by Butcher, Jim
“You should get some rest before you do anything more,” Xian said. “I don’t see why you’re playing games. You should have let me follow the guard back.”
“Stop thinking with your stomach,” the girl growled. “It’s bad enough that you lost control without adding a further lack of discipline to the situation.”
“We are not here because I stopped to eat,” Xian replied, anger of his own in his whisper. “If you hadn’t indulged yourself we wouldn’t face this problem.”
The girl spun from the glass, facing Xian squarely, her face contorted with pride and anger. “Your attitude, Li, is making you part of the problem. Not part of the solution.”
The long-haired man went white and cringed back from the girl. His face rippled, a sort of slithery motion just beneath the surface of his skin that stretched his features grotesquely, causing a slight sinking of the eyes, a slight elongation of the jaw. He let out a gasp, and when his mouth opened I could see the teeth of a carnivore.
It happened for only a second, but I averted my eyes before he might have noticed me watching him. If he had seen me, I would have been in immediate danger. I’d seen a flash of Li Xian’s true face—he was a ghoul. Ghouls are preternatural predators who derive their primary sustenance from devouring human flesh. Fresh, cold, rotting, they don’t care as long as it gets into their bellies.
My stomach turned. Butters said that someone had removed Bartlesby’s quadriceps, the long, strong muscles on the front of the thigh. It had been Xian. He’d carved himself steaks from the old man’s corpse. If he suspected that I knew what he was, he might decide to protect himself with extreme prejudice, and that would be bad. Ghouls are quick, strong, and harder to kill than a juicy rumor about the president. I’d fought ghouls before, and it wasn’t something I wanted to repeat if I could avoid it. Especially given that I’d left my staff in Butters’s office.
Xian recovered his normal appearance and lowered his eyes. He bowed his head to Alicia.
“Do I make myself clear?” the girl whispered.
“Yes, my lord,” Xian replied.
Lord? I thought. My mind raced over the possibilities.
Alicia exhaled and pressed her thumb against the spot between her eyebrows. “Don’t talk, Xian. Just don’t talk. We’ll all be happier. And safer.” She breezed past him, back to the little waiting area, and sat down. She picked up a copy of Newsweek sitting out on an end table and began to flick through it, while Xian remained standing near the door. I pretended to be drowsing.
Casey returned a couple of minutes later and said, “Ms. Nelson, it’s going to be a while before Dr. Brioche can see you.”
“How long?” she asked, smiling.
“An hour or so at least,” Casey said. “He says that if you’d like to make an appointment for this afternoon that he will be glad to—”
“No,” she interrupted him, shaking her head firmly. “Some of his business is time-critical, and I need to recover his effects at the earliest possible opportunity. Please tell him that I will wait.”
Casey lifted his eyebrows and then shrugged. “Yes, ma’am.”
I blinked my eyes a few times and then sat up straight, stretching. “Oh, hey, Casey,” I mumbled, standing. I feigned a limp and went to the desk. “I left my cane in Butters’s office. Would it be okay to go back and grab it?”
Casey nodded. “One second.” He picked up the phone, and a second later I heard polka music pumping through the little speaker. “Doctor, your consultant friend forgot something in your office. You want me to send him back?” He listened, nodding, and then waved me at the door, buzzing me through.
I hurried back to Butters’s examination room and knocked. Butters unlocked the door to let me in.
“Hurry,” I told him, glancing back down the hall. “We’ve got to go.”
Butters gulped. “What’s going on?”
“There are some bad guys here.”
“Grevane?” he asked.
“No. New bad guys,” I said.
“More of them?” Butters said. “That’s not fair.”
“I know. It’s getting to be like Satan’s reunion tour around here.” I shook my head. “Is there a back door?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Grab your stuff and let’s go.”
Butters gestured at the exam table. “But what about Eduardo?”
I chewed on my lip. “You find out anything?”
“Not a lot,” he said. “A car hit him. He suffered some pretty massive blunt impact trauma. He died.”
I frowned and took a few steps toward the corpse. “There’s got to be more to it than that.”
Butters shrugged. “If there is, I didn’t see it.”
I frowned down at the dead man. He was a painfully skinny specimen. His abdomen had been opened with a neat Y incision. There was a lot of blood and disgusting-looking greyish flesh. Broken, jagged bone protruded from the skin of one leg. One hand had been crushed into pulp. And his face…
Looked familiar. I recognized him.
“Butters,” I said. “What was this guy’s name?”
“Eduardo Mendoza.”
“His full name,” I said.
“Oh. Uh, Eduardo Antonio Mendoza.”
“Antonio,” I said. “It’s him. It’s Tony.”
“Who?” Butters asked.
“Bony Tony Mendoza,” I said, excited. “He’s a smuggler.”
Butters tilted his head at me. “A smuggler? Not like Han Solo, I guess.”
“No. He’s a ballooner.”
“What’s that?”
I gestured at his head. “He’d done time in a carnival as a sword swallower when he was a kid. He would fill up a balloon with jewels or drugs or whatever other small items he wanted to move around. Then he swallowed the balloon with a string tied to it. Check at the back of his mouth. He’d wedge the string between two of his back teeth and pull the balloon out when the coast was clear.”
“That’s silly,” Butters said, but he went over to the corpse and pried its jaws open. He adjusted an overhead work lamp on a flexible stand and peered down past Bony Tony’s teeth. “Holy crap. It’s there.”
He fished around for a few moments while I went back to the door and picked up my staff. I looked back to see Butters drag from the corpse’s mouth a yellow-white condom with its end closed and a heavy piece of kite cord knotted around it.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“Hang on.” Butters sliced the condom open with a scalpel and withdrew a small rectangle of dark plastic, about the size of a key chain ornament.
“What is that?” I asked him.
“It’s a jump drive,” he said, frowning.
“A what?”
“You plug it into your computer so you can store data on it when you want to move files around to other machines.”
“Information,” I said, frowning. “Bony Tony was smuggling information. Something Grevane needed to know. Maybe the two out front wanted it too. Maybe that’s why he got killed.”
“Ugh,” Butters said.
“Can you read the information?” I asked him.
“Maybe,” he said. “I can try another machine.”
“Not now,” I said. “No time. We need to get out of here.”
“Why?”
“Because things have just become a lot more dangerous.”
“They have?” Butters chewed on his lip. “Why?”
“Because,” I said. “Bony Tony worked for John Marcone.”
Chapter
Fifteen
Gentleman Johnnie Marcone was the most powerful figure in Chicago’s criminal underworld. If there was an illegal enterprise afoot, Marcone was either in charge of it or had been paid for the privilege of its operating in his territory. Bony Tony had done most of a dime in a federal penitentiary for trafficking in narcotics, and after that he’d moved into less politically incorrect areas of the business. He mostly dealt in moving stolen goods, everything from jewels to hot furn
iture.
I wasn’t sure exactly where Bony Tony ranked in Marcone’s criminal hierarchy, but Marcone wasn’t the sort of person who would take the murder of one of his people lightly—not without his approval, at any rate. Marcone would know about Bony Tony’s death soon, if he didn’t already. He was sure to get involved in one fashion or another, and the best way for him to get to whoever had killed Bony Tony would be to get his hands on whatever it was they wanted.
I had to get Butters somewhere safe, the quicker the better. But until I knew what was on that storage device, I couldn’t judge what would be safe for him and what wouldn’t.
“Harry,” Butters said, as if he was repeating himself.
I blinked a couple of times. “What?”
“Do you want to hang on to this?” he said in the same tone. He stepped over to me and offered me the little slip of plastic.
“No!” I snapped, and took two steps back. “Butters, get that the hell away from me.”
He froze in place, staring at me, his expression somewhere between confused and wounded. “I’m sorry.”
I took in a deep breath. Where the hell was my concentration? This was no time to start spacing out on trains of thought, no matter how relevant to the circumstances. “Don’t be,” I said. “Look, that thing doesn’t have any moving parts, right? Electronic storage?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I don’t dare touch it,” I said. “Remember how messed up my X-rays were?”
He nodded. “You’re saying that the data on here could get messed up the same way.”
“I couldn’t ever have cassette tapes after I started working magic,” I said. “They’d just fade away into static after a while. The magnetic strips on my credit cards stopped working in a day or two.”
Butters chewed on his lip and nodded slowly. “The data on the jump drive would be even more fragile than a magnetic strip. It might make sense if it was some kind of erratic electromagnetic field around you. Every human body gives off a unique field of electromagnetic energy. It could be like with your cell replication, that your field is more—”
“Butters,” I said, “no time for that now. The important thing is that I don’t dare touch that toy.” I frowned, thinking out loud. “Or take it back to my place, either. The wards keep magic out, but they keep it in, too. It would probably fry it to hang around in there for too long. Even working any heavy energy around it could be dangerous.”
“Well, that’s stupid,” Butters said. “I mean, storing important wizard information on something that getting close to a wizard would destroy.”
“It’s not stupid if you want to sell it to a wizard and you’re worried the buyer might off you instead of dealing in good faith,” I said.
Butters looked at the corpse and then back at me. “You think Grevane killed Bony Tony?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But Grevane knew that he couldn’t get to the information on that jump drive on his own.”
Butters swallowed. “Which explains why he needed me.”
“Yeah.” I chewed on my lip for a second and then said, “Get Bony Tony back in the fridge. We’re leaving.”
Butters nodded and went back to the examining table. He threw the cloth over the corpse. “Where?”
“Can you read that thing here?”
“No,” Butters said. “This computer is too old. It has the wrong ports. We could go to one of the other offices, maybe—”
“No. We need to get out of here—now.”
“We could go to my place,” Butters suggested.
“No. Grevane will definitely have it under surveillance. Dammit.”
“Why dammit?”
“We’re short on options, and that means we have to go someplace I didn’t want to go.”
“Where?” he asked.
“A friend’s. Come on.”
“Right,” Butters said, and promptly walked over to his polka suit. He heaved up a couple of pieces. The cymbals clashed tinnily against one another.
“What are you doing?” I demanded. “We’ve got to go.”
“I’m not leaving it here for God-knows-what to mess with,” Butters said. He grunted and threw a strap awkwardly over his shoulder. The bass drum rumbled.
“Yes, you are,” I said. “We are not taking it with us. We don’t have time for this.”
Butters turned to face me, his expression stricken.
That stupid polka suit filled up most of the back of the SUV. It was a pain to move it without making a bunch of noise, but in the end we managed to slip out the back door of the Forensic Institute and make a clean getaway. I watched the road behind us carefully, until I was sure that I wasn’t being followed. Then I headed for the campus area, and Billy’s apartment.
I pulled into the apartment’s parking lot, leaned out, and yelled, “Hey!”
A young man with arms and legs a few sizes too large to match his body appeared from behind the corner of the building, frowning. He was dressed in sweats, a T-shirt, and boat shoes, standard easily discarded werewolf wardrobe for troubled times. He flipped an untidy mop of black hair out of his eyes and leaned against the SUV’s door. “Hey, Harry.”
“Kirby,” I greeted him. “This is my friend Butters.”
Kirby nodded to Butters and asked me, “Did you spot me?”
“No, but Billy always has someone on watch outside when times are tense.”
Kirby nodded, his expression serious. “What do you need?”
“Park this beast for me. I keep running into things.”
“Sure. Billy and Georgia are upstairs.”
I got out of the car, and Butters hopped out with me. “Thanks, man.”
“Yeah,” Kirby said. He got in the SUV and frowned. He looked around at all the doors.
“The door is ajar,” the dashboard said.
“It won’t shut up,” I explained to him.
“It gets sort of Zen after a while,” Butters said brightly. “Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is a jar.”
Kirby gave him a skeptical look. I grabbed Butters by the shoulder and hauled him into the building and up to the apartment.
Billy opened the door before we even got to it, and looked out expectantly. He stepped a bit to one side, holding the door open for us, watching up and down the hallway. “Heya, Harry.”
The apartment was a typical college place—small, a couple of bedrooms, nothing permanent on the walls, furniture that wasn’t too expensive or hard to move, and equipped with an expensive entertainment center. Georgia sat on the couch reading from one of a small mountain of medical books. I walked in and introduced everyone.
“I need a computer,” I told Billy.
He arched an eyebrow at me.
I waved a hand in a vague motion. “Tell him, Butters.”
Butters pulled the jump drive from his pocket and showed it to Billy. “Anything with a USB port.”
Georgia frowned and asked, “What’s on it?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I need to know.”
She nodded. “Better let him use the one on the far wall of the computer room, Will. The farther from Harry the better.”
“Feel the love.” I sighed. I pointed at the little table next to the door and asked, “Can I make a few calls while I wait?”
“Sure.” Billy turned to Butters. “Right this way.”
They went into one of the bedrooms. Georgia went back to her book. I picked up the phone.
The phone at my place rang a dozen times before it rattled, and then Thomas slurred, “What?”
“It’s me,” I said. “You all right?”
“I was all right. I was asleep. Stupid Mouse woke me up to get the phone.”
“Any sign of visitors? Calls?”
“No and no,” he said.
“Get some more sleep,” I said.
He made a grunting noise and hung up.
I called my answering service next. They had recently phased over to stored voice mail. I was suspicious of i
t on general principles. From a purely logical standpoint, I knew my issues with technology wouldn’t extend all the way across town over the phone lines, but all the same I didn’t trust it. I would much rather have dealt with an actual person taking messages, but it cost too much now to keep someone manning the phones when voice mail could do all the work. I punched the buttons and had to go through all the menus only twice to get it to work.
Beeeeeep. “Harry, it’s Murphy. We got into Hawaii all right, and there was no problem with the hotel, so you can reach me at those contact numbers. I’ll call in again in a couple of—” Her voice broke off into a sudden high-pitched noise. “Would you stop that?” she demanded, with a lot more laughter than anger in her voice. “I’m on the phone. In a couple of days, Harry. Thanks for taking care of my pants. Er, plants, plants.” Beeeeeep.
I wondered what had caused Murphy to make a high-pitched noise and a big old Freudian slip. And I wondered what to read into the fact that she had left me a message instead of calling me at home. Probably nothing. She probably didn’t want to wake me up or something. Yeah. She was probably only thinking of me.
Beeeeep. “Harry. Mike. The Beetle will be ready at noon.” Beeeeep.
God bless Mechanic Mike. If I heard a car complaining about its closed doors being open one more time, I would have to disintegrate something.
Beeeeep. “Oh,” said a young woman’s voice. “Mister Dresden? It’s Shiela Starr. We met at Bock Ordered Books last night?” There was the sound of her taking an unsteady breath. “I wondered if I could ask for a few minutes of your time. There have been…I mean, I’m not completely certain but…I think something is wrong. Here at the store, I mean.” She let out a snippet of laughter that was half anxiety and half weariness. “Oh, hell, I probably sound crazy, but I would really like to speak to you about it. I’ll be at the shop until noon. Or you can call my apartment.” She gave me the number. “I hope you can come by the store, though. I would really appreciate it.” Beeeep.
I found myself frowning. Shiela hadn’t said it outright, but she had sounded pretty scared. That wasn’t terribly surprising, given what she’d probably seen happening right outside Bock’s shop the night before, but it made me feel uncomfortable to hear fear in her voice. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that I’m not comfortable with fear in any woman’s voice.