Jim Butcher - Side Jobs

I nodded slowly. Then I asked, “Why?”

He blinked and looked at me as if I’d broken out into a musical number. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“He always told us that if we ever needed him but couldn’t find him, we were supposed to go to you. That you were the person in this city who could help us better than anyone else.”

I stared at him for a minute. Then I said, “Yeah. I can just see him saying that.” I shook my head. “And never bothering to mention it to me.”

I’ll give Will credit—he was obviously terrified, but he managed to try a joke. “He probably thought you were formidable enough without the confidence boost from something like that.”

“Like I need his approval to be confident,” I muttered. I studied Will for a moment. I knew him well enough to know there was something off in his behavior. He was too quiet. Will wasn’t the sort of man to sit at a table fiddling with his napkin when his wife was missing and quite possibly in danger. He was terrified, frightened to such a degree that it was nearly paralytic. I recognized the look.

I’d seen it in the mirror often enough.

“What aren’t you telling me, Will?” I asked quietly.

He closed his eyes and shivered as a tear tracked down each cheek.

“Georgia’s pregnant,” he whispered. “Seven months.”

I nodded. Then I pushed the rest of my coffee away and got up. “Let me get my coat.”

“It’s supposed to be nice today,” Will said.

“With the coat, I can carry more guns,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

WILL’S APARTMENT WAS a wreck. The lock had been smashed, though the door was still in one piece. The furniture was askew. A few things were broken. Paperback books had been knocked off a shelf. A laptop computer lay on its side, a blue screen of death glaring from its monitor. A mug of cocoa had been spilled and lay in a drying puddle on the hardwood floor.

I looked back and forth for a moment, frowning. The spill lay near the laptop, and both were to the right side of a comfortable-looking recliner, which had been bowled over backward. There was a therapeutic contoured pillow lying a few feet beyond that.

“So,” I said, “maybe it went like this. The attacker kicks in the door. There’s a partial impression of a shoe’s tread on it. Georgia’s sitting in her chair, there, working on her computer.” I frowned some more. “She drink a lot of cocoa?”

“No,” Will said. “Only when she’s really upset. She jokes about it being self-medication.”

So she’d been upset already, even before the attack. She was sitting in the chair with her laptop and her cocoa and . . . I walked over to the fallen chair and found a simple household wireless phone lying behind it.

“Something besides the prospect of an attack had upset her,” I said. “She took the time to make a cup of cocoa, and you don’t do that when there’s a maniac at the door. She made herself a comfort drink and huddled up in her chair to call you. Do you have any idea what could have upset her like that?”

Will shook his head. “Normally, no. But she’s been on a hormone crazy train the past few months. She’s overreacted to a lot of things.”

I nodded and stood there, just trying to absorb it all, to get an image of how things might have fit together. I pictured Georgia, a long, lean, willowy woman, curled up in the recliner, her face blotchy, her eyes red, almost curling up around her baby and the sound of her husband’s voice.

Someone broke the door in with a single kick and rushed her. Georgia was a fighter, accustomed to combat, even if it was mostly when she was in the form of another creature. She used the first defense she could bring to bear—her legs. As her attacker rushed her, she kicked out with both legs, trying to shove him away. But he had too much momentum, and instead Georgia’s kick had flung her chair over backward.

A pregnant woman nowhere near as lithe or graceful as she usually was, she turned and tried to get away.

“There’s no blood,” I said.

The attacker had dragged her out by main force. Either he’d beaten her with his fists and feet—easy, on a pregnant woman, who would instinctively curl her body around her unborn child, so that blows landed mostly on the back, ribs, and buttocks—or else he’d choked her unconscious. Either way, he’d subdued her without, apparently, drawing blood.

Then they left.

I shook my head.

“What do you think?” Will asked.

“I think you don’t want to know.”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “But I need to.”

I nodded. I repeated my theory and its supporting evidence. It made Will go pale and silent.

“How was her hand-to-hand?” I asked him.

“Fair. She used to teach women’s self-defense seminars on campus. I don’t think she’s ever had to use it in earnest. . . .” His voice trailed off as he stared at the fallen chair.

“What did you find out that I couldn’t?” I asked. “I mean, with the whole werewolf thing.”

He shook his head. “The human brain isn’t wired for serious scent-processing,” he said. “Not like a wolf’s, anyway. Shifting . . . sort of turns up the volume in your nose, but it’s really hard to sort things out. I can follow a trail if I’m on it soon enough, but when a bunch of scents get mixed together, it’s a crap shoot. In here there’s new paint, spilled cocoa, the last day or two of meals. . . .” He shrugged.

“Magic never seems to make things any easier,” I said.

Will snorted faintly. “Dresden keeps saying the same thing.”

I felt an odd pain in my chest. I ignored it. I walked over to the apartment’s little kitchen and studied it for a minute. Then I said, “So she’s a cocoa junkie.”

“Well, she’s functional.”

“She drink instant?”

“Are you kidding?” The pitch and cadence of his voice changed a little, becoming slightly higher and more clearly inflected, in what was probably an unconscious imitation of his wife. “It’s the Spam of cocoas.”

I got a pen out of my pocket and used it to lift a second cup, this one with a bit of lipstick smeared on the rim. The bottom of the cup was sticky with the residue of real cocoa, the kind you make from milk and chocolate. Some of it was still liquid enough to stir as the cup shifted. I showed it to him.

“Georgia doesn’t wear makeup,” he half whispered.

“I know,” I said. “And the cocoa in this cup has been sitting out for about the same length of time as the cocoa in the other cup. So the next question we need to answer: Who was drinking cocoa with Georgia when the door broke in?”

Will shook his head. “Either it’s the attacker’s scent or it’s someone we know. Someone who is over a lot.”

I nodded. “Redhead, right? The one who likes wearing the tight shirts.”

“Andi,” Will said. “And Marcy. She moved back to town after Kirby’s funeral. Their scents are here, too.”

“Marcy?”

“Little mousey girl. Brown hair. She and Andi had kind of a thing in school.”

“Liberal werewolves,” I said. “Two words rarely seen adjacent to each other.”

“Lots of people experiment in college,” Will said. “You probably did.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I tried getting into watching European football. It didn’t work out.”

“Neither did Marcy and Andi.”

“Bad blood there?”

“Not that I know of. They were still roommates after they split.”

“But Marcy left town.”

Will nodded. “She wanted into the animation business. She pulled a job at Skywalker. Seriously cool stuff.”

“So cool that she left it to come back here?”

Will shrugged a shoulder. “She said it was more important for her to be here to help us. And she lived in a cardboard box or something, socked most of her money into the bank. Says the interest is enough to get by on for now.”