Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) (11 page)

He wanted to
be
feared
.

He thought
about it carefully.

Maybe a reporter
. They’re always so smug, because the crime is over when they get
there. The death isn’t connected to them. They’re
safe
.

A new
message to deliver… direct from
The
Archer
.

You are
not
safe
.

He
snickered. Reporters weren’t hard to find at a crime scene. Maybe that
attractive reporter the big cop had been talking to after Tanya. The fidgety
smoker chick.

Except for
the smoking, she was actually very attractive.

Yeah
…
maybe that one. They would notice that one.

LUPO

Instinct
.

Sometimes,
he had learned over his life spent with a monster,
his
monster, that the Creature inside had instincts better than his
own. When such instincts made themselves known he’d started to follow them with
less questioning, less rationalizing.

Now the
feeling, the
sense
, the instinctive
twinge that made him try to find the guy in the hoodie took him toward the
casino, whose walls towered over them all – it was a lot closer than he’d
thought. He crossed what was left of the approach, a concrete apron
interspersed with pebbly decorative slabs, and scanned the thin rank of people between
him and the door.
No twinges
.

Inside the
main entrance atrium was a wide, round lobby full of people, none of whom
looked particularly happy to be there. They gave off the feeling of facing a
grim destiny, a looming encounter with the goddess of luck, Fortuna, already
knowing it would not go well but seemingly stuck on an irreversible path.

The interior
of the casino seemed to extend across the horizon with three main aisles of
beeping, jangling slot and poker machines. He knew they’d give him a headache
if he was forced to work inside this vast cavern of pseudo-Indian clichés and
ridiculous machinery of greed. Lupo could almost imagine electronic money
flowing like digital blood into the veins and arteries of some huge, cackling
Lovecraftian monster perched inside a brick cavern below the marble floor.

Lupo shook
his head to dismiss his brief philosophical foray.
Stick to the task at hand
. He scanned the people quickly, but there
were no hoodies in sight.

Problem was
he had no idea where to go. He thought about compelling the Creature to help,
but he couldn’t quite imagine how or what the help would look like. And anyway
the Creature was notably skittish about being conscripted – the wolf
might be a part of him, but it did not always take his commands easily. After
all the years, this still drove Lupo crazy. He felt he should be in charge, and
if there was a way to take full control, he was still unaware of it. He dropped
the idea… for now. Instead he finally selected a direction and stalked inside,
suddenly understanding the casino’s mindset in making every aisle, every
alcove, every rounded corner similar to every other.

You could walk around for hours and never find
the exit
.

That was one
way to keep people playing games. And losing money.

He looked
over his shoulder and the round lobby had completely disappeared, hidden behind
pillars tricked-up to resemble huge gnarled trees, and partial walls lined with
banks of slot and video poker machines. Depressed, intense-looking people
huddled over half of them, watching their own life’s blood disappear into the
veins of the gigantic tentacled monster he visualized lurking below.

Have to stop reading all that Lovecraft
.

He shook his
head again and kept an eye out for hoodies, but every one he spotted was worn
with the hood spread flaccid on the person’s back. So it would even be harder
to find the guy he thought had eyeballed him and set off his “spider sense.”
Wolf
-sense?

Whatever
.

Rage sparked
lightning-like through his limbs. He slowed his pace so as to scan as many
faces and jackets as possible, but the farther he got inside the enormous
building the more he was forced to admit that he suspected he’d chosen the
wrong aisle. So now what, angle toward one side or the other and try a
different main aisle, or was it hopeless? The guy could be anywhere at all.

Fuck!

Chances were
he was wrong and chasing his own tail. Would the fucking Archer really stalk
his prey inside? Wasn’t he an outdoor killer?

Lupo
selected a cross aisle and went left, but he sensed the trail was cold.

He stalked
down a few identical aisles, but then he gave up.

Was
he
sensing, or the Creature? Didn’t
matter, the trail – such as it was – seemed to be cold.

THE ARCHER

He hadn't
thought ahead too many moves – or targets.

That was how
you became predictable. He didn't want predictability. He wanted them to piece
together his message, feel his fury, and eventually understand… even though he
knew they wouldn't. But he'd put up with so much throughout his life, now it
was his turn to communicate his feelings. On TV they were always telling you to
express your feelings. That fat Doctor Phil guy and all those other talking
heads thought feelings should all be exposed, communicated. Well, that turned
out to be good advice good, and The Archer felt a lot better now that he had
begun to
communicate
.

Now he was
in need of a new target. He went over his options.

At first
he'd thought,
another dealer
. There
were many to choose from, and if he picked another attractive female it would
be big news. The second target, the guy, was cementing The Archer’s reputation,
but would they care as much? If he picked another male, chances were no one
would
really
care. So he had figured
his course was set and settled then. Another female dealer.

But then…
then he'd started to think
reporter
.

And the more
he thought about it, the better it sounded.

So now he watched
as one of the cops from last night was back again – the thinner one with
the wrinkled suit – talking to a couple of the casino security guys. They
nodded grimly at what he told them and walked away, leaving him alone in the
ebbing crowd. He looked tired, worn out really, probably because he'd been here
holding the fort while the big cop pulled rank and went off to do something
civilized like sleep. But now he was back, looking not rested at all.

The Archer
was amused, watching all this effort to take
him
down. Now he was ducking behind a rank of brightly-lit,
flashing slot machines sporting towers with an added "Wheel of
Fortune" add-on that gave players the chance to add to their wins. You
couldn't really lurk without showing up on the cameras, so he was actually
gambling, watching quarter-sized credits dip and rise on his twenty, a small
enough investment to make himself nearly invisible. The machine’s wheel of
fortune towered over him and the others nearby were like a rank of sentinels
hiding him, so he could lean slightly in the chair and look past the machinery
at the action.

Interesting.

The Archer
raised an eyebrow.

He watched
as that same reporter from last night, the hot one with the nicotine habit,
dragged her camera guy with her and approached the tired cop. She looked a
little worse for wear but was still hot enough to melt your eyelids, and he
stared at her so intensely that he forgot to spin his machine's dials. She
wanted to do an interview apparently, a microphone looking rather phallic in
her slender hand, cradled by pointed red fingernails, but the cop was waving
her off, shaking his head and trying to turn away. She was persistent, turning
with him so he couldn't avoid facing her. Their voices were starting to rise,
audible even with the continuous wave of sound all around them. The cop wasn’t
being very accommodating, and she was frustrated, and the camera guy was just
standing there, uncomfortable.

Then someone
else approached the three. The cop greeted her with some obvious relief.

This time
The Archer remembered to hit the Bet button, but he didn't watch the machine’s
spinning reels and the lights. His attention was riveted by the newcomer.

She was
really something. She was more attractive than the reporter lady, completely
outclassing her without effort. There was a decidedly less
plastic
look to her, that was it.

The reporter
did a kind of double-take too, then smiled and nodded as the three of them
talked a bit, and then she seemed to defer to the newcomer, who was pulling
some sort of rank and seeming to politely wave off the reporter.

The Archer
watched intently but couldn't decipher the body language. Was the newcomer lady
outranking the reporter? Either way, the reporter's attractiveness had faded
for the Archer, who now found himself staring at the new arrival. She had on a
well-worn brown leather jacket like a pilot’s, tight jeans that showed off her
spectacular ass, and ankle-high boots. She looked like a hip explorer-type,
like an investigative reporter assigned to Afghanistan might look if she'd just
stepped off a plane. But her chestnut hair and fantastic features made her look
even hotter than Tanya the dealer.

Tanya
…

Suddenly he
could barely remember Tanya’s face.
Sorry,
Tanya.

He felt his
groin stirring, knowing that just the sight of this goddess was what he'd
wanted, what he'd hoped for. A reporter, maybe, he wasn’t sure. Maybe a
reporter on her day off? On vacation? Dragged in by
him
, The Archer and his story? She was vaguely familiar. Maybe he’d
seen her on television? Whatever, she was exactly what he needed…

If she was a
reporter, she
had
to be his next
target.

His hard-on
suddenly throbbing, he switched machines without losing sight of the tableau in
the center of all the action.

The goddess
talked with the thin cop some more, both grinning and nodding like old friends,
and suddenly he wanted to kill the sonofabitch. He wanted to choke him until he
could feel the cop’s life leaking out of him. He pictured the cop with one of
The Archer’s bolts sticking out of his chest, looking down in shock where the
stain would be spreading fast, the colorful fletching marking where the red
rose would bloom, anomalous as death came and dropped the bastard’s body
flopping to the ground right there, in the middle of the casino’s main floor.

The goddess
would shrink back in horror…

But he
couldn’t risk it. As much as he would have loved it, there was no good way to
sneak a fucking crossbow into the casino. And without it he couldn’t be The
Archer, could he?

He stared at
the woman’s back, now turned to him, but suddenly she whirled and almost caught
him staring at her. He went into motion and walked past her, twenty feet away,
a man with a mission. He ignored her glance and kept going until he was sure
he’d disappeared behind another island of slot machines encased in a smoky fog.
Only then did he realize he’d left behind his active slot machine with money in
the credit slot. Oh well, somebody would get lucky. He shrugged. It was only a
few dollars. Money no longer mattered to him. Without a job, without the
ability to make money handling money, he was lost in his own sense of needed
revenge.

Once past
them, he turned and snuck a look. She was still standing in the middle of the
aisle, talking to the cop, yet clearly wondering where to go next. What was she
looking for?
Who?

He thought
he heard the thin cop call her
Jessie
.

God, she was something!
She almost made the other reporter, the smoking chick he’d lusted
after fade right from his memory.

Almost.

He muttered
to himself as the lights blinked beside him, unseen. He saw the reporter
weaving through the aisle just ahead of him again, her motions jerky. She’d
ditched the camera guy, or had given him an assignment. She stopped walking
now, pulled out a mirror and fixed her face.

Yes, he had
found his new target.

She was the one
.

But suddenly
he didn’t want to just shoot her. He wanted to possess her first. The Archer
would have his say, but first there would be a small detour. She shouldn’t be a
target here at the casino, where the other – more mundane – targets
had been.

She was the
one. She was special, and she had to be handled specially.

JESSIE

After
successfully talking the chatty, pushy TV reporter into leaving Rich DiSanto
alone – using Nick Lupo's name had seemed to work wonders – she had
spent a few minutes catching up with DiSanto, who looked like he was about to
drop. He told her Lupo had called him back and she smiled grimly, knowing her
tryst with Nick had cost poor Rich the sleep he needed. She didn’t tell him. He
probably already figured.