Wolf's Blind (The Nick Lupo Series Book 6) Read online

  “You bastard—”

  The overhead light went on again.

  Corrado said, “You will want to check the firing pin on the, how do you say, the throw-down piece in your ankle holster,, too. I knew you would not use your service gun to try to take me.”

  “Fuck!” Lupo instinctively reached down and felt his baby P290RS Sig, which he’d carried as back-up to the off-book H&K submachine gun. Nice to know the fuckin’ guy’s predicted my every thought. It was still there, but useless.

  Of course, he had his dagger. He could still…

  But no, the moment had passed. The moment in which he might have lost his explosive Lupo temper and gone for the blade.

  This Corrado had outplayed him somehow.

  How the fuck did he manage to sabotage my weapons?

  Now he had to sweep his place. He could kick himself—maybe Corrado had bought his way in when the damage was being repaired after the raid? That was one angle he hadn’t protected against.

  “Yes, well maybe now we can talk instead of kill each other, no? Can you keep yourself from drawing that blade in your boot, at least until we are finished? Yes, I can sense it, which is not supposed to be. Many things are not supposed to be, yet they are. You, for instance. Me, as well. As old as it is, that blade still carries my DNA, this I would bet.” He stopped, tried a slight smile. “Can we dispense with death for a few moments and talk about your father?”

  Lupo swallowed but his throat rebelled. He set the useless submachine gun down on the table with disgust. How had he allowed that to happen?

  The guy had been in his house! But then, since the shootout in his place, he’d had work done on his walls and windows. Perfect opportunity for someone to gain entry and…commit sabotage. He wondered briefly if the rest of his arsenal had been compromised.

  Definitely a rookie mistake not to have checked.

  But then, a voice in his head whose sound he had squelched, suddenly found the volume it needed and began to nag him. How did you think you were going to hide the aftermath of a shooting in the middle of a storage facility? There were cameras mounted at various locations. How would he have managed to outplay the requests for digital video that would show him and DiSanto arriving, and this Corrado later, and then the removal of the victim’s remains?

  All in all, Lupo reluctantly admitted to himself finally, he had gone off on an emotional vendetta he could barely have explained, let alone forgiven. He’d had to do so many things against his will, against his ethics, against his own code—hell, against his own morality. He’d covered up so much, dragged so many with him into the dark…he’d known it was all wrong. He hadn’t told DiSanto what he planned here tonight, hadn’t shared the contents of the gym bag he’d carried.

  Now, faced with this smooth and charming opponent and too many unanswered questions, he felt lost. He considered forcing a Change and letting his Creature out to slug it out with this new player, but the question of the man’s age held him back.

  He has to be a werewolf.

  And if he was, wouldn’t he have been Frank Lupo’s sworn enemy?

  Lupo’s head spun. His father was becoming a greater enigma than he had ever imagined.

  “These files?” he said, cocking his head at a row of cabinets. “You and my father?”

  Corrado nodded grimly.

  “Yes, but not in the last few years. Then only myself.”

  “After my father got sick?”

  “Before. He was weary. He was…disillusioned. He was ashamed of what we—he—had done, in a way. Not because of the monsters. But because of how it had hardened him against his own family.” He gestured at a stack of storage boxes. “May I sit, or will you attack me?”

  The man’s salt and pepper hair was movie-star perfect, as was his chiseled jaw—definitely the jaw of a younger man. His eye color was difficult to discern in the poor lighting. That was a clue…

  “Sit,” Lupo said, not making any moves. Corrado hadn’t lived so long without developing advanced survival skills, after all.

  Suddenly Lupo wished Ghost Sam would show up, but it was just him and Corrado and his father’s ghost, as manifested in the handwritten files.

  Goddamn it, I’m Hamlet.

  Rabbioso

  “Fuck you!” The words were mashed by the broken teeth and blood in the guy’s mouth.

  Joe Rabbioso chuckled. The guy was tied up like a sausage to an uncomfortable chair, beaten, ribs cracked and broken, couple fingers twisted at odd angles. And still he refused to tell them what he’d been doing, cozying up to Marina.

  “Are you sleeping with her?” Rabbioso waited for the words to stop echoing in the meat freezer, then smacked the guy across the face again, because the guy started to say “Fuck you!” again. “Are you? Because you’re either fucking her or trying to get something out of her, you asshole, and when I warned you to stay away you gave me the finger. Let’s see you use that finger now, you miserable piece of shit.” His voice had become a hissing whisper.

  The guy was spitting out blood and crud, coughing. Maybe he’d choke to death before Rabbioso got what he wanted. Maybe not.

  Let’s see.

  A couple of the boys had picked up the scumbag at Sonny’s (real original naming, that one!) and scraped him off the bar late last night. Marina had just left. They’d been on the two of them since Rabbioso had issued their orders—when she’s gone, bring him to me. They had done so, with maybe a little too much enthusiasm—the guy had some rib damage and bruises blowing up on his face by the time Rabbioso left his usual restaurant and met them here, behind the butcher shop.

  Another cliché, eh, Gus?

  The old Don, who hadn’t been so old, had lived his life like a never-ending string of mob movie clichés (except for the porn addiction, that was something new but appropriate to the Vegas Vibe), and Rabbioso had started to change that since he had taken over the Bastone family, but even he had to admit that having a butcher shop you could take a scumbag to, after hours, and pop him into a walk-in freezer…and maybe out the back door in slop buckets…even he had to admit that sometimes that hit the sweet spot for a new boss who hadn’t quite garnered the respect he deserved.

  Rabbioso had been forced to defend his takeover bid with tooth and claw, literally. He had caused a couple pretenders to the crown to disappear, though they had tasted good. He had gone old school with a couple and hired out hits like in the movies, a little cloak and dagger to keep the traditionalists happy. Gus had surrounded himself with traditionalists, but they sometimes had their uses.

  And then there was Marina.

  She was the old Don’s freewheeling daughter. Ha! Freewheeling was putting it mildly. Rabbioso had brashly married her in a fit of…of what? Bad ideas? Totally masochistic tendencies? Why the hell had he thought he could control her? He knew her father the Don never had been able to, and now that the idiot Don Bastone had been reduced to a frail old-before-his-time invalid by that fuckin’ cop Lupo, now he sure as hell couldn’t control her. Rabbioso thought he could manage to muzzle her, at least for a while, with that mumbo-jumbo at the altar, but he’d been wrong. Very wrong.

  And he’d been annoyed enough that now he was handling some of his own wetwork. Well, sometimes it paid to keep his hand in, and it helped with the younger guys who respected an up and coming head of family who could still kick some ass on his own.

  Marina had hopped a plane heading back home to Milwaukee right after meeting this guy. She’d barely told him she was planning to do that, but it turned out she’d had a ticket for a week. Having to deal with her and her moods made him angry, although when she was in the mood the sex they shared was mind-blowingly kinky and satisfying. Gave him a boner just thinking about her mouth on his cock, her tongue in his ass, her body splayed backwards and upside-down on his, and…all that other stuff. People thought that Fifty Shades crap was kinky—they had no fuckin’ idea.

  Yeah, dealing with her made him angry, especially when she wasn’t within reach t
o keep the underlings from forgetting that, as her husband, he was now the Don, like it or stuff it.

  He was angry. He was fucking pissed off.

  And he was in the mood to prove it.

  Rabbioso punched the guy right in the classically beautiful Italian nose, his big diamond ring tearing up the guy’s skin and bone and turning the center of his face into a gushing mass of hamburger.

  The guy screamed, and Rabbioso stopped him with another fist in the mouth.

  Careful now, or he won’t be able to talk.

  He only needs to say a few words.

  No, fuck you, thought Rabbioso.

  He was running out of kindness and patience, and the wolf inside was getting hungry.

  As he beat the guy to a pulp, he finalized the fun idea that had been rolling around in his head the last few days of his healing period. He was still thinking about it when he heard the words he wanted to hear whimpered from the ruined pie-hole, then shed his clothes and pissed on the bastard before forcing a change. The guy’s eyes widened in shocked terror, even distracting him from the pain he felt everywhere, but he remembered how to scream, all right, when the wolf in the room suddenly went for his belly and ripped it open like a Christmas package.

  The wolf’s growls blended with the ragged screaming and reached such a crescendo that even Rabbioso’s closest lieutenants, who were relegated to guard duty in the hall, cringed and mouthed prayers they didn’t normally believe in.

  Lupo

  They faced each other across the desk.

  A communist desk, they would have joked at the precinct. It was one of those Sixties manufacture drab, battleship-gray metal desks that weighed a ton. They were sure enough sixty-year-old government issue, but ours—not the Commies’, Lupo thought. So how had that flip occurred? How had an accepted symbol of the enemy’s aesthetics turned out to be designed and built by the so-called free ones, the capitalists? Wasn’t there some kind of irony at play?

  Lupo thought about that.

  Irony abounded in his life, that was certain. He hadn’t had the best relationship with his father, true, but he’d thought of his old man as a dull and boring example of the older generation, a stern and taciturn man whose worldview rarely matched that of his son.

  So Nick Lupo had spent a large part of his adult life avoiding his father, partly because for some reason his father had kept a silver-loaded Beretta shotgun in the house. Nick had given that gun a wide berth and his father hadn’t been pleased that his son was so uninterested. But Frank Lupo was a more complex man than Nick could have imagined, and only after his death had his mother told him much of the history the elder Lupo had always skirted. That, and a letter from his grandmother that revealed more secret history. Some of it very painful, indeed.

  But this?

  No, he’d never expected to learn his father had not only hunted Nazi werewolves during World War II, but that he’d continued pursuing them after the war. That even as Nick had grown older and become a cursed werewolf, his father had secretly been involved in something greater than himself, something that tied him to his youth and the war.

  There had been some travel young Nick had never understood. And more.

  These files.

  This jury-rigged office in a storage unit, intended to be kept a secret for over a decade, maybe twenty years—and probably designed to be rolled out in a van in very little time if necessary.

  And Corrado.

  Who as a young partisan commander had known Frank Lupo when he was barely out of his childhood.

  Corrado. Who sat across from him now, handsome and much younger-looking than he should be.

  Lupo knew what this meant. But the question was—had Frank Lupo known? From Nick Lupo’s earliest days as a monster, he had understood—perhaps subconsciously—that his father hated monsters. Young Nick had had no idea his father was aware of the existence of werewolves, but even now he remembered vividly the night Frank Lupo and the neighborhood men had hunted down the monster who had been Andy Corrazza, the neighbor boy whose bite had cursed Nick. Only much later had he realized that the neighborhood men had all been aware of the truth behind the legends.

  “So now what?” Corrado finally spoke in his slightly accented English. “You want we stare each other to death?”

  “There are other options,” Lupo said. He felt the Creature inside itching to break free and challenge this unknown intruder. He sensed the silver blade in his boot almost lusting to feel the night air and taste Corrado’s blood. He stared at the older man and saw a reflection of his own father.

  “Yes, there are many options as you say, but one is we can just talk. Man to man.”

  “Monster to monster,” Lupo muttered.

  “It is what you see, but it does not have to be this way.”

  “All right.” Lupo sighed. Let it play out. “Did my father know?”

  Corrado smiled thinly. “Know what? About the wolves? Oh, yes, he learned the worst way possible. But you already know that he knew.”

  “Yeah, he killed his own father. With this blade in my boot.”

  “Or its twin, yes. And he became a fearsome werewolf hunter, and later a hunter of men too. Perhaps it was his destiny.”

  Lupo’s tone was steel itself. “And what was your destiny?”

  Corrado shrugged, a thoroughly Italian shrug. “I’m still learning that. At the time, first we fought for our country and for our families. The Germans were a scourge on us, and—how do you say?—we had a grudge. They had created a small army of werewolves, too late to change the war, but they used them against us…”

  “And anyone else?”

  Corrado cocked his head, obviously pissed at being interrupted. Good, Lupo thought. “The Werwolf Division is known to have existed,” said Corrado, after a theatrical sigh. “But most do not know—they would not believe—that at its center were real uomini-lupi, the werewolves. I am sure some Russians on that front probably saw them and were forced to learn fast, or they died. Some Americans, most of them died. Is this what you mean?”

  Lupo nodded. He’d been curious. “Go on.”

  “Okay.” Corrado continued, “You know about the German scientific approach to everything, right? Well, they went ahead and decided to scientifically create not only the werewolves, but also to, to build in a strength, a resistance to silver—the one thing that can really stop a werewolf. This was a top-secret operation that took place at several concentration camps, using inmates as test subjects, as prey, as reward…” He stopped, his eyes hardened. “There were the worst of humanity, you understand. These men were the representation of evil.”

  Lupo nodded grudgingly. He had pieced together some of the information, but Corrado—well, he had lived it. Maybe it was best he hadn’t just killed the bastard.

  “All right, I get it,” Lupo said. “I know enough about the Germans and their connection to Wolfpaw, descendants of some of the Werwolf guys, yada yada. But what about all this?”

  “I am getting to this,” said Corrado with a sigh. “You young people, always in a hurry. Yes, your father and I did not stop the hunting of werewolves when the war was over. You are aware that your father traveled quite a bit after the war?”

  “Yeah, he was at sea a lot.”

  “It began accidentally, but it became a way to catch and kill more escaping Nazi werewolves. Nazis were fleeing to South America in droves using what are called ratlines, indirect routes to other countries. One of these went from Germany to either Rome or Genova, the seaport as you are aware, and then from there to South America. By God, even the Vatican helped the bastards escape, or at least some factions in the Vatican. My old friend Father Tranelli, who knew your father very well, he was mortified that fellow priests and cardinals helped them escape, and he knew from first-hand…well, he was the reason my brigade had the sacred blades, which were removed from the secret Vatican repository, and which you now have.”

  Lupo was fidgeting. “All right, this is all very interesting, but wha
t does it have to do with me now?”

  “Again, be patient. Every road leads to Rome, eh? In this case, Genova, your parents’ hometown. And mine.” Corrado stopped to think. “I will edit the story, somewhat. On one of those ratlines, a route to Buenos Aires by freighter, went a young man named Franco Lupo and a priest named Tranelli. It was not meant to be, but young Franco was very persuasive…”

  “I’ll bet,” Lupo said with a snort.

  “Yes, your father was a hard, stubborn man, and he had been that way all his life. He had seen too much, done too much by the time he was in his teen years, and he hated the Nazis—and the Nazi werewolves even more. Much happened on that voyage, three weeks at sea, much that would change your father. But the important fact right now is that eventually he learned some things that would have changed the world, if they had been exposed. But we were young, you see, and we were mostly alone. We did some damage, but we could not…” Corrado’s eyes blurred with sudden tears. “We could not do it all, and we already dealt with things people would not believe or understand. We—we did the best we could.”

  “Why did anyone not help you expose these ratlines? Why did you have to go it alone?”

  “In Argentina, Juan Perón himself welcomed Nazis to their new land! He recruited them, in a way, gave them what do you call it, the welcome mat. The government itself wanted these monsters, so how could a couple ragtag partisans who had never been outside their villages stop them? In the end we only made a small dent, and created a mess for them, but it was not much, like the speed-bump, no?”

  Lupo glanced around the jury-rigged office and its many cartons of files. If this was a dent, then he could barely imagine how much had slipped by.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I might as well hear you out.”

  “Yes, you might as well,” said Corrado wistfully.

  Chapter Two

  Franco Lupo

  On the Freighter Zeniča, crossing the Atlantic Ocean

  December 1945