Skin Game

by Jim Butcher

  Grey just looked at me with that calm smile. He made a little motion of his hand, pantomiming sticking a pin into something. Or maybe pulling it out again.

  “Oh, goodie,” I muttered. “Field trip.”

  Sixteen

  Harvey kept an office just off Logan Square, on the second floor of a brownstone he shared with a Chase bank. I drove us past the building and then around the square twice in Nicodemus’s black town car, using the time to think. It was a sunny morning, promising a mild spring day.

  “You are literally driving in circles,” Grey noted, from the passenger seat.

  “Harvey shares a building with a bank,” I pointed out.

  Grey made an unhappy sound.

  “What difference does that make?” Deirdre asked from the backseat.

  “They’ll have at least one armed guard on-site,” Grey said, “and probably more than one. Additionally, everyone there will have rapid access to alarms that will summon the local constabulary.”

  “Then we’ll take him quickly and go,” Deirdre said.

  “A broad-daylight kidnapping,” I said. “In view of all this foot traffic, bank customers and . . .” Even as I spoke, a white sedan with blue and white bubs and a sky blue horizontal stripe rolled through on the opposite side of the square’s roundabout. “And Chicago PD patrol cars, which regularly prowl through here.”

  Grey sighed. “He’s right. We’re going to have to be patient.”

  “Can’t keep circling the square,” I said, pulling off. “We’ll hit the next street over, try to find someplace we can park that gives us a view of the building.”

  Deirdre scowled at me in the rearview mirror. “The simplest way is to walk in, kill him silently, and take what we need. No one will be the wiser until the body is discovered.”

  “Point,” Grey said.

  “Simple, all right,” I said. “I mean, we don’t know his schedule today, who is coming to his office, where he is expected to be, who might raise a cry if he goes missing, or anything like that, but why let inconvenient little things like facts slow us down?”

  Deirdre’s scowl turned into a glower. Her hair whipped back and forth a few times, like an agitated cat thrashing its tail. I ignored her and drove slowly down the street on the other side of the bank building. It was early enough that I managed to find a parking space with a view of Harvey’s office door, and I wedged the town car inexpertly into it.

  “There’s his car,” Grey noted, as I did. “Our man comes in to work early.”

  “Maybe he loves his job.”

  “How tiresome,” Grey said. He settled back in his seat with his odd eyes half-closed and unfocused.

  “So?” Deirdre asked. “What are we going to do?”

  “Await developments,” Grey said.

  “Harvey will leave eventually,” I said, “to get lunch, if nothing else. We’ll follow him until he’s somewhere a little less likely to result in alarms and swarms of cops.”

  Deirdre didn’t like that. “We are on a schedule.”

  “I guess Daddy should have thought of that before he decided to proceed without telling anyone his plans,” I said. “We could have gotten started days ago.”

  “Patience, Miss Archleone,” Grey advised, barely moving his lips as he spoke. He had the look of someone who was comfortable with the idea of spending a lot of time waiting. The man had worked stakeouts before. “We have a little time—and we can always do it the direct way should we need to change our minds.”

  And we waited.

  * * *

  “Why?” Grey asked me abruptly, a couple of silent hours later.

  “Why what?” I asked. I needed a bathroom break, but I didn’t want to wander off and take the chance that the two of them would roll up and kill Harvey the minute I wasn’t looking.

  “This man is no one to you,” Grey said. “Why does it matter if he lives or dies?”

  “Because killing people isn’t right,” I said.

  Grey smiled slightly. “No,” he said. “I’m being serious.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  “A random hardpoint of irrational morality?” he asked. “I’ve heard your reputation, Dresden. You don’t mind killing.”

  “If I’ve got to, I will,” I said. “If I don’t have to do it, I don’t. Besides. It’s smarter.”

  Grey opened his eyes all the way and turned his head toward me. “Smarter?”

  “You kill someone, there’s always someone close to them who is going to take it hard,” I said. “Maybe a lot of someones. You remove one enemy, but you make three more.”

  “Do you honestly think Harvey has someone ready to avenge him should we take his life?” Grey asked.

  “He’s got whoever he works for,” I pointed out. “And he’s got the cops and the FBI. If we make a corpse of him, we risk warning our target and setting large forces in motion that could skew this whole deal.”

  “Kill them as well,” Deirdre said sullenly.

  “I thought we were on a schedule,” I sniped back at her waspishly. I turned to Grey again. “The point is, killing someone is almost never the smart move, long term. Sometimes it’s got to be done if you want to survive—but the more you do it, the more you risk creating more enemies and buying yourself even more trouble.”

  Grey seemed to consider that for a moment, and then shrugged. “The argument is not entirely without merit. Tell me, wizard, does it give you some sort of satisfaction to protect this man?”

  “Yeah.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “Hmm.”

  “Good, you want to keep him alive now,” I said. It’s just possible that I might have sounded sarcastic. “That was easy.”

  Grey resumed his waiting posture, eyes slipping out of focus again. “It doesn’t matter to me, either way. I’ve no objection to killing for professional reasons, and no need to do it when doing so would be stupid.”

  “I thought you said it would be fun.”

  That made Grey bare his teeth in a smile. “Always. But just because something is pleasurable doesn’t mean it is appropriate.”

  “Look,” Deirdre said, her voice suddenly intent.

  I did. Three people in overcoats were walking up to Harvey’s building. They skipped the entrance in front and headed for the staircase in back. Two of them were men, fairly bulky. The third was a petite woman.

  All three moved with a clarity and intensity of purpose that marked them as predators.

  “Poachers,” Grey noted. There was a low, growling tone to his voice.

  I peered at the woman a little more closely, and shot Deirdre a look over my shoulder. “Is that—?”

  Her eyes were wide. She nodded tightly. “My mother.”

  Fantastic.

  Polonius Lartessa was another Knight of the Blackened Denarius, the bearer of Imariel. She was also Nicodemus’s estranged wife, a sorceress, and an all-around piece of bad news.

  “What’s she doing here?” I demanded.

  Deirdre stared intently at the woman. “I’m not sure. She’s supposed to be in Iran. She wasn’t supposed to know that—” Deirdre cut herself off abruptly.

  So. The wife was cutting in on Nicodemus’s action—assuming Deirdre was telling the truth, which I couldn’t.

  “We can’t let her take the factor from us,” Grey said calmly. He unbuckled his seat belt and got out of the car. “Come on.”

  Deirdre bit her lip. But then she got out, following Grey, and I went with them.

  Seventeen

  “Grey,” I said, hurrying to catch up.

  “Hmm?”

  “How is walking up and starting a fight with Tessa any better than doing it with Harvey?”

  “It isn’t,” he said. “But the alternative may be losing him. Unacceptable.”

  “Then we don’t los
e him,” I said. “How good is your Nicodemus impersonation?”

  Grey narrowed his metallic eyes. “What did you have in mind?”

  “You two go up and distract them,” I said. “One big happy family. I go in the front door and get Harvey the hell out of there. Quietly.”

  Grey considered it for a moment and then nodded once. “I doubt I’ll be able to fool his wife for more than a moment. But then, you only need a moment.”

  Deirdre grimaced. “Just press your lips together as hard as you can and keep quiet. He gets like that when he’s angry. I’ll talk.”

  Grey’s mouth turned up into a grin. Then he winked at me and just melted.

  One second, the plain man in jeans and an athletic jacket was there. The next, it was Nicodemus, head to toe, black suit and all—and not just in appearance. Grey’s posture changed, along with his walk, the way he held his head, right down to the smug, wary eyes. “Why, thank you, Deirdre,” he said in a perfect imitation of Nicodemus’s gravelly voice. “Such a dear child.”

  Deirdre stared at Grey for a second in something between fascination and disgust. Then she said to me, “Hurry. Imariel will realize Anduriel isn’t there before long.”

  I nodded and took off at a jog. I vaulted a large cast-iron fence behind the building (Parkour!) and hustled down an alley no wider than my shoulders between the bank building and its neighbor, keeping the bank between me and the approach of Tessa and her goons, the way a squirrel will circle and hide behind the trunk of a tree. I stopped at the corner to check and be sure that they’d gone out of sight, found the coast clear, then ran down the length of the front side of the bank and went up the stairs to Harvey’s office three steps at a time.

  The front door had a simple logo on it that read: MORRISON FIDUCIARY SERVICES. I went on in and found myself in an office decorated with tastefully spartan sensibilities. There was a receptionist’s desk, though no one was at it, and an open door leading into what was obviously a working office.

  “Just a moment,” called a man from the other room. “I’ll be right with you.”

  I didn’t give him a moment. The way the office was laid out, the rear entrance had to open directly into Harvey’s office, and Tessa and company might appear there anytime.

  Harvey’s office was as elegant as his entry, but more crowded with the tools of his trade—computers and office equipment and bookshelves and files. The man himself sat behind the desk with his shirtsleeves rolled up, hunched over a computer keyboard, fingers flying as he watched figures and diagrams of some kind rolling by on his screen.

  No sooner did I set foot in the office than the computer started making an odd buzzing noise and the scent of scorched insulation filled the air. An instant later, Harvey’s screen turned blue, covered in white text.

  “What?” he said, baffled. Then he slapped the side of the monitor and repeated, “What? You have got to be kidding me . . .” He turned his gaze toward me, annoyance all over his face, and suddenly froze as he saw my expression and my quarterstaff. “Uh,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Come with me if you want to live,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “No time,” I said. “It isn’t your fault, but you’re into some bad business, Harvey. There’s a woman with two hired goons about to come up your back steps, and they aren’t here to sell you a magazine subscription.”

  “What?” he said. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Are you freaking kidding me?” I growled, and stalked over to his desk. “Get up and come with me.”

  “Now see here, young man,” Harvey stammered. “I will not be ordered about in my own place of business. If you do not leave immediately, I will summon the authorities.”

  There just wasn’t time for this dance. So I stepped around the desk, grabbed his upper arm in my left hand, and hauled him to his feet.

  “Take your hands off of me at once!” he shouted.

  “I’m trying to help you,” I told him, dragging him back out into the front room by main force. “You are going to thank me for this later—”

  The front door opened, and two more goons stepped into the office, different men from the ones Tessa had with her. Dammit. I hadn’t been keeping an eye out for them on the way in. Of course, if we’d thought to cover both exits, Tessa and her people would have done the same.

  The two men saw us and immediately plunged their hands into their jackets, going for their shoulder holsters.

  I was quicker. I thrust Harvey behind me with my left hand and pointed my staff at the two men with my right, summoning up a burst of will and snarling, “Forzare!”

  The runes carved into the staff flared into a pale green-white light, and a wave of force caught both men. One of them was slapped against the wall hard enough to dent the drywall, while the other went reeling back out the door and was thrown down the steps.

  The thug who hit the drywall was tough. He bounced off it, completed drawing his silenced pistol, dropped to a knee, and aimed at Harvey.

  No time to pull together a shield, not without the advantage of a specialized magical tool to make it happen. So I spun, putting my back between the shooter and Harvey, bowed my head forward as far as I could, and hunched my shoulders.

  The gun coughed, clack, clack, clack. Slugs smashed against my back, only to be defeated by the painstaking protective energies I had spell-wrought into the leather duster I wore. I counted eight hits, all of which felt like taking a Little League fastball to the back—painful but not debilitating. Then the gun fell silent and I heard the metallic click of a magazine being released.

  I whirled and slashed the end of my staff at the gunman. The heavy oak smashed against the wrist of his gun hand and knocked away the fresh magazine he’d been about to load. I followed up with a backswing and hit him on the jaw right below his ear and sent him sprawling to the floor, the gun tumbling free.

  I kicked the gun away from him, and hauled Harvey to his feet. He was staring at the downed gunman, aghast.

  “That . . . that man just tried to kill you.”

  “No,” I said. “He just tried to kill you. Seriously, dude, what part of come with me if you want to live did you not understand?”

  I hauled Harvey along with me again, and this time he wasn’t resisting me. We headed for the door just as the sound of breaking glass cut in from the office.

  “What was that?” he panted.

  “Trouble,” I said. “Hurry.”

  I led the way, staff in hand, a shield spell ready to leap into reality if the second gunman proved to be waiting for us, but there was no sign of him.

  “You’re in pretty good shape, Harvey,” I said as I led him down the stairs. “You a jogger by any chance?”

  “Uh,” he said. “I swim. And do yoga.”

  “No, Harvey,” I said. “You run. You run marathons every morning before breakfast. Make me believe it. Move.” I broke into a run down the sidewalk, dodging a little bit of foot traffic now and then. Harvey hurried to keep up, breathing harder than was strictly warranted by the exercise. We’d gotten past the bank and to the next strip of brownstone buildings before I heard a shout behind me. Tessa had appeared in the doorway to Harvey’s office. She focused on me, and even from that distance I could feel the malice in her gaze. She pointed a finger at me and two goons took up the chase.

  I ducked down the next alley between buildings, circling back toward where I hoped Grey and Deirdre would be waiting to give me some backup, but they were not to be found. As I looked, I saw Tessa emerge from the back door of Harvey’s office and begin hurrying after us. There wasn’t much foot traffic on this block, and I saw Tessa shuck out of her overcoat on the run. In another moment, she’d take her demonic form and close in on us.

  If she was truly out to disrupt her husband’s plans, Tessa wasn’t worried about causing a scene. If she could stir
up the city’s police forces, so much the better. She’d happily become that hideous bug thing she turned into and rip Harvey’s skull apart.

  “Dammit,” I said, fleeing down the street, away from Harvey’s office and my compatriots. I didn’t have much choice. Tessa had me outnumbered. I might have been able to take my chances in a fight with her and some armed thugs, but I couldn’t fight them and protect Harvey at the same time. If I stood my ground, they’d take him. So I ran, to buy myself some time to think.

  As I did, I realized that I didn’t have to beat them in a fight. All I had to do was stall them, or hold them off long enough for Deirdre and Grey to catch up with me. While I didn’t trust either of my companions to give a damn about me, they needed Harvey to carry out the plan, and the farther I ran, the more likely it was that I might accidentally lose my own backup.

  We reached a building that had been abandoned; its windows were boarded up and covered with graffiti. It would have to do. I whirled toward it, unleashed another blast of energy from my staff, and blew a hole the size of a garbage can in the plywood and the glass beyond.

  “Come on,” I said. “Stay close.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “We’re playing hide-and-seek,” I said, and lunged into the building. Harvey stared slack-jawed at me for a second, but then glanced back toward Tessa.

  His face went pale, and his eyes widened. He made a few strangled noises, and then thrust himself through the hole, almost sprawling into the broken glass. I caught him and set him on his feet.

  The building had been a retail store of some kind, and most of it was one large room. There were still clothing racks scattered around the place, along with the detritus of long-term abandonment. The only light came in around the edges of its boarded-up windows, and through the hole I’d blasted. Shadows crawled everywhere.

  I headed deeper into the building, stumbling blindly over things on the floor while my eyes struggled to shift from the light of the spring morning to the gloom of the store’s interior. I almost ran into a wall before I saw it, but once I had, I was able to make out just enough shapes to realize that the shop had a doorway leading back to some restrooms and what were probably managerial offices of some kind.