Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) (9 page)

The Archer
liked the roulette wheel for that very reason. It was like the wheel of
fortune. With a crossbow in his hand, he felt almost like a medieval holdover
himself. A protector of castle walls.
Anachronistic,
and proud of it
.

Random
, he
reminded himself as he watched.

Well, the
guy wasn’t actually
random
, but he
would appear to be.

The Archer
had played at this guy's table once, but he had studied him from nearby tables
a few times. He’d left a fair amount of his aunt’s cookie-jar cash on that
green felt, just so he could watch this other guy across the way.

He'd
deliberately built up a rage about the guy, who didn't know
him
from Adam. He decided he didn’t like
the way this croupier had clearly been hired because he was a minority. The
more he thought about it now, the angrier he got. The angrier he got, the more
his finger itched.

He pulled
the van around in a U-turn so he wouldn’t overshoot his new target. When he
came up on the croupier from the rear on his second approach, he had lowered
the passenger window. They were still a ways from the camera-swept customer
lots. He slowed the van, looked around quickly for a last-second reason to
abort, didn’t see any, and raised the crossbow…

And then the
croupier turned slightly, perhaps because he heard the van’s rumble nearby.
Turning, he made the target – his broad back – quite a bit
narrower.

The Archer
held his breath. Relaxed. Breathed, then squeezed the trigger, letting loose
the bolt he had already prepped.

The deadly projectile took the guy high and maybe to the left and the
Archer thought he had missed, that the target’s last-second turn had caused the
bolt to fly off harmlessly.

But no, the croupier gave a tiny, almost girlish scream and clapped his
hands to his neck and went down in a floppy mess, seemingly all at once, legs
twitching so hard the Archer could hear his heels rapping the sidewalk like a
snare drum.

The Archer could swear he saw blood squirting from the wound, but it
might have been a trick of the lighting above. He really was too far away. He
had the flash of a thought that it might be swell to try killing the next one
from up close, just walk up to whoever it would be and see if the bolt would
drill right through the body. Then he could watch the life leaving the dumb-shit’s
eyes, just like he had watched Randy’s eyes as he had snapped the boy’s neck.
Why was he so interested to watch someone’s life drain away like that? He
wasn’t sure he understood, but why question his own needs?

The croupier might have made one last, loud gargle, or it was a sound the
Archer imagined – and then the man’s legs finally stopped their manic
tap-tapping on the cement, and the Archer imagined the red stain spreading
below him.
Must’ve winged the guy right
in the jugular, or something.

He nudged the van’s gas pedal and sped gradually away, leaving behind a
new sacrifice to –
to what?
All
he knew was that he was starting to feel really alive. The wrongs done to him
were now being righted, which was making him feel better. Better about himself
and about everything else.

The Archer smiled as he drove away.

His trigger finger was itchy again.
Already
.

Not long after, he made a cautious u-turn.

JESSIE

Showered and
rested…

And righteously well-fucked!
The wicked little voice added, interjecting itself directly into the
midst of her thoughts
.
It was a
parody of her own voice, given some kind of witch-like quality enhanced by
imaginary cackling.

She smiled
as she drove, realizing that this was why she’d made the trip down to the city.
If it was true that great sex prolongs life, then she thought she’d live to a
hundred fifty or more. No, she had no complaints where the sex was concerned.

She piloted
the Pathfinder around the east side, exploring. It had been years since she’d
spent time in Milwaukee, and now that she was here while Nick was at work she
was free to do some bumming, as they’d called it when she was in school. She
expanded her circling, reaching the edge of the mostly revitalized downtown
area, then slipping a ways south to the trendy Third Ward with its bistros,
cafés, bars and
osterie
.

Reclaimed, remodeled
warehouses were now filled with lofts that towered over busy streets no longer
filled with lined-up produce trucks but instead overflowing with crawling
upscale cars and stylish walkers. The “cream city” brick buildings jostled
against newer condo blocks designed to look as old as the real antiques, their
lower levels given over to trendy eating and drinking establishments, high-end
salons, boutiques, fitness centers, and the odd theatrical costume shop or
dance academy.

She gawked
like a tourist at the scenery, thumped over one of the bridges that spanned the
Milwaukee River (at Water Street, of course), then found herself heading west,
toward the city's old industrial valley.

She didn't
really know where she was heading until, after bypassing the three
blister-shaped characteristic horticultural glass domes, she caught sight of
the massive casino building rising out of the formerly unused industrial sprawl
of the so-called Valley. Evenly-spaced blue-violet colored spots illuminated
the structure's exterior walls, making it resemble an alien mother-ship
squatting on the flat ground.

Not sure why
the casino seemed to be summoning her, she pulled into one of its exterior
parking lots and sat, just soaking in the high walls of the main building. On
closer inspection, it was more like a squared-off Aztec or Mayan pyramid, a
temple to the goddess Fortuna. Or whatever the goddess of the stupid loser might
have been. She chuckled, but she knew she wanted to go inside.

According to
Nick, the first murder had taken place nearby, and when he'd called her just
after she'd left the shower, he had told her they now had a second victim, also
killed in one of the nearby surface lots.

Why was she
so interested in the place, suddenly?

Jessie
couldn't be sure but she figured her fascination was one part stress-related
and one part Nick-related, wanting to lend a hand or moral support. He’d gone
to the main police precinct downtown to supervise some of the plodding
research, then he’d be heading for the casino later in the morning. Sometime
during her drive, she’d decided to do a little investigating on her own and
then meet Nick at the casino. She thought she remembered a couple people on the
staff here, transplants from Up North who had come to the big city to work.
She’d just ask a few questions, look around, and maybe have some more ideas to
offer Nick when he got here.

He would
have warned her to stay away. To keep away from the crime scene.

She was
never one to take a warning to heart.

Once independent, always independent
.

LUPO

He’d been in
barely an hour when Charlie Bear had called him with grim news.

“Shit,” Lupo
said with a growl. “Another one? Crossbow again?”

“Yeah.”
Charlie turned the end of the word into a sigh, then briefly described the
scene. “This isn’t good. No fucking good at all.”

“Uh, no,”
Lupo said. “Means the bastard likes it, needs it, wants to exact some sort of
revenge only his twisted mind understands.”

“You got a
degree in psychology?”

“Don’t need
one. You do this job long enough, you can see into every black soul you come
into contact with. And I’ve come into contact with some dark fucking souls, let
me tell you.” He stared into his blank computer screen, as if ogling those dark
souls now.

“I believe
you,” Charlie said. “So now what? I’ve got people on the perimeter. The press
will get here again soon, I’m betting. This is gonna blow up into one of those
twenty-four hour coverage stories. We’ll try keeping them at bay.”

“Good luck.
I’m at police HQ. We’ve got some searches going here. Seems like nowadays half
of police work is just looking at online stuff, you know, so we’ve been hiring
librarians to help build our searching capabilities. How about you, can you
have your people do some searching for me?”

“Sure, what
do you need?”

“I’ll be
heading over soon to look over this new scene, and my partner when I can find
him,
 
but I’ll request the lab guys
get to you first. In the meantime, uh, we’re operating on the possibility our
guy might be not a casino employee or a former employee, but a
would-be
employee.”

“Would-be?”
Charlie stopped to
shush
somebody in
the background. “Not sure what you mean.”

“Like if he
interviewed for a job and was rejected…”

Charlie
digested the news. “Shit, I’m not sure we keep records of that.”

“Actually
I’d like to see the interviews themselves. Recorded or transcribed. Notes
maybe?”

“Not likely
we’d have that, either,” Charlie said, his words coming out slow.

“I bet your
HR department does. Even if they don’t record video, whenever they interview
somebody, they might make a note of it and maybe even scribble something on the
app itself. Still using paper?”

“Yeah, we’re
still a little old-fashioned. But I know they’re switching over to online
applications and some management software any day now. They’ve been testing
it.”

“But if
they’re not doing it yet, we might be in business. Check with your HR and see
if they file the applications. And anything on interviews they conducted.”

“I’ll do
that…” Charlie didn’t sound convinced. But the security head was up to his
knees in a second vic’s blood and Lupo was sure his administration was probably
starting to make noises about containment and prevention. Civilians
always
want prevention. They’d complain
about Orwellian thought-crime crackdowns, but most of ’em would vote for just
that kind of intervention if given half a chance. Administrations always want
containment, trying to staunch the bleeding of bad press, especially with the
constantly hungry media. Especially when scared customers don’t show up to
spend. The tribe would be anxious to either resolve this or downplay it any way
they could.

“Listen,”
Lupo added, as his mind reprocessed what he and Jessie had discussed, “can you
also make a couple calls and see if you can get the same kind of list from up
in Watersmeet?”

Charlie was
silent for a moment. “You think he might have applied up there too?”

“Well, it’s
a possibility that he’s after revenge on casinos in general, so maybe in his
head one casino could stand in for all of them. Come to think of it, we should
try to get the same list from all local casinos.”

Lupo thought
the guy could pull up stakes and head for one of the other Indian casinos in
the state. He mentioned that possibility, hoping it would bait Charlie into
digging harder for this data.

“Huh,”
Charlie said.

Chewing it over
, Lupo
thought. He liked the quality. Too often security guys wore blinders when
other,
outside
people pointed out
things. Cops, too, in his experience.

He pressed
Charlie: “You have connections with other security heads? You guys coordinate
at all?”

“Some, but
not at this level. We… tend to share info on known cheats and other banned
patrons, we do some cross-training, some team-building exercises, and we do
trade personnel when they want to transfer…”

“Even tribe
to tribe?” Lupo asked.

“Sure, far
as I know it’s common. The training works from place to place, so we’d be
stupid not to take pre-trained employees when they can be vouched for.”

“Would you
guys trade info on bad employees who got fired and the like, too?”

“In some
cases, sure. More with bad customers, but occasionally employees we think are
going to try their luck at another tribe’s joint.”

“See, that
could feed into this guy’s persecution complex,” Lupo mused. “You know: ‘The
system’s stacked against me. One place rejected me, now they all will. I hate
the one – I hate them all.’ I can see it as a motive. Maybe not practical
or logical, but who knows how this guy’s gears mesh?”

“Yeah, I get
your point,” Charlie admitted.

“All right,
see if you can find out if your HR – and any of the others you talk to
– hang on to the applications of rejects. Get lists. Should be easier for
you to request this stuff than if I do.”

Charlie
chuckled. “They’d make
you
get a
court order.”

“Which would
take too long. We’d have a third, maybe a fourth victim by then. This guy’s
escalating. I just have a feeling this is a spree, not a one-two deal. I really
think he’s enjoying himself and he’s only gonna stop when we put a bullet in
him. I’d rather stop him in the act, fuck the research, but our chances of that
are about
nada
. Unless we get very
fucking lucky. Do you gamble yourself?”