by Jim Butcher
We did what we could for them, which wasn’t much more than jerking the tablecloths off the water tables in the corner and improvising soft pads out of them to apply to open wounds. The second girl lay on her side nearby, sobbing hysterically I checked on the old woman, who had just had the wind knocked out of her. I hauled the guy who’d fallen from his wheelchair into a slightly more comfortable position and he nodded thanks at me.
“See to the other victim,” Rawlins said. He held the pad against the boy’s opened abdomen, putting gentle pressure on it as he jerked out his radio. It squealed with feedback and static when he used it, but he managed to get emergency help headed our way.
I went to the sobbing girl, a tiny little brunette wearing much the same clothes as Molly had been. She’d been bruised up pretty well, and from the way she lay on the floor she could evidently not move without feeling agony. I went to her and felt over her left shoulder gently. “Be still,” I told her quietly. “It’s your collarbone, I think. I know it hurts like hell, but you’re going to be all right.”
“It hurts, it hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts,” she panted.
I found her hand with mine and squeezed tight. She returned it with a desperate pressure. “You’ll be all right,” I told her.
“Don’t leave me,” she whimpered. Her hand was all but crushing mine. “Don’t leave.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m right here.”
“What the hell is this?” Rawlins said, panting. He looked around him, at the corpse, at the movie screen, at the dent in the wall beyond. “That was the Reaper, the freaking Reaper. From the Suburban Slasher films. What kind of psycho dresses up as the Reaper and starts…” His face twisted in sudden nausea. “What the hell is this?”
“Rawlins,” I said, in a sharp voice, to get his attention.
His frightened eyes darted to me.
“Call Murphy,” I told him.
He stared at me blankly for a second, then said, “My captain is the one who has to make the call on that one. He’ll decide.”
“Up to you,” I said. “But Murphy and her boys might actually be able to do something with this. Your captain can’t.” I nodded at the corpse. “And we aren’t playing for pennies here.”
Rawlins looked at me. Then at the dead boy. Then he nodded once and picked up his radio again.
“Hurts,” the girl whimpered, breathless with pain. “Hurts, hurts, hurts.”
I held her hand. I patted it awkwardly with my gloved left hand while we heard sirens approach.
“My God,” Rawlins said again. He shook his head. “My God, Dresden. What happened here?”
I stared at the enormous rip in the movie screen and at the Reaper-shaped dent in the wooden panels of the wall behind it. Clear gelatin, the physical form of ectoplasm, the matter of the spirit world, gleamed there against the broken wood. In minutes it would evaporate, and there would be nothing left behind.
“My God,” Rawlins whispered again, his voice still stunned. “What happened here?”
Yeah.
Good question.
Chapter Thirteen
The authorities arrived and replaced crisis with aftermath. The EMTs rushed the more badly injured girl and the eviscerated young man to an emergency room, while police officers who arrived on the scene did what they could to take care of the other injured attendees until more medical teams could show up. I stayed with the injured girl, holding her hand. One of the EMTs had examined her briefly, saw that though in considerable pain she was not in immediate danger, and ordered me to stay with her and keep anyone from moving her until the next team could arrive.
That suited me fine. The thought of standing up again was daunting.
I sat with the girl as more police arrived. She had become quiet and listless as her fear faded and her body produced endorphins to dull the pain. I heard a gasp and the sudden sound of pounding feet. I looked up to see Molly slip by a patrolman and fling herself down beside the girl.
“Rosie!” she cried, her face very pale. “Oh my God!”
“Easy, easy,” I told her, putting a hand against Molly’s shoulder to prevent her from embracing the wounded girl. “Don’t jostle her.”
“She’s hurt,” Molly protested. “Why haven’t they put her in an ambulance?”
“She’s not in immediate danger,” I said. “Two other people were. The ambulance took them first. She goes on the next one.”
“What happened?” Molly asked.
I shook my head. “I’m not sure yet. I didn’t see much of it. They were attacked.”
The girl on the floor suddenly stirred and opened her eyes. “Molly?” she said.
“I’m here, Rosie,” Molly said. She touched the injured girl’s cheek. “I’m right here.”
“My God,” the girl said. Tears welled from her eyes. “He killed them. He killed them.” Her breathing began to come faster, building toward panic.
“Shhhhhhh,” Molly said, and stroked Rosie’s hair back from her forehead as one might a frightened child. “You’re safe now. It’s all right.”
“The baby,” Rosie said. She slid her hand from mine and laid it over her belly. “Is the baby all right?”
Molly bit her lip and looked at me.
“She’s pregnant?” I asked.
“Three months,” Molly confirmed. “She just found out.”
“The baby,” Rosie said. “Will the baby be all right?”
“They’re going to do everything possible to make sure that you’re both all right,” I said immediately. “Try not to worry about it too much.”
Rosie closed her eyes, tears still streaming. “All right.”
“Rosie,” Molly asked. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I’m not sure,” she whispered. “I was sitting with Ken and Drea. We’d already seen our favorite scene in the movie and we decided to go. I was bending over to get my purse and Drea was checking her makeup and then the lights went out and she started screaming… And then when I could see again, he was there.” She shuddered. “He was there.”
“Who?” Molly pressed.
Rosie’s eyes opened too wide, showing white all around. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “The Reaper.”
Molly frowned. “Like in the movie? Someone in a costume.”
“It couldn’t be,” Rosie said, her trembling growing more pronounced. “It was him. It was really him.”
The next medical team arrived and headed right for us. Rosie seemed to be on the verge of another panic attack when she saw them, and started thrashing around. Molly leaned in close, whispering to her and continually touching her head, until the EMTs could get to work.
I stepped back. They got Rosie loaded onto a stretcher. When they laid her arm down by her side, I could see several small, round marks, irregular bruises, and damaged capillaries just under the surface of the skin at the bend of her arm.
Molly stared at me for a second, her eyes wide. Then she helped the EMTs throw a blanket over Rosie and her track marks. The EMTs counted to three and lifted the stretcher, flicked out the wheels underneath, and rolled her toward the doors. The girl stirred and thrashed weakly as they did this, letting out whimpering little cries.
“She’s frightened,” Molly told the EMTs. “Let me ride with her, help keep her calm.”
The men traded a look and then one of them nodded. Molly let out a breath of relief, nodded to them, and went to walk by the head of the stretcher, where Rosie could see her.
“Don’t worry,” said the other EMT “We’ll be right back for you, sir.”
“What, this?” I asked, and waved vaguely at my head. “Nah, I didn’t get hurt here. This is from earlier. I’m good.”
The man’s expression was dubious. “You sure?”
“Yep.”
They took the girl out. I dragged myself to the wall and propped my back up against it. A minute later, a man in a tweed suit came in and walked directly to Rawlins. He spoke to the officer for a moment, glancing over at
me once as they talked, then turned and walked over to me. Of only average height, the man was in his late forties, thirty pounds overweight, balding, and had watery blue eyes. He nodded at me, grabbed a chair, and settled down into it, looking down at me. “You’re Dresden?”
“Most days,” I said.
“My name is Detective Sergeant Greene. I’m with homicide.”
“Tough job,” I said.
“Most days,” he agreed. “Now, Rawlins back there tells me you were an eyewitness to what happened. Is that correct.”
“Mostly,” I said. “I only saw what happened at the very end in here.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. He blinked his watery eyes and absently removed a pen and a small notebook from his pocket. Behind him, cops were surrounding the area where the victims had lain with a circle of chairs and stringing crime scene tape between them. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“The lights went out,” I said. “People panicked. We heard screams. Rawlins went to help and I went with him.”
“Why?” he asked.
“What?”
“Why,” Greene said, his tone mild. “You’re a civilian, Mr. Dresden. It’s Rawlins’s job to help people in emergencies. Why didn’t you just head for the door?”
“It was an emergency,” I said. “I helped.”
“You’re a hero,” Greene said. “Is that it?”
I shrugged. “I was there. People needed help. I tried to.”
“Sure, sure,” Greene said, blinking his eyes. “So what were you doing to help?”
“Holding the light,” I said.
“Didn’t Rawlins have his own flashlight?”
“Can’t have too many flashlights,” I replied.
“Sure,” Greene said, writing things. “So you held the light for Rawlins. What then?”
“We heard screams in here. We came in. I saw the attacker over that girl they just took out.”
“Can you describe him?” Greene asked.
“Almost seven feet tall,” I said. “Built like a battleship, maybe three hundred, three twenty-five. Hockey mask. Sickle.”
Greene nodded. “What happened.”
“He attacked the girl. There were other people behind him, already down. He was about to cut her throat with the sickle. Rawlins shot him.”
“Shot at him?” Greene asked. “Since we don’t have a dead bad guy on the floor?”
“Shot at him,” I amended. “I don’t know if he hit him. The bad guy dropped the girl and swung that sickle at Rawlins. Rawlins blocked it with his flashlight.”
“Then what?”
“Then I hit the guy,” I said.
“Hit him how?” Greene asked.
“I used magic. Blew him thirty feet down the aisle and through the projector and the movie screen.”
Greene slapped his pen down onto the notebook and gave me a flat look.
“Hey,” I said. “You asked.”
“Or maybe he turned to run,” Greene said. “Knocked the projector over and jumped through the screen to get to the back of the room.”
“If that makes you feel better,” I said.
He gave me another hard look and said, “And then what?”
“And then he was gone,” I said.
“He ran out the door?”
“No,” I said. “We were pretty much right next to the door. He went through the screen, hit the wall behind it, and poof. Gone. I don’t know how.”
Greene wrote that down. “Do you know where Nelson Lenhardt is?”
I blinked. “No. Why would I?”
“He apparently attacked someone else at this convention today and beat him savagely. You bailed him out of jail. Maybe you’re friends with him.”
“Not really,” I said.
“Seems a little odd, then, that you dropped two thousand dollars to bail out this guy you’re not friends with.”
“Yeah.”
“Why did you do it?”
I got annoyed. “I had personal reasons.”
“Which are?”
“Personal,” I said.
Greene regarded me with his watery blue eyes, silent for a long minute. Then he said, patiently and politely, “I’m not sure I understand all of this. I’d appreciate it if you could help me out. Could you tell me again what happened? Starting with when the lights went out?”
I sighed.
We started over.
Four more times.
Greene was never so much as impolite to me, and his mild voice and watery eyes made him seem more like an apologetic clerk than a detective, but I had a gut instinct that there was a steely and dangerous man underneath the tweed camouflage, and that he had me pegged as an accomplice, or at least as someone who knew more than he was saying.
Which, I suppose, was true. But going on about black magic and ectoplasm and boogeymen that disappeared at will wasn’t going to make him like me any better. That was par for the course, when it came to cops. Some of them, guys like Rawlins, had run into something nasty at some point in their careers. They never talked much about it with anyone- other cops tend to worry about it when one of their partners starts talking about seeing monsters, and all kinds of well-intentioned counseling and psychological evaluations were sure to follow.
So if a cop found himself face-to-face with a vampire or a ghoul (and survived it), its only existence tended to be in the landscape of memory. Time has a way of wearing the sharpest edges away from that kind of thing, and it’s easy to avoid thinking about terrifying monsters, and even more terrifying implications, and get back to the daily routine. If enough time went by, a lot of cops could even convince themselves that what happened had been exaggerated in their heads, bad memories amplified by darkness and fear, and that since everyone around them knew monsters didn’t exist, they must therefore have seen something normal, something explainable.
But when the heat was on, those same cops changed. Somewhere deep down, they know that it’s for real, and when something supernatural went down again, they were willing, at least for the duration, to forget about anything but doing whatever they could to survive it and protect lives, even if in retrospect it seemed insane. Rawlins would poke fun at me for “pretending” to be a wizard when there was a fan convention in progress. But when everything had hit the proverbial fan, he’d been willing to work with me.
Then there was the other kind of cop-guys like Greene, who hadn’t ever seen anything remotely supernatural, who went home to their house and 2.3 kids and dog and mowed their lawn on Saturdays, who watch Nova and the Science Channel and subscribe to National Geographic, and keep every issue stored neatly and in order in the basement.
Guys like that were dead certain that everything was logical, everything was explainable, and that nothing existed outside the purview of reason and logic. Guys like that also tend to make pretty good detectives. Greene was a guy like that.
“All right, Mr. Dresden,” Greene said. “I’m still kind of unclear on a few points. Now, when the lights went out, what did you do?”
I rubbed at my eyes. My head ached. I wanted to sleep. “I’ve already told you this. Five times.”
“I know, I know,” Greene said, and offered me a small smile. “But sometimes repeating things can jiggle forgotten little details loose. So, if you don’t mind, can you tell me about when it went dark?”
I closed my eyes and fought a sudden and overwhelming temptation to levitate Greene to the ceiling and leave him there for a while.
Someone touched my shoulder, and I opened my eyes to find Murphy standing over me, offering me a white Styrofoam cup. “Evening Harry.”
“Oh, thank God,” I muttered, and took the cup. Coffee. I sipped some. Hot and sweet. I groaned in pleasure. “Angel of mercy, Murph.”
“That’s me,” she agreed. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a very light cotton blazer. She had circles under her eyes and her blond hair was messy. Someone must have gotten her out of bed for this one. “Detective Greene,” she said.
> “Lieutenant,” Greene replied, all courtesy on the surface. “I didn’t realize I’d called Special Investigations for help. Maybe someone bumped the speed dial on my phone.” He reached into a pocket and took out a cell.
He regarded it gravely for a moment and then said, “Oh, wait. My mistake. You aren’t on my speed dial. I must have slipped into some kind of fugue state when I wasn’t looking.”
“Don’t worry, Sergeant,” Murphy said, smiling sweetly “If I find out whodunit, I’ll tell you so you can get the collar.”
Greene shook his head. “This is messy enough already,” he said. “Some clown in a horror movie costume cuts a bunch of horror fans to ribbons. The press is going to make piranhas look like goldfish.”
“Yep,” Murphy said. “Seems to me you should take all the help you can get. Don’t want to screw it up in front of all those cameras.”
He gave her another flat look and then shook his head. “You aren’t exactly famous for your friendly spirit of cooperation with your fellow officers, Lieutenant.”
“I get the job done,” Murphy said easily. “I can help you. Or I can see to it that the press knows that you’re refusing assistance in finding a murderer because of departmental rivalry. Your call.”
Greene stared at her for another long minute, then said, “Does calling someone an overbearing, egotistical bitch constitute sexual harassment?”
Murphy’s smile grew sunnier. “Come to the gym sometime and we’ll discuss it.”
Greene grunted and rose, stuffing his pad and pen into his pocket. “Dresden, don’t leave town. I might need to speak to you again.”
“Won’t that be nice,” I mumbled, and sipped more coffee.
Greene handed Murphy a card. “My cell number is on it. In case you actually do want to cooperate.”
Murphy traded him for one of hers. “Ditto.”
Greene shook his head, gave her a barely polite nod, and walked off to speak to the officers near the taped-off section of floor.
“I think he likes you,” I told Murphy.
Murphy snorted. “He’s had you running in a circle, huh?”