Side Jobs df-13

by Jim Butcher

Will frowned. “So they can get a look at you first, right?”

  “Probably.”

  “You shouldn’t look like you,” Marcy blurted. Her face colored slightly. “I mean, like, you’re the supernatural cop in Chicago. Everyone knows that. And it makes sense that anyone planning something here wouldn’t have much trouble finding out who might actually get in their way.”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “I don’t have a different look.”

  Will looked at Marcy, frowning, and then said, “Ah. Makeover.”

  “We have a little time,” Marcy said, nodding.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “She’s right, Ms. Murphy,” Will said. “You’ve been seen with Dresden a lot. And, no offense, but not many people look like you do.”

  “Meaning?” I asked him. I smiled.

  Will’s eyes might have checked the distance between himself and the door. “Meaning you’re outside the norm for adult height and weight,” he said. “Exceptionally so. We should do what we can to make it harder to identify you.”

  Will had a point, I supposed. Annoying as it might be, his logic was sound. And I was almost certainly a little sensitive where my height was concerned. I sighed. “All right. But if I hear montage music starting to play, I’m cutting it short.”

  Will, seeming to relax, nodded. “Cool.”

  Marcy nodded with him. “So what about Will and me? I mean, what do the two of us do?”

  I looked at the pair of young werewolves and pursed my lips. “How do you feel about duct tape?”

  WHEN I ANSWERED the pay phone outside a small grocery store on Belmont, I felt like an idiot. In the windows of a darkened shop across the street, I could see my reflection.

  Halloween had come early this year. I wore boots not unlike Herman Munster’s, with elevator soles about three inches thick, making me look taller. My hair was dyed matte black and was slicked down to my skull. There was so much product in it, I was fairly sure it would deflect bullets. I wore some black dance tights Marcy had donated to the cause, a black T-shirt, and a black leather jacket in a youth size.

  My face was the worst part of the disguise. I was all but smothered beneath the makeup. Dark tones of silver that faded to black made a mess of my eyes, altering their shape by means of suggestion, through clever application of liner. In the evening light, I might have looked Asian. My lips were darkened, too, a shade of wine red that somehow managed to complement the eye shadow. The lipstick changed the shape of my mouth slightly and made my lips look fuller.

  I glowered at the reflection. This costume had exactly one thing going for it: I didn’t look a thing like me.

  The phone rang and I picked it up, jerking it off the base unit as if impatient. I glared around me, my eyes tracking across every spot I thought could contain an observer, and said, “Yeah?”

  “The merchandise,” murmured a soft, sibilant voice with an odd accent. “Describe.”

  There was something intrinsically unsettling about the voice. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “One male and one female, mid- to late-twenties. Shapeshifters.”

  There was a rustle of static over the line, unless the speaker could make an extremely odd hissing sound. All things considered, I gave it even odds.

  “Ten thousand,” said the voice.

  I could have played it a couple of different ways. The kinds of people who get into this sort of deal come in about three general types: greedy, low-life sons of bitches; cold professionals engaged in a business transaction; and desperate amateurs who are in over their heads. I’d already decided to try to come across as the first on the list.

  “Forty thousand,” I shot back instantly. “Each.”

  There was a furious sound on the other end of the phone. It wasn’t a human sound, either.

  “I could pluck out your eyes and cut your tongue into slivers,” hissed the voice. Something about it scared the hell out of me, touching on some instinctual level that Ray, in all his repulsive mass, had not. I felt myself shudder, despite my effort not to do so.

  “Whatever,” I said, trying to sound bored. “Even if you could do it, it gets you nothing. But hey, no skin off my ass either way.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of my phone. I thought I felt some kind of pressure building behind my eyelids. I told myself it was my imagination.

  “Yo, anyone there?” I complained. “Listen. Are you up for doing some business, or did I just waste my time?”

  After another pause, the voice hissed something in a bubbling, serpentine tongue. The phone rustled, as if changing hands, and a very deep male voice said, “Twenty thousand. Each.”

  “I’m not selling the female for less than thirty.”

  “Fifty total, then,” rumbled the new voice. It sounded entirely human.

  “Cash,” I demanded.

  “Done.”

  I kept tracking the street with my eyes, looking for their spotter, but saw no one. “How do you handle delivery?”

  “There’s a warehouse.”

  “Fat chance. I pull in there, you’ll just pop me and make the body disappear along with the freaks.”

  “What do you suggest?” rumbled the voice.

  “Buttercup Park. Thirty minutes. One carrier. Carrier hands me half the cash. Then carrier verifies the merchandise in the back of my truck. Carrier hands me the rest of the money. I hand him the keys to the vehicle carrying the merchandise. We all walk away happy.”

  The deep-voiced man thought about it for a moment and then grunted. Translation: Agreed. “How will you identify me?”

  I snorted and said, “Park isn’t huge, tough guy. And it ain’t my first rodeo.”

  I hung up on him, then went back to my motorcycle and left, heading for Buttercup Park. A lighted sign hanging outside a bank told me it was a quarter after nine. The metro traffic grid was dying down for the night. I got there in a little more than fifteen minutes, parked my Harley in a garage, and made my way to where Georgia’s high-dollar SUV was waiting in the same structure. I went around to the back and opened the hatch. Will was just finishing wrapping Marcy in what appeared to be several layers of duct tape, covering her in a swath from her hips to her deltoids, trapping her arms against her sides. She was wearing a simple sundress with, I assumed, nothing underneath. I guess when you change into a wolf, you don’t take your ensemble with you—being trapped in undies made for a different species could prove awkward in a fight.

  Will looked up and gave me a quick nod of greeting. “All set?”

  “So far. You’re sure you won’t have a problem getting out?” I asked.

  Will snorted. “Claws, fangs. It’ll sting a bit, when it tears out the hair. Nothing serious.”

  “Spoken like someone who’s never had his legs waxed,” Marcy said in a nervous, forcedly jovial tone. She might have looked like a skinny little thing, but the muscles showing on her legs were lean and ropy.

  Will tore off the end of the duct tape and passed the roll to me. He sat down on the open floor in the back of the SUV, the seats of which had been folded away to make room for the “prisoners.” He stripped out of his shirt, leaving only a pair of loose sweats. I started wrapping him.

  “Tighten your muscles,” I said. “When I’m done, relax them. It should leave you enough room to maintain blood flow.”

  “Right,” Will said. “Houdini.” He contracted the muscles in his upper body and the duct tape creaked. Damn, the kid was built. Given that I was more or less leaning against his naked back to reach around him with the roll of tape, it was impossible not to notice.

  Dresden hadn’t been muscled as heavily as Will. Harry’d had a runner’s build, all lean, tight, dense muscle that . . .

  I clenched my jaw and kept wrapping tape.

  “One more time,” I said. “I meet the contact, then bring him here.” I held up the SUV’s remote control fob. “I’ll disarm the security system so you know we’re coming. If you hear me say the word red, it means things aren’t goin
g well. Get loose and help me jump the contact. We’ll question him, find out where the other specials are being kept. Otherwise, sit tight, and make like you got hit with tranquilizer darts. I’ll shadow you back to their HQ.”

  “What then?” Marcy asked.

  “We’ll have to play that by ear,” I said. “If there aren’t many of them, we’ll hit them and get your people out. If they’ve got a lot of muscle, I’ll make a call. If I can get a large force here, they’ll run rather than fight.”

  “Can you be sure of that?” Will asked.

  “Dresden said that to the supernatural world, bringing in mortal authorities was equated with nuclear exchanges. No one wants to be the one to trigger a new Inquisition of some kind. So any group with a sense of reason will cut their losses rather than tangle with the cops.”

  “The way they didn’t tangle with FBI headquarters?” Will asked.

  I had sort of hoped no one would notice that flaw in my reasoning. “That was an act of war. This is some kind of profit-gaining scheme.”

  “Come on, Karrin,” Will said. “You’ve got to know better than that.”

  “This is a professional operation,” I said. “Whoever is behind it is depending on distraction and speed to enable them to get away with it. They’ll already have their escape plan ready to go. If a bunch of cars and lights come at them, I think their first instinct will be to run rather than fight.”

  “Yeah,” Marcy said, nodding. “That makes sense. You’ve always said supernatural predators don’t want a fight if they can avoid one, Will.”

  “Lone predators don’t,” Will said, “but this is an organization. And you might have noticed how a lot of supernatural types are a couple of french fries short of a Happy Meal. And I’m talking about more than here, tonight. More than Georgia and Andi. More than just Chicago.”

  I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

  He leaned forward, his eyes intent. “I mean that if Dresden just blew up the Red Court . . . that means the status quo is gone. There’s a power vacuum, and every spook out there is going to try to fill it. The rules have changed. We don’t know how these people are going to react.”

  A sobering silence fell over us.

  I hadn’t followed the line of reasoning, like Will had. Or rather, I hadn’t followed it far enough. I’d only been thinking of Dresden’s cataclysm in terms of its effect on my city, upon people who were part of my life.

  But he was right. Dear God, he was right. The sudden demise of the Red Court, with consequences that would reach around the whole world, would make the fall of the Soviet Union look like a minor organizational crisis.

  “So, what?” I asked. “We back out?”

  “Are you kidding?” Will said. “They took my wife. We go get her and anyone else they’ve taken.”

  “Right,” Marcy said firmly, from where she lay on the bed of the vehicle.

  I felt a smile bare my teeth. “And if they fight?”

  Will’s face hardened. “Then we kick their fucking ass.”

  “Ass,” said Marcy, nodding.

  I finished wrapping Will in the duct tape. He exhaled slowly and relaxed. He took a few experimental breaths and then nodded. “Okay. Good.”

  “Lie down, both of you. I’ll be back with the buyer.”

  “Be careful,” Will said. “If you aren’t back in twenty minutes, I’ll come looking.”

  “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, there won’t be much point in finding me,” I said.

  Then I shut them into the SUV and headed for the park.

  BUTTERCUP PARK WASN’T exactly overwhelming. There were grass, playground equipment, and a tree or two on an island bordered by four city streets. That was pretty much it. It was the sort of place my low-life persona would choose. It was out in the open, and there was not much to break up the line of sight. It was a good location for criminals with mutual trust issues to meet up. Each could be sure the other was alone. Each could be reasonably sure the other wouldn’t start shooting, right out there in front of God and everybody.

  The park, as it should have been, was empty. The surrounding streetlights left little hidden on the green grass, but the playground equipment cast long, asymmetric shadows.

  A man sat on one of the swings. He was huge—the biggest individual I’d ever seen. He was heavy with muscle, though it was an athlete’s balanced build—made for action, not for display. His hips strained the heavy flexible plastic seat of the swing to the horizontal. He must have been better than seven feet tall.

  He was quietly sitting there, completely still, watching and waiting. His head was shaved and his skin was dark. He wore a simple outfit—black chinos and a thin turtleneck sweater. If the October chill was bothering him, it didn’t show. I stomped over toward him in my Munster boots. When I was about thirty feet away, he turned his head toward me. His gaze was startling. His eyes were blue-white, as on some northern sled dogs, and looked nearly luminous in the half shadows.

  He lifted his eyebrows as I came closer, then rose and bowed politely from the waist. I realized that he wasn’t seven feet tall. He was more like seven foot four or five.

  “Good evening,” he said. His basso rumble was unmistakable. This was the person I had spoken to earlier.

  I stopped in front of him and put a hand on my hip, eyeing him as if I wasn’t much impressed. “As long as you brought the money, it will be,” I drawled.

  He reached into a cavernous pocket in his pants and drew out a brick wrapped in plastic. He tossed it to me. “Half.”

  I caught it and tore open the plastic with my teeth. Then I started counting the money, all of it in nonsequential Ben Franklins.

  A trace of impatience entered my contact’s voice. “It’s all there.”

  “Talking to me is just going to make me lose count and start over,” I said. “What am I supposed to call you?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “No one. I am nothing to you.”

  “Nothing it is,” I replied. The bills were bound in groups of fifty. I counted one out and compared its thickness to that of the others, then flipped through just to be sure Nothing wasn’t trying to short me by throwing some twenties into the middle of the stack. Then I stuck the money in my jacket pocket and said, “We’re in business.”

  Nothing inclined his head a bit. “The merchandise?”

  “Come with me,” I said, injecting my voice with breezy confidence. I turned to stomp back toward the garage parking lot, and Nothing paced along beside me.

  Already, this wasn’t going well. This guy was huge. I was good, but training and practice can get you only so far. The old saying is that a good big man will beat a good little man. Which is sexist as all get-out, but no less true. Levels of skill being equal, whoever has the size and weight advantage damn near always wins. Nothing probably outweighed all three of us together, and I already had a sense, from the way he held himself and moved, that he was a person accustomed to violence. He was good.

  I could shoot him (probably), but I didn’t need a dead trafficker on my hands. I needed one who could talk—which meant I was going to have to let Will and Marcy be taken.

  “How long you fellas setting up shop?” I asked him as we walked. “Might be able to come up with another one, if the price is right.”

  Nothing looked at me for a moment before speaking. “If you cannot do it by dawn, do not bother.”

  “Maybe. We’ll see how this plays out.”

  Nothing shrugged and kept on walking. I caught sight of our reflection in a passing window—Biker Barbie and Bigfoot. I tried to keep out of his reach as we walked, but there was only so much sidewalk, and Nothing’s arms looked long enough to slap me from the middle of the street.

  As we walked, I noticed the smell. The man just smelled wrong. I wasn’t sure what it was—something . . . musty, vaguely like the scent of stagnant water and rotting fish. It hung in the air around him.

  “You aren’t really human, are you,” I noted as we walked into the park
ing garage—and away from any potential witnesses.

  “Not anymore,” he replied.

  As he spoke, the collar of the turtleneck . . . stirred. It rippled, as if something had moved beneath it.

  “Well, I am,” I said. “Completely worthless for whatever you’re doing collecting specials. So don’t be thinking you can get three for the price of two.”

  Nothing looked down at me with those unsettling eyes. “You are pathetic.”

  I put a little extra swagger into my step. “Careful what you say there, big guy. You’ll turn me on.”

  Nothing made a small, quiet sound of disgust and shook his head. It was hard not to smile as I watched him pigeonhole me into “scum, treacherous, decadent.”

  “It’s right up here.”

  “Before we approach the vehicle,” he said, “you should know that if you have associates waiting in ambuscade, I will break their necks—and yours.”

  I lifted my hands. “Jesus. Show a little trust, will you? We’re all capitalists here.” I pointed the fob at the SUV and disarmed the alarm with a little electronic chirp. The lights flashed once. I tossed him the keys. “That one. I’ll stay back here if you like.”

  “Acceptable,” he said, and strode to the SUV. Watching him bend down to look in was like a scene from Jurassic Park. He opened the rear hatch and then lifted his hands to his neck for a moment. He tugged the turtleneck down a little.

  The skin of Nothing’s neck was deformed with narrow flaps of skin, somehow, and it took me a few seconds to realize what I was looking at.

  Gills.

  The man had gills. And he was breathing through them. They opened and closed in a rhythm not far removed from a dog’s sniffing.

  “Werewolves,” he said. “Valuable.”

  “They make good pets?” I asked.

  He reached in and seized Will, lifting him with one hand. The young man remained limp, his eyes closed.

  “Their blood has unique properties. What did you use to subdue them?”

  “Roofies. The way my dating life has been going, I keep some on hand.”

  He made a dissatisfied sound and tugged his collar up again. “The drug might lower their value.”