by Butcher, Jim
“Too simple,” I said. “Too easy. He’s running some kind of game on you.”
We went through another door and then up some stairs, which opened onto the second floor.
The place was one enormous chamber almost entirely free of interior walls. There was a small gym, complete with shower rooms and a boxing ring. Inside the ring, Murphy, wearing her street clothes, stood facing a man who had inherited a portion of his DNA from a rhinoceros—and not many generations ago. He was huge and heavily muscled, his dark hair and beard in long braids. He wore an old pair of jeans and nothing else. His upper body was coated with more dark hair.
(Not like a werewolf or circus freak or anything. Just at the top end of the hirsute bell curve. A real hair ball.)
Butters froze in place, waiting.
Murphy stared steadily at the big man for several moments, her body relaxed, her eyes never blinking. He returned a blank stare of his own. Then they both moved.
I couldn’t tell who went first, but Murphy’s fist streaked toward the big guy’s groin. He twisted his hip, deflecting the blow, and when he returned it to balance, his leg scythed up in an arc that clipped the tip of Murphy’s chin. She spun away and went down.
Hair Ball did not hesitate for so much as a second. He moved toward her, fast for someone so large, and stomped his heel down toward her head.
Murphy rolled and dodged the blow, but he followed up and she had to keep rolling to stay ahead of his sledgehammer heels. She hit the edge of the boxing ring, then abruptly reversed her roll, moving toward him instead of away.
She slipped the next stomp, scissored his knee with her legs, twisted her whole body, and brought him down. Hair Ball fell like a tree, huge and slow. The boxing ring ropes shook when he landed.
Murphy came up onto all fours, scrambled a bit to one side, and then swept her foot at Hair Ball’s head. He dodged, but her kick shifted direction, her leg moving up, then straight down, bringing her heel down like a hatchet onto the hand Hair Ball was using to support his weight. Bones snapped.
Hair Ball howled, scrambled to his feet, and started swinging wildly at her. Murphy dodged and slipped one blow after another, and at one point abruptly turned and drove her heel into Hair Ball’s solar plexus.
The blow rocked him back a step, but Murphy followed it too closely, too recklessly. Hair Ball recovered from the kick almost instantly, slapped a blow aside, and seized her arm. He turned and flung her, one-handed, over the top rope of the ring and into the nearest wall. She hit it with a yell and bounced off onto the floor.
“Dead,” I snarled, my fists clenched. I started forward and took three or four whole steps before I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to hit the guy. Or blow him up. Or send him on a vacation to another reality. Hell, I couldn’t even sneak up on him and shout, “Boo!”
“Harry, wait,” Butters hissed. “It’s okay.”
Murphy picked herself up from the floor, moving slowly. As she did, the giant Hair Ball came over to the nearest side of the ring, holding his right hand in his left. Murphy brushed some dust from her clothing and turned to face him. Her blue eyes were steady and cold, her mouth set in a small smile. Her teeth were white, and rich red blood quivered on her lower lip where the impact had split it open. She wiped the blood off on her sleeve without looking away from Hair Ball. “Three?” she asked.
“Broke all four,” he said, moving his right hand a little by way of demonstration. “Took out my best sword hand. Good. If you hadn’t gotten greedy for the kill, maybe you’d have taken this round.”
Murphy snorted. “You’ve been drinking bad mead, Skaldi Skjeldson.”
That made Hair Ball smile. “Sword tomorrow?”
Murphy nodded. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, as if each expected the other to suddenly charge the second the other turned his back. Then, with no detectable signal passing between them, they simultaneously nodded again and turned away from each other, relaxing.
“Butters,” rumbled Skaldi Hair Ball. If he really had broken fingers, it didn’t look like they were bothering him much. “When are you going to get in this ring and train like a man?”
“About five minutes after I get a functional lightsaber,” Butters replied easily, much to Hair Ball’s amusement. Then the little medical examiner nodded to Murphy and said, “Can we talk in the conference room?”
“Sure,” she said. She walked by the ring and bumped (left) fists with Skaldi. Then she led Butters and me out of the gym, down another hallway, and into a long, narrow conference room. She shut the door behind us, and Butters popped Bob’s flashlight onto the table. His eyelights winked on again, and I saw Murphy react visibly when that light revealed my presence.
She stiffened a little, looking at me, and her eyes showed a sudden weariness and pain. She took a deep breath through her nose and closed her eyes for a second. Then she took off her jacket, moving gingerly, and said, “Hi, Harry.”
Butters put the radio on the table and I said, “Hi, Murph.”
She was wearing thin, light padding under the jacket—like the stuff I’d seen on stuntmen on a case I’d done not long after I’d gone into business. So her full-contact practice hadn’t been as vicious as it had looked. She’d be covered in bruises, but the impact with the wall hadn’t actually been likely to break her back. Her skull, maybe, but not her back.
“You okay?”
She rolled one shoulder with a grimace of discomfort. “I will be.”
“Big guy like that going to town on you,” I growled. “Someone needs to push his face in.”
Her eyes glittered as she gave me a sharp look. “Dresden . . . when, exactly, am I going to fight someone my size and strength?”
“Um.”
“If you want to wrestle hostile mooses—”
“Moose,” Butters corrected absently. “Singular and plural, same word.”
“Gorillas,” Murphy continued, hardly breaking stride, “then the best way to train for it is by wrestling slightly less hostile gorillas. Skaldi’s two hundred pounds heavier than me, almost two feet taller, and he has going on two millennium—”
“Millennia,” Butters said. “Millennium is the singular.”
Murphy pushed a breath out through her nose and said, “Millennia of experience in breaking the backs of annoying little doctors with annoying little grammar fetishes.”
Butters grinned.
“I’m not going to beat him, Harry. Ever. That isn’t the point.” She looked away and her voice became quiet. “The point is that the world isn’t getting any kinder. A girl’s got to take care of herself.”
The expression on her face? It hurt. Hearing the words that went with it felt like a knife peeling back layers of skin. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t let it show. Murphy would have been offended at the notion that she needed my protection, and if she thought I felt guilty for not being there to protect her, to help her, she’d be downright angry.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t think Murphy was a princess in a tower. But at the end of the day, she was just one person, standing in defiance of powers that would regard her with the same indifference as might an oncoming tsunami, volcanic eruption, or earthquake. Life is precious, fragile, fleeting—and Murphy’s life was one of my favorites.
“Okay, Harry,” Murphy said. “Where do we get started?”
I felt awkward standing there while she and Butters sat at the table, but it wasn’t like I could pull out a chair. “Um. Maybe we get started with what you know about my . . . my shooting.”
She nodded and pulled on her cop face—her expression professionally calm, detached, analytical. “We don’t have much, officially speaking,” she said. “I came to pick you up and found the blood and a single bullet hole. There wasn’t quite enough to declare it a murder scene. Because the vic . . . because you were on the boat and it was in motion, there was no way to extrapolate precisely where the bullet came from. Probably a nearby rooftop. Because the bullet apparently beg
an to tumble as it passed through your body, it left asymmetric holes in the walls of the boat. But forensics thinks it was something between a .223 assaultrifle round and a .338 magnum-rifle round; more likely the latter than the former.”
“I never got into rifles. What does that mean?”
“It means a sniper rifle or a deer rifle,” Butters clarified. “Not necessarily military. There are plenty of civilian weapons that fire rounds in those calibers.”
“We never found the bullet,” Murphy said. She took a deep breath. “Or the body.”
I noticed that both Murph and Butters were staring at me very intently.
“Uh,” I said. “I . . . sort of did that whole tunnel-of-light thing—which is a crock, by the way.” I bit down on a mention of Murphy’s father. “Um, I was sent back to solve the murder. Which . . . sort of implies a death. And they said my body wasn’t available, so . . .”
Murphy looked down and nodded.
“Huh,” Butters said, frowning. “Why send you back?”
I shrugged. “Said what came next wasn’t for whiners or rubberneckers.”
Murphy snorted. “Sounds like something my father would say.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Heh.”
Butters arched an eyebrow. His dark eyes flickered between me and Murphy, and thoughtful lines appeared on his face.
“Anyway,” I said. “That’s what you know officially, right? So . . . what else do you know?”
“I know it wasn’t Marcone,” Murphy said. “All of his troubleshooters have alibis that check out. So do he and Gard and Hendricks. I know which building the shot probably came from, and it wasn’t an easy one.”
“Four hundred and fifty yards,” Butters said. “Which means it was probably a professional gunman.”
“There are amateurs who can shoot that well,” Murphy said.
“As a rule, they don’t do it from buildings at their fellow Americans,” Butters replied. “Look, if we assume it’s an amateur, it could be anyone. But if we assume it was a professional—which is way more likely, in any case—then it gives us the beginning of an identity, and could lead us back to whomever he works for.”
“Even if we do assume that,” Murphy said, “I don’t have the access to information that I used to. We’d need to review TSA video records, security cameras—all kinds of things I can’t get to anymore.”
“Your brother-in-law can,” I said. “Dick can.”
“Richard,” she corrected me. “He hates that nickname.”
“Dick who?” Butters asked, looking between us.
I said, “Her brother-in-law,” at the same time she said, “My exhusband.”
Butters’s brow arched even farther and he shook his head. “Man. Catholics.”
Murphy gave him a gimlet look. “Richard runs by the book. He won’t help a civilian.”
“Come on, Murph,” I said. “You were married to the guy. You’ve got to have some dirt on him.”
She shook her head. “It isn’t a crime to be an asshole, Harry. If it was, I’d have put him away for life.”
Butters cleared his throat. “We could ask—”
“No,” Murphy and I said at the same time, and continued speaking over each other.
“The day I ask for that bastard’s help will be the day I—”
“—told you before, over and over, that just because he’s reasonable doesn’t mean he’s—”
“—a murderer and a drug dealer and a pimp, and just because Chicago’s corrupt government can’t put him away doesn’t mean—”
“—you were smarter than that,” Murphy finished.
Butters lifted his hands mildly. “Okay, okay. I was on board at no. No going to Marcone for help.” He paused and looked around the room as if he’d never seen it before. “Because that would be . . . unprecedented.”
“Wally,” Murphy said, one eyebrow arching dangerously.
He held up his hands again. “Uncle. I don’t understand your reasoning, but okay.”
“You think Marcone was behind it, Harry?” Murphy asked.
I shrugged. “Last time I saw him, he said he didn’t need to kill me. That I’d get myself killed without any help from him.”
Murphy frowned. It made her lip hurt and she winced, reaching up. The wince made it hurt worse, apparently, because fresh blood appeared. “Dammit. Well. You can take that a couple of different ways, can’t you?”
“Like how?”
Murphy looked at me. “Like maybe Marcone knew something was happening already, and that’s why he said he didn’t need to kill you. It wasn’t him, but it was still something he was aware of.”
I grunted. Marcone ran Chicago like his own personal clubhouse. He had legions of employees, allies, and flunkies. His awareness of what happened in his city wasn’t supernatural; it was better than that. He was rational, intelligent, and more prepared for a crisis than any man I’d ever seen. If the Eagle Scouts had some sort of Sith equivalent, Marcone was it.
If someone’s wet-work specialist had come to town, Marcone was very likely to have learned of it. He and his underworld network missed little.
“Dammit,” Murphy said, evidently coming to the same conclusions I had. “Now I have to talk to the scum.” She got out her little notepad and scribbled on it. “Butters, you said that Lindquist’s house had burned down?”
“Big-time,” said Butters.
I nodded. “According to the ghosts hanging around it, the Grey Ghost showed up—I didn’t tell you about the Grey Ghost, did I?”
“Mr. Lindquist filled us in after the shooting,” Butters said.
“Oh, right. Anyway, it showed up with several mortals and snatched him. We’ve got to get him back.”
Murphy nodded, still writing. “What happens if we don’t?”
“A bunch of serial killer–type ghosts start wandering around Chicago, looking for a good time. Ghosts like that can manifest—make themselves the next-best thing to real, Murph. Like the Nightmare. People will get hurt. A lot of them.”
Murphy’s mouth thinned into a line. She wrote on her notepad. “We’ll do triage in a minute. What else?”
“I found the gang who shot up your house last night,” I said.
The tip of Murphy’s pencil snapped against the notepad. She looked up at me, and her eyes were cold, furious. She spoke in a very quiet voice. “Oh?”
“Yeah,” I said. I paused for a moment to think about what I was going to say: Murphy’s temper was not a force to be invoked lightly. “I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about them anymore.”
“Why?” she asked, in her cop voice. “Did you kill them?”
There’d been a little too much intensity in that question. Wow. Murphy was clearly only too ready to go after these guys the minute she knew where they were.
I glanced at Butters, who looked like someone sitting near an armed explosive.
“No,” I said, working out my words carefully. If Murphy’s fuse was really as short as it seemed, I didn’t want her charging off to deal with Fitz and his poor crew in true Viking tradition. “But they don’t have the resources they had before. I don’t think they’re going to hurt anybody in the immediate future.”
“That’s your professional opinion, is it?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me for a minute, then said, “Abby was standing on my patio last night when they came by. She took a round in the belly during that attack. She didn’t get down fast enough. They don’t know if she’s going to live or not.”
I thought of the plump, cheerful little woman, and swallowed. “I . . . I didn’t know, Murph. I’m sorry.”
She continued speaking as if I hadn’t said anything. “There was a retiree living in the house behind mine. He used to give me tomatoes he grew in his garden every summer. He wasn’t as lucky as Abby. The bullet hit him in the neck while he was sleeping in bed. He had enough time to wake up, terrified, and knock the handset of his phone out of its cradle before he bled out.�
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Hell’s bells. That put a different spin on things. I mean, I had been hoping to go for a no-harm, no-foul argument with Murphy. But if blood had been spilled and lives lost . . . Well. I knew Murphy. Whether or not she was a cop anymore, she wasn’t going to back away.
“Where are they?” she asked.
“This is not a time to kick down doors,” I told her. “Please hear me out.”
Her hand tightened into a fist, but she visibly took control of her anger, took a deep breath, and then nodded. “Go ahead.”
I told her about Fitz and his gang. I told her about Aristedes.
“I notice, Harry,” she said, “that you didn’t tell me where they are.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I, uh. I sorta told the kid I would help him. That you would help him.”
Murphy narrowed her eyes. “You did what?”
“They’re kids, Murph,” I said. “In over their heads. They need help.”
“They’ve killed at least one person, maybe more,” Murphy said. “There are still laws in this town, Dresden.”
“Send the cops in and it’ll get ugly. I’m not sure how much juice their boss has, but even if he can’t shoot, he’d be a nightmare for the police—even SI.”
Murphy frowned. “How sure are you about that?”
“Guys like him use fear and violence as daily tools. He won’t think twice about hurting a cop.”
Murphy nodded. “Then I’ll deal with him.”
“Murph, I know you can handle yourself, but—”
“Dresden, I’ve dealt with two men since you . . . since the shooting, who were skilled enough for Carlos to call them the next-best thing to full Council-quality warlocks. I’ve handled several lesser talents, too. The Fomor like to use them as officers and commanders. I know what I’m doing.”
“You’ve killed them,” I said quietly. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
She looked away. It was a moment before she answered. “With someone that powerful . . . there’s not really a choice. If you try to take them alive, they have plenty of time to kill you.”