensed
something, his eyes passing over the crowd in which The Archer had enveloped
himself, his eyes roving from face to face.

The Archer
shivered when the cop's gaze passed his, went on, then came back for a second
look. Then moved on, almost reluctantly.

He shivered
again and wondered if the cop had shivered, too.

Then his
pulse quickened. For a second it looked as if the cop was going to come over.
The Archer felt his muscles stiffen, his legs preparing to break into a run.

But then the
cop's phone trilled some chunk of music and his eyes, which had been
momentarily fixed on the Archer, unfocused as he stuck the phone to his ear and
turned away, nodding at the news-chick.

Multi-tasking
.

She nodded
back at the cop and walked away to where her camera guy or producer or whatever
had parked the van.