by Jim Butcher
This was going to be a straight fight, and if Ortega was better than me, he’d kill me. Simple as that. The fear was simple, too. Simple and undeniable.
I swallowed, and my knuckles turned white. I tried to relax my fingers but they wouldn’t. They were too afraid to let go of the wheel. Stupid fingers.
I got back to my apartment, pried my fingers off the steering wheel, and found my door halfway open. I ducked to one side, in case someone had a gun pointed up the narrow stairway down to my apartment door, and drew out my blasting rod.
“Harry?” called a quiet, female voice from my apartment. “Harry, is that you?”
I lowered the blasting rod. “Murph?”
“Get inside,” Murphy said. I looked down the stairway and saw her appear in the doorway, her face pale. “Hurry.”
I came down the stairs warily, feeling out my wards as I did. They were intact, and I relaxed a little. I had given Murphy a personalized talisman that would let her through my defenses, and it would only have worked for her.
I slipped into my apartment. Murphy shut the door behind me and locked it. She’d started a fire in the fireplace and had one of my old kerosene lamps lit. I went to the fireplace and warmed up my hands, watching Murphy in silence. She stood with her back and shoulders rigid for a moment, before she came over to stand beside me, facing the fire. Her lips were held into a tense, neutral line. “We should talk.”
“People keep saying that to me,” I muttered.
“You promised me you’d call me in when you had something.”
“Whoa, there, hang on. Who said I had anything?”
“There is a corpse on a pleasure ship in Burnham Harbor and several eyewitnesses who describe a tall, dark-haired man leaving the scene and getting into a multicolored Volkswagen Beetle.”
“Wait a second—”
“There’s been a murder, Dresden. I don’t care how sacred client confidentiality is to you. People are dying.”
Frustration made me clench my teeth. “I was going to tell you about it. It’s been a really busy day.”
“Too busy to talk to the police about a murder you may have witnessed?” Murphy said. “That is considered aiding and abetting a first-degree murder in some places. Like courts of law.”
“This again,” I muttered. My fingers clenched into fists. “I remember how this one goes. You slug me in the jaw and arrest me.”
“I damn well should.”
“Hell’s bells, Murph!”
“Relax.” She sighed. “If that was what I had in mind you’d be in the car already.”
My anger evaporated. “Oh.” After a moment, I asked, “Then why are you here?”
Murphy scowled. “I’m on vacation.”
“You’re what?”
Murphy’s jaw twitched. Her words sounded a little odd, since she kept her teeth ground together while she talked. “I’ve been taken off the case. And when I protested I was told that I could either be on vacation or collecting unemployment.”
Holy crap. The muckety-mucks at CPD had ordered Murphy off a case? But why?
Murphy answered the question I hadn’t asked yet. “Because when Butters looked at the victim from the harbor, he determined that the weapon used to kill her and the one used on that victim you saw last night were the same.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Same weapon,” Murphy said. “Butters seemed pretty confident about it.”
I turned that over in my head a few times, trying to shake out the kinks in the chains of logic. “I need a beer. You?”
“Yeah.”
I went over to the pantry and grabbed a couple of brown bottles. I used an old bottle opener to take off the lids and took the drinks back to Murphy. She took her bottle in hand and eyed it suspiciously. “It’s warm.”
“It’s the new recipe. Mac would kill me if he heard I served his brown cold.” I took a pull from my bottle. The ale had a rich, full flavor, a little nutty, and it left a pleasant aftertaste lingering in the mouth. Make what jokes you will about trendy microbrews. Mac knew his stuff.
Murphy made a face. “Ugh. Too much taste.”
“Wimpy American,” I said.
Murphy almost smiled. “Homicide got wind that there was a link between the killing in Italy, the one here by the airport, and the one this morning. So they pulled strings and hogged the whole thing.”
“How did they find out?”
“Rudolph,” Murphy spat. “There’s no way to prove anything but I’ll bet you the little weasel heard me on the phone with Butters and ran straight over there to tell them.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“Officially, yes. But in real life people are going to start accidentally losing reports and forms and requests if I try to file them. And when I tried to apply some pressure of my own, I got put down hard.” She took another angry drink. “I could lose my job.”
“That both sucks and blows, Murph.”
“Tell me about it.” She frowned and looked up at my eyes briefly. “Harry. I want you to back off on this case. For your own sake. That’s why I came over here.”
I frowned. “Wait a minute. You mean people are threatening you with me? That’s a switch.”
“Don’t joke about it,” Murphy said. “Harry, you’ve got a history with the department, and not everyone thinks well of you.”
“You mean Rudolph.”
“Not just Rudolph. There are plenty of people who don’t want to believe you’re for real. Besides that, you were near the scene of and may have witnessed a felony. They could put you away.”
Obviously my life was too easy already. I swigged more beer. “Murph, cop, crook, or creature, it doesn’t matter. I don’t back off because some bully doesn’t like what I do.”
“I’m not a bully, Harry. I’m your friend.”
I winced. “And you’re asking me.”
She nodded. “Pretty please. With sugar.”
“With sugar. Hell, Murph.” I took a drink and squinted at her. “How much do you know about what’s going on?”
“I had some of the files taken away before I could read them.” She glanced up at me. “But I can read between the lines.”
“Okay,” I said. “This might take a little explaining.”
“You aren’t backing off, are you?”
“It isn’t an option.”
“Stop there then,” Murphy said. “The less you tell me, the less I can testify to.”
Testify? Hell. There should be some kind of rule about being forced to dodge several kinds of legal land mines at the same time. “This isn’t a friendly situation,” I said. “If straight cops go into it like it’s normal business, they’re going to get killed. I’d be really worried even if it were SI.”
“Okay,” Murphy said. She didn’t look happy. She drank her beer in a long pull and set the bottle on my mantel.
I put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t snap it off at the wrist. “Murph. This looks bad already. I have a hunch it could get worse, fast. I have to.”
“I know,” she said. “I wish I could help.”
“Did you get the information on that cell phone?”
“No,” she said. But as she said it, she passed me a folded piece of paper. I unfolded it with my fingers and read Murphy’s printing: Quebec Nationale, Inc, owner. No phone number. Address a P.O. box. Dead end.
A dummy company, probably, I thought. The Churchmice could have it set up to do a lot of the buying and selling for them. Maybe dead Gaston had been from Quebec instead of France.
“Got it. Thanks, Murph.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Murphy said. She picked up her jacket from where she’d tossed it on my couch and shrugged into it. “There’s no APB out for you yet, Harry, but I’d be discreet if I were you.”
“Discreet. That’s me.”
“I’m serious.”
“Serious, yep.”
“Dammit, Harry.” But she smiled when she said
it.
“You probably don’t want me to call you if I need help.”
She nodded. “Hell, no. That would be illegal. Keep your nose clean, walk the straight and narrow.”
“Okay.”
Murphy paused and asked, “I don’t think I’ve seen you without that coat outside of summer. Where’s your duster?”
I grimaced. “Missing in action.”
“Oh. You talk to Susan?”
I said, “Yeah.”
I felt Murphy’s eyes on my face. She got it without being told. “Oh,” she said again. “Sorry, Harry.”
“Thanks.”
“See you.” She opened my door, kept her hand near her gun, and then warily padded on out.
I shut my door after her and leaned against it. Murphy was worried. She wouldn’t have come to me in person if she weren’t. And she’d been extra careful with the legal stuff. Were things that dicey in the CPD?
Murphy was the first head of Special Investigations not to get her rear bounced onto the street after a token week or three of unsolvable cases. Generally speaking, when the administration wanted someone off the force, they’d get promoted to running SI. Or at least working in it. Every cop there had some kind of failing that had landed them what everyone else considered to be a cruddy assignment. It had, by and large, created a strong sense of camaraderie among the SI officers, a bond only made tighter by the way they occasionally faced off with one kind of nightmarish creature or another.
SI cops had taken down several half-assed dark spellslingers, half a dozen vampires, seven or eight ravening trolls, and a demon that had manifested itself out of a mound of compost-heated garbage behind a pawnshop in Chinatown. SI could handle itself pretty well because they played careful, they worked together, and they understood that there were unnatural beings that sometimes had to be dealt with in ways not strictly in accordance with police procedure. Oh, and because they had a hired wizard to advise them about bad guys, of course. I liked to think that I had contributed too.
But I guess every bucket of fruit has something go rotten sooner or later. In SI the stinker was Detective Rudolph. Rudy was young, good-looking, clean-cut, and had slept with the wrong councilman’s daughter. He had applied some industrial-strength denial to his experiences with SI despite freak encounters with monsters, magic, and human kindness. He had clung to a steadfast belief that everything was normal, and the realm of the paranormal was all make-believe.
Rudy didn’t like me. Rudy didn’t like Murphy. If the kid had sabotaged Murphy’s investigation in order to curry favor with the folks in Homicide, maybe he was angling to get out of SI.
And maybe he’d lose a bunch of teeth the next time he walked through a quiet parking garage. I doubted Murphy would take that kind of backstabbing with good grace. I spent a moment indulging myself in a pleasant fantasy in which Murphy pounded Rudy’s head against the door of her office at SI’s home building until the cheap wood had a Rudolph-shaped dent in it. I enjoyed the thought way too much.
I gathered up a few things from around my apartment, including the antivenom potions Bob had helped me with. I checked on Bob while I was in the lab, and got a sleepy and incoherent response that I understood to mean that he needed more rest. I let him, went back upstairs, and called my answering service.
I had a message from Susan, a phone number. I called it, and a second later she answered. “Harry?”
“You’ve become clairvoyant. If you can do a foreign accent you could get a hot line.”
“Like, sure, as if,” Susan drawled ditzily.
“California isn’t foreign,” I said.
“You’d be surprised. How did things go?”
“Okay, I guess,” I said. “I got a second.”
“Michael?” she asked.
“Shiro.”
“Who?”
“He’s like Michael but shorter and older.”
“Oh, uh. Good. I did the legwork.”
I thought of some work I’d seen Susan’s legs do before. But I only said, “And?”
“And the downtown Marriott is hosting an art gala this very night, including a gallery sale and a fund-raiser auction for charity.”
I whistled. “Wow. So lots of art and money moving around, changing hands, being shipped hither and yon.”
“Hither maybe, but I don’t think UPS does yon,” Susan said. “Seems like a good place to sell a hot article or three. And it’s all sponsored by the Chicago Historical and Art Society.”
“Who?”
“A very small and very elite club for the upper crust. Gentleman Johnny Marcone is chairman of its board of directors.”
“Sounds like smuggling country all right,” I said. “How do I get in?”
“You put up a five-thousand-dollar-per-plate donation to charity.”
“Five thousand,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever had that much all in one place at one time.”
“Then you might try option two.”
“Which is?”
Susan’s voice took on a note of satisfaction. “You go with a reporter from the Midwest Arcane on her last assignment for her editor. I talked to Trish and got two tickets that had originally been given to a reporter on the Tribune.”
“I’m impressed,” I said.
“It gets better. I got us formal wear. The gala begins at nine.”
“Us? Uh, Susan. I don’t want to sound like an ass, but do you remember the last time you wanted to come on an investigation with me?”
“This time I’m the one with the tickets,” she said. “Are you coming with me or not?”
I thought about it for a minute but didn’t see any way around it. There wasn’t time for a long argument, either. “I’m in. I have to meet the Reds at McAnnally’s at eight.”
“Meet you there with your tux. Eight-thirty?”
“Yeah. Thank you.”
“Sure,” she said quietly. “Glad I could help.”
Silence stretched long enough to become painful for both of us. I finally broke it at the same time as Susan. “Well, I’d better—”
“Well, I’d better let you go,” Susan said. “I have to hurry to get all of this done.”
“All right,” I said. “Be careful.”
“Stones and glass houses, Harry. See you this evening.”
We hung up, and I made sure I was ready to go.
Then I went to pick up my second, and work out the terms to a duel I was increasingly certain I had little chance of surviving.
Chapter Seventeen
I put on an old fleece-lined denim jacket and went by my office. The night security guy gave me a little trouble, but I eventually browbeat him into opening the safe in the office to retrieve my envelope from Father Vincent. I opened it and found a plastic case the size of a playing card, like the kind coin collectors use to frame paper money. In the exact center of the case was a single, dirty white thread about two inches long. The sample from the Shroud.
It wasn’t much to work with. I could use the thread to create a channel to the rest of the Shroud, but nothing was certain. The thread had presumably been absent from the rest of the Shroud for going on thirty years. Not only that, but it had presumably been handled by various scientists or clergy, and it was possible that they had left enough of a psychic residue on the thread to cloud a seeking spell.
On top of all that, the thread was tiny. I would have to be extremely careful if I used a spell to go hunting the Shroud, or the forces in it would overload the thread in the same way that enough electrical current will overload the filament in a lightbulb. I’m not so great with delicate spell work. I’ve got plenty of power, but fine control of it could be a problem. By necessity, I would have to use a very gentle spell, and that would put severe limits on the range of it.
The spell would be a metal detector, rather than a radar dish, but it was a whole lot better than nothing. I hit the door.
Rather than inflicting another Charity encounter upon myself, I pulled the Beetle up to
the curb in front of Michael’s house and honked the horn. A moment later, Shiro appeared. The little old man had shaved the white down from his head, and where he didn’t have liver spots, the skin shone. He wore some kind of loose-fitting black pants that looked a lot like the ones I’d seen Murphy wear at one of her aikido tournaments. He also wore a black shirt and a white gi jacket with a scarlet cross on either side of his chest. A belt of red silk held the jacket closed, and he wore his sword through it, still in its wooden cane-sheath. He opened the door, slipped into the Beetle, and held his sword across his lap.
I got going, and neither of us said anything for a while. My knuckles were getting white again, so I started talking. “So you’ve done one of these duels before?”
“Hai,” he said, nodding. “Many times.”
“Why?”
Shiro shrugged. “Many reasons. Protect someone. Force something to leave an area in peace. Fight without involving others.”
“To the death?”
Shiro nodded. “Many times.”
“Guess you’re pretty good at it then,” I said.
Shiro smiled a little, eyes wrinkling even more. “Always someone better.”
“You ever dueled a vampire?”
“Hai. Jade Court. Black Court.”
“Jade Court?” I said. “I’ve never heard that there was such a thing.”
“Southeast Asia, China, Japan. Very secretive. But they respect the Accords.”
“Have you dueled any of the Denarians?”
He frowned out the window. “Twice. But they do not honor agreements. Treachery both times.”
I thought that over for a while before I said, “I’m going for energy. If he won’t take it, we’ll do will.”
Shiro glanced aside at me and nodded. “But there is a better choice.”
“What?”
“Don’t fight. Can’t lose a fight you don’t have.”
I felt a snort coming on but I held it back. “I’m sort of locked into it now.”
