Death Masks df-5

by Jim Butcher

  After all the perishables got put away, Charity fixed a bottle of formula and passed it off to Molly, who took it, the diaper bag, and the sleeping boy into another room. Charity waited until she had left, then shut the door. "Very well," she said, still putting groceries away. "I haven't spoken to Michael since you called this morning. I left a message with his cell phone voice mail."

  "Where is he?" I asked.

  Shiro laid his cane on the table and sat down. "Mister Dresden, we have asked you not to get involved in this business."

  "That isn't why I'm here," I said. "I just need to talk to him."

  "Why are you looking for him?" Shiro asked.

  "I'm dueling a vampire under the Accords. I need a second before sundown or I get disqualified. Permanently."

  Shiro frowned. "Red Court?"

  "Yeah. Some guy named Ortega."

  "Heard of him," Shiro said. "Some kind of war leader."

  I nodded. "That's the rumor. That's why I'm here. I had hoped Michael would be willing to help."

  Shiro stroked a thumb over the smooth old wood of his cane. "We received word of Denarian activity near St. Louis. He and Sanya went to investigate."

  "When will they get back?"

  Shiro shook his head. "I do not know."

  I looked at the clock and bit my lip. "Christ."

  Charity walked by with an armload of groceries and glared at me.

  I lifted my hands. "Sorry. I'm a little tense."

  Shiro studied me for a moment, and then asked, "Would Michael help him?"

  Charity's voice drifted out of the cavernous walk-in pantry. "My husband is sometimes an idiot."

  Shiro nodded and said, "Then I will assist you in his stead, Mister Dresden."

  "You'll what?" I asked.

  "I will be your second in the duel."

  "You don't have to do that," I said. "I mean, I'll figure out something."

  Shiro lifted an eyebrow. "Have the weapons been set for the duel?"

  "Uh, not yet," I said.

  "Then where is the meeting with the emissary and your opponent's second?"

  I fished out the card I'd gotten from the Archive. "I don't know. I was told to have my second call this number."

  Shiro took the card and rose without another word, heading for the phone in the next room.

  I put my hand on his arm and said, "You don't need to take any chances. You don't really know me."

  "Michael does. That is enough for me."

  The old Knight's support was a relief, but I felt guilty, somehow, for accepting it. Too many people had been hurt on my behalf in the past. Michael and I had faced trouble together before, looked out for each other before. Somehow, it made it easier for me to go to him and ask for help. Accepting the same thing from a stranger, Knight of the Cross or not, grated on my conscience. Or maybe on my pride.

  But what choice did I have?

  I sighed and nodded. "I just don't want to drag someone else into more trouble with me."

  Charity muttered, "Let me think. Where have I heard that before?"

  Shiro smiled at her, the expression both paternal and amused, and said, "I'll make the call."

  I waited while Shiro made a call from the room that served as the family study and the office for Michael's contracting business. Charity stayed in the kitchen and wrestled a huge Crock-Pot onto the counter. She got out a ton of vegetables, stew meat, and a spice rack and set to chopping things up without a word to me.

  I watched her quietly. She moved with the kind of precision you see only in someone who is so versed at what they are doing that they are already thinking of the steps coming twenty minutes in the future. I thought she took her knife to the carrots a little more violently than she needed to. She started preparing another meal somewhere in the middle of making the stew, this one chicken and rice and other healthy things I rarely saw in three dimensions.

  I fidgeted for a bit, until I stood up, washed my hands in the sink, and started cutting vegetables.

  Charity frowned at me for a moment. She didn't say anything. But she got a few more veggies out and put them down next to me, then collected what had been cut so far and pitched them into the Crock-Pot. A couple of minutes later she sighed, opened a can of Coke, and put it on the counter next to me.

  "I worry about him," she said.

  I nodded, and focused on cucumbers.

  "I don't even know when he'll be home tonight."

  "Good thing you have a Crock-Pot," I said.

  "I don't know what I would do without him. What the children would do. I'd feel so lost."

  What the hell. An ounce of well-intentioned but irrational reassurance didn't cost anything. I took a sip of the Coke. "He'll be all right. He can handle himself. And he has Shiro and Sanya with him."

  "He's been hurt three times, you know."

  "Three?" I asked.

  "Three. With you. Every time."

  "So it's my fault." My turn to chop vegetables like teenagers in a slasher movie. "I see."

  I couldn't see her face but her voice was, more than anything else, tired. "It isn't about blame. Or whose fault it is. All that matters is that when you're around, my husband, my children's father, gets hurt."

  The knife slipped and I cut off a neat little slice of skin on my index finger. "Ow," I snarled. I slapped the cold water on in the sink and put my finger under it. You can't tell, with cuts like that, how bad they're going to be until you see how much you're leaking. Charity passed me a paper towel, and I examined the cut for a minute before wrapping the towel around it. It wasn't bad, though it hurt like hell. I watched my blood stain the paper towel for a minute and then I asked, "Why didn't you get rid of me, then?"

  I looked up to see Charity frowning at me. There were dark circles under her eyes that I hadn't noticed before. "What do you mean?"

  "Just now," I said. "When Shiro asked you if Michael would help me. You could have said no."

  "But he would have helped you in an instant. You know that."

  "Shiro didn't."

  Her expression became confused. "I don't understand."

  "You could have lied."

  Her face registered comprehension, and some fire came back into her eyes. "I don't like you, Mister Dresden. I certainly don't care enough for you to abandon beliefs I hold dear, to use you as an excuse to cheapen myself, or to betray what my husband stands for." She stepped to a cabinet and got out a small, neat medical kit. Without another word, she took my hand and the paper towel and opened the kit.

  "So you're taking care of me?" I asked.

  "I don't expect you to understand. Whether or not I can personally stand you, it has no bearing on what choices I make. Michael is your friend. He would risk his life for you. It would break his heart if you came to grief, and I will not allow that to happen."

  She fell silent and doctored the cut with the same brisk, confident motions she'd used for cooking. I hear that they make disinfectants that don't hurt these days.

  But Charity used iodine.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Shiro came out of the office and showed me an address written on a piece of paper. "We meet them tonight at eight."

  "After sundown," I noted. "I know the place. I'll pick you up here?"

  "Yes. I will need a little time to prepare."

  "Me too. Around seven." I told them good-bye and headed for the door. Charity didn't answer me but Shiro did. I got into my car. More kids came pelting into the house as I did, two boys and a girl. The smaller of the two boys stopped to peer at my car, but Charity appeared in the door and chivvied him inside. She frowned at me until I coaxed the Blue Beetle to life and pulled out.

  Driving home left me with too much time to think. This duel with Ortega was something I had no way to prepare for. Ortega was a warlord of the Red Court. He'd probably fought duels before. Which meant that he'd killed people before. Hell, maybe even wizards. I'd squared off against various toughs but that had been free-for-all fighting. I had been able to fi
nd ways to cheat, by and large. In a one-on-one duel, I wasn't going to be able to fall back on cleverness, to take advantage of whatever I could find in my environment.

  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."

  Murp
hy 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.