Crooked Halos

by Charlie Cottrell

  “Are you sure it’s a good idea to put this kind of pressure on Maya?” Miss Typewell asked.

  “We don’t really have a choice. I need you to coordinate things here between us and Kimiko, and Crowder already knows who you are. Maya is an unknown, so I think she’ll be able to slip through where you or I couldn’t.”

  “Just keep an eye on her, okay?” Miss Typewell begged. I nodded, hoping that her fears were misplaced.

  The next afternoon, Maya and I stepped up to Crowder’s first safe house, located on W. Chesnut Street, where Dresden usually used the alias Wayne Everett. Everett was supposedly a professor of English from some prestigious university, but I knew Dresden really just liked reading Proust and pretending he didn’t drink light beer.

  It was a townhouse, built maybe fifty years earlier, showing signs of age and wear but appeared reasonably well-kept. I sent Maya up to ring the bell while I crouched, painfully, in the bushes, using a cane to help support my still-unsteady legs. I always forget how much getting shot takes out of you.

  Maya was wearing a gray business suit Miss Typewell had dug out of her own closet earlier that morning. It was a bit big across the shoulders, given Maya’s scrawny build, but we’d done the best we could on short notice.

  No one answered for nearly two minutes, at which point someone who was most definitely not Dresden Crowder answered the door with a scowl on her face.

  “What do you want?” the woman asked with annoyance.

  “Um, well,” began Maya, uncertainly.

  “Spit it out, girl!” the woman snarled.

  “Ma’am, I’m, uh, I’m here ask you, uh . . .” Maya was clearly not up to the task. The woman heaved a laborious sigh and slammed the door in Maya’s face. Miss Janovich turned around and schlepped down the stairs, her shoulders sagging in defeat. “Sorry, Eddie, I wasn’t able to, uh, get any information from her.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, rising from the bushes and patting her on the shoulder. “That obviously wasn’t Dresden, so we can cross this one off the list.” She gave me a wan smile as we climbed into the car and headed for the next address.

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  The second safe house was on 38th Street, deep in the heart of Old Town. It was an apartment on the fifteenth floor of a run-down, dilapidated building that probably should have been condemned, torn down, and the earth salted afterward, just to be safe. Again, Maya knocked on the door, while I hid in the doorway of the next apartment down. I didn’t have much information on Crowder’s false identity at this location; I knew he was something shady, possibly someone with Organization ties.

  Once again, there was a bit of a delay between Maya’s knock and the opening of the door. Once again, the person who answered the door wasn’t Crowder, but a woman. She stared at Maya as though not fully understanding why someone was at her door.

  “Do you need something?” the woman asked.

  “Oh! Um, sorry, I think I have the wrong address,” Maya said, backing away. The woman gave her a weird look, then closed the door. We could hear a deadbolt being thrown from inside, then an old-fashioned chain dragged across the rail to further discourage unwanted visitors.

  “Sorry,” Maya said again. I shrugged.

  “I didn’t necessarily expect to actually find Crowder at one of these,” I said. “He wouldn’t be very good if he’d been that easy to catch.”

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  The third and final safe house was back Downtown, just off the financial powerhouse that is Eakin Plaza. Crowder’s identity here was that of a stock broker; I knew from his APD personnel file that he’d done a stint on the fraud and racketeering squad as a consultant after I left the force and before he got his bionic legs.

  Once more, Maya stepped up to a door; this time, the building featured a doorman and her business suit had been exchanged for a courier’s uniform we’d managed to borrow from a guy I knew. We communicated via a vid window channel Maya had opened up; her end was minimized, so she wouldn’t be able to see me, but she could hear everything I said and I could still see and hear everything she encountered. We’d rehearsed what to say to bluff her way past the doorman, but I could still hear her nervousness as she announced she had a delivery that had to be signed by Mr. Powers (Crowder’s alias at this particular location) himself. The doorman waved her through without so much as a glance at her falsified credentials.

  Inside, Maya made her way to the elevator and rode it to the fifth floor, where she emerged in a hallway filled with nice carpets and evenly-spaced potted plants. This was the nicest of Crowder’s safe houses, though, at this point, I had little hope we’d find him here, either. It’d been too many years since I’d been able to keep detailed tabs on him, and I figured my data was simply way out of date.

  So it came as no surprise when the door to the apartment opened and a man who looked nothing like Crowder stood there.

  Which isn’t to say he didn’t look familiar, it just took me a few seconds to recognize the face, with fourteen extra years of life and a few dozen extra pounds added on.

  It was Alex Caruthers, the man who had killed Sherman Lee.

  III.

  I balked for a moment, surprised to see Caruthers’s face after all this time. What was he doing in one of Crowder’s safe houses? I vaguely heard Maya do her usual “Oops, wrong address” routine as I pulled up the video footage she’d shot at each safe house. With a growing sense of certainty, I ran the faces of the two women we’d encountered against all the databases I could. Nothing came up in the criminal databases, but I did get hits from the DMV, and they confirmed what I’d suspected the moment I saw Caruthers: the two women were Melanie Rothgarten and Tallulah Tremaine, Sherman Lee’s old neighbors. I collapsed on a convenient bench outside the apartment building and waited for Maya to come back down, my head spinning. Why would Sherman Lee’s old neighbors all be living in safe houses connected to Dresden Crowder? Could they have all somehow been in on Lee’s killing? I knew Caruthers had done the deed, even if Crowder had trumped up evidence that said otherwise and managed to get me booted from the police force, but what about Rothgarten and Tremaine? How were they connected to this whole mess?

  Maya found me on my bench, head cradled in my hands, my face a mask of deep thought. She sat down next to me and twiddled her thumbs for a minute, glancing around nervously. “Um, Eddie?” she said finally.

  “Yes, Maya?” I replied without looking at her.

  “Uh, we didn’t, y’know, find Crowder at any of those safe houses. What’re we gonna do?”

  “Well,” I said, sitting up gingerly; my gunshot wound was still tender and got tight whenever I sat still for long, “we’re going to head back to the office, have a nice cup of coffee, and then we’re going to call Dresden Crowder.”

  “Call him?” Maya asked, confused. “You have his number?”

  “Oh, yes,” I replied, standing.

  “So, um, why didn’t we start with that?” she asked.

  “Tactics, my dear,” I answered, taking up my cane and shuffling off for the parked car.

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  Miss Typewell listened to our tale with a mixture of concern and overprotective motherliness. She still wasn’t happy about having used Maya as the face of the operation.

  “Well, it is pretty bizarre that those three would be living in Crowder’s safe houses,” Miss Typewell said when we’d finished.

  “I know, it’s damned weird,” I replied, sipping a cup of hot coffee. “Any luck on your end?”

  “Crowder’s last-known address with the DMV was falsified; it was the address of an old refinery out in the Warehouse District,” Miss Typewell said. “My contact at City Utilities, Debbie, said public records don’t have anything under Crowder’s name for the last ten years. He’s covered his tracks pretty well, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s about what I figured we’d find,” I replied, setting my cup down. “I guess there’s nothing for it but to call
him.” I turned to Maya. “Miss Janovich, would you kindly get ready to trace a call?”

  “Um, sure,” Maya replied, pulling out a small personal computer and firing up several vid windows at once. She started moving them around and manipulating them as though casting some arcane spell. I knew in reality she was opening up different tracing, GPS, and hacking programs, making a connection to my computer (which I’d use to make the call), and probably checking out pictures of cats dressed up in funny hats, because cats in funny hats.

  When she was ready, I opened my phone tool and dialed a number I thought I’d never call again. It rang five times before a connection was made, audio only.

  “Eddie,” the voice at the other end said simply; it was Crowder.

  “Dresden,” I replied, trying to keep my own voice even and neutral.

  “Seems you survived your stint in Pratchett,” Crowder said almost conversationally.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty tough to put down,” I answered. “And pretty damn tenacious. I’m coming after you, y’know.”

  “Oh, I know,” Crowder replied, “I’m not at the hotel anymore, though.”

  “I know,” I replied. “You’re not at any of your safe houses, either, I noticed.”

  “Yes, I saw you visiting today. You didn’t really think I’d be at one of them, did you?” He sent over an image file; I opened it up and saw a picture of me, taken that afternoon, crouching in the bushes outside the townhouse on W. Chesnut Street.

  “Well, someone’s become a shutterbug,” I said, opening a new vid window of my own and copying a file from it to send to Crowder. “Of course, I figured you’d be out there somewhere, watching, so I did take the liberty of having my tech expert hack local security cameras to see what they could see. And, wouldn’t you know it, they saw this.” I sent him a picture of himself, lurking on a rooftop across the street from the townhouse, trying to look inconspicuous. “Rather silly, hiding on a rooftop. What are you, some sort of masked vigilante out for rough justice?” Maya gestured at me; she needed only one more minute to get the trace.

  “I’ll admit, I’m impressed, Eddie,” Crowder said, a hint of a smile in his voice. “I didn’t think you’d be as good as you are. Of course, you’re still not as good as you think you are. You can tell your little ‘hacker’ friend that she can stop trying to trace the call; if she continues, it’ll probably just fry her computer.” I glanced over at Maya and noticed that her usually calm demeanor when handling technological tasks was replaced with a mask of confusion and consternation; clearly, the trace wasn’t going the way it was supposed to.

  “Crowder, you oughta give yourself up. You know I’m going to hunt you down.”

  “Of course you are, Eddie. I tell you what, I’ll even help you out. I’ll be at the top of the Zimmerman tomorrow at sunset. Meet you there?” He didn’t bother waiting to hear my reply, he simply cut the connection.

  “Did we get anything useful out of that?” I asked Maya. She shook her head.

  “No, um, whatever anti-black hat software he’s running, it’s top of the, uh, line,” she replied sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “The point of this little game wasn’t to trace his call, it was to let him know we were coming for him.”

  “So, you’re going to meet him at the Zimmerman tomorrow night?” Miss Typewell asked.

  “Of course not. I’m headed to the Warehouse District tonight,” I answered.

  “Why?” Miss Typewell asked.

  “Because that’s where he’s hiding out,” I replied. “That address he gave the DMV that we figured was a dead end? That’s definitely where he is. The guy wants me to find him.” I stood up, my hands clenched tightly. “And I’m gonna walk right in and shove his teeth down his throat, so help me God.”

  IV.

  “You’re giving him or yourself way too much credit for being clever here,” Miss Typewell said, pulling to a stop outside the refinery. “Be careful, Eddie,” she said.

  “I will be, I will be,” I said, crawling out of the car and steadying myself with my cane. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, call Captain O’Mally and get as many cops out here as you can.” Miss Typewell nodded as I shut the car door. I heard the door locks engage as Miss Typewell gripped the steering wheel and stared after me.

  The walk to the refinery door gave me time to reflect on the events of the past few months. There was a lot of time spent thinking about getting shot. Gunshot wounds are a hazard of the job, a frequent malady like schoolteachers catching colds or child workers in industrial New England losing fingers. You expected it, you planned for it as best you could, and you cried a bit when it happened, but you knew it was ultimately unavoidable. Getting locked up in Pratchett had been a new and horrible experience, one I wasn’t all that keen on repeating any time soon. Of course, I was a fugitive, and I’d have to clear up everything with the police after I’d handled the business with Crowder and Pratt, but that was a problem for future me.

  Crowder was clearly every inch the man I’d come to think he was in the years since I’d been unceremoniously let go from the Arcadia Police Department. He was conniving, cruel, and careful. He had things planned out or was good enough at improvising that it appeared as though he did. In the end, it didn’t matter; I was going to put him away or six feet under or die in the attempt myself. Anything less wouldn’t be good enough.

  The doors of the refinery were heavy, metal, and rusted almost completely through in some places. In days gone by, the refinery had processed raw metal ore and turned it into rectangular ingots that were then shipped all over the country—and probably the world—to be used in any number of ways. They’d shut it down about twenty years ago, after a series of horrible accidents ended with half the factory floor catching fire and about a dozen men dying in the blaze. Those who’d survived suffered extreme burns and health problems due to smoke inhalation. It had all been pretty horrific and had driven the refinery’s parent company into bankruptcy.

  I put my weight against the door and pushed. It swung open reluctantly with a prolonged screech of metal on concrete, sticking when the door was about halfway open and refusing to budge further. I sucked in my gut and slid through, hearing fabric tear as my coat caught on a particularly jagged piece of rusted metal. “Hello, Tetanus City,” I murmured.

  Inside was about what I expected. The place had a gutted, burnt-out look. Most of the major machinery had been unsalvageable, and what could be saved had been hauled off, leaving barren, unburned patches here and there. The rusted metal motif from outside carried to the interior as well, joined by twisted, blackened metal, and charred, unidentifiable lumps.

  I was reasonably certain all the bodies had been removed from the building. Reasonably certain.

  The place felt empty, with the power shut off and no signs of actual human presence save my own. Maybe I’d misjudged Crowder; maybe he wasn’t hiding in plain sight.

  The floodlight cut on and caught me right in the eyes, blinding me. I threw up a hand to cover them, but by then it was far too late. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the tears of pain welling up in the corners. “Real cute, Dresden!” I called out.

  “Eddie, this is not the Zimmerman Building,” Dresden said from somewhere I couldn’t pinpoint. I was the ineptest bat imaginable, attempting to use echolocation with a brain wired for visual tracking. I held the cane up in front of me in a feeble effort to ward off any sudden attacks. I heard Crowder’s usually warm laughter bounce through the refinery; the echo robbed that voice of its warmth and humanity, leaving it cold and sinister.

  “Sorry, I got so eager to have another go-‘round, I had to drop in unannounced,” I replied, blinking. Some of my sight was returning, even if it was just vague, fuzzy shapes.

  “You’ve already been shot once in the last two months. Let’s not toy with fate.”

  “Look, why don’t you do us both a favor and just give yourself up now. I’ve already got the cops on the way, so even if you kill me
, you won’t get away with this.” I tried to sound more confident than I felt, but Crowder didn’t buy it.

  “If there were cops here, you wouldn’t have come in first. Or at all, probably.” I heard a clunk echo through the building and the sound of footsteps across a metal catwalk. “I’m afraid this is it, for you.”

  I sighed. “I wish we could resolve things without resorting to clichéd violence.” I flipped the top of my cane up and pressed a button, a split second before gunfire erupted.

  The bullets bounced off of an invisible barrier about two inches from the surface of my skin. The kinetic energy from the bullets knocked me slightly off balance, giving me a direction for the shooter. The force field wouldn’t last more than a couple of minutes, but it would give me enough time to hopefully put an end to this whole business.

  I slipped a small, oblong object out of my pocket, pressed a button on it, and hurled it in the direction of the gunfire. I heard it beeping as I ducked behind a piece of blackened machinery. I crouched down behind the metal wall as the grenade went off, releasing a huge cloud of thick, noxious, black smoke. The gunfire stopped, so I stepped out from behind the machinery and drew the popgun. Things were still blurry, but I could make out a shape on the catwalk. I aimed and fired, an expanding bubble bursting from the popgun and catching the figure above, enveloping him. I holstered the popgun and found a ladder up to the catwalk. I climbed gingerly, feeling the ache in my gut with each rung, and pulled myself up on the metal grating of the catwalk. I walked up to the bubble and nudged it with my foot. The figure inside flopped forward, and I got a clear look at it for the first time.

  It was a dummy, a mannequin.

  Behind me, the click of a gun being cocked grabbed my undivided attention.