by Butcher, Jim
I missed my staff. I missed my duster. But I wasn’t missing the .44 revolver I drew from my coat’s pocket and aimed at the bad guys, while I raised my left hand, shaking the shield bracelet there out from under the sleeve of my coat.
I recognized one of the two gunmen, the one with the brace of pistols. His name was Bart something or other, and he was muscle for hire—cheap muscle, at that, but at least you got what you paid for. Bart was the kind of guy you called when you needed someone’s ribs broken on a budget.
The other guy was familiar, too, but I couldn’t put a name to him. Come on, it wasn’t like I hung around in outfit bars, getting to know everyone. Besides, all I really needed to know was that he’d shot Murphy.
I started walking forward, straight at them, and stopped when I was maybe fifteen feet away. By the time I got there they were finally getting the ice and snow out of their eyes. I didn’t wait for them to get their vision back. I aimed carefully and put a bullet through shotgun boy’s right knee.
He went down screaming, and kept screaming.
Bart turned toward me and raised both guns, but my shield bracelet was ready. I made an effort of will, and a hemisphere of shimmering, translucent silver force flickered to life between Bart and me. He emptied both automatics at me, but he might as well have been shooting water pistols. My shield caught every shot, and I angled it to deflect the rounds up into the air rather than into one of the houses in the neighborhood around us.
Bart’s guns clicked empty.
I lowered the shield and lifted my revolver as he fumbled at his pockets for fresh magazines. “Bart,” I chided him, “Think this one through.”
He froze in place, and then slowly moved his hands away from his pockets.
“Thank you. Guess what I want you to do next?”
He dropped his guns. Bart was in his late thirties and good-looking, tall, with the frame of a man who spent a lot of his time at the gym. He had little weasel eyes, though, dark and gleaming. They darted left and right, as if seeking possible avenues of escape.
“Don’t make me shoot you in the back, Bart,” I said. “Bullet could hit your spine, paralyze you without killing you. That would be awful.” I moseyed over to him, keeping the gun trained on him and making sure I always had a clear view of the other gunman. He was still screaming, though it had a hoarse, thready sound to it now. “Do you know who I am?”
“Dresden, Jesus,” Bart said. “Nothing personal, man.”
“You tried to kill me, Bart. That’s just about as personal as it gets.”
“It was a job,” he said. “Just a job.”
And I suddenly remembered where I’d seen the other guy before: unconscious in the hallway outside Demeter’s office at Executive Priority. He was one of Torelli’s flunkies, and he did not appear to have much more savvy than his boss.
“Job’s gonna get you killed one day, Bart,” I said. “Maybe even right now.” I called out, “Molly? How is she?”
Murphy’s voice came back to me instead of Molly’s. “I’m fine,” she said. The words were clipped, as if she were in pain. “Vest stopped all but one of the balls, and that one isn’t bad.”
“Her arm is bleeding, Harry,” Molly said, her voice shaking. “It’s stopping, but I don’t think there’s anything else I can do.”
“Murph, get back to the car. Stay warm.”
“Like hell, Harry. I will—”
I completed the sentence for her. “—go into shock. Don’t be stupid, Murph. I can’t lug your unconscious body around and keep these guys under control.”
Murphy growled something vaguely threatening under her breath, but I heard Molly say, “Here, let me help you.”
Bart’s beady eyes were all but bugging out of his head as he searched for the source of the sound of Molly’s voice. “What? What the hell?”
By now, I was sure, people in the houses around us had called the police. I was sure that the cops would be a few moments longer than usual arriving, too. I wanted to be gone by then, which meant that I didn’t have much time. But Bart didn’t have to know that. Just like Bart didn’t have a clue what he’d gotten himself involved in.
I most likely didn’t have time to grill even one of the gunmen. Torelli’s goon was hurt and probably mad as hell at me. He was probably more loyal to Torelli, too, if he was a personal retainer. That really left me only one smart option for gathering information.
I stepped forward, shifting my gun to my left hand, and held out my right. I spoke a quiet word and a sphere of fire, bright as a tiny sun, kindled to life in the air above my right hand. I turned a slow stare on Bart and stepped close to him.
The thug flinched and fell onto his ass in the snowy street.
I released the sphere of fire, and it drifted closer to Bart. “Look, big guy,” I said in an amiable tone. “I’ve had a tense couple of days. And I’ve got to tell you, burning someone’s face off sounds like a great way to relax.”
“I was just a hire!” Bart stammered, scooting back on his buttocks from the little sphere of fire. “Just a driver!”
“Hired to do what?” I asked him.
“I was just supposed to put you off the road and cover the shooter,” Bart half screamed. He pointed a finger at the wounded man. “Him.”
I spread my fingers a little wider, and the flaming sphere jumped a few inches closer to the goon’s face. “Bart, Bart. Let’s not change the focus here. This is about you and me.”
“I’m just a contractor!” Bart all but screamed, writhing to get his face farther away from the fire. “They don’t tell guys like me shit!”
“Guys like you always know more than you’re told,” I said. “So you’ve got something you can give the cops to keep yourself out of jail.”
“I don’t!” Bart said. “I swear!”
I smiled at him and pushed the fire sphere a little closer. “Inhale blue,” I said. “Exhale pink. Hey, this is relaxing.”
“Torelli!” Bart screamed, throwing up his arms. “Jesus, it was Torelli! Torelli wanted the job done! He’s been getting ready to move on Marcone!”
“Since when?” I demanded.
“I don’t know. Couple of weeks, maybe. That’s when they brought me in! Oh, Jesus!”
I closed my hand and snuffed out the sphere of fire before it could do more than scorch the sleeves of Bart’s coat. He lay there on the ground breathing roughly, and refused to lower his arms.
The sound of sirens ghosted through the streets. It was time to go.
“He been talking to anyone lately?” I demanded. “Anyone new? Setting up an alliance?”
Bart shook his head, shuddering. “I ain’t one of his full-timers. I ain’t seen nothing like that.”
“Harry!” Molly screamed.
I’d gotten too intent on the conversation with Bart, and I’d been too worried about Murphy to remember to take everybody’s guns away. The gunman on the ground had recovered his shotgun and worked the action, ejecting a spent shell and loading a new round. I spun toward him, raising my shield bracelet. The problem was that my spiffy redesigned bracelet, while better in a lot of ways than the old one, took a lot more power to use, and as a result I could bring it up only so fast. I threw myself to the ground and tried to put Bart between me and Torelli’s hitter. Bart scrambled frantically to clear the line of fire, and I knew that I wasn’t going to get the shield up in time.
Mouse must have darted off to the side at the beginning of the confrontation, because he appeared out of the shadows and came bounding through nearly three feet of snow as if he’d been running on racetrack turf. He was moving so fast that a bow wave of flying snow literally preceded him, like when a speedboat cuts through the water. He hit Torelli’s hitter just as the man pulled the trigger.
Shotguns are loud. Bart screamed an impolite word.
Mouse seized Torelli’s man by his wounded leg, the one I’d shot a minute ago, and began wrenching him around by it, shaking him as easily as a terrier shakes a rat. The goon
had another ear-piercing scream left in him, a high-pitched thing that sounded like it had come from a slaughterhouse hog. The shotgun flew from his fingers, and he began flopping like a rag doll, unconscious from the pain.
The sirens grew louder, and I pushed myself back to my feet. Bart lay on the ground, rocking back and forth and screaming. The wild shotgun blast had hit him right in the ass. There was a lot of blood on his jeans, but he didn’t seem to be gushing anything from a major artery. Granted, depending on how much of the shot he’d caught, the wound could potentially maim, cripple, or maybe even kill him if there was any internal bleeding. But there are worse places to get hit, and with all the adrenaline surging through me, it seemed pretty hilarious.
Cackling, I called to Mouse and ran for the car.
Molly already had Murph buckled into the passenger seat. I had to crawl across her to get to the driver’s side. She let out a blistering curse as I accidentally bumped her arm. The driver’s chair was practically touching the steering wheel, and for a second I thought I was going to have to push down the pedals with one hand and drive with the other, but I managed to find the lever that made the seat slide back, and the car started on the first try.
“Dammit, Dresden,” Murphy wheezed. “There were weapons involved. We have to go back.”
Mouse sailed into the backseat through the open door, and Molly closed both doors on that side of the car. I rocked the steering wheel and wiggled the Saturn loose from the snow, then started off down the street. I still had an irrational smile plastered on my face. My cheeks hurt. “Not a chance, Murphy.”
“We can’t just let them go.”
I suppressed another round of adrenaline giggles. “They aren’t going anywhere. And I’m persona non grata, remember? You want to get caught at the scene of a shooting with me mixed up in it?”
“But—”
“Dammit, Murphy,” I said, exasperated. “Do you want me to go to jail? If we go back now, Torelli’s goon tells them I shot him. They take my gun, and if they can find the bullet, or if it’s still in his leg, it’s assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Not if you were defending yourself,” Murphy grated.
“In a fair world, maybe,” I said. “As it is, if there’s no one but outfit goons there, two guys with records and a known association, both of them wounded, the cops are going to assume that they quarreled and shot each other. Two bad guys go away, you keep your job, and I don’t get pulled off of this case—which is the same thing as getting killed.” I glanced aside at her. “Who loses?”
Murphy didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Everyone loses, Harry. The law is there to protect everyone. It’s supposed to apply equally to everyone.”
I sighed and paid attention to the road. I’d drive for a few minutes to be sure we were in the clear, and then circle back to Michael’s place. “That’s wishful thinking, Murph, and you know it. Pretty sure Marcone’s lawyers love that attitude.”
“The law isn’t perfect,” she replied quietly. “But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to make it work.”
“Do me a favor,” I said.
“What?”
“Hold your nose shut, put on a Philadelphia accent, and say, ‘I am the law.’”
Murphy snorted and shook her head. I glanced aside at her. Her face was pale with pain, her eyes a little glassy. Her left arm was wrapped up in what looked like strips torn from Molly’s T-shirt.
I checked the rearview. My apprentice was, indeed, wearing nothing but a green lace bra under her winter coat. She was crouched down with both arms around Mouse, her face buried in his snow-frosted fur.
“Hey, back there,” I said. “Anyone hurt?”
Mouse yawned, but Molly checked him over anyway. “No. We’re both fine.”
“Cool,” I said. I looked over my shoulder for a second to give Molly a smile. “Nice veil back there. Fast as hell. You did good, grasshopper.”
Molly beamed at me. “Did my face look like that when you did that little ball-of-fire thing to me?”
“I prefer to think of it as a little ball of sunshine,” I said. “And you were stoic compared to that guy, grasshopper. You did a good job too, furface,” I told Mouse. “I owe you one.”
Mouse opened his mouth in a doggy grin and wagged his tail. It thumped against Molly, scattering a little snow against bare skin. She yelped and burst into a laugh.
Murphy and I traded a look. If the gunman had squeezed the trigger a hundredth of a second sooner or later, Murphy would be dead. The blast could have taken her in the head or neck, or torn into an artery. Without Mouse I’d probably be dead, too. And if they’d gotten me and Murphy, I doubted they’d have left Molly behind to testify against them.
That one had been close—no supernatural opposition necessary. Molly might not realize that yet, but Murphy and I did.
“How’s the arm, Murph?” I asked quietly.
“Just hit muscle,” she said, closing her eyes. “It hurts like hell, but it isn’t going to kill me.”
“You want me to drive you to the emergency room?”
Murphy didn’t answer right away. There was a lot more to the question than the words in it. Doctors are required by law to report any gunshot wound to the authorities. If Murph went in for proper medical treatment, they’d report it to the cops. And, since she was a cop, it would mean that she had to answer all kinds of questions, and it would probably mean that the truth of what happened behind us would come out.
It was the responsible, law-abiding thing to do.
“No, Harry,” she said finally, and closed her eyes.
I exhaled slowly, relieved. That answer had cost her something. My hands had started shaking on the wheel. Generally speaking I’m fine when there’s a crisis in progress. It’s afterward that it starts getting to my nerves. “Sit tight,” I said. “We’ll get you patched up.”
“Just drive,” she said wearily.
So I drove.
Chapter Twenty
“This is getting awfully murky, Harry,” Michael said, worry in his voice. “I don’t like it.”
Snow crunched under our feet as we walked from the house to the workshop. The daylight was fading as a second front hit the city, darkening the skies with the promise of more snow. “I don’t like it much either,” I replied. “But nobody came rushing up to present me with options.” I stopped in the snow. “How’s Murphy?”
Michael paused beside me. “Charity is the one who’s had actual medical training, but it seemed a simple enough injury to me. A bandage stopped the bleeding, and we cleaned the wound thoroughly. She should be careful to monitor her condition for the next few days, but I think she’ll be all right.”
“How much pain is she in?” I asked.
“Charity keeps some codeine on hand. It isn’t as strong as the painkillers at a hospital, but it should let her sleep, at least.”
I grimaced and nodded. “I’m going to hunt up the Denarians, Michael.”
He took a deep breath. “You’re going to attack them?”
“I should,” I said, a little more sharply than I’d meant to. “Because there are people who don’t deserve a second chance, Michael, and if these losers don’t qualify for the permanent shit list, I don’t know who does.”
Michael gave me a small smile. “Everyone does, Harry.”
A little shiver went through me, but I didn’t let it show on my face. I just rolled my eyes. “Right, right. Original sin,
God’s grace, I’ve heard this part before.” I sighed. “But I’m not planning to assault them. I just want to learn whatever I can about them before we square off.”
Michael nodded. “Which is why we’re standing out in the snow talking, I take it.”
“I need whatever information you can give me. And I don’t need another philosophical debate.”
Michael grunted. “I already got in touch with Father Forthill. He sent over a report on who we think might be in town with Tessa.”
I spent a couple of seconds feeling like an argumentative jerk. “Oh,” I said. “Thank you. That…that could help a lot.”
Michael shrugged. “We’ve learned to be wary of even our own intelligence. The Fallen are masters of deception, Harry. Sometimes it takes us centuries to catch one of them lying.”
“I know,” I said. “But you must have something solid.”
“A little,” he said. “We are fairly certain that Tessa and Imariel are the second-eldest of the Denarians. Only Nicodemus and Anduriel have been operating longer.”
I grunted. “Are Tessa and Nicodemus rivals?”
“Generally,” Michael replied. “Though I suppose it bears mentioning that they’re also husband and wife.”
“Match made in Hell, eh?”
“Not that it seems to mean much to either of them. They very rarely work together, and when they do it’s never good. The last time they did so, according to the Church’s records, was just before the Black Plague came to Europe.”
“Plagues? The Nickelheads did that last time they were in town.” I shook my head. “You’d expect a different tune or two in a husband-and-wife act that had been running that long.”
“Variety is the key to a happy marriage,” Michael agreed solemnly. His mouth quivered. “Nickelheads?”
“I decided their name gave them too much dignity, given what they are. I’m correcting that.”
“Those who underestimate them generally don’t survive it,” Michael said. “Be careful.”
“You know me.”
“Yes,” he said. “Where were we?”
“Plagues.”
“Ah, yes. The Nickelheads have used plagues to instigate the most havoc and confusion in the past.”
I fought off a smile that threatened my hard-ass exterior as Michael continued.
“It’s proven a successful tactic on more than one occasion. Once a plague has gained momentum, there’s almost no limit to the lives they can claim and the suffering they can inflict.”