Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  “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 …

  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.”

&nb
sp; 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. You 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?”

  “It’s legit?”

  I dropped the drama voice. “Yeah, man, I was actually at the con. It’s real—you have my word.”

  Patterson crowed and seized the card with absolutely Gollumesque avarice. “Pleasure doing business with you, I Put the Pal In.” He gestured for me to join him behind the desk, and rubbed his hands together in mock-epic greed. “What you need?”

  That’s the thing about knowing a lot of gamers. They do not necessarily count their riches with bank accounts. Not when there are virtual status symbols to acquire.

  “Guy got admitted a couple of hours ago, ER, first name Stan,” I said. “I sent him in with Reg Lamar, probable overdose. I want to see him.”

  Patterson started thumping on computer keys. “You sent him in?”

  “Out jogging this morning, found him seizing,” I said.

  He stopped typing for a second and looked at me. Then he looked back at the monitor and said, “Someone’s taking his character way too seriously.”

  “Nah, I just have too many corpsesicles already,” I said.

  “You’re lucky it happened in the morning. We start getting busy come the afternoon.”

  I started to tell him that luck hadn’t had anything to do with it, and felt myself shiver.

  I mean, that’s kind of a huge thing to think about, you know? That in all probability, luck really hadn’t been involved. That God, or some version of God, who the Knights simply referred to as the Almighty, had knowingly arranged for me to be in the right place at the right time to help Stan—and that He (or She, or It—I mean I didn’t want to get too presumptuous, all things considered, and how should I know?) had done so in such a way as to make it uniquely possible for me, personally, to go help Stan.

  Could God, with all the majesty of the universe at his disposal, with the uncounted myriad of life forms to look after throughout practically uncountable galaxies, really be all that interested in one little drug addict? One little medical examiner, playing at being a hero?

  Answer that question with a yes or a no, and tell me which is the more terrifying. I’m not sure I can.

  I’d asked Michael the same question, more or less. He’d been of the opinion that God couldn’t not be interested on a personal level. That He knew each and every one of us too well to be anything less than passionately involved in caring about our lives and our choices.

  And, honestly, that seemed a little stalkery to me. I mean, bad enough when your mom is too interested in what you do. Do you really want God looking over your shoulder at every moment? Me, personally, that was too embarrassing to even consider.

  In the end, I’d decided that whatever the Almighty might care about or not care about, He seemed to be interested in helping people who needed help, at least where the Knights of the Cross were concerned
. So, okay. Fine. I could work with the Guy. But all these deep questions bothered me.

  “Here he is, top of the list,” Patterson said. “Oh, Stanley Bowers. Been in and out a lot lately. I think I know this guy. Addict. One of the worst I’ve seen. Got maybe a year left in him, if the weather isn’t too bad. Got a sedative, saline, observation.”

  “How’s he get the drugs?”

  “Disability, and some kind of court settlement. Pretty much sticks it up his nose. Won’t do rehab.”

  “Family?”

  “Nah. We’ve looked.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “You want to help guys like this,” Patterson said. “But he doesn’t want to help himself. You know? You can’t save someone who don’t want to be saved.”

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t try,” I said. “Where is he?”

  Patterson peered at the monitor and rattled the keys a couple more times. Then he said, “Huh. That’s weird.”

  AS A MEDICAL examiner, I don’t spend a lot of time in pediatrics. Neither, as a rule, do adult junkies. But for some reason, Stan had been moved up with the kids.

  I rode the elevator up, trying to look distracted and disinterested like a proper physician, most of whom were operating on not much sleep at least part of the time, but it was tough, because I was feeling something that I suspected was a deeper-than-usual anger.

  Whatever had hurt Stan was bad enough. But now there were kids involved. And some things you just don’t do. You know?

  I walked briskly into pediatrics. There are a ton of pediatric physicians at St. Tony’s, plus various pediatric specialists, consulting physicians, et cetera, et cetera. The floor was busy, its beds full, and the nurses had their plates full—and to make things worse, there were renovators at work on the floor. Plastic sheets hung from some of the walls, shutting parts of the floor off from the rest, and buckets and tools and sawhorses and materials were stacked up, blurry shapes just out of sight on the other side of the first layer of curtains.

  Workmen, tagged with hospital tags and clearly utterly ignorant of the place’s rhythms, were walking out, evidently headed to an early lunch break. One of them was flirting with a young nurse who obviously had a mile of work to do. It was kind of pandemonium, or what passes for it in an orderly hospital.