by Jim Butcher
“That will be fine, yes,” I told her. I tried not to fondle the envelope. At least I wasn’t crass enough to dump the money on my desk and count it out.
She drew out another envelope. “He took most of his things with him,” she said. “At least, I couldn’t find them where he usually keeps them. But I did find this.” There was something in the envelope, making it bulge, an amulet, ring, or charm of some kind, I was betting. A third envelope came out of her purse—the woman must be compulsively well organized. “There’s a picture of him in here, and my phone number inside. Thank you, Mr. Dresden. When will you call?”
“As soon as I know something,” I told her. “Probably by tomorrow afternoon or Saturday morning. Sound good?”
She almost looked at my eyes, caught herself, and smiled directly at my nose instead. “Yes. Yes, thank you so much for your help.” She glanced up at the wall. “Oh, look at the time. I need to go. School’s almost out.” She closed her teeth over her words and flushed again, as though embarrassed that she had let such an important fact about her slip out.
“I’ll do whatever I can, ma’am,” I assured her, rising, and walking her to the door. “Thank you for your business. I’ll be in touch soon.”
She said her good-byes, never looking me in the face, and fled out the door. I shut it behind her and went back to the envelopes.
First, the money. It was all in fifties, which always look new even when they’re years old because they get so little circulation. There were ten of them. I put them in my wallet, and trashed the envelope.
The envelope with the photo in it was next. I took it out and regarded a picture of Monica and a man of lean and handsome features, with a wide forehead and shaggy eyebrows that skewed his handsomeness off onto a rather eccentric angle. His smile was whiter-than-white, and his skin had the smooth, dark tan of someone who spends a lot of time in the sun, boating maybe. It was a sharp contrast against Monica’s paleness. Victor Sells, I presume.
The phone number was written on a plain white index card that had been neatly trimmed down to fit inside the envelope. There was no name or area code, just a seven-digit number. I got out my cross-listing directory and looked it up.
I noted that down as well. I wondered what the woman had expected to accomplish by only giving out first names, when she had been going to hand me a dozen other ways of finding out in any case. It only goes to show that people are funny when they’re nervous about something. They say screwy things, make odd choices which, in retrospect, they feel amazingly foolish for making. I would have to be careful not to say anything to rub that in when I spoke to her again.
I trashed the second envelope and opened the last one, turning it upside down over my desk.
The brown husk of a dead, dried scorpion, glistening with some sort of preservative glaze, clicked down onto my desk. A supple, braided leather cord led off from a ring set through the base of its tail, so that if it was worn, it would hang head down, tail up and curled over the dried body to point at the ground.
I shuddered. Scorpions were symbolically powerful in certain circles of belief. They weren’t usually symbols of anything good or wholesome, either. A lot of petty, mean spells could be focused around a little talisman like that. If you wore it next to your skin, as such things are supposed to be worn, the prickly legs of the thing would be a constant poking and agitation at your chest, a continual reminder that it was there. The dried stinger at the tail’s tip might actually pierce the skin of anyone who tried to give the wearer a hug. Its crablike pincers would catch in a man’s chest hair, or scratch at the curves of a woman’s breasts. Nasty, unpleasant thing. Not evil, as such—but you sure as hell weren’t likely to do happy shiny things with magic with such an item around your neck.
Maybe Victor Sells had gotten involved in something real, something that had absorbed his attention. The Art could do that to a person—particularly the darker aspects of it. If he had turned to it in despair after losing his job, maybe that would explain his sudden absence from his home. A lot of sorcerers or wanna-be sorcerers secluded themselves in the belief that isolation would increase their ability to focus on their magic. It didn’t—but it did make it easier for a weak or untrained mind to avoid distractions.
Or maybe it wasn’t even a true talisman. Maybe it was just a curiosity, or a souvenir from some visit to the Southwest. There wasn’t any way for me to tell if it was indeed a device used to improve the focus and direction of magical energies, short of actually using it to attempt a spell—and I really didn’t want to be using such a dubious article, for a variety of good reasons.
I would have to keep this little un-beauty in mind as I tried to run this man down. It might well mean nothing. On the other hand, it might not. I looked up at the clock. A quarter after three. There was time to check with the local morgues to see if they had turned up any likely John Does—who knew, my search might be over before the day’s end—and then to get to the bank to deposit my money and fire off a check to my landlord.
I got out my phone book and started calling up hospitals—not really my routine line of work, but not difficult, either, except for the standard problems I had using the telephone: static, line noise, other people’s conversations being louder than mine. If something can go wrong, it will.
Once I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a twitch of motion from the dried scorpion that sat on my desk. I blinked and stared at it. It didn’t move. Cautiously, I extended my senses toward it like an invisible hand, feeling about for any traces of enchantment or magical energy.
Nothing. It was as dry of enchantment as it was of life.
Never let it be said that Harry Dresden is afraid of a dried, dead bug. Creepy or not, I wasn’t going to let it ruin my concentration.
So I scooped it up with the corner of the phone book and popped it into the middle drawer of my desk. Out of sight, out of mind.
So I have a problem with creepy, dead, poisonous things. So sue me.
Chapter
Five
McAnally’s is a pub a few blocks from my office. I go there when I’m feeling stressed, or when I have a few extra bucks to spend on a nice dinner. A lot of us fringe types do. Mac, the pub’s owner, is used to wizards and all the problems that come along with us. There aren’t any video games at McAnally’s. There are no televisions or expensive computer trivia games. There isn’t even a jukebox. Mac keeps a player piano instead. It’s less likely to go haywire around us.
I say pub in all the best senses of the word. When you walk in, you take several steps down into a room with a deadly combination of a low clearance and ceiling fans. If you’re tall, like me, you walk carefully in McAnally’s. There are thirteen stools at the bar and thirteen tables in the room. Thirteen windows, set up high in the wall in order to be above ground level, let some light from the street into the place. Thirteen mirrors on the walls cast back reflections of the patrons in dim detail, and give the illusion of more space. Thirteen wooden columns, carved with likenesses from folktales and legends of the Old World, make it difficult to walk around the place without weaving a circuitous route—they also quite intentionally break up the flow of random energies, dispelling to one degree or another the auras that gather around broody, grumpy wizards and keeping them from manifesting in unintentional and colorful ways. The colors are all muted, earth browns and sea greens. The first time I entered McAnally’s, I felt like a wolf returning to an old, favorite den. Mac makes his own beer, ale really, and it’s the best stuff in the city. His food is cooked on a wood-burning stove. And you can damn well walk your own self over to the bar to pick up your order when it’s ready, according to Mac. It’s my sort of place.
Since the calls to the morgues had turned up nothing, I kept a few bills out of Monica Sells’s retainer and took myself to McAnally’s. After the kind of day I’d had, I deserved some of Mac’s ale and someone else’s cooking. It was going to be a long night, too, once I went home and started trying to figure ou
t how whoever it was had pulled off the death spell used on Johnny Marcone’s hatchet man, Tommy Tomm, and his girlfriend, Jennifer Stanton.
“Dresden,” Mac greeted me, when I sat down at the bar. The dim, comfortable room was empty, but for a pair of men I recognized by sight at a back table, playing chess. Mac is a tall, almost gangly man of indeterminate age, though there’s a sense to him that speaks of enough wisdom and strength that I wouldn’t venture that he was less than fifty. He has squinty eyes and a smile that is rare and mischievous when it manifests. Mac never says much, but when he does it’s almost always worth listening to.
“Hey there, Mac,” I hailed him. “Been one hell of a day. Give me a steak sandwich, fries, ale.”
“Ungh,” Mac said. He opened a bottle of his ale and began to pour it warm, staring past me, into the middle distance. He does that with everyone. Considering his clientele, I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t chance looking them in the face, either.
“You hear about what happened at the Madison?”
“Ungh,” he confirmed.
“Nasty business.”
Such an inane comment apparently didn’t merit even a grunted reply. Mac set my drink out and turned to the stove behind the bar, checking the wood and raking it back and forth to provide even heating for it.
I picked up a prethumbed newspaper nearby and scanned the headlines. “Hey, look at this. Another ThreeEye rampage. Jesus, this stuff is worse than crack.” The article detailed the virtual demolition of a neighborhood grocery store by a pair of ThreeEye junkies who were convinced that the place was destined to explode and wanted to beat destiny to the punch.
“Ungh.”
“You ever seen anything like this?”
Mac shook his head.
“They say the stuff gives you the third sight,” I said, reading the article. Both junkies had been admitted to the hospital and were in critical condition, after collapsing at the scene. “But you know what?”
Mac looked back at me from the stove, while he cooked.
“I don’t think that’s possible. What a bunch of crap. Trying to sell these poor kids on the idea that they can do magic.”
Mac nodded at me.
“If it was serious stuff, the department would have already called me by now.”
Mac shrugged, turning back to the stove. Then he squinted up and peered into the dim reflection of the mirror behind the bar.
“Harry,” he said, “you were followed.”
I had been too tense for too much of the day to avoid feeling my shoulders constrict in a sudden twinge. I put both hands around my mug and brought a few phrases of quasi-Latin to mind. It never hurt to be ready to defend myself, in case someone was intending to hurt me. I watched someone approach, a dim shape in the reflection cast by the ancient, worn mirror. Mac went on with cooking, unperturbed. Nothing much perturbed Mac.
I smelled her perfume before I turned around. “Why, Miss Rodriguez,” I said. “It’s always pleasant to see you.”
She came to an abrupt stop a couple of paces from me, apparently disconcerted. One of the advantages of being a wizard is that people always attribute anything you do to magic, if no other immediate explanation leaps to mind. She probably wouldn’t think about her perfume giving her identity away when she could assign my mysterious, blind identification of her to my mystical powers.
“Come on,” I told her. “Sit down. I’ll get you a drink while I refuse to tell you anything.”
“Harry,” she admonished me, “you don’t know I’m here on business.” She sat down on the barstool next to me. She was a woman of average height and striking, dark beauty, wearing a crisp business jacket and skirt, hose, pumps. Her dark, straight hair was trimmed in a neat cut that ended at the nape of her neck and was parted off of the dark skin of her forehead, emphasizing the lazy appeal of her dark eyes.
“Susan,” I chided her, “you wouldn’t be in this place if you weren’t. Did you have a good time in Branson?”
Susan Rodriguez was a reporter for the Chicago Arcane, a yellow magazine that covered all sorts of supernatural and paranormal events throughout the Midwest. Usually, the events they covered weren’t much better than “Monkey Man Seen With Elvis’s Love Child,” or “JFK’s Mutant Ghost Abducts Shapeshifting Girl Scout.” But once in a great, great while, the Arcane covered something that was real. Like the Unseelie Incursion of 1994, when the entire city of Milwaukee had simply vanished for two hours. Gone. Government satellite photos showed the river valley covered with trees and empty of life or human habitation. All communications ceased. Then, a few hours later, there it was, back again, and no one in the city itself the wiser.
She had also been hanging around my investigation in Branson the previous week. She had been tracking me ever since interviewing me for a feature story, right after I’d opened up my business. I had to hand it to her—she had instincts. And enough curiosity to get her into ten kinds of trouble. She had tricked me into meeting her eyes at the conclusion of our first interview, an eager young reporter investigating an angle on her interviewee. She was the one who had fainted after we’d soulgazed.
She smirked at me. I liked her smirk. It did interesting things to her lips, and hers were already attractive. “You should have stayed around for the show,” she said. “It was pretty impressive.” She put her purse on the bar and slid up onto the stool beside me.
“No thanks,” I told her. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for me.”
“My editor loved the coverage. She’s convinced it’s going to win an award of some kind.”
“I can see it now,” I told her. “‘Mysterious Visions Haunt Drug-Using Country Star.’ Real hard-hitting paranormal journalism, that.” I glanced at her, and she met my eyes without fear. She didn’t let me see if my gibe had ruffled her.
“I heard you got called in by the S.I. director today,” she told me. She leaned toward me, enough that a glance down would have afforded an interesting angle to the V of her white shirt. “I’d love to hear you tell me about this one, Harry.” She quirked a smile at me that promised things.
I almost smiled back at her. “Sorry,” I told her. “I have a standard nondisclosure agreement with the city.”
“Something off the record, then?” she asked. “Rumor has it that these killings were pretty sensational.”
“Can’t help you, Susan,” I told her. “Wild horses couldn’t drag it out of me, et cetera.”
“Just a hint,” she pressed. “A word of comment. Something shared between two people who are very attracted to one another.”
“Which two people would that be?”
She put an elbow on the counter and propped her chin in her hand, studying me through narrowed eyes and thick, long lashes. One of the things that appealed to me about her was that even though she used her charm and femininity relentlessly in pursuit of her stories, she had no concept of just how attractive she really was—I had seen that when I looked within her last year. “Harry Dresden,” she said, “you are a thoroughly maddening man.” Her eyes narrowed a bit further. “You didn’t look down my blouse even once, did you?” she accused.
I took a sip of my ale and beckoned Mac to pour her one as well. He did. “Guilty.”
“Most men are off-balance by now,” she complained. “What does it take with you, anyway, Dresden?”
“I am pure of heart and mind,” I told her. “I cannot be corrupted.”
She stared at me in frustration for a moment. Then she tilted back her head to laugh. She had a good laugh, too, throaty and rich. I did look down at her chest when she did that, just for a second. A pure heart and mind only takes you so far—sooner or later the hormones have their say, too. I mean, I’m not a teenager or anything, anymore, but I’m not exactly an expert in things like this, either. Call it an overwhelming interest in my professional career, but I’ve never had much time for dating or the fair sex in general. And when I have, it hasn’t turned out too well.
Susan was a known quantity—s
he was attractive, bright, appealing, her motivations were clear and simple, and she was honest in pursuing them. She flirted with me because she wanted information as much as because she thought I was attractive. Sometimes she got it. Sometimes she didn’t. This one was way too hot for Susan or the Arcane to touch, and if Murphy heard I’d tipped someone off about what had happened, she’d have my heart between two pieces of bread for lunch.
“I’ll tell you what, Harry,” she said. “How about if I ask some questions, and you just answer them with a yes or a no?”
“No,” I said promptly. Dammit. I am a poor liar, and it didn’t take a reporter with Susan’s brains to tell it.
Her eyes glittered with cheerfully malicious ambition. “Was Tommy Tomm murdered by a paranormal being or means?”
“No,” I said again, stubbornly.
“No, he wasn’t?” Susan asked. “Or no, it wasn’t a paranormal being?”
I glanced at Mac as though to appeal for help. Mac ignored me. Mac doesn’t take sides. Mac is wise.
“No, I’m not going to answer questions,” I said.
“Do the police have any leads? Any suspects?”
“No.”
“Are you a suspect yourself, Harry?”
Disturbing thought. “No,” I said, exasperated. “Susan—”
“Would you mind having dinner with me Saturday night?”
“No! I—” I blinked at her. “What?”
She smiled at me, leaned over, and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips, which I’d admired so much, felt very, very nice. “Super,” she said. “I’ll pick you up at your place. Say around nine?”
“Did I just miss something?” I asked her.
She nodded, dark eyes sparkling with humor. “I’m going to take you to a fantastic dinner. Have you ever eaten at the Pump Room? At the Ambassador East?”
I shook my head.
“Steaks you wouldn’t believe,” she assured me. “And the most romantic atmosphere. Jackets and ties required. Can you manage?”