Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) (8 page)

And he’d
stepped up to where Randy lay upside-down and put his hands on the injured boy’s
neck and twisted, hard, until he heard the badly damaged spine snap under his
calloused fingers.

He’d stared
at those frozen, accusing, shocked eyes for a long time, as if waiting for a
blink that would never come, then he had made his way home to build the alibi
that would make Randy’s fate a complete and terrible accident.

Turnabout
can be fair play, sure enough.

And now Aunt
Rose herself was in the basement, stuffed into that old-fashioned steamer trunk
she’d dragged around with her for some unknown reason. The belt he’d been
punished with had come from that trunk. Maybe her dead husband’s clothes were
stored in it, along with the alcoholic’s who had also apparently succumbed to
something. The homestead had been sold, the house torn down. When he’d tracked
her down here in Milwaukee, to a tiny, long-unpainted and run-down bungalow on
the south side, she was living the life of an old lady. Watching ancient
television series, reading prim and proper romances, doing word puzzles, and
feeding a yappy rat-like dog. The yappy dog rested in peace right on her body,
now, the two forever entwined. Their loose broken necks identical. It felt
right
, like a cycle completed.

The Archer
was born.

Like a
superhero.

This was
his
origin story.

Tonight he
had flipped on Rose’s television and waited for the news at 10:00, and sure
enough there was another live report from the casino.

He felt the
thrill of knowing the news-chick, the hot-looking brunette, was talking about
what he had done. There was footage of the casino, an establishing shot, and
then they’d managed to get some video of the scene itself. The cops swarmed
around it, so the Archer couldn’t see Tanya’s body, and they wouldn’t have
shown it anyway. The hot reporter was melodramatic. The anchor in the studio, a
handsome Latino man with short hair gelled straight up, made the obligatory
terrified and shocked face:
That this
could happen in our city! Imagine!

He tried to
eyeball the cops who stood nearby, but it was hard because the video was
choppy. A couple guys in leather, including the big cop who'd talked to the
reporter and a guy in a three-quarter length dark wool coat, a bunch of
uniformed cops, and a small cluster of crime scene guys like on the CSI shows.
A few cars drove past slowly, waved around the scene by uniformed cops who
stared into their windshields.

They kept
the report short to avoid sickening their audience, but they did mention that
an
arrow
was the cause of death.

Then in a
sublime moment, the hot reporter used her sweet lips to give him his nickname.

“The police
are following up several leads, but until this killer is caught, all we can do
is wonder whether the Archer will kill again.” She stared straight at the
camera and nodded gravely, as if agreeing with herself. “Ashley Johnson, live
at the scene of this gruesome murder.”

The Archer
.

It was
bullshit ratings game-playing, but they were the first on the air, and their
name for him would probably stick. Nobody but him would care that he hadn’t
actually used a traditional bow.

He thought
about it, tasting it like an ice cream flavor. He liked it.

“Aunt Rose,
you would have liked it. You’d be proud of me. You always said, tell people how
you really feel.”

He
snickered.

LUPO

They were
stretched out on the sofa, curled into each other’s embrace so their slick
bodies dried together by the blue-tinted light of the gas fireplace.

He was still
nuzzling her neck, granting her tiny kisses. The musk of their lovemaking still
enveloped them. Jessie’s hand was in Lupo’s hair, combing it with her fingers.

They wound
down, enjoying each other’s touch.

“Tell me
about this weird case you mentioned,” she said
after a while.

“Why worry
about it?” he mumbled. “Let’s just enjoy the moment.”

“I’m all for
that,” she said, “but as soon as you said
weird
,
my radar went off. Seems like everything has turned weird lately.”

“Well, that’s
true.”

It was an
understatement, and they both knew it. As soon as it became obvious that Nick
Lupo was not the only werewolf in the world, everything had changed. He’d
thought he was, only because he considered that in most ways it had ruined his
life. He had looked upon it as a serious illness. A
condition
. His father’s odd behavior at the time of his friend Andy
Corrazza’s fateful bite –
that
had stayed with him. Looking back, he wondered if his father had known more
than he let on. He’d had a shotgun loaded with silver slugs, hadn’t he?

Had his
father known about werewolves?

Come to think of it, why would I have thought there
would be only one werewolf?

Even Jessie
had warned him – with two other examples of people infected by the
werewolf disease (Andy the neighbor boy and the young guy from up north who had
infected
him
), the implication was
that others could also have been infected. Let alone
born
that way, as some of the Wolfpaw mercenaries appeared to have
been. But for so many years, he hadn’t encountered any evidence of other
lycanthropy victims – he had always considered himself a victim –
and so the Wolfpaw assholes had blindsided him and fucked up his world.

Now he made
a decision.

He told
Jessie about the so-called Archer and his victim.
So far
. He sensed there would be more victims.

“He wants to
be noticed. There’s almost no other reason he’d use a crossbow. He’s got a
gripe of some sort, and he wants television to make him a star.”

Jessie
rubbed the back of his head. “What a horrible thing to do to people. Innocent
people.” She shivered despite being nestled against him. “I’m not sure how you
can keep doing this.”

Being a cop
, he figured
she meant that.

“Huh, I
guess I figure I can help stop things like this, or at least catch the people
who do them and try to make sure they’re punished. I know it sounds like a
cliché, but that’s it.”
To serve and
protect.

He didn’t
add that he relished the chase, the hunt, the takedown. Maybe
that
was the Creature in him. He
couldn’t remember much about himself from before the bite that drew him to the
moon, but he doubted he’d been that… aggressive. That much into the hunt.

Maybe he
wasn’t quite as noble as he liked to think. Maybe he was just letting the
Creature have an outlet. He’d given the wolf latitude before.

“It’s not a
cliché,” Jessie mumbled. “It’s noble. I love that about you. I don’t think you
even realize how noble you are.”

He chuckled
at the irony. “
Noble
’s not how I
would have put it.” He kissed her hair, then her forehead, her eyes, her nose,
and then their mouths met. “But I’ll take it,” he muttered.

Her hand snaked downwards and found him hardening. “Hello,” she said. “I
think you have a problem here we need to take care of.” Her fingers caressed
his length softly at first, then with more urgency. Her lips were hot, her eyes
full of fire again.

And then
Lupo put the Archer – and whatever his goddamn gripe happened to be
– out of mind for a little while longer.
When Jessie straddled him, enveloping his erection with her unchained
need, their mouths and tongues still connected, his mind and body were filled
with nothing but the heat and the rhythm of the moment.

They made the moment last as long as they could.

Afterwards,
as their skin dried yet again
, she
reminded him that they’d been talking about this Archer.

“You know,”
she said, nestling again into his comfortable embrace. “Maybe he doesn’t have a
gripe with the people. Maybe he has a gripe with the casino itself.”

“Thought of
that,” Lupo said. “But since we don’t know who he is, we don’t know if they
ever hired or fired him
.
” They’d started the process of doing a check of employees and former
employees, but it would take time. A lot of time.

But Jessie
had a thoughtful look he’d seen before. She had helped him figure out and
determine some of Martin Stewart’s deep motivations. Stewart was a serial
killer who had targeted Lupo’s friends and partner and eventually Jessie, and
ultimately Lupo himself. Stewart been messed up as a kid, messed up by terrible
abuse – but it had become obvious that the abuse alone hadn’t made him
what he was, it had only triggered his darkest impulses. He’d been miswired
from birth, apparently – a true psychopath. Jessie’s insight into
Stewart’s fetish and motivation had made things click for Lupo.

Now she was
thinking again. They’d been together long enough. He could tell. She was
mulling over what he had told her.

“What?” he
said. He smiled, encouraging.

“Well, I was
just thinking. What if he’s upset because he wasn't hired? What if that’s why
you don’t find him as a disgruntled employee – because he’s disgruntled,
but because was never hired? Maybe he wanted to be…” She searched for another
way to put it. “He wanted to be, but he was
rejected
.”

Lupo let the
idea sink in. He felt his pulse quicken.

“Shit,
that's not bad profiling, Jess. I doubt they keep records of interviews, but
I’ll check. It’s possible they do.”

“Also, maybe
he wasn’t interviewed here…”

“Huh?” Lupo
pulled back a little to see her full face. She was intense, thinking hard in
brainstorming mode, struck by the problem he faced.

She
continued: “What if he’s just acting out of a
general
anger? What if he was rejected elsewhere? Maybe more than
one place? He snaps and decides to take it out on the nearest generic
representative of what he’s angry at, in this case… Indian casinos? He’s here
so he picks on this one, but maybe this isn’t the one that pissed him off.” Her
dusky eyes were more green than grey in the light, and more intense because of
her seriousness. He loved to see her like this.

“That’s
another great thought.” He fumbled for his phone, which he had slid onto an end
table. “Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place, at the wrong population. Gotta
call Charlie Bear. Then I’m going in to work so they don't think I’m goofing
off.” He grinned. “Not too much, anyway.”

“Want to
goof off
once more before you leave?”

“Jess,
you’re wearing me out…”

“That’s the
idea, Mr. Lupo. Keeping you busy. And I bet I can keep you busy all over
again.” She licked her lips suggestively and reached for him.

“Is
keep busy
some kind of metaphor?”

“Let’s find
out.”

So he did.

THE ARCHER

The day was
barely a few hours old and he was sitting in another stolen van. The previous
van was now sitting, abandoned, at a Sam’s Club parking lot, where he had left
his own car. This new van came from another lot, to which he had bused. His car
waited outside the WalMart where he would dump this van. He could pull this
switch a hundred times.

He was now
approaching the casino from Canal Street west. There were several surface lots
spread on both sides of the road that bisected former industrial spaces and
buildings, and then came the massive parking structure. He was looking for a
specific type of uniform. There was an employees’ lot, and he crawled past it,
waiting for someone to exit a car.

The day
before he’d taken a chance, going for Tanya. After all, he admitted to himself
that he did have a crush on her. They probably had film (or files on a hard
drive, whatever the
fuck
they did
these days) of him hanging around her tables. But he wasn’t the only one who
had followed her from table to table. He'd seen other lonely guys watching her,
trying hard to catch her eye, to start up conversations. She’d been cold, hard
and full of sharp angles. Unapproachable. It had galvanized his hate, his need
to strike a blow.
Somewhere
.

But today he
was randomizing, muddying the waters for the pattern-seekers. They always
caught killers based on their obsessive patterns, didn’t they? And he was a
killer now, wasn’t he? The thought gave him a boner.

Random
, he thought
as he tried to get on track.
Random
.

At least it
had to
look
random.

He saw a
tall black male squeezing out of a five-year-old, light-gold Camry, reaching
back in for a leather jacket. He was wearing a white shirt and a black bowtie
and the Archer smiled.

This guy was
a roulette
croupier
, one of those
dealer-types who spin the old-fashioned wheel and drop in the ball, then scrape
up all the house wins off the board. Occasionally they pay out some wins, but
it’s almost never as much as the house took in. Too many people think they can
hit a number despite the astronomical odds – not realizing they’re safer
with spreads and with some of the lesser-paying but easier-winning groups and
either-or bets (black or red, odd or even).
Roulette
looks so medieval
, the Archer thought,
that
it attracts easy marks
.