by Jim Butcher
I tried not to think too much about what sort of person it might be who survived. I would burn that bridge when I came to it.
I would go up to my office and hold business hours for the rest of the day. I would wait for Murphy to call me, and give her any aid that I could. I would keep my eyes and ears open in case Parker or any of his gang came after me. There wasn’t much more I could do, and it was frustrating as hell.
I went up to my office, unlocked it, and flipped on the lights. Gentleman Johnny Marcone was seated at my desk in a dark blue business suit, and his hulking bodyguard, Mr. Hendricks, was standing behind him.
Marcone smiled at me, but it didn’t touch the corners of his eyes. “Ah, Mr. Dresden. Good. We need to talk.”
Chapter Ten
Marcone had eyes the color of old, faded dollar bills. His skin was weatherworn, with an outdoorsman’s deep tan. Creases showed at the corners of his eyes and mouth, as though from smiling, but those smiles were rarely sincere. His suit must have cost him at least a thousand dollars. He sat at ease in my chair, my chair, mind you, and regarded me with professional calm.
From behind him, Mr. Hendricks looked like an all-star collegiate lineman who hadn’t been smart enough to go into the pros. Hendricks’s neck was as big around as my waist, and his hands were big enough to cover my face—and strong enough to crush it. His red hair was buzz cut, and he wore his ill-fitting suit like something that he planned to rip his way out of when he turned into the Hulk. I couldn’t see his gun, but I knew he was carrying one.
I stood in the doorway and stared at Marcone for a minute, but my gaze did nothing to stir him. Marcone had met it already, and taken my measure more than I had taken his. My eyes held no more fear for him.
“Get out of my office,” I said. I stepped inside and closed the door.
“Now, now, Mr. Dresden,” Marcone said, a father’s reproof in his tone. “Is that any way to talk to a business partner?”
I scowled. “I’m not your partner. I think you’re scum. The worst criminal this city has. One of these days the cops will nail you, but until then, I don’t have to put up with you here in my own office. Get out.”
“The police,” Marcone said, a hint of correction in his voice, “would be best off run by private agencies, rather than public institutions. Better pay, better benefits—”
“Easier to bribe, corrupt, manipulate,” I injected.
Marcone smiled.
I took off my duster and dropped it over the table in front of the door, the one covered in pamphlets with titles like “Witches and You,” and “Want to Do Magic? Ask Me How!” I untied my blasting rod from its thong and set it calmly on the table in front of me. I had the satisfaction of seeing Hendricks tense up when he saw the rod. He remembered what I had done to the Varsity last spring.
I glanced up. “Are you still here?”
Marcone folded his hands in front of him. “I have an offer to make you, Mr. Dresden.”
“No,” I said.
Marcone chuckled. “I think you should hear me out.”
I looked him in the eyes and smiled faintly. “No. Get out.”
His fatherly manner vanished, and his eyes became cold. “I have neither the time nor the tolerance for your childishness, Mr. Dresden. People are dying. You are now working on the case. I have information for you, and I will give it to you. For a price.”
I felt my back stiffen. I stared at him for a long minute, and then said, “All right. Let’s hear your price.”
Marcone held out his hand and Hendricks handed him a folder. Marcone put the folder down on the battered surface of my old wooden desk and flipped it open. “This is a contract, Mr. Dresden. It hires you as a consultant for my firm, in personal security. The terms are quite generous. You get to name your own hours, with a minimum of five per month. You can fill in your salary right now. I simply want to formalize our working relationship.”
I walked over to my desk. I saw Hendricks’s weight shift, as though he were about to jump over the desk at me, but I ignored him. I picked up the folder and looked over the contract. I’m not a legal expert, but I was familiar with the forms for this kind of deal. Marcone was on the up and up. He was offering me a dream job, with virtually no commitment, and as much money as I could want. There was even a clause that specified that I would not be asked or expected to perform any unlawful acts.
With that kind of money, I could live the life I wanted. I could stop scraping for every dollar, running my legs off working for every paranoid looney who wanted to hire me to investigate his great-aunt’s possessed cow. I could catch up on reading, finally, do the magical research I’d been itching to do for the past few years. I wouldn’t live forever, and every hour that I wasted looking for UFOs in Joliet was one more hour I couldn’t spend doing something I wanted to do.
It was a pretty damned tempting deal.
It was a very comfortable collar.
“Do you think I’m an idiot?” I said, and tossed the folder down on my desk.
Marcone’s eyebrows went up, his mouth opening a little. “Is it the hours? Shall I lower the minimum to one hour per week? Per month?”
“It isn’t the hours,” I said.
He spread his hands. “What, then?”
“It’s the company. It’s the thought of a drug-dealing murderer having a claim on my loyalty. I don’t like where your money comes from. It’s got blood on it.”
Marcone’s cold eyes narrowed again. “Think carefully, Mr. Dresden. I won’t make this offer twice.”
“Let me make you an offer, John,” I said. I saw the corner of his cheek twitch when I used his first name. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll do my best to nail the killer before he comes for you.”
“What makes you think I’m worried, Mr. Dresden?” Marcone said. He let a fine sneer color his words.
I shrugged. “Your business partner and his pet bodyguard get gutted last month. Spike gets torn to bits last night. And then you crawl out from under your rock to dangle information in my face to help me catch the killer and try to strong-arm me into becoming your bodyguard.” I bent down and rested my elbows on the surface of the desk, then lowered my head until my eyes were a few inches from his. “Worried, John?”
His face twitched again, and I could smell him lying. “Of course not, Mr. Dresden. But you don’t get where I have in life by being reckless.”
“Just by being soulless, right?”
Marcone slammed his palms down on the desktop and stood. I rose with him, enough to stand over him, and to keep my eyes on his. “I am a man of business, Mr. Dresden. Would you prefer anarchy in the streets? Wars between rival crime lords? I bring order to that chaos.”
“No. You just make the chaos more efficient and organized,” I shot back. “Stick whatever pretty words you want onto it, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re a thug, a fucking animal that should be in a cage. Nothing more.”
Marcone’s normally passionless face went white. His jaw clenched over words of rage. I pressed him, hard, my own anger spilling out with a passion gone out of control. I poured all of my recent frustration and fear into venomous words and hurled them at him like a handful of scrap metal.
“What’s out there, John? What could it possibly be? Did you see Spike? Did you see how they’d torn his face off? Did you see the way they’d ripped his guts open? I did. I could smell what he had for dinner. Can you just imagine it happening to you next, John?”
“Don’t call me that,” Marcone said, his voice so quiet and cold that it set my momentum back on its heels. “If we were in public, Mr. Dresden, I’d have you killed for speaking that way to me.”
“If we were in public,” I told him, “you’d try.” I drew myself up and glared down my nose at him, ignoring Hendricks’s looming presence. “Now. Get the hell out of my office.”
Marcone straightened his jacket and his tie. “I presume, Mr. Dresden, that you are going to continue your investigation with the police departme
nt.”
“Of course.”
Marcone walked around my desk, past me, and toward my door. Hendricks followed in his wake, huge and quiet. “Then in my own interests, I must accept your offer and aid the investigation however I might. Look up the name Harley MacFinn. Ask about the Northwest Passage Project. See where they lead you.” He opened the door.
“Why should I believe you?” I asked him.
He looked back at me. “You have seen the deepest reaches of my soul, Mr. Dresden. You know me in a way so profound and intimate that I cannot yet fathom its significance. Just as I know you. You should know that I have every reason to help you, and that the information is good.” He smiled again, wintry. “Just as you should know that it was unwise to make an enemy of me. It need not have been this way.”
I narrowed my eyes. “If you know me so well, you should know that there’s no other way it could be.”
He pursed his lips for a moment, and did not try to refute me. “Pity,” he said. “A true pity.” And then he left. Hendricks gave me a pig-eyed little glare, and then he was gone, too. The door shut behind them.
I let out a long, shaking breath, and slumped against my desk. I covered my face with my hands, noticing as I did that they were shaking, too. I hadn’t realized the depth of the disgust in me for Marcone and what he stood for. I hadn’t realized how much it had sickened me to have my name associated with his. I hadn’t realized how much I wanted to launch myself at the man and smash him in the nose with my fists.
I stayed that way for a few minutes, letting my heart beat hard, catching my breath. Marcone could have killed me. He could have had Hendricks tear me apart, or put a bullet in me right there—but he hadn’t. That wasn’t Marcone’s way. He couldn’t eliminate me now, not after working so hard to spread the word throughout the underworld that he and I had some sort of alliance. He would have to be more indirect, more subtle. Having Hendricks scatter my brains out on the floor wasn’t the way to do it.
I thought over what he had said, and the implications of his acceptance of the deal I’d offered. He was in danger. Something had him scared, something that he didn’t understand and didn’t know how to fight. That was why he had wanted to hire me. As a wizard, I take the unknown and I turn it into something that can be measured. I take that cloak of terror off of things, make people able, somehow, to deal with them. Marcone wanted me to stand by him, to help him not be afraid of those things lurking in the dark.
Hell. It was only human.
I winced. I wanted to hate the man, but disgust, maybe anger, was as far as I could go. Too much of what he said was true. Marcone was a businessman. He had reduced violence in the streets—while sending the number of dollars made by criminals in this town soaring. He had protected the city’s flesh while si-phoning away its blood, poisoning its soul. It changed nothing, nothing at all.
But to know that the man I knew, the tiger-souled predator, the businessman killer—to know that he was frightened of what I was about to go up against: That scared the hell out of me, and added an element of intimidation to the work I was doing that hadn’t been present before.
That didn’t change anything, either. It’s all right to be afraid. You just don’t let it stop you from doing your job.
I sat down on the desk, forced thoughts of blood and fangs and agonizing death from my mind, and started looking for the name Harley MacFinn and the Northwest Passage Project.
Chapter Eleven
The demon trapped in the summoning circle screamed, slamming its crablike pincers against the unseen barrier, hurling its chitinous shoulders from side to side in an effort to escape the confinement. It couldn’t. I kept my will on the circle, kept the demon from bursting free.
“Satisfied, Chauncy?” I asked it.
The demon straightened its hideous form and said, in a perfect Oxford accent, “Quite. You understand, I must observe the formalities.” Then it took a pair of wholly incongruous wire-frame spectacles from beneath a scale and perched them upon the beaklike extremity of its nose. “You have questions?”
I let out a sigh of relief, and sat down on the edge of the worktable in my lab. I had cleared away all the clutter from around the summoning ring in the floor, and I’d have to move it before I could clamber up out of my lab, but I didn’t like to take chances. No matter how comfortable Chaunzaggoroth and I were with our working relationship, there was always a chance that I could have messed up the summoning. There were rules of protocol that demonic beings were obliged to follow—one of them was offering resistance to any mortal wizard who called them. Another was doing their best to end the life of the same wizard, should they be able to escape the confines of the circle.
All in all, squeezing information from faeries and spirits of the elements was a lot easier and safer—but Bob had turned up nothing in his search among the local spirits. They weren’t always up on information to be had in the city, and Bob now resided in his skull again, exhausted and unable to help any further.
So I’d gone to the underworld for assistance. They know when you’ve been bad or good, and they make Santa Claus look like an amateur.
"I need information about a man named Harley MacFinn, Chauncy. And about something he was working on called the Northwest Passage Project.”
Chauncy clacked his pincers pensively. “I see. Presuming I have this information, what is it worth to you?”
“Not my soul,” I snorted. “So don’t even start with that. Look, I could dig this up myself in a few days.”
Chauncy tilted his head, birdlike. “Ah. But time is of the essence, yes? Come now, Harry Dresden. You do not call upon me lightly. The possible dangers, both from myself and from your own White Council, are far too great.”
I scowled at him. “Technically,” I said, “I’m not breaking any of the Laws of Magic. I’m not robbing you of your will, so I’m clear of the Fourth Law. And you didn’t get loose, so I’m clear of the Seventh Law. The Council can bite me.”
The bone ridges above Chauncy’s eyes twitched. “Surely, that is merely a colorful euphemism, rather than a statement of desire.”
“It is.”
Chauncy pushed the glasses a bit higher up on his nose. “The moral and ethical ramifications of your attitudes are quite fascinating, Harry Dresden. I am continually amazed that you remain in the Council’s good graces. Knowing full well that most of the Council would look the other way while their enforcers killed you, should they learn that you have willfully brought a demon into this world, you still summon me not once, but a half-dozen times. Your attitudes are much more contiguous with those of many of my brethren in the World Below—”
“And I should throw in with your side, accept the dark powers, et cetera, et cetera,” I finished for him, with a sigh. “Hell’s bells, Chauncy. Why do you keep on trying to sucker me into signing on with Downbelow, eh?”
Chauncy shrugged his bulky shoulders. “I admit that it would give me no small amount of status to gather a soul of your caliber into our legions,” he said. “Additionally, it would free me from the onerous duties which make even these excruciating visits to your world seem pleasant by comparison.”
“Well, you aren’t getting my soul today,” I told him. “So make me a counteroffer, or we can call a close to the negotiations and I can send you back.”
The demon shuddered. “Yes, very well. Let us not be hasty, Harry Dresden. I have the information you need. Additionally, I have more information of which you are not aware, and which would be of great interest to you, and which I judge, additionally, may help to preserve your life and the lives of others. Given the situation, I do not think the price I will ask inappropriate: I wish another of your names.”
I frowned. The demon had two of my names already. If he gained my whole name, from my own lips, he could use it in any number of magical applications against me. That didn’t particularly disturb me—demons and their ilk had great difficulty in reaching out from the Nevernever, the spirit world beyond the physica
l one we inhabited, with sorcery.
But Chaunzaggoroth was a popular source of information among wizards who went to the underworld in need of it. What bothered me was the possibility that one of them would get it. Chauncy was correct—there were a lot of people on the White Council who would be happy to see me dead. If one of them got my name, there was the chance that they would use it against me, either to kill me or to magically force me to do something that would openly violate one of the Seven Laws and have me brought to trial and killed.
On the other hand, Chauncy never lied to me. If he said he had information that could save people’s lives, he had it, and that’s all there was to it. Hell, he might even know who the killer was, though a demon’s grasp of individual human identity was somewhat shaky.
I decided to gamble.
“Done,” I said. “All pertinent information on the subject of my inquiry in exchange for another of my names.”
Chauncy nodded once. “Agreed.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s have the information on MacFinn and the Northwest Passage Project.”
“Very well,” Chauncy said. “Harley MacFinn is an heir to a considerable fortune made in coal mining and railroads at the turn of the twentieth century. He is one of the ten richest men in the country known as the United States. He served during the police action in Vietnam, and when he returned to this country he began divesting himself of business interests, merely accruing capital. His favorite color is red, his shoe size is—”
“We can skip the little details unless you think they will be really relevant,” I said. “I could hear about his favorite food and his problems in middle school all day and it wouldn’t help anything. ” I got out my notebook and started taking notes.
“As you wish,” Chauncy assented. “The object of his endeavors for the past several years has been the Northwest Passage Project. The project is an effort to buy enormous tracts of land, beginning in the central Rocky Mountains of the American Southwest, and moving northwest into Canada, to provide for an enormous, migratory-sized preserve for North American wildlife.”