by Jim Butcher
By any measure, that kind of remark was insulting. When you were dressed for a date, it was more so.
But Stallings wasn’t trying to piss me off. The insult was Martian, too, for something along the lines of I have so much regard for you that I went out of my way to create this insult so that we can have the fun of a mildly adversarial conversation. See how much I care?
“John,” I replied, using his first name, “you are a sphincter douche.”
Translation: I love you, too.
He gave me a quiet smile and nodded.
Men.
He was right. There was nothing I could do here.
I turned my back on the last place I’d seen Harry Dresden and walked back to my car.
IT HAD BEEN a long day, starting most of two days before, including a gunfight at the FBI building—which the news was still going insane about, especially after the office building bombing a couple of days before that—and a pitched battle at an ancient Mayan temple that ended in the utter destruction of the vampires of the Red Court.
And after that, things had gotten really dangerous.
I’d shown up to that ratty old boat where Harry was crashing, dressed in the outfit Stallings had insulted. Harry and I were supposed to go grab a few drinks and . . . and see what happened.
Instead, I’d found nothing but his blood.
I didn’t think I would sleep, but two days plus of physical and psychological stress made it inevitable. Nightmares came to haunt me, but they didn’t make much of an impression. I’d seen worse in the real world. I did cry, though. I remember that—waking up in the middle of the night from bad dreams that were old hat by now, sobbing my eyes out in pure reaction to the events of the past two days.
It happens. You feel overwhelmed, you cry, you feel better, and you go back to sleep.
If you don’t get it, don’t ask. It doesn’t really translate into Martian.
I WOKE UP to a firm knock at my front door. I got out of bed, my Sig in my hand, and flicked a quick glance out the window at the backyard. It was empty, and there was no one at the door that led into my kitchen. Only after I had checked my six o’clock did I go to the front door, glancing quickly out the window in the hall as I went.
I recognized the stout young man standing on the porch, and I relaxed somewhat. Since I slept in an oversized T-shirt, I grabbed a pair of sweats and hopped into them, then went to see the werewolf standing at my door.
Will Borden didn’t look like a werewolf. He was about five five, five six, and built like an armored car, all flat, heavy muscle. He wore glasses, his brown hair was cut short and neat, and you would never have guessed, from looking at him, that he and his friends had been responsible for a forty percent drop in crime in a six-block radius around the University of Chicago—and that didn’t even take into account the supernatural predators that had been driven away and that now avoided the neighborhood. Strictly speaking, I probably should have arrested him as a known vigilante.
Of course, strictly speaking, I wasn’t a cop anymore. I wouldn’t be arresting anybody. Ever again.
That thought hit my stomach like a lead wrecking ball, and no amount of bravado or discipline could keep it from hurting. So I turned away from it.
I answered the door, and said, “Hello, Will.”
“Sergeant Murphy,” he said, nodding at me. “Got a minute?”
“It’s early,” I said, not bothering to correct his form of address.
“I need your help,” he said.
I took a deep breath through my nose.
It wasn’t as though I had to go to work. It wasn’t as though I had a hot date waiting for me.
Part of me longed to slam the door in Will’s face and go back to bed. I’d always thought that kind of selfish reaction had been a fairly small portion of my character. Today, it felt huge.
The house was silent and empty behind me.
“Okay,” I said. “Come in.”
I SEATED HIM at the kitchen table and went back to my room to put on clothes that looked a little less pajama-like. When I came back out, Will had gotten the coffeepot going, and brew was already a finger deep in the little glass pitcher.
I popped some bread in the toaster and watched it carefully to make sure it didn’t burn. My toaster was an old one, but even so I didn’t need to be watching it. It just gave me something to do until the coffee was done.
I took the finished toast and coffee to the table, a bit for each of us, and set out a jar of strawberry preserves. Will accepted the food readily and, naturally, wolfed it down. We did all of that in silence.
“Okay,” I said, settling back in my chair and studying him. “What help?”
“Georgia’s gone,” he said simply.
I kept myself from wincing. Georgia was Will’s wife. They’d been together since they were barely out of high school. They’d learned to be werewolves together, apparently. I liked them both. “Tell me.”
“Work had me out of town,” he said. “Omaha. Georgia is getting ready to defend her dissertation. She stayed home. We both watched the news—about Dresden’s office building and the terrorists at the FBI. We were worried but . . . I got a call from her late last night. She was . . .” His face became pale. “She was almost incoherent. Terrified. She wasn’t making any sense. Then the call cut off abruptly.” His voice shook. “She was screaming. I tried to call the cops, but . . .”
I nodded. “But if it was something bad enough to make her scream, there wouldn’t be much the cops could do to help. And between the bombing and the attack, they were all overworked, anyway. They’ll get to it as soon as they can.”
“Yeah,” Will said. “So I left a message with Dresden’s service and came back to Chicago. The apartment door was broken, maybe kicked in. The place was a wreck.” He swallowed. “She was gone. And I couldn’t pick up a trail. I went to Harry’s place, but . . . There was still smoke coming up from what was left. Then I came here.”
I nodded slowly. Then I asked, “Why?”
He blinked and looked at me as if I’d broken out into a musical number. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“He always told us that if we ever needed him but couldn’t find him, we were supposed to go to you. That you were the person in this city who could help us better than anyone else.”
I stared at him for a minute. Then I said, “Yeah. I can just see him saying that.” I shook my head. “And never bothering to mention it to me.”
I’ll give Will credit—he was obviously terrified, but he managed to try a joke. “He probably thought you were formidable enough without the confidence boost from something like that.”
“Like I need his approval to be confident,” I muttered. I studied Will for a moment. I knew him well enough to know there was something off in his behavior. He was too quiet. Will wasn’t the sort of man to sit at a table fiddling with his napkin when his wife was missing and quite possibly in danger. He was terrified, frightened to such a degree that it was nearly paralytic. I recognized the look.
I’d seen it in the mirror often enough.
“What aren’t you telling me, Will?” I asked quietly.
He closed his eyes and shivered as a tear tracked down each cheek.
“Georgia’s pregnant,” he whispered. “Seven months.”
I nodded. Then I pushed the rest of my coffee away and got up. “Let me get my coat.”
“It’s supposed to be nice today,” Will said.
“With the coat, I can carry more guns,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
WILL’S APARTMENT WAS a wreck. The lock had been smashed, though the door was still in one piece. The furniture was askew. A few things were broken. Paperback books had been knocked off a shelf. A laptop computer lay on its side, a blue screen of death glaring from its monitor. A mug of cocoa had been spilled and lay in a drying puddle on the hardwood floor.
I looked back and forth for a moment, frowning. The spill lay near the lapt
op, and both were to the right side of a comfortable-looking recliner, which had been bowled over backward. There was a therapeutic contoured pillow lying a few feet beyond that.
“So,” I said, “maybe it went like this. The attacker kicks in the door. There’s a partial impression of a shoe’s tread on it. Georgia’s sitting in her chair, there, working on her computer.” I frowned some more. “She drink a lot of cocoa?”
“No,” Will said. “Only when she’s really upset. She jokes about it being self-medication.”
So she’d been upset already, even before the attack. She was sitting in the chair with her laptop and her cocoa and . . . I walked over to the fallen chair and found a simple household wireless phone lying behind it.
“Something besides the prospect of an attack had upset her,” I said. “She took the time to make a cup of cocoa, and you don’t do that when there’s a maniac at the door. She made herself a comfort drink and huddled up in her chair to call you. Do you have any idea what could have upset her like that?”
Will shook his head. “Normally, no. But she’s been on a hormone crazy train the past few months. She’s overreacted to a lot of things.”
I nodded and stood there, just trying to absorb it all, to get an image of how things might have fit together. I pictured Georgia, a long, lean, willowy woman, curled up in the recliner, her face blotchy, her eyes red, almost curling up around her baby and the sound of her husband’s voice.
Someone broke the door in with a single kick and rushed her. Georgia was a fighter, accustomed to combat, even if it was mostly when she was in the form of another creature. She used the first defense she could bring to bear—her legs. As her attacker rushed her, she kicked out with both legs, trying to shove him away. But he had too much momentum, and instead Georgia’s kick had flung her chair over backward.
A pregnant woman nowhere near as lithe or graceful as she usually was, she turned and tried to get away.
“There’s no blood,” I said.
The attacker had dragged her out by main force. Either he’d beaten her with his fists and feet—easy, on a pregnant woman, who would instinctively curl her body around her unborn child, so that blows landed mostly on the back, ribs, and buttocks—or else he’d choked her unconscious. Either way, he’d subdued her without, apparently, drawing blood.
Then they left.
I shook my head.
“What do you think?” Will asked.
“I think you don’t want to know.”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “But I need to.”
I nodded. I repeated my theory and its supporting evidence. It made Will go pale and silent.
“How was her hand-to-hand?” I asked him.
“Fair. She used to teach women’s self-defense seminars on campus. I don’t think she’s ever had to use it in earnest. . . .” His voice trailed off as he stared at the fallen chair.
“What did you find out that I couldn’t?” I asked. “I mean, with the whole werewolf thing.”
He shook his head. “The human brain isn’t wired for serious scent-processing,” he said. “Not like a wolf’s, anyway. Shifting . . . sort of turns up the volume in your nose, but it’s really hard to sort things out. I can follow a trail if I’m on it soon enough, but when a bunch of scents get mixed together, it’s a crap shoot. In here there’s new paint, spilled cocoa, the last day or two of meals. . . .” He shrugged.
“Magic never seems to make things any easier,” I said.
Will snorted faintly. “Dresden keeps saying the same thing.”
I felt an odd pain in my chest. I ignored it. I walked over to the apartment’s little kitchen and studied it for a minute. Then I said, “So she’s a cocoa junkie.”
“Well, she’s functional.”
“She drink instant?”
“Are you kidding?” The pitch and cadence of his voice changed a little, becoming slightly higher and more clearly inflected, in what was probably an unconscious imitation of his wife. “It’s the Spam of cocoas.”
I got a pen out of my pocket and used it to lift a second cup, this one with a bit of lipstick smeared on the rim. The bottom of the cup was sticky with the residue of real cocoa, the kind you make from milk and chocolate. Some of it was still liquid enough to stir as the cup shifted. I showed it to him.
“Georgia doesn’t wear makeup,” he half whispered.
“I know,” I said. “And the cocoa in this cup has been sitting out for about the same length of time as the cocoa in the other cup. So the next question we need to answer: Who was drinking cocoa with Georgia when the door broke in?”
Will shook his head. “Either it’s the attacker’s scent or it’s someone we know. Someone who is over a lot.”
I nodded. “Redhead, right? The one who likes wearing the tight shirts.”
“Andi,” Will said. “And Marcy. She moved back to town after Kirby’s funeral. Their scents are here, too.”
“Marcy?”
“Little mousey girl. Brown hair. She and Andi had kind of a thing in school.”
“Liberal werewolves,” I said. “Two words rarely seen adjacent to each other.”
“Lots of people experiment in college,” Will said. “You probably did.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I tried getting into watching European football. It didn’t work out.”
“Neither did Marcy and Andi.”
“Bad blood there?”
“Not that I know of. They were still roommates after they split.”
“But Marcy left town.”
Will nodded. “She wanted into the animation business. She pulled a job at Skywalker. Seriously cool stuff.”
“So cool that she left it to come back here?”
Will shrugged a shoulder. “She said it was more important for her to be here to help us. And she lived in a cardboard box or something, socked most of her money into the bank. Says the interest is enough to get by on for now.”
I decided to remain skeptical on that story. “You happen to remember if either of them wears this color lipstick?”
He shook his head. “Sorry. Not really the kind of thing I notice.”
If I remembered right, most guys who looked at Andi wouldn’t be entirely certain whether or not she had lips afterward. But she’d probably have back problems at some point. “Okay,” I said. “Maybe the cops will be here soon, and maybe not. Either way, I don’t think we should wait around for them.”
Will nodded. “What are we going to do?”
“This isn’t exactly high-dollar soundproof housing. Someone in this building must have heard or seen something.”
“Maybe,” Will said, though he didn’t sound confident.
I turned to leave the apartment and tried not to notice the little crib and changing table that had already been set up just beyond the open door of the apartment’s second bedroom. “We won’t know until we ask. Come on.”
CANVASSING A BUILDING isn’t particularly fun work. It’s awkward, boring, repetitive, and frustrating. Most of the people you talk to don’t want to be talking to you and want out of the conversation as quickly as possible—or else they’re just delighted to be talking to you, and want to keep talking to you even though they don’t know a damn thing. You have to ask the same questions over and over again, get the same answers over and over again, and generally look like you’re an idiot without a single clue.
And you pretty much are, or you wouldn’t be canvassing the building in the first place. You grow a thick skin fast for that kind of thing when you do police work.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Will said after the umpteenth door, his frustration and worry finally boiling over to the point that it was beginning to outweigh his terror for his wife and child. He turned to face me, his stance unconsciously confrontational, his shoulders squared, his chest thrust out, his hands clenched into fists. “We need to do something else.”
Ah, masculine assertiveness—I’ve got nothing against it, as long as it helps get the job done ins
tead of making it harder. “Yeah?” I asked him. “You think we’d be better off walking down the street calling her name, Will?”
“N-no, but—”
“But what?” I asked him, keeping my tone reasonable while facing him with an equal amount of ready-to-kick-your-ass Martian body language. You do not intimidate me. “You came to me for help. I’m giving it to you. Either you work with me or you tell me you want to go it alone. Right now.”
He backed off, unclenching his hands and looking away. I relaxed as well. Will hadn’t meant to deliver a threat to me, as such, but he was a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than I was. Stronger isn’t everything, but simple mass and power mean a lot in a fight, and Will had the ferocity and killer instinct to make them count even more heavily than most. He’d never considered—hell, probably never noticed—the full depth of the statement he was making with his stance and clenched fists.
It’s another in a long list of things that Martians hardly ever think about: Almost any woman knows that almost any man is stronger than she is. Oh, men know they’re stronger, but they seldom actually stop to think through the implications of that simple reality—implications that are both unnerving and virtually omnipresent, if you aren’t a Martian. You think about life differently when you know that half the people you see have the physical power to do things to you, regardless of whether you intend to allow it—and even implied threats of physical violence have to be taken seriously.
Will hadn’t intended to frighten me. He just wanted to find his wife.
“I know it’s frustrating,” I told him, “but it’s the best way to find out something we didn’t know before.”
“We’ve been through the whole building,” he snapped. “The most we’ve got is a neighbor a couple of floors up who heard a thump.”
“Which tells us there wasn’t much of a fight,” I said, “or they’d have probably heard it. Fights are loud, Will, even when only one person is fighting. A building like this, everyone knows it when the neighbor beats his wife.”
