Skin Game: A Novel of the Dresden Files

by Jim Butcher

  “We aren’t done talking about Maggie,” he replied firmly. “But we’ll take it up soon.”

  “Why?” I asked. “She’s safe here. Is she . . . She’s happy?”

  “Mostly,” he said amiably. “She’s your daughter, Harry. She needs you. But not, I think, nearly as much as you need her.”

  “I don’t know how you can say that to me,” I said, “after Molly.”

  He tilted his head. “What about Molly?”

  “You . . . you know about Molly, right?” I asked.

  He blinked at me. “She’s been doing great lately. I saw her last weekend. Did she lose her apartment or something?”

  I looked back at him in dismay, realizing.

  He didn’t know.

  Michael didn’t know that his daughter had become the Winter Lady. She hadn’t told him.

  “Harry,” he said, worried, “is she all right?”

  Oh, Hell’s freaking bells. She hadn’t told her parents?

  That was so Molly. Unimpressed by a legion of wicked faeries—terrified to tell her parents about her new career.

  But it was her choice. And I didn’t have the right to unmake it for her.

  “She’s fine,” I blurted. “She’s fine. I mean, I meant, uh . . .”

  “Oh,” Michael said, a look of understanding coming over his face. “Oh, right. Well, that’s . . . that’s fine. Behind us now, and it all worked out.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but it was getting me out of making a major problem for Molly. I rolled with it. “Right,” I said. “Anyway. Thank you, again. For too much.”

  “If it’s ever too much,” he said, “I’ll thump you politely on the head.”

  “You’ll have to, for it to get through,” I said.

  “I know.” He rose, and offered me his hand.

  I shook it.

  “Michael,” I asked, “do you ever . . . miss it?”

  His smile lines deepened. “The fight?” He shrugged. “I’m very, very happy to have the time to spend with my wife and children.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “That . . . wasn’t exactly an answer.”

  He winked at me. Then he walked me to the door, leaning on his cane.

  By the time I got to the car, the icy ache in my arm had dulled down to a buzzing sensation. I was recovering. I’d get some anti-inflammatories into me before I got back, to help with the swelling. No, I couldn’t feel the pain, but that didn’t mean that it wouldn’t be smart to do whatever I could to take the pressure off the mantle, to save my strength for when it counted. I needed to pick up some other things too, thinking along the same lines.

  Whatever Nicodemus had planned, it would go down in the next twenty-four hours, and I was going to be ready for it.

  Twenty-one

  I rolled back up to the slaughterhouse just before the rented town car’s transmission gave out on me altogether.

  It sort of cheered me up, actually. I hadn’t wrecked a car with my wizardliness in a long time. And it just couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy’s rental vehicle. For a moment, I felt a sudden, sharp pining for my old Volkswagen, which made about as much sense as anything else I’d been doing that day. The Blue Beetle had been uncomfortable and cramped and it had smelled a bit odd, not to mention that it was put together from the cannibalized scraps of a bunch of other late-sixties VWs—and I must have looked absolutely ridiculous crouched behind its wheel. But it had been my car, and while it hadn’t run like a race car, it did run, most of the time.

  Suck it, rental town car. The built-in talking GPS computer hadn’t lasted two blocks.

  “Jordan!” I boomed as I came in. I tossed a paper bag with a couple of cheeseburgers in it at the Denarian squire. “Chow down, buddy. They’re hot, so don’t let the cheese burn your ton— Oh, right. Sorry.”

  Jordan scowled at me and fumbled with the bag and his shotgun until he managed to balance the two. I clapped him on the shoulder in a genial fashion and rolled on by. I pointed at the guard at the next post and said, “You don’t get cheeseburgers. You didn’t say nice things to me like Jordan did.”

  The guard glowered at me in silence, of course. It was an act. No one could resist my bluff and manly charisma. In his heart of hearts, he wanted to be friends with me. I just knew it.

  As I descended to the floor of the slaughterhouse, Karrin looked up from a long worktable absolutely covered in guns. She tracked my entrance, her expression touched with both wariness and . . . a certain amount of incredulity.

  “Harry?” she asked, as I came down the last few steps.

  “Who else would I be?” I asked. “Except that jerk Grey, except he’s too busy being Harvey to be me.” I took another paper bag from Burger King and plopped it down in front of Karrin, then dumped the loaded duffel I’d picked up from a military surplus store off where it hung over my shoulder. “Figured you might be hungry.”

  She eyed the fast-food bag. “I’m not sure I’m that hungry.”

  “Whoa, whoa, hold on there, Annie Oakley. You did not just say that,” I said. “Not right to my face.”

  A slow smile spread over her mouth and reached her eyes. “Harry.”

  “I . . .” I exhaled. The talk with Michael had made me feel about twenty tons lighter, at least on the inside. “Yeah. I guess maybe it is.” I felt my own smile fade. “Harvey’s dead.”

  Her face sobered and her eyes raked over me, stopping on my arm. “What happened?”

  “Polonius Lartessa showed up with a squad of soldier-ghouls and whacked him,” I said. “Unless maybe it was Deirdre who did it. Or Grey. I had ghouls all over my face when it happened.”

  “Who took care of your arm for you?”

  “A good man,” I said.

  She stared at me for a moment and then her eyebrows lifted. “Oh,” she said. Her eyes glittered. “Oh. That explains some things, then.”

  “Yeah,” I said, bouncing my weight lightly on my toes. “The point being, someone’s trying to screw with the job before we even get going.”

  “What a crime,” Karrin said.

  I grunted. “If Tessa’s trying to stop Nicodemus, I’ve got to wonder why.”

  “She’s married to him?” she suggested drily.

  “That’s vengeance-worthy, all right,” I said. “But . . . I don’t know. I hate working in the dark.”

  “So what’s the move?”

  I chewed my lip and said, “Nothing’s changed for us. Except . . .”

  “Except what?” she asked.

  “Except someone’s going down for Harvey before this is done,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I can get behind that.”

  I took a long look at the table. “Uzis,” I noted.

  “They’re a classic,” Karrin said. “Simple, reliable, durable, and not assault rifles.”

  That was good for the innocent bystanders of Chicago. Pistol ammunition wasn’t nearly as good at flying through an extraneous wall or ten and killing some poor sap sitting in his apartment two blocks away. Which wasn’t to say that they weren’t insanely dangerous—just less so than a bunch of AK-47s would have been. Nicodemus wasn’t doing that to be thoughtful. Either he’d bought what was available, or else he had a reason to cause only limited collateral damage.

  “Can Binder’s goons handle them?” she asked.

  “I assume so,” I said. “They seemed to take to guns pretty easily the last time. Check with Binder on it.”

  “Check with Binder on what?” asked Binder, appearing from farther down the factory floor. He was carrying a sandwich in one hand, a cup of what might have been tea in the other.

  “Speak of the devil and he appears,” I said.

  Binder sketched me a courtly little bow, rolling his sandwich as he did.

  “Your . . . people,” Karrin said. “Do they know how to handle an Uzi or do they need some kind of orientation?”

  “They’ll be fine,” he said, his tone confident, even cocky. “Don’t ask them to fieldstr
ip and repair one, or for witty banter before they shoot, but for trigger work or reloading they’re golden.” His sharp, beady little eyes landed on my arm in its splint. “Does someone not know how to play well with others?”

  His eyes went from me to start flicking around the slaughterhouse. I could all but see the calculation going on in his head. One Harry, no Deirdre, no Grey.

  “They’re fine,” I said. “We ran into some opposition around the accountant.”

  “Bookmark,” Binder said, holding up two fingers. He turned and retreated, wolfing down his sandwich, and returned a moment later with Hannah Ascher in tow. Ascher had ditched her sweater in favor of a tank top, and she looked as if she’d just come off a treadmill. She was breathing lightly and her skin was sheened with sweat. There were bits of ash stuck in the fine hairs of her forearms and smudging one cheek. Like every other look I’d seen on her, it was an awfully intriguing one—easily translated to let a fellow imagine what she might look like during . . .

  “Right, then,” Binder said. “Resume.”

  “We staked out the accountant,” I said. “Nicodemus’s wife showed up with a crew of ghouls and went after him. The accountant was killed.”

  “The wife did it?” Ascher asked.

  “Women,” Binder said scornfully.

  Karrin and Ascher both eyed him.

  He folded his arms. “I’m a century older than any of you sprats,” he said. “I’ll stand by that.”

  “I’m pretty sure I didn’t kill Harvey,” I said. “My gut says it wasn’t Grey. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Eh?” Binder said, nodding toward me conspiratorially. “Women.”

  Karrin gave me a very level look.

  I coughed. “The female of the species is deadlier than the male?”

  She snorted, and picked up the next Uzi in the row.

  “I don’t understand. Why would Nicodemus’s wife be trying to sabotage him?” Ascher asked.

  “Maybe she wants to cop the job,” Binder said wistfully. “Lot of money.”

  “Nah,” I said. “Money isn’t her thing.”

  “’Fraid you’d say that,” he said. “Personal?”

  “Let’s just say that ‘dysfunctional’ doesn’t even come close to that family.”

  “Bloody hell,” Binder said. “Why does everyone have to get bloody personal? No bloody professional pride anymore.” He glowered at me. “Present bloody company included.”

  “Language,” Ascher said, wincing.

  “Sod off,” he said. “Where’re Deirdre and Grey?”

  “Grey’s doubling the accountant,” I said. “No clue about Deirdre.”

  Binder made a growling sound.

  “Hey,” Ascher said. “Has anyone else been keeping track of how many goats are in the pen?”

  “Eight,” said Karrin and Binder together.

  I did a rough calculation. “It’s eating one goat at every meal.”

  That got me a round of looks.

  I shrugged. “Something’s here. It stands to reason.”

  Ascher and Binder both looked around the factory floor. Ascher folded her arms as if she’d suddenly become cold.

  “Big,” Karrin noted calmly. “If it eats that much.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And quiet.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And really, really fast.”

  Binder shook his head. “Bloody hell.”

  “What is it?” Ascher said.

  “Could be a lot of things,” Binder said. “None of them good.” He squinted at me. “Muscle, you think?”

  “Maybe where we’re going, we need something with that kind of physical power,” I said.

  Ascher scowled. “Or maybe it’s there to clean us up after the job.”

  “We wouldn’t have been given a chance to become aware of it if that was the case,” Karrin said.

  “Unless that’s what Nicodemus wants us to think,” Binder said.

  Us. I liked the sound of that. The more people I could incline against pitching in on Nicodemus’s side when it all hit the fan, the better. “Let’s not go down that rabbit hole,” I said. “We’ve got problems enough without adding in paranoia.”

  “Too right,” Binder said. “Job worth twenty million each, with an invisible monster nipping about the place and a psychotic ex trying to bugger us out of tweaking the nose of a bloody Greek god. What have we got to be paranoid about?”

  “Look,” I said, “at the best, it means Nicodemus isn’t telling us everything.”

  “We knew that already,” Ascher said.

  I shrugged a shoulder in acknowledgment of that. “At worst, it means someone on the inside is giving information to some kind of opposition.”

  Ascher narrowed her eyes. “That’s rich, coming from the opposition.”

  I waved a hand. “At this point, I’m playing the game. I’ll get in and out again, because if I don’t, Mab is going to have my head.” Well, technically, she’d have the splattered pieces, but they didn’t need the details. “I’m not looking to derail the train before then.”

  Ascher looked skeptical. Binder looked pensive. Karrin finished her inspection of the next Uzi and picked up another one.

  “Ash-my-girl,” Binder said, and jerked his head toward the other end of the factory floor.

  She nodded, and the two of them moved off, walking close and speaking quietly.

  Karrin watched them go, and then asked me, “What do you think they’re talking about?”

  “Same as us,” I said. “Wondering when someone’s going to pull the rug out from underneath them, and how they’re going to get out of it in one piece.”

  “Or maybe thinking about doing a little pulling themselves,” she said.

  “Or maybe that,” I said. “But . . . they won’t do it until after they’ve got their packs loaded with jewels.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Binder,” I said. “He’s a mercenary, plain and simple.”

  “Unless that’s what he wants us to think,” Karrin said.

  “Unless that,” I said. I exhaled slowly. “This whole thing,” I said, “is going to come down to guessing who isn’t what they look like.”

  “Who is?” Karrin asked, her hands moving surely over the weapon. “Ever.”

  “Point,” I said. “But it’s going to be about guessing motivations. Whoever’s done a better job of figuring out what the other wants wins.”

  Her mouth quivered at the corners. “Then we might be in trouble. Because your motivations have . . . never exactly been mysterious, Harry.”

  “Not to you,” I said. “To someone like Nicodemus, I must seem like an utter lunatic.”

  Karrin let out a short laugh. “You know what? I think you’re probably right.” She manually cycled the action of the Uzi, caught the round as it was ejected, then put the weapon down and nodded. “That’s it. Forty of them.”

  I grunted. “Didn’t some biblical guy have forty soldiers to take on an army or something?”

  “Gideon. He had three hundred.”

  “I thought that was the Spartans.”

  “It was also the Spartans,” Karrin said. “Except that they had about four thousand other Greeks there with them in addition to their three hundred.”

  “Three hundred makes a better movie. Who had forty guys, then?”

  “You’re thinking of how many days and nights it rained on Noah’s ark.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I was sure somebody had forty guys.”

  “Ali Baba?”

  “He didn’t have forty guys,” I said. “He ripped off forty guys.”

  “Maybe you’re remembering cartoons again,” Karrin said.

  “Probably,” I said. I stared down at the guns. “Forty of those demon suit guys. With Uzis.”

  She grimaced. “Yeah. Gonna take me maybe three hours just to load all the clips.”

  “What kind of target is tough enough that it needs forty demon soldie
rs with submachine guns to assault?”

  Karrin shook her head. “Military installation?”

  I grunted.

  “You don’t plan for this many guns if you don’t intend to use them,” Karrin said. “If it comes down to Binder’s goons shooting people . . .”

  “We sure as hell don’t stand around and watch it happen,” I assured her.

  She nodded. “Good.” She twisted her mouth in distaste. “Won’t that upset Mab, if you bail out?”

  “Her Royal FreezePop-iness can get upset—but if she claims to be surprised, I’ll laugh in her face.”

  “But it could mean she kills you,” she said quietly.

  “Could mean she tries,” I said, aiming for cocky and confident.

  Karrin looked away, the motion a little too sharp. She didn’t go so far as to need to blink tears from her eyes or anything, but for a moment she looked about ten years older. She nodded. It looked like she wanted to say something.

  “Karrin?” I asked.

  She shook her head once and said, “I’ve got to get these clips loaded.”

  “Want help?”

  “Sure.”

  We set to the task of loading a hundred and twenty thirty-two-round magazines with 9mm rounds. Thirty eight hundred bullets or so. Even with speed-loading tools, it took a while, and we worked in companionable silence, broken occasionally by the passing guard or an increasingly gentle, intermittent series of whumping sounds that came from the far end of the factory floor—Ascher, presumably, practicing her breaching spell.

  Just as we were finishing up, bootsteps came from the opposite direction and I looked up to see Nicodemus marching toward us, a pair of his squires tromping along behind him. Deirdre walked beside him, in her human form, her expression unfriendly and otherwise unreadable.

  “Weapons ready?” he asked Karrin, without stopping.

  “All set.”

  “Excellent. Conference table, please.”

  “Why?” I asked. My left hand hadn’t been good for much beyond holding the magazine as I loaded rounds, and the fingertips of my right hand felt raw.

  Nicodemus went on by and glanced over his shoulder at me, his eyes lingering on my splint. “Grey is back. It’s time to talk about our target.”