Side Jobs df-13

by Jim Butcher

Murphy blindsided me with a kick that lit up my whole rib cage with pain, and she had seized an arm before I could fight through it. If it had been my right arm, I’m not sure what might have happened— but she grabbed my left, and I activated my shield bracelet, sheathing it in sheer, kinetic power and forcing her hands away.

  I don’t care how many aikido lessons you’ve had—they don’t train you for force fields.

  I reached out with my will and screamed, “Forzare!” Then I seized a large plastic waste bin with my power. With a flick of my hand, I flung it at Murphy. It struck her hard and knocked her off me; I backpedaled. Meditrina had regained her feet and was coming for me, bottle flickering.

  She drove me back into the beer-stand counter across the hall, and I brought up my shield again just as her makeshift weapon came forward. Glass shattered against it, cutting her own hand—always a risk with a bottle. But the force of the blow was sufficient to carry through the shield and slam my back against the counter. I bounced off some guy trying to carry beer in plastic cups and went down soaked in brew.

  Murphy jumped on me then, pinning my left arm down as Meditrina started raking at my face with her nails, both of them screaming like banshees.

  I had to shut one eye when a sharp fingernail grazed it, but I saw my chance as Meditrina’s hands—hot, horribly strong hands—closed over my throat.

  I choked out a gasped, “Forzare!” and reached out my right hand, snapping a slender chain that held up one end of a sign suspended above the beer stand behind me.

  A heavy wooden sign that read, in large cheerful letters, PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY, swung down in a ponderous, scything arc and struck Meditrina on the side of the head, hitting her like a giant’s fist. Her nails left scarlet lines on my throat as she was torn off me.

  Murphy looked up, shocked, and I hauled with all my strength. I had to position her before she took up where Meditrina left off. I felt something wrench and give way as my thumb left its socket, and I howled in pain as the sign swung back, albeit with a lot less momentum now, and clouted Murphy on the noggin, too.

  Then a bunch of people jumped on us, and the cops came running.

  ———

  WHILE THEY WERE arresting me, I managed to convince the cops that there was something bad in Mac’s beer. They got with the caterers and rounded up the whole batch, apparently before more than a handful of people could drink any. There was some wild behavior, but no one else got hurt.

  None of which did me any good. After all, I was soaked in Budweiser and had assaulted two attractive women. I went to the drunk tank, which angered me mainly because I’d never gotten my freaking beer. And to add insult to injury, after paying exorbitant rates for a ticket, I hadn’t gotten to see the game, either.

  There’s no freaking justice in this world.

  Murphy turned up in the morning to let me out. She had a black eye and a sign-shaped bruise across one cheekbone.

  “So let me get this straight,” Murphy said. “After we went to Left Hand Goods, we followed the trail to the Bulls game. Then we confronted this maenad character, there was a struggle, and I got knocked out.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  There was really no point in telling it any other way. The nefarious hooch would have destroyed her memory of the evening. The truth would just bother her.

  Hell, it bothered me—on more levels than I wanted to think about.

  “Well, Bassarid vanished from the hospital,” Murphy said. “So she’s not around to press charges. And, given that you were working with me on an investigation, and because several people have reported side effects that sound a lot like they were drugged with Rohypnol or something—and because it was you who got the cops to pull the rest of the bottles—I managed to get the felony charges dropped. You’re still being cited for drunk and disorderly.”

  “Yay,” I said without enthusiasm.

  “Could have been worse,” Murphy said. She paused and studied me for a moment. “You look like hell.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She looked at me seriously. Then she smiled, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed my cheek. “You’re a good man, Harry. Come on. I’ll give you a ride home.”

  I smiled all the way to her car.

  LOVE HURTS

  —from Songs of Love and Death, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

  Takes place between Turn Coat and Changes

  Gardner Dozois has a bunch of awards for his anthologies because he’s good at them, and I leapt at his invitation to contribute to the anthology he was working on with George R. R. Martin, originally titled Star-Crossed Lovers. Despite my enthusiasm, finding a starting point for a Dresden story was sort of a puzzler for me, since Harry Dresden might be in the top three Star-Influence-Free lovers in the whole contemporary-fantasy genre. How was I going to bring him into a story with a theme like that?

  Answer: Get him into the thick of things next to Murphy when seemingly random love spells are running amok through the city. After that, all I had to do was apply his usual streak of luck and cackle madly to myself while typing.

  The title of the anthology changed to Songs of Love and Death after I had written the story, which is probably a good thing. Otherwise, I may have tried to find a way to fit a death-metal battle of the bands into the margins somewhere. No one deserves that.

  Murphy gestured at the bodies and said, “Love hurts.” I ducked under the crime scene tape and entered the Wrigleyville apartment. The smell of blood and death was thick. It made gallows humor inevitable.

  Murphy stood there looking at me. She wasn’t offering explanations. That meant she wanted an unbiased opinion from CPD’s Special Investigations consultant—who is me, Harry Dresden. As far as I know, I am the only wizard on the planet earning a significant portion of his income working for a law enforcement agency.

  I stopped and looked around, taking inventory.

  Two bodies, naked, male and female, still intertwined in the act. One little pistol, illegal in Chicago, lying upon the limp fingers of the woman. Two gunshot wounds to the temples, one each. There were two overlapping fan-shaped splatters of blood, and more had soaked into the carpet. The bodies stank like hell. Some very unromantic things had happened to them after death.

  I walked a little farther into the room and looked around. Somewhere in the apartment, an old vinyl was playing Queen. Freddie wondered who wanted to live forever. As I listened, the song ended and began again a few seconds later, popping and scratching nostalgically.

  The walls were covered in photographs.

  I don’t mean there were a lot of pictures on the wall, like at Greatgrandma’s house. I mean covered in photographs. Entirely. Completely papered.

  I glanced up. So was the ceiling.

  I took a moment to walk slowly around, looking at pictures. All of them, every single one of them, featured the two dead people together, posed somewhere and looking deliriously happy. I walked and peered. Plenty of the pictures were near-duplicates in most details, except that the subjects wore different sets of clothing—generally cutesy matching T-shirts. Most of the sites were tourist spots within Chicago.

  It was as if the couple had gone on the same vacation tour every day, over and over again, collecting the same general batch of pictures each time.

  “Matching T-shirts,” I said. “Creepy.”

  Murphy’s smile was unpleasant. She was a tiny, compactly muscular woman with blond hair and a button nose. I’d say she was so cute, I just wanted to put her in my pocket, but if I tried to do it, she’d break my arm. Murph knows martial arts.

  She waited and said nothing.

  “Another suicide pact. That’s the third one this month.” I gestured at the pictures. “Though the others weren’t quite so cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Or, ah, in medias res.” I shrugged and gestured at the obsessive photographs. “This is just crazy.”

  Murphy lifted one pale eyebrow ever so slightly. “Remind me—how much do we pay you to give us advice, Sher
lock?”

  I grimaced. “Yeah, yeah. I know.” I was quiet for a while and then said, “What were their names?”

  “Greg and Cindy Bardalacki,” Murphy said.

  “Seemingly unconnected dead people, but they share similar patterns of death. Now we’re upgrading to irrational and obsessive behavior as a precursor. ...” I frowned. I checked several of the pictures and went over to eye the bodies. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, hell’s bells.”

  Murphy arched an eyebrow.

  “No wedding rings any where,” I said. “No wedding pictures. And ...” I finally found a framed family picture, which looked to have been there for a while, among all the snapshots. Greg and Cindy were both in it, along with an older couple and a younger man.

  “Jesus, Murph,” I said. “They weren’t a married couple. They were brother and sister.”

  Murphy eyed the intertwined bodies. There were no signs of struggle. Clothes, champagne flutes, and an empty bubbly bottle lay scattered. “Married, no,” she said. “Couple, yes.” She was unruffled. She’d already worked that out for herself.

  “Ick,” I said. “But that explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “These two. They were together—and they went insane doing it. This has the earmarks of someone tampering with their minds.”

  Murphy squinted at me. “Why?”

  I spread my hands. “Let’s say Greg and Cindy bump into Bad Guy X. Bad Guy X gets into their heads and makes them fall wildly in love and lust with each other. There’s nothing they can do about the feelings—which seem perfectly natural—but on some level they’re aware that what they’re doing is not what they want, and dementedly wrong besides. Their compromised conscious minds clash with their subconscious”—I gestured at the pictures—“and it escalates until they can’t handle it anymore, and bang.” I shot Murphy with my thumb and forefinger.

  “If you’re right, they aren’t the deceased,” Murphy said. “They’re the victims. Big difference. Which is it?”

  “Wish I could say,” I said. “But the only evidence that could prove it one way or another is leaking out onto the floor. If we get a survivor, maybe I could take a peek and see, but barring that, we’re stuck with legwork.”

  Murphy sighed and looked down. “Two suicide pacts could—technically—be a coincidence. Three of them, no way it’s natural. This feels more like something’s MO. Could it be another one of those Skavis vampires?”

  “They gun for loners,” I said, shaking my head. “These deaths don’t fit their profile.”

  “So you’re telling me we need to turn up a common denominator to link the victims? Gosh, I wish I could have thought of that on my own.”

  I winced. “Yeah.” I glanced over at a couple of other SI detectives in the room, taking pictures of the bodies and documenting the walls and so on. Forensics wasn’t on-site. They don’t like to waste their time on the suicides of the emotionally disturbed, regardless of how bizarre they might be. That was crap work, and as such had been dutifully passed to SI.

  I lowered my voice. “If someone is playing mind games, the Council might know something. I’ll try to pick up the trail on that end. You start from here. Hopefully, I’ll earn my pay and we’ll meet in the middle.”

  “Right.” Murph stared at the bodies, and her eyes were haunted. She knew what it was like to be the victim of mental manipulation. I didn’t reach out to support her. She hated showing vulnerability, and I didn’t want to point out to her that I’d noticed.

  Freddie reached a crescendo that told us love must die.

  Murphy sighed and called, “For the love of God, someone turn off that damn record.”

  “I’M SORRY, HARRY,” Captain Luccio said. “We don’t exactly have orbital satellites for detecting black magic.”

  I waited a second to be sure she was finished. The presence of so much magical talent on the far end of the call meant that at times the lag could stretch out between Chicago and Edinburgh, the headquarters of the White Council of Wizards. Anastasia Luccio, captain of the Wardens, my ex-girlfriend, had been readily forthcoming with the information the Council had on any shenanigans going on in Chicago—which was exactly nothing.

  “Too bad we don’t, eh?” I asked. “Unofficially—is there anyone who might know anything?”

  “The Gatekeeper, perhaps. He has a gift for sensing problem areas. But no one has seen him for weeks, which is hardly unusual. And frankly, Warden Dresden, you’re supposed to be the one giving us this kind of information.” Her voice was half teasing, half deadly serious. “What do you think is happening?”

  “Three couples, apparently lovey-dovey as hell, have committed dual suicide in the past two weeks,” I told her. “The last two were brother and sister. There were some seriously irrational components to their behavior.”

  “You suspect mental tampering,” she said. Her voice was hard.

  Luccio had been a victim, too.

  I found myself smiling somewhat bitterly at no one. She had been, among other things, mindboinked into going out with me. Which was apparently the only way anyone would date me, lately. “It seems a reasonable suspicion. I’ll let you know what I turn up.”

  “Use caution,” she said. “Don’t enter any suspect situation without backup on hand. There’s too much chance that you could be compromised.”

  “Compromised?” I asked. “Of the two people having this conversation, which one of them exposed the last guy rearranging people’s heads?”

  “Touché,” Luccio said. “But he got away with it because we were overconfident. So use caution, anyway.”

  “Planning on it,” I said.

  There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Anastasia said, “How have you been, Harry?”

  “Keeping busy,” I said. She had already apologized to me, sort of, for abruptly walking out of my personal life. She’d never intended to be there in the first place. There had been a real emotional tsunami around the events of last year, and I wasn’t the one who had gotten the most hurt by them. “You?”

  “Keeping busy.” She was quiet for a moment and then said, “I know it’s over. But I’m glad for the time we had together. It made me happy. Sometimes I—”

  Miss feeling that, I thought, completing the sentence. My throat felt tight. “Nothing wrong with happy.”

  “No, there isn’t. When it’s real.” Her voice softened. “Be careful, Harry. Please.”

  “I will,” I said.

  I STARTED COMBING the supernatural world for answers and got almost nothing. The Little Folk, who could usually be relied on to provide some kind of information, had nothing for me. Their memory for detail was very short, and the deaths had happened too long ago to get me anything but conflicting gibberish from them.

  I made several mental nighttime sweeps through the city using the scale model of Chicago in my basement, and got nothing but a headache for my trouble.

  I called around the Paranet, the organization of folk with only modest magical gifts, the kind who often found themselves being preyed upon by more powerful supernatural beings. They worked together now, sharing information, communicating successful techniques, and generally overcoming their lack of raw magical muscle with mutually supportive teamwork. They didn’t have anything for me, either.

  I hit McAnally’s, a hub of the supernatural social scene, and asked a lot of questions. No one had any answers. Then I started contacting the people I knew in the scene, starting with the ones I thought most likely to provide information. I worked my way methodically down the list, crossing out names, until I got to Ask random people on the street.

  There are days when I don’t feel like much of a wizard. Or an investigator. Or a wizard investigator.

  Ordinary PIs have a lot of days like that, where they look and look and look for information and find nothing. I get fewer of those days than most, on account of the whole wizard thing giving me a lot more options—but sometimes I come up goose eggs, anyway.

  I just
hate doing it when lives may be in danger.

  ———

  FOUR DAYS LATER, all I knew was that nobody knew about any black magic happening in Chicago, and the only traces of it I did find were the minuscule amounts of residue left from black magic wrought by those without enough power to be a threat (Warden Ramirez had coined the phrase “dim magic” to describe that kind of petty, essentially harmless malice). There were also the usual traces of dim magic performed subconsciously from a bed of dark emotions, probably by someone who might not even know they had a gift.

  In other words, goose eggs.

  Fortunately, Murphy got the job done.

  Sometimes hard work is way better than magic.

  MURPHY’S SATURN HAD gotten a little blown up a couple of years back, sort of my fault, and what with her demotion and all, it would be a while before she’d be able to afford something besides her old Harley. For some reason, she didn’t want to take the motorcycle, so that left my car, the ever trusty (almost always) Blue Beetle, an old-school VW Bug that had seen me through one nasty scrape after another. More than once, it had been pounded badly, but always it had risen to do battle once more—if by battle one means driving somewhere at a sedate speed, without much acceleration and only middling gas mileage.

  Don’t start. It’s paid for.

  I stopped outside Murphy’s little white house, with its little pink rose garden, and rolled down the window on the passenger side. “Make like the Dukes of Hazzard,” I said. “Door’s stuck.”

  Murphy gave me a narrow look. Then she tried the door. It opened easily. She slid into the passenger seat with a smug smile, closed the door, and didn’t say anything.

  “Police work has made you cynical,” I said.

  “If you want to ogle my butt, you’ll just have to work for it like everyone else, Harry.”

  I snorted and put the car in gear. “Where we going?” “Nowhere until you buckle up,” she said, putting her own seat belt on.

  “It’s my car,” I said.

  “It’s the law. You want to get cited? ’Cause I can do that.”