Jim Butcher - Side Jobs

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Michael pulled the truck into the gravel parking lot of my apartment, in the basement of a big old boardinghouse. “I need to drop by a site before we go back to get your car. Is that all right?”

I took the sword with me as I got out of the truck. “Well,” I said, “as long as it’s all happening for a reason.”

MICHAEL’S SMALL COMPANY built houses. Years of vanishing at irregular intervals to battle the forces of evil had probably held him back from moving up to building the really expensive, really profitable places. So he built homes for the upper couple of layers of the middle class instead. He probably would have made more money if he cut corners, but it was Michael. I was betting that never happened.

This house was a new property, down toward Wolf Lake, and it had the depressing look of all construction sites—naked earth, trees bulldozed and piled to one side, and the standard detritus of any such endeavor: mud, wood, garbage discarded by the workers, and big old boot tracks all over the ground. Half a dozen men were at work, putting up the house’s skeleton.

“Shouldn’t take me long,” Michael said.

“Sure,” I said. “Go to it.”

Michael hopped down from the truck and gimped his way over to the house, moving with an energy and purpose I’d seldom seen from him. I frowned after him, and then pulled the first envelope out of my pocket and started looking at the photos inside.

The photo of Michael at a building site had been taken at this one. Buzz had been here, watching Michael.

He might still be here now.

I got out of the car and slung the sword’s belt over my shoulder, so that it hung with its hilt sticking up next to my head. Photo in hand, I started circling the site, trying to determine where Buzz had been standing when he’d taken his picture. I got some looks from the men on the job—but as I said before, I’m used to that kind of thing.

It took me only a couple of minutes to find the spot Buzz had used—a shadowed area of weeds and scrub brush behind the pile of felled trees. It was obscured enough to offer a good hiding spot, if no one was looking particularly hard, but far enough away that he had to have used a zoom lens of some kind to get those pictures. I had heard that digital cameras could zoom in to truly ridiculous levels these days.

I found footprints.

Don’t read too much into that. I’m not Ranger Rick or anything, but I had a teacher who made sure I spent my share of time hiking and camping in the rugged country of the Ozarks, and he taught me the basics—where to look, and what to look for. The showers last night had wiped away any subtle signs, but I wouldn’t have trusted my own interpretation of them in any case. I did find one clear footprint, of a man’s left boot, fairly deep, and half a dozen partials and a few broken branches in a line leading away. He’d come here, hung around for a while, then left.

Which just about anyone could have deduced from the photo, even if he hadn’t seen any tracks.

I had this guy practically captured already.

There weren’t any bubble-gum wrappers, discarded cigarettes, or fortuitously misplaced business cards that would reveal Buzz’s identity. I hadn’t really thought there would be, but you always look.

I slogged across the muddy ground back toward the truck, when the door of one of the contractors’ vans opened, and a prematurely balding thin guy with a tool belt and a two-foot reel of electrician’s wire staggered out. He had a shirt with a name tag that read CHUCK. Chuck wobbled to one side, dragging the handles of some tools along the side panel of Michael’s truck, leaving some marks.

I glanced into the van. There was an empty bottle of Jim Beam inside, with a little still dribbling out the mouth.

“Hey, Chuck,” I said. “Give you a hand with that?”

He gave me a bleary glance that didn’t seem to pick up on anything out of the ordinary about me or the big old sword hanging over my shoulder. “Nah. I got it.”

“It’s cool,” I said. “I’m going that way anyhow. And those things are heavy.” I went over to him and seized one end of the reel, taking some of the weight.

The electrician’s breath was practically explosive. He nodded a couple of times and shifted his grip on the reel. “Okay, buddy. Thanks.”

We carried the heavy reel of wire over to the house. I had to adjust my steps several times, to keep up with the occasional drunken lurch from Chuck. We took the wire to the poured-concrete slab that was going to be the garage at some point, it looked like, and dropped it off.

“Thanks, man,” Chuck said, his sibilants all mushy.

“Sure,” I said. “Look, uh. Do you really think you should be working with electricity right now, Chuck?”

He gave me an indignant, drunken glare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, you just, uh, look a little sick, that’s all.”

“I’m just fine,” Chuck slurred, scowling. “I got a job to do.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Kind of a dangerous job. In a big pile of kindling.”

He peered at me. “What?” It came out more like “ Wha? ”

“I’ve been in some burning buildings, man, and take it from me, this place . . .” I looked around at the wooden framework. “Fwoosh. I’m just saying. Fwoosh.”

He worked on that one for a moment, and then his face darkened into a scowl again. He turned and picked up a wrench from a nearby toolbox. “Buzz off, freak. Before I get upset.”

I wasn’t going to do anyone any favors by getting into half of a drunken brawl with one of Michael’s subcontractors. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but they were all at other parts of the house, I guessed. So I just held up one hand in front of me and said, mildly, “Okay. I’m going.”

Chuck watched me as I walked out of the garage. I looked around until I spotted the power lines running into the house, and then I followed the trench they were buried in back to the street until I got to the transformer. I looked up at it, glanced around a little guiltily, and sighed. Then I waved my hand at the thing, exerted my will, and muttered, “ Hexus .”

Wizards and technology don’t get along. At all. Prolonged exposure to an active wizard has really detrimental effects on just about anything manufactured after World War II or so, especially anything involving electricity. My car breaks down every couple of weeks, and that’s when I’m not even trying. When I’m making an effort?

The transformer exploded in a humming shower of blue-white sparks, and the sound of an electric saw, somewhere on the site, died down to nothing.

I went back to the truck and sat quietly until Michael returned.

He gave me a steady look.

“It was in the name of good,” I said. “Your electrician was snockered. By the time the city gets by to repair it, he’ll have sobered up.”

“Ah,” Michael said. “Chuck. He’s having trouble at home.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s got a wife, a daughter,” Michael said. “And I know the look.”

“Maybe if he spent less time with Jim Beam,” I said, “it’d go better.”

“The booze is new,” Michael said, looking worriedly at the house. “He’s a good man. He’s in a bad time.” He glanced back at me a moment later. “Thank you. Though perhaps next time . . . you could just come tell me about it?”

Duh, Harry. That probably would have worked, too . I shook my head calmly. “That’s not how I roll.”

“How you roll?” Michael asked, smiling.

“I heard Molly say it once. So it must be cool.”

“How you roll.” Michael shook his head and started the truck. “Well. You were trying to help. That’s the important thing.”