Jim Butcher: Side Jobs

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 parking 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.”

“I hope not,” I said. “This has been such a nice conversation. I’d hate for it to end in a gunshot.”

Nothing turned his head slightly and gave me a very cold little smile.

I felt threatened enough to produce my gun without even consciously thinking about it. I held it in two hands, pointed at the ground near his feet. We stayed that way, facing off for several seconds. Then he shrugged a shoulder. He produced another brick of bills and threw it to me, along with the truck keys. Then he gathered up Marcy and tossed her over one shoulder, and Will over the other.

He turned to the entrance of the garage and made several sharp, popping clicks as he went, producing with an odd quiver of his chest and throat a sound that was somehow familiar. They must have been a signal. A moment later, a van with rental-agency plates pulled up to the curb and stopped.

A man dressed identically to Nothing rolled open the side door. Nothing put the two werewolves inside, then followed them, somehow compressing his bulk enough to get into the van. The driver pulled back into traffic a second later. The entire pickup had taken less than ten seconds.

I got back onto my motorcycle and rolled out of the garage with my lights off before their van had gotten to the end of the block. Then, settling in to follow them from several car lengths back, I tried to make like a hole in the air.

Nothing and his driver headed for the docks, which was hardly unanticipated. Chicago supports an enormous amount of shipping traffic that travels through the Great Lakes, and offloads cargo to be transferred to railroads or trucking companies for shipment throughout the United States. Such ships remain one of the best means for moving illegal goods without being discovered.

There are plenty of storage buildings down by the docks, and Nothing went to one of the seedier, more run-down warehouses on the waterfront. I noted the location and went on by without stopping. Then I circled around, killed the engine with the bike still in motion, and came coasting back over the cracked old asphalt, the whisper of my tires lost in the susurrus of city sounds and water lapping the lakeshore.

There wasn’t much to see. The warehouse had a single set of standard doors, and several large steel doors that would roll up to allow crates and shipping containers to be brought inside. They were all closed. A single guard, a man in a watch cap and a squall coat, wandered aimlessly around outside the building, smoking cigarettes and looking bored.

I got rid of the damn clunky Munster boots and pulled on the black slippers I always wore on the practice mat. I pulled weapons and gear out of the bike’s saddlebags, attached the items to the tactical harness under my coat, and slipped closer. I stayed where it was dark, using the shadows to hide my approach. Then I found a particularly deep patch of darkness and waited.

It took a seemingly endless five minutes for the guard to get close enough for me to shoot him with a Taser.

Darts leapt out and plunged into his chest, trailing shining wires, and I pulled the trigger while he jerked and twitched and fell to the ground. I wasn’t sure if this guy was human or not, but I wasn’t taking chances. I kept the juice on him until I was sure he was down for the count. When I let up, he just lay there on his side, curled up halfway into a fetal position, quivering and twitching while drool rolled out of his mouth.

Actually, he sort of reminded me of my second husband in the morning.

I jerked the darts out of him and shoved the Taser and the trailing wire into my jacket pocket. It would take too much time to reset it for use, and I had a bad feeling that the electronic device wouldn’t do me much good inside the warehouse. I could have slapped some heavy restraining ties on him—but I would be happier if anyone who found the downed man had no idea what had happened to him.