Read Online Werewolf Cop by Andrew Klavan - Free Book Online Page B

Griswold’s left arm now ended in a bloody stump, so that he was known ever after as Peter Stump or Stumpf. On this evidence, Hans assembled the locals roundabout into a posse, and had Griswold bound and brought before the authorities.
    It was Hans himself—now recovered from his wounds—who laid Peter Stumpf on the rack for interrogation. Fearful of torture, the werewolf confessed to everything, a whole lifetime of demonic crime. On All Hallow’s Eve, 1589, in keeping with the sentence of the court, Hans brought Stumpf to the place of execution known as the Raven Stone. There, he pulled chunks of Stumpf’s flesh off with red-hot pincers (a practice known as “nipping”), broke his legs and arms with a wooden axe, and finally cut off his head with a sword.
    And then, of course, there was the whole Margo fiasco, Zach thought. Which was even worse than the Goulart situation, much worse. Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell’s charges against Goulart were sure to bring trouble down on the Task Force one way or another, but Zach could live with that. Margo, though. . . . She could lay his life waste. Break his wife’s heart. Destroy his children’s home. Condemn everyone he loved best to a grief he couldn’t even bear to think about. And what other outcome—what good or even less-horrible outcome—could there possibly be? She had texted him again yesterday. What do I have to do to get you to pay attention to me, darling? He could practically hear the rising hysteria in her tone. A sizable part of his relief at wangling this trip to Germany derived from the fact that it enabled him to put a message on his phone and text and e-mail saying “I will be out of the country for the next few days and unable to receive communications.” Which would electronically make his excuses to Margo and maybe give her a chance to calm down or reconsider or be fatally hit by a car. It would give him a chance to think things through as well.
    â€œThank you,” he said with a brief smile as the stewardess handed him a double bourbon. Thirty thousand feet in the air with a drink—it was practically like being in paradise after these last few awful days. He hoped this jet would never land.
    But what the hell was this crazy thing, this report he was reading, anyway? A 16th-century werewolf? A magic dagger? This better have something to do with Dominic Abend or he’d have two thousand dollars’ worth of explaining to do when he got back to the office, along with his other troubles.
    He sipped his drink, set the plastic receptacle down on the fold-out table, and read on.
    After doing his duty in the torture and beheading of Stumpf, Hans the executioner all but disappears from history—although B. F. Korchinski maintains that a reference is made to his memory in the fictional picaresque account of the Thirty Years War, A Christian’s Progress , written shortly after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The sardonic narrator is describing the aftermath of a battle:
    â€œThe surviving women having been raped and disemboweled in the most Christian fashion imaginable, their still breathing bodies were tied with ropes and dangled from the branches of nearby trees so that the defenders of Our Most Gracious Lord could amuse themselves with their death throes. It was when I went out in the dark of night to see if I could bring relief to any of these poor creatures that I spotted the enormous wolf ranging among the dead and dying. Such a beast was he that had never been seen or even heard of in this region—twice the stature of a man, with flaming red eyes and teeth the size of daggers that glistened in the light of the full moon—so that I was certain I was witnessing a demon who had been summoned from hell by the wickedness that had been perpetrated here. After gorging itself on the bodies of the dying women, the thing retreated. My curiosity overcame my fear and, thinking I might witness