Brief Cases

by Jim Butcher

  The little guy has grown a lot over the course of this story. He was entirely unexpected, and I just couldn’t be more pleased with how his story is going. Here’s a small but important piece of Butters’s tale: his first day on the job as a Knight.

  My name is Waldo Butters, and I am a Jedi Knight, like my father before me.

  Okay, so that isn’t exactly, technically, in a completely legal sense true. I mean, my dad was actually a podiatrist. But I’m as close to the real deal as anyone is likely to ever see in this world. I’m an actual Knight, anyway. Or, at least, I was training to be one, when on a Thursday morning I first heard the Call.

  Only I didn’t hear it, exactly, technically, in a completely legal sense. … Look, maybe I should just tell the story.

  OF ALL THE training Michael Carpenter had me doing, the cardio part was what I liked best. Then again, my main Pandora station plays only polka music, so what the heck do I know?

  I ran along through the early-dawn light in Bucktown while the city began to wake up. The training belt around my waist tugged at my balance constantly and unpredictably. It was hooked to a bungee cord attaching me to Michael’s bicycle, being pulled along behind me as I ran. Michael would swerve and brake randomly. Sometimes he’d hold the brake for several strides, and I’d have to shift to much more powerful strides to keep moving. It was demanding work. Constantly being forced to alter my balance meant that I could never fall into a nice, efficient rhythm and I had to pay attention to every single step.

  The first several weeks, that had been a problem, but I was getting used to it now. Or, rather, I was getting used to it until I saw something impossible, forgot to pay attention, got pulled off-balance by my bungee cord, and crashed into a plastic recycling bin waiting by the side of the street.

  Michael immediately came to a stop, swinging his stiff leg out like an improvised kickstand. He was action-hero-sized, moving toward his late fifties, and had his walking cane strapped to the backpack he wore. “Waldo?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

  I stumbled upright again, panting. “I, uh.” I peered down the street. “I’m not really sure.”

  Michael looked in the same direction I was, frowning. He pursed his lips thoughtfully.

  “You don’t see that, do you?” I asked.

  “See what?”

  I squinted. Took off my glasses. Cleaned them on a corner of my shirt that wasn’t covered in sweat. Put them back on and checked again. It was still there. “If you could see it, you wouldn’t have to ask that.”

  He nodded seriously. “Tell me what you see.”

  “That homeless guy on the bench?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I took a breath and said, “There’s a big yellow exclamation point floating over his head.” After a brief pause, I added, “I’m not crazy. My mother had me tested.”

  Michael sat back a little on the bike’s seat and rubbed at his beard pensively. He missed the reference. “Hmmm. Odd. Does that bring anything to mind for you, personally?”

  I snorted. “Yeah, it’s what every NPC in every MMORPG ever looks like when they have a quest to give you.”

  “There were a great many letters in that, and not much that I understood,” he said soberly.

  “Video games,” I clarified. “When a game character has a quest for you, that’s how the game shows you where the quest begins. A big floaty exclamation point over their heads. You go talk to them and that’s how the quest starts.”

  Michael barked out a laugh and gave the sky a small smile and a shake of his head. “Well, then, Sir Waldo. You’ve just had your first Call.”

  “My what, now?”

  “Your first Call to a quest, I suppose.”

  I blinked. “Uriel talks to the Knights through video-game symbolism?”

  “As far as I know, Uriel talks in person. The Call comes from higher up.”

  “What?” I asked. “You mean, like … God? God speaks video game?”

  “When the Almighty speaks to men, He always does it in voices they can understand,” Michael said. “When I felt the Call, it was always a still, small voice that would come to me when I was in prayer or otherwise quiet. Sometimes I’d have a very strong impression of a name or a face, and a direction that I needed to go.” He nodded toward the transient. “Apparently, you have been Called to help that man.”

  “Put like that, it does seem to be fairly obvious.” I swallowed. “Um. I know we’ve been training pretty hard, but … am I really ready for this?”

  He reached into the backpack, withdrew an old leather messenger bag from it, and offered it to me. “Let’s find out.”

  I swallowed. Then I nodded and slung the bag over one shoulder. I reached into it and patted the old, worn wooden handle inside, and then walked over to the sleeping man. He wore an army-surplus field jacket and old Desert Storm–style khaki BDUs, and he had a beard that birds could have nested in. There wasn’t much grey in it, but his skin was weathered enough to make it difficult to guess his age. Forty?

  By the time I got within five feet of him, I could see that something was wrong. There was a lot of vomit on the slatted bench by the man’s head and the ground beneath. One of his eyes was half open, dilated, and his breath rasped in and out.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, buddy. Can you hear me?”

  No response.

  I knelt down and took his wrist, feeling for his pulse. It was hard, because it was thready and irregular. “Hey,” I said, gently. “Hey, man, can you hear me?”

  He let out a little groan. I checked his other eye. The pupil was normal in that one.

  I didn’t enjoy the work of being an actual physician, professionally. I liked examining corpses for the state of Illinois. Corpses never lie to you, never give you opaque answers, never ask stupid questions, or ignore what you tell them they need to do. Corpses are simple.

  And this guy, who wasn’t nearly as old as I had thought when I walked up to him, was going to be one if he didn’t get attention fast.

  “Call nine-one-one,” I said to Michael. “I think he’s had a stroke, maybe an overdose. Either way, he’s lucky he slept on his side or he’d have choked on his own vomit by now. He needs an ER.”

  Michael nodded once, hobbled a few feet away, and produced a cell phone from a leather case on his belt. He called and began speaking quietly.

  “Okay, buddy,” I said to the guy. “Hang in there. We’re calling the good guys and they’re going to help y—”

  I don’t even know what happened. One second he was lying there, a wheezy vegetable, and the next he was coming at me hard, his ragged-nailed hands grasping for my throat while he gurgled, “No hospital!”

  A few months ago, I’d have gotten strangled right there.

  But a few months ago, I hadn’t been training in hand-to-hand with Michael’s wife, Charity.

  It takes several thousand repetitions of a motion to develop motor-memory pathways in the brain to the point where you can consider the motion a reflex. To that end, Charity, who was into jujitsu, had made me practice several different defenses a hundred times each, every day, for the past two months. She didn’t practice by just going through a motion slowly and gradually speeding up, either. She just came at me like she meant to disassemble me, and if I didn’t defend successfully it freaking hurt.

  You learn fast in those circumstances—and one of the basic defenses she’d drilled into me had been against a simple front choke.

  Both of my forearms snapped up, knocking the grasping hands away, even as I ducked my head and rolled my body to one side. He kept coming through the space where I’d been. His arm hit my face and sent my glasses spinning off me.

  I fought down a decades-old panic as the world shifted from its usual shapes into sudden streaks and blurs of color.

  Look. I wear some big, thick glasses. I’m not quite legally blind without them. I know, because after I gave my optometrist a very expensive bottle of whiskey, he told me so. But without them …
<
br />   Without them, it’s pretty tough to get anything done. Or see anything more than an arm’s length away. Seriously. I’d once mistaken a dressmaker’s mannequin for my girlfriend. Reading was all but impossible without them. Reading.

  My great nightmare is to be stuck somewhere without them, trapped, peering at the sea of fuzzy things that couldn’t possibly be identified. When I’d been a kid, the first thing the bullies did, always, was knock my glasses off. Always. It was like they’d all had a sixth sense or something.

  Then they would start having fun with me. That wasn’t a delight, either, but it was the not knowing what was coming that made it all worse.

  Inside, that kid started screaming and wailing, but there was no time to indulge him. I had a problem to solve—and the Carpenters had given me the tools I needed to solve it.

  For instance, they’d taught me that once things are this close, you don’t really get a lot done with your eyes when it comes to fighting. It was all speed and reflex and knowing where the enemy was and what he was doing by feel. I was sloppy and it took me a second, but I managed to lock the bum’s arm out straight. I kept it moving, got my body to twist at the right angle to put pressure on the shoulder joint, and brought him flat onto his face on the sidewalk with enough force to send stars flying into his vision and stun him.

  It didn’t stun him much. “No hospital!” he screamed, thrashing. I fought to control the fear that was running through me. He was operating with more strength than he should have been, but it didn’t matter. Physics is physics, and his arm was one long lever that I had control of. He might have been bigger and stronger than me, and the way we were positioned that didn’t matter in the least. He fought for a few more seconds and then the burst of frenzy began to peter out. “No hospital! No hospital.” He shuddered and began to weep. His voice became a plea, rendered flat with despair. “No hospital. Please, please. No hospital.”

  Then he went limp and made slow, regular rasping sounds.

  I eased off the pressure and gave him his arm back. It fell limply to the sidewalk as he cried. “Buddy,” I said, “hey, it’s going to be all right. I’m Waldo. What’s your name?”

  “Stan,” he said in a hollow voice.

  “Hey, Stan,” I said. “Try not to worry. We’re going to get you taken care of.”

  “You’re killing me,” he said. “You’re killing me.”

  “Your pulse is erratic, your breathing is impaired, and your eyes are showing different levels of dilation, Stan. What are you on?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “You’re killing me. Damn you.”

  In a few minutes, the ambulance arrived. A few seconds later, someone tapped the side of my chest with my glasses and I put them back on. I looked up at an EMT, a blocky black guy named Lamar. I knew him. He was a solid guy.

  “Thanks, man,” I said.

  “You tackle this guy?” he asked. “Shoot. You ain’t no bigger than a chicken dinner.”

  “But spicy,” I said. I gave him everything I had about Stan, and they got him checked, loaded up, and ready to head out to the ER in under four minutes.

  “Hey, Lamar,” I said, as he was rolling the gurney.

  “Yes, Examiner Mulder?”

  “Scully was the ME,” I complained. “How come no one calls me Examiner Scully?”

  “ ’Cause you ain’t a thinking man’s tart,” Lamar drawled. “What you need?”

  “Where are you taking him?”

  “St. Anthony’s.”

  I nodded. “Is there anything, uh, odd happening over there lately?”

  “Naw,” Lamar said, scratching his chin. “Not that I seen. But it’s only Tuesday.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Keep your eyes open.”

  “Hell, Butters,” he said.

  “Let me rephrase that,” I said. “Let me know if you see anything odd. It might be important.”

  Lamar gave me a long look. I already had a reputation and history with supernatural weirdness, even before I met Harry Dresden and learned how scary the world really is. Lamar had gotten a few peeks at the Twilight Zone, too, over the years, and wanted nothing to do with it, because Lamar was pretty bright.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. We shook hands and he left.

  Michael came to stand next to me as the ambulance pulled away.

  “You hear that?” I asked him.

  “Most of it.”

  “What do you think?”

  He leaned on his cane and blew out a slow breath through his lips, frowning in thought.

  “I think,” he said finally, “that you’re the Knight now, Waldo.”

  “Somehow, I just knew you were going to say that,” I said. “It might be nothing. I mean, I suspect Stan was strung out on uppers and downers and God knows what else. And if some commuter had been the one to try to wake him, he might have strangled them. Maybe this was a low-level warm-up quest, you know? That might have been the whole thing right there.”

  “Maybe,” Michael agreed, nodding. “What does your heart tell you?”

  “My heart?” I asked. “I’m a doctor, Michael. My heart doesn’t tell me anything. It’s a muscle that pumps blood. My brain does all of that other stuff.”

  Michael smiled. “What does your heart tell you?”

  I sighed. I mean, sure, it could have been something really simple and easy—mathematically, that was possible. But everything I’d seen about the supernatural world told me that the Knights of the Cross were only sent into matters of life and death. And, like it or not, when I’d decided to keep the Sword of Faith, I’d decided to get myself involved in situations that would be scary and dangerous—and necessary—without actually knowing exactly what was going on, or why I was being sent.

  I wasn’t really hero material. Even with my recent training, I was small and skinny and rumpled, and I’d never drunk from the fountain of youth. I was a mature, nerdy, Jewish medical examiner, not some kind of daring adventurer.

  But I guess I was the guy who had been given the Sword, and Stan needed my help.

  I nodded and said, “Let’s head back to your place.”

  “Of course,” Michael said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Get the rest of my stuff,” I said. “And then check up on Stan at St. Tony’s. Better safe than sorry.”

  MICHAEL PULLED UP to the hospital in his solid, hardworking white pickup truck, and frowned. “God go with you, Waldo.”

  “You still don’t like it, do you?” I asked him.

  “The skull is a very dangerous object,” he said. “It doesn’t … understand love. It doesn’t understand faith.”

  “That’s what we’re here for, right?” I asked him.

  “It’s not for me,” Michael said, setting his jaw.

  “You think I should take it on my first quest with me?” I asked.

  “God Almighty, no,” Michael said.

  “Just keep an eye on it until I get back.”

  “If it fell into the wrong hands …”

  “It won’t be my problem, because I’ll be all dead and stuff,” I said. “Michael, give me a break. I don’t need you rattling my confidence just now, right?”

  He looked chagrined for a second and then nodded. “Of course. If you weren’t the right person, the Sword wouldn’t have come to you.”

  “Unless it was an honest accident.”

  Michael smiled. “I don’t believe in accidents.”

  “I’d better get out. If God has any sense of humor at all, you’re going to get rear-ended any second now,” I said, and got out of the car. “I’ll call you when I know something.”

  “God go with you,” Michael said, and pulled away, leaving me standing on the curb alone.

  Just me.

  Oy.

  I took a deep breath, tried to imagine myself about two feet taller than I actually was, and walked quickly into the hospital.

  MOVING AROUND A hospital without being noticed is pretty easy. Yo
u just wear a doctor’s white coat and scrubs and some comfortable shoes and walk like you know exactly where you’re going.

  It also helps to have a doctor’s ID, and an actual MD, and to actually be a doctor who has sometimes worked there and to actually know exactly where you’re going.

  I’m a doctor, dammit, not a spy.

  “Patterson,” I said to a lanky ER nurse with a buzz cut and a lumberjack’s beard. “How’s my favorite druid?”

  Patterson looked up at me from a form-field-filled computer screen and squinted. “Waldo Butters, aka I Put the Pal in the Paladin. Your guild stiffed our guild on a treasure roll two weeks ago.”

  I pushed my glasses up on my nose. “Yeah, I’ve been kind of busy. Haven’t been online to keep the power gamers in check. My word, I’ll have Andi look into it, and we’ll make it up to you guys.”

  The nurse scowled at me, but let out a mollified grunt. “Hell are you doing down here? They kick you out of Corpsesicles ’R’ Us?”

  “Not yet,” I said. Though they might, with as many times as I’d called in sick lately. I hadn’t been sick. Just too bruised and sore to move right. “Look, I’m kind of here on something personal. Maybe you could help me out.”

  Patterson stared at me with unamused eyes. Not to get too much into the details, but HIPAA basically means that no one who wants to remain working in the medical field can share any patient information with anyone who isn’t directly involved in that patient’s care, unless the patient gives permission to do so. It’s the kind of thing people get reflexively paranoid about. Also the kind of thing you have to ask a favor to get them to overlook.

  “Why should I?” he asked.

  “Because I have something you want,” I said.

  “What?”

  I leaned a bit closer and looked up and down the hall theatrically before speaking in a lowered tone. “What about … a blue murloc egg?”

  Patterson sat up ramrod straight and his eyes widened. “What?”

  “You heard me,” I said.

  “Dude, don’t even joke about it,” he breathed. “You know it’s the last one I need.”

  “Two thousand five was a very good year,” I drawled. I reached into my pocket and produced a plastic card from my wallet. “Behold. One code for one blue murloc. The rarest pet in all the game can be thine.” Patterson reached for the card with twitchy fingers, and I snapped it a bit farther away from him. “Do we have a deal?”