Brief Cases

by Jim Butcher

  Gard showed me her teeth in a flash. “Well,” she said, “it’s no mead hall. But it will do.”

  I put my house in order. In the end, it took less than half an hour. The troubleshooters made sure the Fomorian creatures were dragged inside, then vanished. Mag’s body had been bagged and transferred, to be returned to his watery kin, along with approximately a quarter of a million dollars in bullion, the price required in the Accords for the weregild of a person of Mag’s stature.

  Justine was ready to meet a car that was coming to pick her up, and Hendricks was already on the way to Schulman’s attentions. He’d seemed fine by the time he left, growling at Gard as she fussed over him.

  I looked around the office and nodded. “We know the defense plan has some merit,” I said. I hefted the dragoon pistol. “I’ll need more of those bullets.”

  “I was unconscious for three weeks after scribing the rune for that one,” Gard replied. “To say nothing of the fact that the bullets themselves are rare. That one killed a man named Nelson at Trafalgar.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I took it out of him,” she said. “Men of his caliber are few and far between. I’ll see what I can do.” She glanced at Justine. “Sir?”

  “Not just yet,” I said. “I will speak with her alone for a moment, please.”

  She nodded, giving Justine a look that was equal parts curiosity and warning. Then she departed.

  I got up and walked over to the girl. She was holding the child against her again. The little girl had dropped into an exhausted sleep.

  “So,” I said quietly. “Lara Raith sent you to Mag’s people. He happened to abduct you. You happened to escape from him—despite the fact that he seemed to be holding other prisoners perfectly adequately—and you left carrying the child. And, upon emerging from Lake Michigan, you happened to be nearby, so you came straight here.”

  “Yes,” Justine said quietly.

  “Coincidences, coincidences,” I said. “Put the child down.”

  Her eyes widened in alarm.

  I stared at her until she obeyed.

  My right arm was splinted and in a sling. With my left hand, I reached out and flipped open her suit jacket, over her left hip, where she’d been clutching the child all evening.

  There was an envelope in a plastic bag protruding from the jacket’s interior pocket. I took it.

  She made a small sound of protest and aborted it partway.

  I opened the bag and the envelope and scanned over the paper inside.

  “These are account numbers,” I said quietly. “Security passwords. Stolen from Mag’s home, I suppose?”

  She stared at me with very wide eyes.

  “Dear child,” I said, “I am a criminal. One very good way to cover up one crime is to commit another, more obvious one.” I glanced down at the sleeping child again. “Using a child to cover your part of the scheme. Quite cold-blooded, Justine.”

  “I freed all of Mag’s prisoners to cover up the theft of his records at my lady’s bidding,” she said quietly. “The child was … not part of the plan.”

  “Children frequently aren’t,” I said.

  “I took her out on my own,” she said. “She’s free of that place. She will stay that way.”

  “To be raised among the vampires?” I asked. “Such a lovely child will surely go far.”

  Justine grimaced and looked away. “She was too small to swim out on her own. I couldn’t leave her.”

  I stared at the young woman for a long moment. Then I said, “You might consider speaking to Father Forthill at St. Mary of the Angels. The Church appears to have some sort of program to place those endangered by the supernatural into hiding. I do not recommend you mention my name as a reference, but perhaps he could be convinced to help the child.”

  She blinked at me, several times. Then she said quietly, “You, sir, are not very much like I thought you were.”

  “Nor are you, Agent Justine.” I took a deep breath and regarded the child again. “At least we accomplished something today.” I smiled at Justine. “Your ride should be here by now. You may go.”

  She opened her mouth and reached for the envelope.

  I slipped it into my pocket. “Do give Lara my regards. And tell her that the next time she sends you out to steal honey, she should find someone else to kill the bees.” I gave her a faint smile. “That will be all.”

  Justine looked at me. Then her lips quivered up into a tiny, amused smile. She bowed her head to me, collected the child, and walked out, her steps light.

  I debated putting a bullet in her head but decided against it. She had information about my defenses that could leave them vulnerable—and, more to the point, she knew that they were effective. If she should speak of today’s events to Dresden …

  Well. The wizard would immediately recognize that the claymores, the running water, and the magic-defense-piercing bullet had not been put into place to counter Mag or his odd folk at all.

  They were there to kill Harry Dresden.

  And they worked. Mag had proven that. An eventual confrontation with Dresden was inevitable—but murdering Justine would guarantee it happened immediately, and I wasn’t ready for that, not until I had rebuilt the defenses in the new location.

  Besides, the young woman had rules of her own. I could respect that.

  I would test myself against Dresden in earnest one day—or he against me. Until then, I had to gather as many resources to myself as possible. And when the day of reckoning came, I had to make sure it happened in a place where, despite his powers, he would no longer have the upper hand.

  Like everything else.

  Location, location, location.

  This is the last of the trio of Bigfoot stories, and is set between Turn Coat and Changes. In this one, I got to play with the collision of a couple of different scions of supernatural beings, and to get a look at how that collision would play out against the background of the world of the Dresden Files.

  This is also where Harry manages to insert himself into what he perceives as a parenting problem on behalf of River Shoulders, and in a quite arrogant, self-righteously wizardly fashion to boot. Naturally, his taking this position would come back to haunt him later, when he would have to face similar problems, and find out that the whole parenting gig is a lot harder than it looks from the outside.

  It was also a chance for me to revisit, if mostly in memory, the campus of the University of Oklahoma and the town of Norman, where a number of excellent and nerdy friends I made in school live to this day.

  The campus police officer folded his hands and stared at me from across the table. “Coffee?”

  “What flavor is it?” I asked.

  He was in his forties, a big, solid man with bags under his calm, wary eyes, and his name tag read DEAN. “It’s coffee-flavored coffee.”

  “No mocha?”

  “Fuck mocha.”

  “Thank God,” I said. “Black.”

  Officer Dean gave me hot black coffee in a paper cup, and I sipped it gratefully. I was almost done shivering. It just came in intermittent bursts now. The old wool blanket Dean had given me was more gesture than cure.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked him.

  Officer Dean moved his shoulders in what could have been a shrug. “That’s what we’re going to talk about.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said in a slow, rural drawl, “you could explain to me why I found you in the middle of an orgy.”

  “Well,” I said, “if you’re going to be in an orgy, the middle is the best spot, isn’t it?”

  He made a thoughtful sound. “Maybe you could explain why there was a car on the fourth floor of the dorm.”

  “Classic college prank,” I said.

  He grunted. “Usually when that happens, it hasn’t made big holes in the exterior wall.”

  “Someone was avoiding the cliché?” I asked.

  He looked at me for a moment, and said, “Wha
t about all the blood?”

  “There were no injuries, were there?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then who cares? Some film student probably watched Carrie too many times.”

  Officer Dean tapped his pencil’s eraser on the tabletop. It was the most agitated thing I’d seen him do. “Six separate calls in the past three hours with a Bigfoot sighting on campus. Bigfoot. What do you know about that?”

  “Well, kids these days, with their Internets and their video games and their iPods. Who knows what they thought they saw.”

  Officer Dean put down his pencil. He looked at me and said calmly, “My job is to protect a bunch of kids with access to every means of self-destruction known to man from not only the criminal element but also from themselves. I got chemistry students who can make their own meth, Ecstasy, and LSD. I got ROTC kids with access to automatic weapons and explosives. I got enough alcohol going through here on a weekly basis to float a battleship. I got a thriving trade in recreational drugs. I got lives to protect.”

  “Sounds tiring.”

  “About to get tired of you,” he said. “Start giving it to me straight.”

  “Or you’ll arrest me?” I asked.

  “No,” Dean said. “I bounce your face off my knuckles for a while. Then I ask again.”

  “Isn’t that unprofessional conduct?”

  “Fuck conduct,” Dean said. “I got kids to look after.”

  I sipped the coffee some more. Now that the shivers had begun to subside, I finally felt the knotted muscles in my belly begin to relax. I slowly settled back into my chair. Dean hadn’t blustered or tried to intimidate me in any way. He wasn’t trying to scare me into talking. He was just telling me how it was going to be. And he drank his coffee old-school.

  I kinda liked the guy.

  “You aren’t going to believe me,” I said.

  “I don’t much,” he said. “Try me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “My name is Harry Dresden. I’m a professional wizard.”

  Officer Dean pursed his lips. Then he leaned forward slightly and listened.

  The client wanted me to meet him at a site in the Ouachita Mountains in eastern Oklahoma. Looking at them, you might not realize they were mountains, they’re so old. They’ve had millions of years of wear and tear on them, and they’ve been ground down to nubs. The site used to be on an Indian reservation, but they don’t call them reservations anymore. They’re Tribal Statistical Areas now.

  I showed my letter and my ID to a guy in a pickup, who just happened to pull up next to me for a friendly chat at a lonely stop sign on a winding back road. I don’t know what the tribe called his office, but I recognized a guardian when I saw one. He read the letter and waved me through in an even friendlier manner than he had used when he approached me. It’s nice to be welcomed somewhere once in a while.

  I parked at the spot indicated on the map and hiked a good mile and a half into the hills, taking a heavy backpack with me. I found a pleasant spot to set up camp. The mid-October weather was crisp, but I had a good sleeping bag and would be comfortable as long as it didn’t start raining. I dug a fire pit and ringed it in stones, built a modest fire out of fallen limbs, and laid out my sleeping bag on a foam camp pad. By the time it got dark, I was well into preparing the dinner I’d brought with me. The scent of foil-wrapped potatoes baking in coals blended with that of the steaks I had spitted and roasting over the fire.

  Can I cook a camp meal or what?

  Bigfoot showed up half an hour after sunset.

  One minute, I was alone. The next, he simply stepped out into view. He was huge. Not huge like a big person, but huge like a horse, with that same sense of raw animal power and mass. He was nine feet tall at least and probably tipped the scales at well over six hundred pounds. His powerful, wide-shouldered body was covered in long, dark brown hair. Even though he stood in plain sight in my firelight, I could barely see the buckskin bag he had slung over one shoulder and across his chest, the hair was so long.

  “Strength of a River in His Shoulders,” I said. “You’re welcome at my fire.”

  “Wizard Dresden,” River Shoulders rumbled. “It is good to see you.” He took a couple of long steps and hunkered down opposite the fire from me. “Man. That smells good.”

  “Darn right, it does,” I said. I proceeded with the preparations in companionable silence while River Shoulders stared thoughtfully at the fire. I’d set up my camp this way for a reason: It made me the host and River Shoulders my guest. It meant I was obliged to provide food and drink, and he was obliged to behave with decorum. Guest-and-host relationships are damned near laws of physics in the supernatural world: They almost never get violated, and when they do, it’s a big deal. Both of us felt a lot more comfortable around each other this way.

  Okay. Maybe it did a wee bit more to make me feel comfortable than it did River Shoulders, but he was a repeat customer, I liked him, and I figured he probably didn’t get treated to a decent steak all that often.

  We ate the meal in an almost ritualistic silence, too, other than River making some appreciative noises as he chewed. I popped open a couple of bottles of McAnally’s Pale, my favorite brew by a veritable genius of hops back in Chicago. River liked it so much that he gave me an inquisitive glance when his bottle was empty. So I emptied mine and produced two more.

  After that, I filled a pipe with expensive tobacco, lit it, took a few puffs, and passed it to him. He nodded and took it. We smoked and finished our beers. By then the fire had died down to glowing embers.

  “Thank you for coming,” River Shoulders rumbled. “Again, I come to seek your help on behalf of my son.”

  “Third time you’ve come to me,” I said.

  “Yes.” He rummaged in his pouch and produced a small, heavy object. He flicked it to me. I caught it and squinted at it in the dim light. It was a gold nugget about as big as a Ping-Pong ball. I nodded and tossed it back to him. River Shoulders’s brows lowered into a frown.

  You have to understand. A frown on a mug like his looked indistinguishable from scowling fury. It turned his eyes into shadowed caves with nothing but a faint gleam showing from far back in them. It made his jaw muscles bunch and swell into knots the size of tennis balls on the sides of his face.

  “You will not help him,” the Bigfoot said.

  I snorted. “You’re the one who isn’t helping him, big guy.”

  “I am,” he said. “I am hiring you.”

  “You’re his father,” I said quietly. “And he doesn’t even know your name. He’s a good kid. He deserves more than that. He deserves the truth.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Look at me. Would he even accept my help?”

  “You aren’t going to know unless you try it,” I said. “And I never said I wouldn’t help him.”

  At that, River Shoulders frowned a little more.

  I curbed an instinct to edge away from him.

  “Then what do you want in exchange for your services?” he asked.

  “I help the kid,” I said. “You meet the kid. That’s the payment. That’s the deal.”

  “You do not know what you are asking,” he said.

  “With respect, River Shoulders, this is not a negotiation. If you want my help, I just told you how to get it.”

  He became very still at that. I got the impression that maybe people didn’t often use tactics like that when they dealt with him.

  When he spoke, his voice was a quiet, distant rumble. “You have no right to ask this.”

  “Yeah, um. I’m a wizard. I meddle. It’s what we do.”

  “Manifestly true.” He turned his head slightly away. “You do not know how much you ask.”

  “I know that kid deserves more than you’ve given him.”

  “I have seen to his protection. To his education. That is what fathers do.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But you weren’t ever there. And that matters.”

  Absolute silence fell for a couple of minutes
.

  “Look,” I said gently. “Take it from a guy who knows. Growing up without a dad is terrifying. You’re the only father he’s ever going to have. You can go hire Superman to look out for Irwin if you want to, and he’d still be the wrong guy—because he isn’t you.”

  River toyed with the empty bottle, rolling it across his enormous fingers like a regular guy might have done with a pencil.

  “Do you want me on this?” I asked him. “No hard feelings if you don’t.”

  River looked up at me again and nodded slowly. “I know that if you agree to help him, you will do so. I will pay your price.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me about Irwin’s problem.”

  “WHAT’D HE SAY?” Officer Dean asked.

  “He said the kid was at the University of Oklahoma for school,” I said. “River’d had a bad dream and knew that the kid’s life was in danger.”

  The cop grunted. “So … Bigfoot is a psychic?”

  “Think about it. No one ever gets a good picture of one, much less a clean shot,” I said. “Despite all the expeditions and TV shows and whatnot. River’s people have got more going for them than being huge and strong. My guess is that they’re smarter than humans. Maybe a lot smarter. My guess is they know magic of some kind, too.”

  “Jesus,” Officer Dean said. “You really believe all this, don’t you?”

  “I want to believe,” I said. “And I told you that you wouldn’t.”

  Dean grunted. Then he said, “Usually they’re too drunk to make sense when I get a story like this. Keep going.”

  I GOT TO Norman, Oklahoma, a bit before noon the next morning. It was a Wednesday, which was a blessing. In the Midwest, if you show up to a college town on a weekend, you risk running into a football game. In my experience, that resulted in universal problems with traffic, available hotel rooms, and drunken football hooligans.