Wolf's Gambit Read online

  Six hours. He would break every speed limit to get to her later today. His lower belly tingled. Or something tingled. He wished he could snap his fingers and zoom past this day.

  Short of sleep again, his heart still racing, Lupo rolled over and stared at his ceiling. He closed his eyes and could still see the vivid dream scene and feel the pain, the sadness.

  Christ.

  He knew he was supposed to talk about these dreams, but he was damned if that crone at the department would hear this one. Or any of the others he’d suffered through lately.

  He sighed and rolled out of bed unwillingly. The sense of dread raised in the nightmare continued to flow through his nerves, making them twang with repressed energy. His hands shook slightly. The itch was coming back, and he fought the urge to scratch himself bloody.

  It was going to be one of those days.

  Arnow

  They’d done it again. The three coffee mugs lined up on the utility counter did not include his. He scanned the room, didn’t see it, and walked past the reception and dispatch station. It was unmanned because Rita had the flu, or a sinus infection, or one of her kids did. Arnow wasn’t sure because halfway through her phone call he had shut her out—her droning voice was bad enough coming out of his radio, he didn’t feel like listening to her on the phone, too.

  “Thanks for calling, Rita,” he had said, interrupting the stream. “Feel better!”

  “It’s not—” He had hung up before hearing any more.

  But now that Rita wasn’t here, no one would bother to get him coffee. No one had bothered to scoop up his mug, wash it, and line it up with the others to be filled.

  He sighed.

  It was always tough being the new guy. He should know. He’d been the new guy a half dozen times, though one was by default. He had started big, rising to detective in Chicago, but a smaller town had beckoned, and he’d found a niche in Daytona Beach. Couldn’t fault the weather or “the view,” especially during spring break. But you could fault the weather when you became aware of hurricane season. Daytona lay mostly off hurricane alley, but a few close calls had soured him on all the good stuff. Even when the hurricane was a bust, like 1999’s Floyd, that bounced northward along the coast and never made landfall in Florida, the evacuations took a lot out of him—criminal activity always seemed to increase during bad weather, or the potential for bad weather.

  Naked bank robbers, mummified corpses, buried body parts, alligator attacks and criminal use of alligators, homicidal relatives, kidnapped children, abused children, abused babies, crackhead babysitters—it was uncanny, but Arnow had seen more in his three years in Daytona than in all the previous years in Chi-town.

  Becoming the new sheriff in sleepy Eagle River was possibly the best thing to have happened to him. In life. Well, as a bachelor he had to list some of the sex he’d had, too. But professionally, this was a superb gig, and he liked it even when they didn’t get him coffee.

  Arnow washed out his mug and dried it absentmindedly, then filled it from the pot. It wasn’t as hot as when Rita made it fresh, but a spoonful of sugar and four ice cubes from the tiny refrigerator under the counter turned it into quite acceptable iced coffee. He returned to his office and sat behind his desk, sipping.

  Technically, somebody should have been at the dispatch station, manning radio and telephones. And e-mail. But Rita was sick, and Jerry Faber was out on a call. The other full-time deputies were either on their daytime patrols or not yet on shift. Hal Halloran, Jonston, Arrales, and Morton. He was still a bit unsure of his night cops because he didn’t see them very often.

  Arnow grimaced. He knew he was running his department still mostly shorthanded. Bunche, his predecessor, had six more full-timers and a couple more part-timers on the job patrolling Vilas County than Arnow did. But how much had it helped when the shit hit the fan a couple years back? That so-called homegrown terrorist cell had exploded into action and shot the hell out of Bunche and a deputy. Other local folks had been killed or wounded, including the reservation doctor, Jessie Hawkins, and that cop from downstate. That cop, what was his name? Lupo. Who was maybe turning out to be Jessie’s boyfriend.

  He’d wondered more than once what the Milwaukee homicide detective was doing in Eagle River. What exactly had been his involvement in the so-called terrorist plot? The whole thing stank to high heaven. Arnow wasn’t born yesterday, dammit, and that was a load of crap they’d unloaded in front of the news media and even the feds.

  He swiveled his chair and stared at the file cabinets. Nah, most of these files had been converted to the newer, more modern computer and server system that had been part of the upgrades done by Sheriff Bunche. The county supervisor and town council had spent considerable money just before and just after the whole terrorist thing. Arnow was still charged with hiring more deputies to fill the schedule.

  He called up a master list of old case files and clicked his way to the appropriate folders. Nodding with satisfaction, he found brief descriptions of what had happened, links to news stories, and a dozen PDFs of reports filed since then, some of them by the feds.

  He was about to click on a report of all the involved parties when his dispatcher’s phone rang. He almost ignored it, having called up in his mind a picture of Jessie Hawkins that he would like to have had time to linger on.

  She was something, the good doctor.

  Pretty. Better than that—beautiful. Cover-model beautiful. And feisty as hell. She’d killed one of the terrorist idiots herself with a goddamn crossbow, no less. Damn.

  The insistent phone broke through his pleasant memory of his last meeting with Dr. Hawkins, and finally he stood and stalked out to the abandoned station and snatched the receiver in midring.

  “Sheriff’s office.”

  There was shocked silence on the other end of the line. Then: “Is that Sheriff Arnow?”

  “Yup. Rita’s got the flu.”

  “Sheriff, it’s Bob Anderson over at the Mobil station on Route QQ. I’ve got one of your deputies here…”

  “What’s that?”

  “Huh, yeah. Jerry Faber’s here. That is, why don’t you talk to him just as soon as he gets done heavin’ his breakfast all over my concrete?”

  There was commotion at the other end. Arnow squinted as if he could see through the phone line. Why wasn’t his deputy calling in on his radio?

  Finally, a tremulous voice came on the line.

  “Sheriff?”

  “Jerry, what’s going on?” Keeping it neutral. Lectures could come later. Lesson on protocol. More training.

  “You’d best get down here, Sheriff. To the station, and then down to the casino from there. There’s a service road—”

  “Service road? Yeah? Jerry?”

  He heard coughing, gasping. Retching?

  “It’s bad, Sheriff. Real bad.” Jerry panted as if he’d run five miles before gagging up his guts.

  “Do you need backup? Do I need backup?”

  “Best bring Ted and anyone else. Lots of crime-scene tape.”

  “A body?”

  “What’s left of it…”

  “Shit. Don’t leave. On my way—I’ll be there shortly.”

  It sounded as though Jerry had another case of the heaves.

  Arnow hung up, then lifted the receiver again. Let it hang in the air.

  He felt the familiar surge of adrenaline. Excitement, sure, but also a heavy dose of despair. You hated to have violent crime on your beat, on your watch. Now his idyllic paradise had just changed. He wondered if Bunche had felt this way just before the terrorist thing literally exploded. He shivered a little. Someone walking on my grave, his grandmother would have said, and for once it didn’t seem so far-fetched.

  What could be so bad Jerry had hightailed it away from his patrol car, away from the crime scene, making a call from a civilian phone? Why had he abandoned his cruiser?

  Before he realized it, Arnow was dialing. Got her machine or voice mail, whatever it was.


  “Uh, this is an emergency. It’s Sheriff Arnow…”

  “Dr. Hawkins.” She’d picked up, interrupting his rambling. The voice was smooth yet very sultry. He pictured her face, wondering if she’d been asleep.

  “Hello, Jessie,” he blurted out. “I think I have a hom icide on my hands. Can you get away?”

  “Tom?” She hesitated, clearly a bit puzzled, as if not tracking. “Sheriff Arnow?”

  Had he forgotten to identify himself? Jesus, he was rattled.

  “Uh, yes, sorry about that, Doc.”

  “It’s okay.” She breathed audibly, a bit of a pant, as if she’d run to the phone. “A hom icide?”

  “A bad one, sounds like, really spooked my deputy.” He told her what he knew.

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  He heard a half sigh in her voice. He sympathized. Things were going to get messy. He knew that now, without a doubt.

  At least he’d get to see Jessie.

  Sam Waters

  The day began as they all did lately. His first awareness included pain.

  Pain in his back. Pain in his knees. And, when he awkwardly rolled himself out of bed, pain in his legs and pelvis. He stood up, none too steadily, and let the tingly jabs dissipate a little. They would, eventually, after a steady diet of Tylenol, muscle relaxants, and whatever else the doc had prescribed. Oh, and exercise. Moving around would settle the pain down some, but moving around also caused pain, so the trade-off sometimes amused him. His wife, Sarah, often accused him of being the cynical sort. But now she was gone, and he let his cynicism run rampant.

  He stood in his pajama bottoms and slippers, waiting for his feet to be ready, and then he tottered off to the bathroom with a sigh. Hold off too much in that department and he’d pay for that, too.

  Shit. Aging sucks.

  Sam Waters was seventy-five and had looked not a day over sixty until a few days two years before, when he’d aged much too quickly. The gunshot wound hadn’t helped. Now he thought he looked his age and more, even if people never said so. Well, except for the younger members of the council. They thought he was too old to sit on the council in the first place.

  He shuffled into the warm kitchen of his farmhouse and slowly made himself tea. It was his favorite time of day. He peered outside and said hello, glancing at his wife’s grave. How many years had it been? He never thought he could survive her leaving him so suddenly, but he’d been driven then. He had still burned with the intensity of a quest that had robbed him of his youth. And robbed him of his son. His only son.

  Then when his quest was fulfilled, he did not find it fulfilling because he learned he had been wrong all those years. His sense of justice was shaken on that day the Stewart gang had shot him.

  The Stewart gang was his own shorthand. They weren’t much of a gang really, despite what CNN had made of them with some careful prompting.

  A serial killer, Martin Stewart, thrown in with three local thugs led by the sociopath Wilbur Klug. Not much of a gang at all, but they’d wiped out the sheriff and almost a dozen others.

  Sam drank his tea after letting it cool. It took the edge off some of his aches and pains.

  Sometimes he couldn’t help thinking about that day. The gunfight. How his grip on reality at first seemed to have slipped—but then how his reality had been altered, forever upset like a cosmic apple cart.

  You think you can count on some things, but then you learn you’re wrong.

  Even though he had always been prepared to experience the uncanny, thanks to what had happened to his son, that day he’d had one strange belief proved and another disproved, and the collision had almost cost his sanity.

  At least for a while.

  Sam Waters was a practical man and quick to bring his cynicism to bear. Along with that came an open-mindedness born of various cultures at war within him. As a Native American, he understood natural magic most non-Indians simply glossed over. As a modern practical man, he placed trust in science.

  So when a stranger named Dominic Lupo had entered his life, a confluence of cultural, religious, and scientific streams proved to him without a doubt that Shakespeare had been right—there were indeed more things in heaven and earth, etcetera. He thought of it that way, with the etcetera. Maybe rendered in Yul Brynner’s timeless inflection.

  Sometimes Sam thought he was too tied to the movies.

  Then again, the best movies reflected life and the human condition. So why not be tied to the movies?

  He shook his head. It felt as if he were trying to shake off something, a dark thing that wanted into his head. There was a fuzzy feeling in his ears, almost as if they were submerged. Sounds were muffled.

  What now?

  He’d been healthy as a horse before being shot, but now new aches and pains crept in almost daily, announcing themselves with a sharp jab here and a dull throb there.

  The telephone rang, and Sam’s ears popped as if he’d been on an airplane.

  He looked at the phone and felt a physical temptation to ignore it. No explanation for it, but he knew whoever was on the other end, the call would change his life again.

  The device continued to squall, and he reached for it.

  Lupo

  His partner waited behind the wheel of an unmarked detec-tive’s car.

  Lupo left his building’s lobby and headed for the nondescript Impala. He hated driving—he was the only cop he knew who hated it with a passion—but if it had been his turn, he would have preferred his own well-worn Maxima. Given it was his partner, Rich DiSanto’s week to drive, Lupo climbed into the passenger seat and buckled up with a greeting grunt.

  “Hey, Nick,” DiSanto said. “Hope you don’t mind I’m early.”

  “Nah, what else is there to do?”

  Lupo didn’t have to think very hard at all to come up with something, anything he’d rather do than go to work. He let the lie fester. No point in whining every week about how much he hated the gang task force assignment.

  Lupo looked at DiSanto surreptitiously as he drove. A small smile played on his thin lips. DiSanto really did enjoy his task force assignment, Lupo decided. He wasn’t faking. Lupo couldn’t help thinking about Ben Sabatini, his former partner, who had succumbed to Martin Stewart’s ferocious attack while Lupo frittered away his time in Eagle River.

  Sabatini had been seasoned, a veteran cop from the old school who had taught Lupo much over the years. But he had forgotten one of his own lessons when it counted most and let down his guard at the worst possible time. Still, Lupo felt the guilt of having been too far away to prevent Ben’s murder. Sometimes it almost crippled him, the guilt. But then, he had plenty of guilt already, and his conscience overflowed.

  “Have a good weekend?” DiSanto was all about clichés.

  “The best,” Lupo said with a smirk his partner didn’t see or hear. He played along, most days.

  “Me too! Too short, though.”

  Lupo grinned without mirth. DiSanto annoyed him to no end, but he seemed like a solid partner most of the time. On the force ten years, plenty of street experience. His love of clichés was forgivable, if just. His shooting was among the best in the detective squad—he had plenty of department championship trophies to prove it. Lupo had been paired with the younger cop when reassigned to the gang task force—officially until he could recover from his injuries at the hands of the Martin gang.

  Lupo smiled to himself. The Martin gang had certainly helped cause the injury, but technically Jessie Hawkins had inflicted the awful wound itself, severing his foot at the ankle to free him from the implacable jaws of the trap that held him prisoner. And that would have kept him from saving them both.

  Thankfully Jessie was a doctor. She’d known how to perform the surgery (if wielding an axe could be considered surgery), and how to take care of him after—

  After. Even after the foot regenerated itself. Though Lupo had to keep that fact hidden with a false artificial foot. There was no way he could explain how his foot regre
w without admitting to the world what he was.

  Lupo still had trouble admitting to himself what he was, what he had been since a childhood friend had forced his disease on him before being torn apart by a hail of silver buckshot…

  Lupo had trouble admitting to himself that the disease had made him into a werewolf. That’s what society called it, though most didn’t believe it was real. But it was all too real to him. He had lived through the fear, the uncertainty, the horror of beholding what he became when the moon called to him.

  At first, the Change had been painful. Not like in the movies, with the muscle and bone alteration. But with a soul-burning sensation that seemed to travel through every vein and tendon. The disease had made his youth hellish, and while in college he had sought comfort in the arms of a psychology professor who had become more than just his lover and protector. Caroline Stewart, Martin’s sister, had become his own personal scientist, attempting to help him make sense of his Change both physically and psychologically.

  It had been Caroline’s belief, her theory, that Lupo the man could exert his will on the Creature that lived within him. The Creature had, up until then, exerted itself only during the monthly full-moon phase. But with Caroline’s help, they had begun to see some sort of rudimentary infl uence that Lupo could exert on the Creature, a breakthrough which had indicated to Caroline that perhaps Lupo would one day be able not only to withstand the Creature’s influence and even avoid the involuntary Change, but learn to force a Change at will.

  Unfortunately, in the testing of her hypothesis, Lupo’s Creature side, confused by the mixed signals of control and acquiescence, had reverted to its most bestial and had murdered Caroline as if she’d been a stranger, tearing her apart like helpless prey, and starting Lupo on a crusade to suppress his evil side. Ironically, becoming a cop had helped him channel his rage and turned him into a first-class homicide detective, though prone to monthly disappearances—drives up north to the great Wisconsin woods that Ben Sabatini, his partner, had learned to accept and help cover.

  Only in the woods, under the moon and pines, could Lupo’s Creature run free, hunt fresh game, and romp like the wild animal—however magical—that it was. And in the last two years, Lupo had proved Caroline’s theories almost completely. Indeed, during the worst part of the Martin gang’s abduction of Jessie Hawkins, Lupo had learned to call upon the Creature, the wolf, almost at will. Though he still felt its influence, the moon was no longer the enemy. Lupo’s occasional involuntary growling and itching (as fur threatened to bloom on his skin) continued to annoy him, but he had made great progress on the heels of the trauma caused by the gang’s actions. He had trouble thinking it was him, still him, when under the Change, but it was and he’d proven it over and over since then.