by Jim Butcher
“For an hour.” I tried not to sound too disgusted.
“It’s annoying,” she said. “But it really does work. Greene’s probably the best homicide detective in the state. If he had a personality he’d have made captain by now.”
“I don’t think he’s going to be much help on this one.”
Murphy nodded, and sat down in the chair Greene had vacated. “So. You want to give me the rundown here?”
“I haven’t even finished my coffee,” I complained. But I told her, starting with bailing Nelson out of jail and skipping over the details of the visit to Michael’s house. I told her about the attack, and how Rawlins and I had presumably cut it short.
She exhaled slowly. “So this thing must have been from the spirit world, right? If it got shot full of bullets, didn’t die, then dissolved into v goor
“That’s a reasonable conclusion,” I said, “but I didn’t exactly have time to make a thorough analysis. It could have been anything.”
“Any chance you killed it?”
“I didn’t hit it all that hard. Must have had some kind of self-destruct.”
“Dammit,” Murphy said, missing the reference. No one loves the classics anymore. “Will it come back?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.
“That’s not good enough.”
I sighed and nodded. “I’ll see what I can figure out. How’s Rawlins?”
“Hospital,” she reported. “He’ll need a bunch of stitches for that cut he took.”
I grunted and rose. It was an effort, and I wobbled a little, but as soon as I got my balance I walked over to the remains of the projector on its stand. I bent down and picked up a large round tin, the one the movie reel had come in. I flipped it over and read the label.
“Hunh,” I said.
Murphy came over and frowned at the tin. “Suburban Slasher II?”
I nodded. “This means something.”
“Other than the death of classic cinema?”
“Movie fascist,” I said. “The guy that jumped them looked like the Reaper.”
Murphy gave me a blank look.
“The Reaper,” I told her. “Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t ever seen the Reaper. The killer from the Suburban Slasher films. He can’t be slain, brings death to the wicked-which includes anyone who is having sex or drinking, apparently If that’s not classic cinema, I don’t know what is.“
“I guess I missed that one,” Murphy said.
“There have been eleven films featuring the Reaper so far,” I replied.
“I guess I missed those eleven,” Murphy amended. “You think this was someone trying to look like the Reaper character?”
“Someone,” I murmured with exaggerated menace. “Or some thing.”
She gave me a level look. “How long have you been waiting to use that one?”
“Years,” I said. “The opportunity doesn’t come up as often as you’d think.”
Murphy smiled, but it was forced, and we both knew it. The jokes didn’t change the facts. Something had killed one young man only a few feet from where we sat, and the lives of at least two of the wounded hung on the skills of the doctors attending them.
“Murph,” I said. “There’s a theater right down the street. Run by a guy named Clark Pell. Could you find out what movie was showing there this afternoon?”
Murphy flipped to an earlier page of her notebook and said, “I already did. Something called Hammerhands.”
“Oldie but a goodie,” I said. “Ruffians push this farmer out onto train tracks and the train cuts his hands off at the wrist. They leave him for dead. But he survives, insane, straps sledgehammer heads to the stumps, and hunts them down one at a time.”
“And Clark Pell was the victim beaten here earlier today,” Murphy said. “Badly beaten with some kind of blunt instrument.”
“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” I said.
She frowned. “Can someone do that? Bring movie monsters to life?”
“Sorta looks that way,” I said.
“How do we stop them?” she asked.
I dragged the con schedule out of my pocket and paged through it. “The real question is, how do we stop them before tomorrow night?”
“What’s tomorrow night?”
“Movie fest,” I said, and held up the film schedule. “Haifa dozen films showing here. Another half a dozen in Pell’s theater. And most of their monsters aren’t nearly as friendly as Hammerhand and the Reaper.”
“God almighty,” Murphy breathed. “Any chance this could be regular folks playing dress up?”
“I doubt it. But it’s possible.”
She nodded. “We’ll let Greene cover that angle, then. Consider yourself to be on the clock for the department, Harry. What’s our next move?”
“We talk to the surviving victims,” I said. “And I try to figure out how many ways there are for someone to do something this crazy.”
She nodded, and then frowned at me. “First, you get some sleep. You look like hell.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Feel like I’m about to fall down.”
She nodded. “I’ll see if I can talk to Pell, if he’s even awake. I doubt we’ll get to the others before morning. Assuming they survive.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll need to get back here and do some snooping tomorrow With any luck, we can track down our bad guy before something else jumps off the movie screen.”
Murphy nodded and rose. She offered me a hand. I took it and she hauled me up. Murphy is a lot stronger than she looks.
“Give me a ride home?” I asked.
She already had her keys in her hand. “Do I look like your driver?”
“Thanks, Murph.”
We headed for the door. Usually I have to shorten my steps to match Murphy’s, but tonight I was so tired that she was waiting for me.
“Harry,” she said. “What if we can’t find out who is doing it in time?”
“We’ll find them,” I said.
“But if we don’t?”
“Then we fight monsters.”
Murphy took a deep breath and nodded as we stepped out into the summer night. “Damn right we do.”
Chapter Fourteen
Murphy drove me home and parked in the gravel lot next to the century-old converted boardinghouse. She killed the engine in the car, and it made those clicking noises they do. We sat there with the windows rolled down for a second. A cool breeze coming off the lake whispered through the car, soothing after the unrelenting heat of the day.
Murphy checked her rearview mirror and then scanned the street. “Who were you watching for?”
“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“You rubbernecked so much on the way here, I’m surprised your shoulders aren’t bruising your ears.”
I grimaced. “Oh, that. Someone was tailing me tonight.”
“And you’re just now telling me about it?”
I shrugged. “No sense worrying you over nothing. Whoever he is, he’s not there now.” I described the shadowy man and his car.
“Same one who ran you off the road, do you think?” she asked.
“Something tells me no,” I said. “He wasn’t making any effort to avoid being spotted. For all I know, he could just be a PI gathering information on me for the lawsuit.”
“Christ,” Murphy said. “Isn’t that thing over with?”
I grimaced. “For a talk show host, Larry Fowler can really hold a grudge. He keeps doing one thing after another.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have burned down his studio and shot up his car, then.”
“That wasn’t my fault!”
“That’s for a court to decide,” Murphy said in a pious tone. “You got an attorney?”
“I helped a guy find his daughter’s lost dog five or six years ago. He’s an attorney. He’s giving me a hand with the legal process, enough so it hasn’t actually bankrupted me. But it just keeps going and going.”
Neither of us got out o
f the car.
I closed my eyes and listened to the summer night. Music played somewhere. I could hear the occasional racing engine.
“Harry?” Murph asked after a while. “Are you all right?”
“Hungry. Little tired.”
“You look like you’re hurting,” she said.
“Maybe a little achy,” I said.
“Not that kind of hurt.”
I opened my eyes and looked at her, and then away. “Oh. That.”
“That,” she agreed. “You look like you’re bleeding, somehow.”
“I’ll get over it,” I told her.
“Is this about last Halloween?”
I shrugged a shoulder.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “There was a lot of confusion in the blackout and right after. But they found a corpse in the Field Museum that had been savaged by an animal. Lab guessed it was a large dog. They found three different blood types on the floor, too.”
“Did they?” I asked.
“And at Kent College. They found eight dead bodies there. Six of them had no discernable means of death. One had its head half severed by a surgically sharp blade. The other had taken a.44 round to the back of the head.”
I nodded.
She stared at me for a while, frowning and waiting for me to continue. Then she said, in a quiet, certain voice, “You killed them.”
My memory played some bad clips in my head. My stomach twisted. “I didn’t do the headless guy.”
Her cool, blue eyes stayed steady and she nodded. “You killed them. It’s eating at you.”
“It shouldn’t. I’ve killed a lot of things.”
“True,” Murphy said. “But they weren’t faeries or vampires or monsters this time. They were people. And you weren’t in the heat of battle when they died. You made the choice cold.”
I couldn’t lift my eyes for some reason. But I nodded and whispered, “More or less.”
She waited for me to say more, but I didn’t. “Harry,” she said. “You’re tearing yourself up over it. You’ve got to talk to someone. It doesn’t have to be me or here, but you’ve got to do it. There’s no shame in feeling bad about killing someone, not for any reason.”
I let out a short little laugh. It tasted bitter. “You’re the last person I’d expect to tell me not to feel bad about committing murder.”
She shifted uncomfortably. “Sort of surprised myself,” she said. “But dammit, Harry. You remember when I shot Agent Denton?”
“Yeah.”
“Took me some time to deal with it, too. I mean, I know he’d lost it. And he was going to kill you if I didn’t do it. But it made me feel…” She squinted out at the Chicago night. “Stained. To take a life.” She swallowed. “And those poor people the vampires had controlled at the shelter. That was even worse.”
“All of those people were trying to kill you, Murph. You had to do it. You didn’t have an option. You thought about it. You knew that when you pulled the trigger.”
“Do you think you had an option?” she asked.
I shrugged and said, “Maybe. Maybe not.” I swallowed. “The point is that I never bothered to consider it. Never hesitated. I just wanted them dead.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“What if the Council is right about me?” I asked Murphy quietly. “What if I grow into some kind of monster? One who takes life without consideration for anything but his own will. Who cares more about end than means. More about might than right. What if this is the first step?”
“Do you think it is?” Murphy asked.
“I don’t-”
“Because if you think so, Harry, then it probably is. And if you decide that it isn’t, it probably isn’t.”
“The power of positive thinking?” I asked.
“No. Free will,” she said. “You can’t change what has already happened. But you choose what to do next. Which means that you only cross over to the dark side if you choose to do it.”
“What makes you think that I won’t?” I asked.
Murphy snorted, and reached over to touch my chin lightly with the fingers of one hand. “Because I’m not an idiot. Unlike some other people in this car.”
I reached up and gripped her fingers with my right hand, squeezing gently. Her hand was steady and warm. “Careful. That was almost a compliment.”
“You’re a decent man,” Murphy said, lowering her hand without removing it from my fingers. “Painfully oblivious, sometimes. But you’ve got a good heart. It’s why you’re so hard on yourself. You’re tired, hungry, and hurting, and you saw the bad guys do something you couldn’t stop. Your morale is low. That’s all.”
Her words were simple, frank, and direct. There was no sense of false comfort to her tone, not a trace of indulgent pity. I’ve known Murphy for a while. I knew that she meant every single word. Knowing that I had her support, even in the face of violation of the laws she worked to preserve, was a sudden and vast comfort.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.
Murphy is good people.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Hell’s bells, I’ve got to stop feeling sorry for myself and get to work.”
“Start with food and rest,” she said. “If you don’t hear from me, assume I’ll pick you up in the morning.”
“Right,” I said.
We sat there holding hands for a minute. “Karrin?” I asked.
She looked up at me. Her eyes looked very large, very blue. I couldn’t stare at them too long. “Have you ever thought about… you know. Us?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. “But… the timing always seems to be off, somehow.”
She smiled a little. “I noticed.”
“Do you think it’ll ever be right?”
She squeezed my hand gently, and then withdrew hers from mine. “I don’t know. Maybe sometime.” She frowned at her hand, and then said, “It would change a lot of things.”
“It would,” I said.
“You’re my friend, Harry,” Murphy said. “No matter what happens. Sometimes in the past… I haven’t really done right by you.”
“Like when you handcuffed me in my office,” I said.
“Right.”
“And when you chipped one of my teeth arresting me.”
Murphy blinked. “I chipped a tooth?”
“And when-”
“Yes, all right,” she said. She gave me a mild glare, her cheeks pink.
“The point is that I should have seen that you were one of the good guys a lot sooner than I did. And…”
I blinked at her ingenuously, and waited for her to say it.
“And I’m sorry,” she growled. “Jerk.”
That had cost her something. Murphy has more pride than is good for her. And yes, I am aware of the proverb about glass houses and stones. So I didn’t give her any more of a hard time than I already had. “Don’t go all romantic on me now, Murph.”
She smiled a little and rolled her eyes. “If we ever did get together, I’d kill you inside a week. Now, go get some rest. You’re useless to me like this.”
I nodded and swung out of the car. “In the morning, then.”
“Around eight,” she said, and pulled out and back onto the street. She called to me, “Be careful!”
I looked after the car and sighed. My feelings about Murphy were still in a hopelessly complicated tangle. Maybe I should have said something to her sooner. Shared my feelings with her sooner. Acted more swiftly, taken the initiative.
Be careful, she said.
Why did I feel like I’d been too careful already?
Chapter Fifteen
My Mickey Mouse alarm clock went off at seven, and buzzed stubbornly at me until I kicked off the covers, sat up, and shut it off. I ached all over, felt stiff all over, but that sense of overwhelming exhaustion had faded, and since I was already vertical, I got moving.
I got into the shower, and tried not to jump to
o much when the first shock of freezing water hit me. I’ve had some practice at it. I’ve never had a water heater last me more than a week without some kind of technical problem coming up-and that was the kind of thing you just did not want to take chances on when you have a gas heater. So my showers were always either cold or colder. Given my dating life, and the inhuman charms available to some of the beings who occasionally faced off with me, it was probably just as well.
But, especially when I had bumps and bruises and sore muscles, I wished I could have a skin-blistering hot shower like everyone else in the country.
And suddenly the water shifted from ice-cold to piping hot. It was a shock, and I actually let out a little yelp and danced around in the shower until I could redirect the shower head so that it wasn’t scalding my bits and pieces. After the initial shock of the temperature change, I leaned my aching head and neck into the spray for a second, and let out a long groan. Then I said, “Dammit, I told you to stop that.”
Lasciel’s voice murmured in a quiet laugh under the sound of the water. The sensation of phantom fingertips dug into the wire-tight muscles at the base of my neck, easing soreness away. “You should use the technique I taught you last autumn to block out the discomfort.”
“I don’t need to,” I said, and tried for grouchy. But the heated water and massaging fingers, illusory though they were, were simply delicious. “I’ll be fine.”
“Your discomfort is my discomfort, my host,” she said, and sighed. “Literally, as all my perceptions can come only through your own.”
“This isn’t real,” I said quietly. “The water isn’t really hot. No one is actually massaging my neck. It’s an illusion you’re laying over my senses.”
“Does it not feel soothing?” her disembodied voice asked. “Does it not ease the tension?”
“Yes,” I sighed.
“What matter, then? It is real enough.”
I waved a hand as though trying to brush off an annoying fly from my neck, and the sensation of those strong, steady fingers retreated. “Go on,” I said. “Hands off. I don’t want to start my day with a psychic cage match, but if you push me to it, I will.”
“As you wish,” her voice said, and the sense of presence retreated. Then paused. “My host, I note that you made no mention of the hot water.”
