Brief Cases: The Dresden Files

by Jim Butcher

  “But …” My protest trailed off weakly.

  “If you have an alternative, I would be more than willing to consider it.”

  Silence stretched.

  “I don’t,” I said quietly.

  “Then do your duty,” Mab said.

  I opened the door and looked back at her. “I don’t yet,” I said, and I said it hard. “This isn’t over.”

  Mab gave me the slow blink again. Then she inclined her head by a fraction of an inch, her expression pensive.

  I turned and left the broken form of Carlos Ramirez behind me to steal away the Miksani’s children.

  And I couldn’t stop crying.

  When you set out to write a wizard, there are a lot of issues you have to face: How does the magic work? Where did he get his power? What is the nature of magic in relation to the universe? How do people regard magic in that story world? And on and on and on. Those are pretty obvious questions. They make for some really fun and occasionally thought-provoking tales.

  But as story devices, wizards also have some inherent problems with their popular perception: They are generally loner figures, living in some tower and only occasionally interacting with the world—which works great when the wizard is a supporting figure, and is complete garbage when it comes to having a wizard as a central character. Wizards have tremendous power—which is great when it’s coming from a supporting character who has limitations that mean he can only occasionally do something. But, again, when casting a wizard as the central character, from a storytelling standpoint all of that power is a liability, not an asset. Protagonists have to be challenged, struggle, and grow, not just mow down everything that gets in their way with their Tenser’s Mystic Inflammable Bulldozer spell.

  So, I knew I was going to have to subvert some of these popular perceptions from the very get-go. To do that, I turned to a different set of archetypes: magicians. Short version, there are three archetypes of performing magicians: the dark and mysterious guy, the glitzy professional-showman guy, and the apparently incompetent buffoon. The popular perception of wizards definitely fits in that first category—but it ain’t a simple trick to write dark and mysterious in a first-person protagonist. By its very nature, first-person viewpoint is incredibly intimate, and hiding things from the audience while using that viewpoint works against its deepest strength. So dark and mysterious was out. Glitzy was out, too, because I’m not sure Burt Wonderstone could carry a series.

  So I basically went with option three, the buffoon. And the way I chose to do it was to make my protagonist a young, clumsy puppy of a wizard who was absolutely incompetent at real life, in this case reflected in how his magical powers disrupt modern technology. Once I knew I was doing that, it seemed clear that I had to go all in: While I needed him to be pretty savvy about matters pertaining to the wild side of life so that he could be good at his job, I wanted to make him into a character who was constantly challenged by the most mundane issues—paying his bills, fixing his car, dealing with his landlord, struggling with taxes and the DMV, and all the dumb stuff we grown-ups have to do, which, in our honest moments, we admit that we just hate doing and would much rather have some milk and a cookie and a nap.

  This tale, set after the events of Skin Game, chronicles the latest clash between the mighty wizard Dresden and the dread forces of the Real World: in this case, a summons to jury duty.

  “I don’t believe it. They found me,” I muttered grimly. I looked left and right, checking around me for lurking threats. “I don’t know how, but they did it. I’ve been back in the world for less than a month, and they found me.”

  Will Borden, engineer and werewolf, set down a heavy box of books on the kitchen table and looked at me with concern. Then he came over and looked down at the letter in my hands before snorting. “Such a drama queen.”

  “I’m serious!” I said, and shook the letter. “I’m being hunted! By my own government!”

  “It’s a summons to jury duty, Harry,” Will said. He opened the fridge and helped himself to a bottle of Mac’s ale. He had to navigate around a few boxes to do it. I didn’t think I’d had much out on the island, but it’s amazing how many boxes it takes to hold not much. It had taken most of a day to ferry it all from the island into Molly’s apartment in town. She rarely used the place these days and had given it to me to live in until I found my own digs.

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  “Too bad,” Will said. “You got it. Look, you probably won’t be selected anyway.”

  “Summons,” I said, glowering. “It’s a freaking command. They want to see what a real summoning is, I could show them.”

  Will laughed at me. He was younger than me, shorter than average, and built like a linebacker. “How dare they intrude upon the solitude of the mighty wizard Dresden?”

  “Nngh,” I said, and tossed the paper onto the top of a box of unopened envelopes—my mail, which had accumulated for more than a year, most of it junk. Some of it had been at the post office. More had been set aside by the new owner of my old address, formerly Mrs. Spunkelcrief’s boardinghouse, and now the Better Future Society. I hadn’t been able to stomach asking the new owner for my mail, but Butters had gotten it for me.

  “Maybe I won’t show up,” I said. I paused. “What happens if I don’t show up?”

  “You can be held in contempt of court or fined or jailed or something,” Will said. He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Now that I think about it, they actually leave it kind of vague, what’s going to happen.”

  “Good threats are like that. Scarier when you can use your imagination.”

  “The government isn’t the mob, Harry.”

  “Aren’t they?” I asked. “Pay them money every year to protect you, and God help you if you don’t.”

  Will rolled his eyes and got another bottle from the fridge. He opened it for me and passed it over. “Mac would kill you for drinking this cold, et cetera and so on.”

  “It’s hot out,” I said, and took a long pull. “Especially for this early in the year. And he would just give me that disappointed grunting sound. Damned government. Not like I don’t have things to do.”

  “Is justice worth having?” Will asked.

  I eyed him.

  “Is it?”

  “Mostly,” I said. Warily.

  “Well, that’s why there’s a legal system.”

  “What does justice have to do with the legal system?”

  “Do you really want to tear it all apart and start over from 1776?” Will asked.

  “Not particularly. I have books to read.”

  He spread his hands. “The courts aren’t perfect,” Will said, “but they can do okay a lot of the time.” He reached into the box and picked up the summons. “And if you really think the courts aren’t working, maybe you should do something about it. If only there was some way you could directly participate …”

  I snatched the letter back from him with a scowl. “Think you’re smart, huh?”

  “You’re kind of a solitary hunter by nature, Harry,” Will said. “I’m more of a pack creature. We’re smart about different things, that’s all.”

  I read a little more. “There’s a dress code, too?” I demanded.

  Will covered up his mouth with his hand and coughed, but I could see that he was laughing at me.

  “Well,” I said firmly, “I am not wearing a tie.”

  Will lowered his hand, his expression carefully locked into sober agreement. “Viva la revolution.”

  SO I WENT to court.

  It meant a trek downtown to the Richard J. Daley Center courthouse, whose name did little to inspire confidence in me that justice might indeed be done. Ah well. I wasn’t here to create disorder. I was here to preserve disorder.

  I went up to the seventeenth floor, turned in my card along with about a gazillion other people, none of whom seemed at all enthusiastic about being there. I got a cup of bad coffee and grimaced at it while waiting around for a while. Then a
guy in a black muumuu showed up and recounted the plot of My Cousin Vinny.

  Okay, it was a robe, and the guy was a judge, and he gave us a brief outline of the format of the trial system, but it’s not nearly as entertaining to say it that way.

  Then they started calling names. They said they only needed about half of us, and when they had been going for a while, I thought I was about to get lucky and get sent home, but then some clerk called my name, and I had to shuffle forward to join a file of other jurors.

  There were lines and questions and a lot of waiting around. Long story short: I wound up sitting in the box seats in a Cook County courtroom as the wheels of justice started to grind for a guy named Hamilton Luther.

  THE CASE WAS being handled by one of the new ADAs. I used to keep track of those people pretty closely, but then I was mostly dead for a while, and then living in exile, and my priorities shifted. When you live in a city with a reputation for political corruption as pervasive as Chicago’s, and work in a business that sometimes treads close to the limit of the law (or twenty miles past it), it’s wise to keep an eye on the public servants. Most of them were decent enough, I guess, by which I mean they were your basic politicians—they had just enough integrity to keep up appearances and appease political sponsors, and at the end of the day they had an agenda to pursue.

  Once in a while, though, you got one who was thoroughly in someone’s pocket. The outfit owned some of those types. The unions owned some others. The corporations had the rest.

  The new kid was in his late twenties, clean-cut, thoroughly shaven, and looked a little distracted as he assembled notes and folders around him with the help of an attractive female assistant. His grey suit was tailored to him, maybe a little too well tailored for someone just out of law school, and his maroon tie was made of expensive silk that matched the kerchief tucked into his breast pocket. He had big ears and a large Adam’s apple, and his expression was painfully earnest.

  On the other side of the aisle, at the defendant’s table, sat a study in contrast. He was a man in his fifties, and if he’d ever been in college it had been on a wrestling scholarship. He had shoulders like a bull moose, hunched with muscle, and his arms ended in fists the size of sledgehammer heads. The dark skin on his knuckles was white and lumpy with old scars, the kind you get in back-alley fistfights, not in a boxing ring. He had shaved his head. There was stubble around the edges but the top was shiny. He had a heavy brow, a nose that had been broken on a biannual basis, and his suit was cheap and ill-fitting. He had a couple of folders on the table with him, along with a pair of thick books. The man looked bleakly uneasy and kept flicking nervous glances across the aisle.

  If that guy was a lawyer, I was an Ewok. But he sat alone.

  So where was his public defender?

  “All rise!” a large man in a uniform said in a voice pitched to carry. “Court is now in session, the Honorable Mavis Jefferson presiding.”

  Everyone stood up. After a second, so did I.

  I guess you could say I’m not really a joiner.

  The judge came in and settled down at her bench, and the rest of us sat, too. She was a blocky woman in her early sixties, with skin the color of coffee grounds and bags under her eyes that made me think of Spike the bulldog in those old cartoons. If you didn’t look closely, you’d think she was bored out of her mind. She sat without moving much, her eyes half closed, scanning over a document on her own desk through a pair of reading glasses. There was something serpentine about her eyes, a suggestion of formidable, remorseless rationality. This was a woman who had seen a great deal, had been amused by very little of it, and who would not be easily made a fool. She finished scanning the document and glanced up at the defendant.

  “Mr. Luther?” she said.

  The bruiser in the bad suit rose. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I see that you have taken it upon yourself to serve as your own defender,” she said. Her tone was bored, entirely neutral. “While this is your right under the law, I strongly advise you to reconsider. Given the severity of the charges against you, I would think that a professional attorney would offer you a much more comprehensive and capable legal defense.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Luther said. “I thought that, too. But all the public defender wanted to do was plea bargain, ma’am. And I want to have my say.”

  “That, too, is your right,” the judge said. For a second, I thought I saw a flicker of something like regret on her face, but it vanished into neutrality again almost instantly. Her tone took on the measured cadence of a cop reading formal Miranda rights. “If you go through with this, you will not be able to move for a mistrial based on the fact that you do not have adequate representation. This trial will proceed and its outcome will be binding. Do you understand this warning as I have stated it to you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Luther said. “Ain’t no take-backsies. I want to represent myself, ma’am.”

  The judge nodded. “Then you may be seated.” Luther sat. The judge turned toward the prosecutor and nodded to him. “Counselor.” There was a pause about a second and a half long, and then she repeated, in a mildly annoyed tone, “Counselor?” Another impatient pause. “Counselor Tremont, am I interrupting you?”

  The young ADA in the fine suit blinked, looked up from his notes, and hastily rose. “No, Your Honor, please excuse me. I’m ready to begin.”

  “Thank goodness,” the judge said in a dry tone. “My granddaughter graduates from high school in three weeks. You may proceed.”

  Tremont flushed. “Um, yes. Thank you, Your Honor.” The young man cleared his throat, adjusted his suit jacket, and walked over to face the jury box. He held up a glossy professional headshot of a handsome man in his thirties and showed it to us.

  “Meet Curtis Black,” Tremont said. “He was a stockbroker. He liked to go rock climbing on the weekends. He volunteered in a soup kitchen three weekends a month, and he once won an all-expenses-paid vacation to Florida by making a half-court shot during halftime at a Bulls game. He was well liked by his professional associates and had an extensive family and was owned by an Abyssinian cat named Purrple.

  “You have doubtless noted my use of the past tense. Was. Liked. Volunteered. But I have to use the past tense, because one year ago, Curtis Black was brutally murdered in an alley in Wrigleyville near the corner of Southport and Grace. Mr. Black was bludgeoned to death with a bowling pin. His skull was smashed flat in the back, and the autopsy showed that it had been shattered into a dozen pieces, like plate glass.”

  Tremont took a moment to let the graphic description sink in. The room was very still.

  “The state intends to prove,” he said, “that the defendant, Hamilton Luther, murdered Mr. Black in cold blood. That he followed him into the alley, seized the bowling pin from a refuse bin, and struck him from behind, causing him to fall to the ground. That he then proceeded to continue beating Mr. Black’s skull with twelve to fifteen heavy blows while Mr. Black lay stunned and helpless beneath him.

  “This is a serious crime,” Tremont continued. “But Mr. Luther has a long history of violent offenses. Forensic evidence will prove that Mr. Luther was at the crime scene, that he left his fingerprints on the weapon, and that the forensic profile of the attack matches his height and build closely. Eyewitnesses and security cameras witnessed him fleeing the alley shortly after Mr. Black entered it, the victim’s blood literally on his hands. The evidence will prove Mr. Luther’s guilt beyond any reasonable doubt and, in the end, you must find him guilty of this horrible crime. Thank you.”

  “Thank you, Counselor,” the judge said, as Tremont returned to his seat. “Mr. Luther, you may present your opening statement.”

  Luther rose slowly. He glanced around the jury box, licked his lip nervously, and approached the jury.

  “Ladies and—and gentlemen,” he said, stammering a little. “I know I got a past. I did a dime in Stateville for putting a guy in the hospital. But that was my past. I ain’t that man no more.” He
swallowed and gestured vaguely over his shoulder, toward Tremont. “This guy is going to tell you about all this CSI stuff that says I did it. But all those reports and pictures don’t tell the whole story. They leave a lot of stuff out. I ain’t a lawyer. But I’m gonna tell you the whole story. And then … then I’ll see what you think about it, I guess.” He hovered for a moment longer, awkwardly, then nodded and said, “Okay. I’m done.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Luther,” the judge said. “You may return to your seat.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Luther said, and did so.

  “Mr. Luther, you are charged with first-degree murder,” the judge said, still in her rote-memory voice. “How do you plead?”

  “I …” Luther looked down at some notes in front of him and then up again. “Not guilty, ma’am.”

  Hell’s bells.

  The full legal might of the state of Illinois was being thrown at Luther. The man seemed sincere enough. But apparently the only defense he had to offer was a story. A story from an ex-con, no less.

  I wanted to hear him out. I knew all about being judged for things that were out of my control. But I was pretty sure Luther was going back to jail.

  “Mr. Tremont,” the judge said. “Is the prosecution ready to begin?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Tremont said.

  “Very well,” she said. “You may call your first witness.”

  TREMONT SPENT THE afternoon driving nails into Luther’s coffin, thoroughly, methodically, and one at a time.

  He did exactly what he said he would do. He brought out each case of physical evidence, point by point, and linked Luther undeniably to the scene of the crime. Luther had been photographed by a grainy black-and-white security camera coming out of the alley’s far side, spattered in blood. His fingerprints were on the murder weapon, in the blood of the victim. The officer who arrested him had taken blood samples from his skin and clothing matching those of the victim. He additionally gave testimony of Luther’s past criminal record, which had landed him in jail as a young man.