Jim Butcher - Side Jobs

Ray shuddered.

“Look up, Ray,” I said quietly.

He did, and he saw what I had seen a moment before.

Doors were open all up and down the hallway. People stood in them, men and women, children, parents, the elderly. They all stood there silently and watched a little blond woman handling big mean Ray as if he were an unruly child.

Their eyes were very hard. And there wasn’t any fear in them now.

“Look at them, Ray,” I said.

He did. He shuddered again. Then his body stopped straining, and he sagged down.

“I’ll go,” he said.

“Fucking right you will.” I shoved on his arm, and he screamed with pain—but I hadn’t dislocated it. I only did it to give myself a moment to pick up my badge and step out of grab range, just in case he was too dumb to quit.

He wasn’t. He simply lay there like a beached shark.

“I’ll be checking back here, Ray. Regularly. If I think you’ve harmed any of these people, stolen or broken their property—hell, if I hear that you gave them a dirty look , I am going to find you and shove a bundle of rusty rebar up your ass. I promise.”

I took out one of my business cards, now obsolete, I supposed, and wrote down a phone number. I took the card to Maria and held it out for her. “If you have any trouble, you call this number on the back. You ask for Lieutenant Stallings. Tell him Murphy gave you the number.”

Maria bit her lip. Then she looked at Ray and back to me.

She took the card with a hurried, nervous little motion and scampered back, closing her apartment door. Several locks clicked shut.

I didn’t say anything else. I walked out of the building. I was halfway across the lot, heading back to Will’s place, when I heard quick footsteps coming behind me. I turned with one hand close to my Sig, but relaxed when I recognized Maria.

She stopped in front of me and said, “I s-saw something.”

I nodded and waited.

“There were some odd sounds, late last night. Like . . . like thumps.

And a little while later, a car rolled in. It pulled up to the building across the lot, and a man got out and left it running, like he wasn’t worried about it being stolen.”

“Did you recognize him?” I asked.

Maria shook her head. “But he was big. Almost as big as Ray, but he . . . You know, he moved better. He was in shape. And he was wearing an expensive suit.”

“What else can you tell me about him?” I asked.

Maria shrugged. “Not . . . not anything, really. I saw him come out again, right away. Then he got into the car and drove away. I didn’t see any plates or anything. I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” I said quietly. “Thank you.”

She nodded and turned to scurry back toward her building. Then she stopped and looked back at me. “I don’t know if it matters,” she said, “but the man had one of those army haircuts.”

I stiffened a little. “Do you remember what color hair?”

“Red,” she said. “Like, bright orange-red.” She swallowed. “If it matters.”

It mattered—but I didn’t want to scare her, so I nodded and smiled, then said, “Thank you, Maria. Seriously.”

She tried to smile back and did pretty well. Then she looked around her, as if uncomfortable standing in so much open space, and hurried back to her building.

A big guy in a suit with a bright red crew cut—it was almost word for word the short description in the notes of the file that CPD kept for a man named Hendricks.

Hendricks was a former college football player. He weighed upward of three hundred pounds, none of it excess. He had been under suspicion for several mysterious disappearances, mostly of criminal figures who seemed to have earned his boss’s displeasure. And his boss had, presumably, sent him to Will and Georgia’s building late last night.

But why?

To get an answer, I was going to have to talk to Hendricks’s boss.

I had to go see “Gentleman” John Marcone.

THE POLICE KNOW where Marcone can be reached. Finding him doesn’t do diddly to let us nail him. The fact that he has his fingers in so many pies means that not only do we have to work against Marcone and his shadowy empire, but we have our own superiors and politicians breathing down our necks as well. Oh, they never say anything directly, like, “Stop arresting Marcone’s most profitable pimps.” Instead, we get a long speech about racial and socioeconomic profiling. We get screams from political action committees. We get vicious editorial pieces in the newspapers and on TV.

We mostly stay quiet and keep plugging away at our jobs. Experience has taught us that hardly anyone ever cares what we think or have to say. They demand answers, but they don’t want to listen.

I’m not saying that cops are a bunch of white knights. I’m just saying that the politicians can spin things all sorts of ways if it means that they’re guaranteed stacks of cash for their campaign chests—or that Marcone’s blackmailers won’t expose some dark secret from their pasts.

I still had friends in the CPD. I called one who worked in the Organized Crime Division and asked him where I could find Marcone.

“Aw, Murph,” Malone said. He sounded weary. “This ain’t the time.”

“Since when have you been big on punctuality?” I asked. “I need this. It’s about Dresden.”

Malone grunted. Dresden had saved his uncle from some kind of possession or (and I still have trouble with the concept when I say it), an evil enchantment. The elder Malone had been suffering to a degree I had never seen elsewhere. Cops and medics and so on couldn’t do a thing for the man. Dresden had walked in, shooed everyone else out of the room, and five minutes later Malone was sane again, if worse for wear. It had made an impression on Malone’s nephew.

“Okay,” he said. “Give me a couple minutes. They got everyone with a star running around the city looking for bin Laden or Bigfoot or whoever else might have blown up that building. I ain’t slept in two days. And the FBI is coming down like a freaking cloud of angry mama birds, after what happened at their office.” He cleared his throat. “Um. I heard you might have been around there.”

I grunted. Neutrally.

“Weird stuff, huh?”

I sighed. Internal Affairs or the FBI might still have my phone tapped, and I was reluctant to say much.

On the other hand, what were they going to do? Take my career away?

“Serious weirdness. The same flavor as the kind that hit the old Velvet Room.” That was where Dresden had fought a whole bunch of vampires and wound up burning down the entire house.

Malone whistled. “Was it as bad as that guy down in the SI holding tank?”

The kid meant the loup-garou. We were stupid enough to lock Harley MacFinn in a normal cell. He transformed into this hideous Ice Age-looking thing. It was half the size of an old Buick and it could only loosely be called a wolf. Brave men had died that night, fighting with weapons that were utterly useless against the loup-garou. Carmichael, my old partner, had died there, all but throwing himself into the thing’s jaws to buy me a few seconds.

I feel nauseated when I think about it.

“I don’t know, really. Things happened too fast. I rounded up some people, went down a stairway and out. SWAT went in, but by the time they did, there was nothing left but staff hiding in closets and under desks, and a lot of bodies.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“Malone, I need this,” I pressed firmly.

“Call you back in a minute,” he said.

I put my phone back into my coat pocket and looked at Will. We were both standing on the sidewalk in front of his apartment.

“This is crazy,” Will said quietly. “Vampires hitting a government building? Blowing up buildings in a major city? They don’t do that.”