by Jim Butcher
I arched an eyebrow. “You’ve been splitting the pizza a thousand ways?”
“Well, lord,” he amended. “Several dozen, at any rate.”
The Wee Folk are a fractious, fickle bunch, but I’ve learned a couple of things about them that I’m not sure anyone else knows. First, that they’re just about everywhere, and anywhere they aren’t, they can usually get. They don’t have much of an attention span, but for short, simple tasks, they are hell on wheels.
Second—they have a lust for pizza that is without equal in this world. I’ve been bribing the Wee Folk with pizza on a regular basis for years, and in return they’ve given me their (admittedly erratic) loyalty. They call me the Za-Lord, and the little fair folk who take my pizza also serve in the Za-Lord’s Guard—which means, mostly, that the Wee Folk hang around my house hoping for extra pizza and protecting it from wee threats.
Toot-toot was their leader, and he and his folks had pulled off some very helpful tasks for me in the past. They had saved my life on more than one occasion. No one in the supernatural community ever expected everything of which they were capable. As a result, Toot and his kin are generally ignored. I tried to take that as a life lesson: never underestimate the little people.
This was a job that was right up Toot-toot’s alley. Almost literally.
“Do you know which car is his?” I asked.
Toot threw back his head, Yul Brynner style. “Of course! The blue one with this on the hood.” He threw his arms out and up at an angle and stood ramrod straight in a Y shape.
“Blue Mercedes, eh?” I asked. “Okay. Here’s what I want you to do. . . .”
Five minutes later, I walked back around the side of the house to the front opposite the street. Then I turned to face the house where the snoop was set up and put on my most ferocious scowl. I pointed directly at the curtained second-floor windows, then turned my hand over and crooked my finger, beckoning. Then I pointed to the ground right in front of me.
One of the curtains might have twitched. I gave it a slow count of five, and then started walking briskly toward the other boardinghouse, crossing the busy street in the process.
A young man in his twenties wearing khaki shorts and a green T-shirt came rushing out of the converted boardinghouse and ran toward a blue Mercedes parked on the street, an expensive camera hanging around his neck.
I kept walking, not changing my pace.
He rushed around to the driver’s door, pointing some kind of handheld device at the car. Then he clawed at the door but it stayed closed. He shot another glance at me, and then tried to insert his key into the lock. Then he blinked and stared at his key as he pulled it back trailing streamers of a rubbery pink substance—bubble gum.
“I wouldn’t bother,” I said as I got closer. “Look at the tires.”
The young man glanced from me to his Mercedes and stared some more. All four tires were completely flat.
“Oh,” he said. He looked at his gum-covered key and sighed. “Well. Shit.”
I stopped across the car from him and smiled faintly. “Don’t feel too bad about it, man. I’ve been doing this longer than you.”
He gave me a sour look. Then he held up his key. “Bubble gum?”
“Coulda been superglue. Take it as a professional courtesy.” I nodded toward his car. “Let’s talk. Turn the air-conditioning on, for crying out loud.”
He eyed me for a moment and sighed. “Yeah. Okay.”
We both got in the car. He scraped the gum off of his key and put it in the ignition, but when he turned it, nothing happened.
“Oh. Pop the hood,” I said.
He eyed me and did. I went around to the front of the car and reconnected the loose battery cable. I said, “Okay,” and he started the engine smoothly.
Like I said, give Toot-toot and his kin the right job, and they are formidable as hell.
I got back in the car and said, “You licensed?”
The young man shrugged and turned his AC up to “deep freeze.” “Yeah.”
I nodded. “How long?”
“Not long.”
“Cop?”
“In Joliet,” he said.
“But not now.”
“Didn’t fit.”
“Why are you watching my place?”
He shrugged. “I got a mortgage.”
I nodded and held out my hand. “Harry Dresden.”
He frowned at the name. “You the one used to work for Nick Christian at Ragged Angel?”
“Yeah.”
“Nick has a good reputation.” He seemed to come to some kind of conclusion and took my hand with a certain amount of resignation. “Vince Graver.”
“You got hired to snoop on me?”
He shrugged.
“You tail me last night?”
“You know the score, man,” Graver said. “You take someone’s money, you keep your mouth shut.”
I lifted my eyebrows. A lot of PIs wouldn’t have the belly to be nearly so reticent, under the circumstances. It made me take a second look at him. Thin, built like someone who ran or rode a bicycle on his weekends. Clean-cut without being particularly memorable. Medium brown hair, medium height, medium brown eyes. The only exceptional thing about his appearance was that there was nothing exceptional about his appearance.
“You keep your mouth shut,” I agreed. “Until people start getting hurt. Then it gets complicated.”
Graver frowned. “Hurt?”
“There have been two attempts on my life in the past twenty-four hours,” I said. “Do the math.”
He focused his eyes down the street, into the distance, and pursed his lips. “Damn.”
“Damn?”
He nodded morosely. “There go the rest of my fees and expenses.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “You’re bailing on your client? Just like that?”
“ ‘Accomplice’ is an ugly word. So is ‘penitentiary.’ ”
Smart kid. Smarter than I had been when I first got my PI license. “I need to know who backed you.”
Graver thought about that one for a minute. Then he said, “No.”
“Why not?”
“I make it a personal policy not to turn on clients or piss off people who are into murder.”
“You lost the work,” I said. “What if I made it up to you?”
“Maybe you didn’t read that part of the book. The ‘I’ in PI stands for ‘investigator.’ Not ‘informer.’ ”
“Maybe I call the cops. Maybe I tell them you’re involved in the attacks.”
“Maybe you can’t prove a damned thing.” Graver shook his head. “You don’t get ahead in this business if you can’t keep your teeth together.”
I leaned back in my seat and crossed my arms, studying him for a moment. “You’re right,” I said. “I can’t make you. So I’m asking you. Please.”
He kept on staring out the windshield. “Why they after you?”
“I’m protecting a client.”
“Old guy in the wheelchair.”
“Yeah.”
Graver squinted. “He looks like a hard case.”
“You have no idea.”
We sat in the air-conditioning for a moment. Then he glanced at me and shook his head.
“You seem like a reasonable guy,” Graver said. “Hope you don’t get dead. Conversation over.”
I thought about pushing things, but I’ve been around long enough to recognize someone who was genuinely tough-minded when I see him. “You got a business card?”
He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a plain white business card with his name and a phone number. He passed it over to me. “Why?”
“Sometimes I need a subcontractor.”
He lifted both eyebrows.
“One who knows how to keep his teeth together.” I nodded to him and got out of the car. I leaned down and looked in the door before I left. “I know a mechanic. I’ll give him a call and he’ll come on out. He’s got a compressor on his truck, and he
can fill up your tires. I’ll pay for it.”
Graver studied me with calm, intelligent eyes and then smiled a little. “Thanks.”
I closed the door and thumped on the roof with my fist. Then I walked back to my apartment. Mouse, who had waited patiently in the yard, came shambling up to greet me as I stepped out of the street, and he walked alongside me as I went back to the apartment.
Morgan was lying on my bed again when I came back in. Molly was just finishing up changing his bandages. Mister watched the entire process from the back of the couch, his ears tilted forward, evidently fascinated.
Morgan nodded to me and rasped, “Did you catch him?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A local PI had been hired to keep track of me. But there was a problem.”
“What’s that?”
I shrugged. “He had integrity.”
Morgan inhaled through his nose and nodded. “Pretty rare problem.”
“Yeah. Impressive young man. What are the odds?”
Molly looked back and forth between us. “I don’t understand.”
“He’s quitting the job, but he won’t tell us what we want to know about his client, because he doesn’t think it would be right,” I said. “He’s not willing to sell the information, either.”
Molly frowned. “Then how are we going to find out who is behind all of this?”
I shrugged. “Not sure. But I told him I’d get someone to come by and put the air back in his tires. Excuse me.”
“Wait. He’s still out there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Blue Mercedes.”
“And he’s a young man.”
“Sure,” I said. “A little older than you. Name’s Vince Graver.”
Molly beamed. “Well, then, I’ll go get him to tell me.” She walked over to my icebox, opened it, pulled out a dark brown bottle of micro-brewery beer, and walked toward the door.
“How you gonna do that?” I asked her.
“Trust me, Harry. I’ll change his mind.”
“No,” Morgan said fiercely. He coughed a couple of times. “No. I would rather be dead—do you hear me? Be dead than have you use black magic on my behalf.”
Molly set the beer down on the shelf by the door and blinked at Morgan. “You’re right,” she said to me. “He is kind of a drama queen. Who said anything about magic?”
She pulled one arm into her T-shirt, and wriggled around a little. A few seconds later, she was tugging her bra out of the arm hole of her shirt. She dropped it on the shelf, picked up the bottle, and held it against each breast in turn. Then she turned to face me, took a deep breath, and arched her back a little. The tips of her breasts pressed quite noticeably against the rather strained fabric of her shirt.
“What do you think?” she asked, giving me a wicked smile.
I thought Vince was doomed.
“I think your mother would scream bloody murder,” I said.
Molly smirked. “Call the mechanic. I’ll just keep him company until the truck gets there.” She turned with a little extra hip action and left the apartment.
Morgan made a low, appreciative sound as the door closed.
I eyed him.
Morgan looked from the door to me. “I’m not dead yet, Dresden.” He closed his eyes. “Doesn’t hurt to admire a woman’s beauty once in a while.”
“Maybe. But that was just . . . just wrong.”
Morgan smiled, though it was strained with discomfort. “She’s right, though. Especially with a young man. A woman can make a man see everything in a different light.”
“Wrong,” I muttered. “Just wrong.”
I went to call Mike the mechanic.
Molly came back about forty-five minutes later, beaming.
Morgan had been forced to take more pain medication and was tossing in a restless sleep. I closed the door carefully so that we wouldn’t wake him.
“Well?” I asked.
“His car has really good air-conditioning,” Molly said smugly. “He never had a chance.” Between two fingers, she held up a business card like the one I’d gotten.
I did the same thing with mine, mirroring her.
She flipped hers over, showing me a handwritten note on the other side. “I’m worried about my job as your assistant.” She put the back of her hand against her forehead melodramatically. “If something happens to you, whatever will I do? Wherever shall I go?”
“And?”
She held out the card to me. “And Vince suggested that I might consider work as a paralegal. He even suggested a law firm. Smith Cohen Mackleroy.”
“His job-hunting suggestion, eh?” I asked.
She smirked. “Well, obviously he couldn’t just tell me who hired him. That would be wrong.”
“You are a cruel and devious young woman.” I took the card from her and read it. It said: Smith Cohen Mackleroy, listed a phone number, and had the name “Evelyn Derek” printed under that.
I looked up to meet Molly’s smiling eyes. Her grin widened. “Damn, I’m good.”
“No argument here,” I told her. “Now we have a name, a lead. One might even call it a clue.”
“Not only that,” Molly said. “I have a date.”
“Good work, grasshopper,” I said, grinning as I rolled my eyes. “Way to take one for the team.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Smith Cohen and Mackleroy, as it turned out, was an upscale law firm in downtown Chicago. The building their offices occupied stood in the shadow of the Sears Tower, and must have had a fantastic view of the lake. Having plucked out the enemy’s eyes, so to speak, I thought that I might have bought us some breathing space. Without Vince on our tail, I hoped that Morgan could get a few hours of rest in relative safety.
I’d figure out somewhere else to move him—just as soon as I leaned on Ms. Evelyn Derek and found out to whom she reported Vince’s findings.
I guess I looked sort of mussed and scraggly, because the building’s security guard gave me a wary look as I entered solidly in the middle of lunch hour. I could practically see him deciding whether or not to stop me.
I gave him my friendliest smile—which my weariness and stress probably reduced to merely polite—and said, “Excuse me, sir. I have an appointment with an attorney at Smith Cohen and Mackleroy. They’re on the twenty-second floor, right?”
He relaxed, which was good. Beneath his suit, he looked like he had enough muscle to bounce me handily out the door. “Twenty-four, sir.”
“Right, thanks.” I smiled at him and strode confidently past. Confidence is critical to convincing people that you really are supposed to be somewhere—especially when you aren’t.
“Sir,” said the guard from behind me. “I’d appreciate it if you left your club here.”
I paused and looked over my shoulder.
He had a gun. His hand wasn’t exactly resting on it, but he’d tucked his thumb into his belt about half an inch away.
“It isn’t a club,” I said calmly. “It’s a walking stick.”
“Six feet long.”
“It’s traditional Ozark folk art.”
“With dents and nicks all over it.”
I thought about it for a second. “I’m insecure?”
“Get a blanket.” He held out his hand.
I sighed and passed my staff over to him. “Do I get a receipt?”
He took a notepad from his pocket and wrote on it. Then he passed it over to me. It read: Received, one six foot traditional Ozark walking club from Mr. Smart-ass.
“That’s Doctor Smart-ass,” I said. “I didn’t spend eight years in insult college to be called Mister.”
He leaned the staff against the wall behind his desk and sat back down at his chair.
I went to the elevator and rode up. It was one of those express contraptions that goes fast enough to compress your spine and make your ears pop. It opened on the twenty-fourth floor facing a reception desk. The law office, apparently, took up the entire floor.
The receptionist was,
inevitably, a young woman, and just as unavoidably attractive. She went with the solid-oak furnishings, the actual oil paintings, and the handcrafted furniture in the reception area, and the faint scent of lemon wood polish in the air—variations on a theme of beautiful practicality.
She looked up at me with a polite smile, her dark hair long and appealing, her shirt cut just low enough to make you notice, but not so low as to make you think less of her. I liked the smile. Maybe I didn’t look like a beaten-up bum. Maybe on me it just looked ruggedly determined.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but the addiction-counseling center is on twenty-six.”
Sigh.
“I’m actually here to see someone,” I said. “Assuming that this is Smith Cohen and Mackleroy?”
She glanced rather pointedly—but still politely—at the front of her desk, where a plaque bore the firm’s name in simple sans serif lettering. “I see, sir. Who are you looking for?”
“Ms. Evelyn Derek, please.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” I said. “But she’ll want to talk to me.”
The receptionist looked at me as though she had some kind of bitter, unpleasant taste in her mouth. I’d timed my arrival correctly, then. The young lady clearly would have been much more comfortable handing me off to a secretary, or executive assistant, or whatever you’re supposed to call them now, and letting someone else decide if I was supposed to be there. And Ms. Evelyn Derek’s assistant was just as clearly out to lunch, which was the point of showing up during lunch hour. “Who shall I say is here?”
I produced Vincent Graver’s business card and passed it to her. “Please tell her that Vince has acquired some unexpected information and that she needs to hear about it.”
She pushed a button, adjusted her headset, and dutifully passed on the message to whoever was on the other end. She listened and nodded. “Straight back down the hall, sir, the second door on the left.”
I nodded to her and walked through the door behind her. The carpet got even thicker and the decor more expensive. A nook in the wall showcased a small rock fountain between a pair of two-thousand-dollar leather chairs. I shook my head as I walked through a hall that absolutely reeked of success, power, and the desire for everyone to know about it.
