Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

“I don’t,” he said. “Get out.”

I fed Fitz his next line.

“He also said that you owed him a favor.”

Nick narrowed his eyes to slits. “What favor?”

Fitz listened to me, then said, “All the money and fame the Astor case brought you.”

Nick arched an eyebrow. “All the . . .” He looked away and shook his head. He couldn’t keep the smile off his mouth, until he finally snorted. When he spoke, there was laughter under his words. “That sounds like Harry.”

The Astor case had been about a little girl lost. Her parents cared more about the fame of having an abducted daughter than they did about her, and when she ran off one day, they hired the child-recovery specialist Nick Christian and his apprentice, Harry Dresden, to find her. We did. She hadn’t been kidnapped, but the Astors had reported her so, and, in the absence of an actual perpetrator, fingered Nick and me. It had been a trick and a half to get her safely back into her parents’ custody without going to jail. There was a lawsuit afterward. The judge threw it out. But, all in all, finding that little girl had cost Nick about two thousand bucks.

Nick hadn’t wanted to take the case. I had talked him into it. He had wanted to cut and run the moment I confirmed the kid was at liberty. I had talked him into seeing it through, being sure she was safe. When I’d completed my apprenticeship, Nick’s graduation present had been to forgive me the two grand I owed him.

“You were tight with him?” Nick asked.

“He was sort of my adviser,” Fitz said. “Sometimes it’s almost like he’s right there next to me, still.”

Nick grunted. “Investigation apprentice or the other kind?”

Fitz put on a sober face. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Hngh,” Nick said, nodding. “Heard he’d picked up an apprentice. You’re holding back to keep me distanced from the situation.”

“Yes.”

“And you just want the information? You don’t want me to work the field on it?”

“That’s right.”

“A wwww,” Nick said. He scratched at his ear and said, “Yeah. I guess. What else can you tell me about this guy?”

I fed Fitz his lines. “He was crazy.”

Nick snorted. “Whole hell of a lot of gangers are crazy, kid. Or the next best thing.”

“Less money-drugs-sex-violence crazy,” Fitz said. “More creepy-cult crazy.”

“Hngh,” Nick said. Lines appeared on his brow. “There’s one, where they all wear the hoodies with the hoods up all the time. Got rolling maybe three or four years back. They don’t call themselves anything, but the gangs call them the Big Hoods. No one knows much about them.”

“Perfect,” I said to Fitz. “Sounds like the assholes we’re looking for. Ask him where they’re set up.”

“A tunnel under the Eisenhower Expressway, on the south end of the Meatpacking District. The other gangs think they’re crazy to be where the cops move so freely, but the Big Hoods never seem to attract any police attention.” He scrunched up his eyes. “Don’t think they even claim any territory. That’s all I got.”

“Because they aren’t a gang, per se,” I said. “Excellent, Fitz. Let’s move.”

“Thank you,” Fitz said to Nick.

“Thank Dresden. Wouldn’t have said that much to anyone else.”

“I’ll do that.” Fitz stared intently at Nick for a moment and then said, “What do you do here?”

“As a private cop?” Nick asked. “Take some cruddy work to keep the lights on—divorces and so on. But mostly I look for lost kids.”

“Doing it a while?” Fitz asked.

“Thirty years.”

“Find any?”

“Plenty.”

“Find any in one piece?”

Nick stared hard at Fitz for a long time. Then he pointed a finger up and behind him, to the row of portraits on the wall.

“Seven?” Fitz asked.

“Seven,” Nick said.

“In thirty years ? You live like this and . . . Seven ? That’s it ? That’s all ?”

Nick leaned back in his chair and gave Fitz a small smile. “That’s enough.”

Outside, Fitz said, to me, “He’s crazy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And he helps people.”

Fitz frowned and moved hurriedly back out of the Vice Lords’ domain. He was silent for several blocks, seemingly content to walk beside me and think. Eventually, he looked up and asked, “You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. I helped you. Pay up.”

“Okay,” I said. “Take a right at the next corner.”

“Why?”

“So I can introduce you to someone who will help.”

Fitz made a rude sound. “You really love not telling people things, don’t you?”

“I don’t love it, so much as I’m just really good at it.”

Fitz snorted. “Does this guy drink, too?”

“Nah. Sober as a priest.”

“Fine,” Fitz sighed, and kept trudging.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Fitz.

We were standing outside Saint Mary of the Angels. Calling the place a church is like calling Lake Michigan a swimming hole. It’s huge, literally taking up an entire city block, and an architectural landmark of Chicago. Gorgeously built, a true piece of gothic art, both inside and out, St. Mary’s had often served as a refuge for people with the kind of trouble Fitz was facing.

The kid was not in good shape. We’d done a considerable bit of hiking that evening, and despite what might have been the beginnings of a thaw, it was still below freezing, and the slight lack of bitter cold in the wind wasn’t stopping it from cutting through Fitz’s layers of mismatched clothing and his old jacket. Those lean, gangly kids have the worst of it when winter sets in. They lose their body heat fast. He’d been making up for it in exercise, but he was getting tired, and I remembered that he probably hadn’t eaten since I’d seen him before the previous day’s sunrise.

He stood clutching his arms around his body, shivering and trying to look like nothing was wrong. His teeth were chattering.

“I know a guy here,” I said. “Go around to the back door and knock until someone answers. Ask for Father Forthill.”

Fitz looked skeptical. “What’s he gonna do for me?”

“Give you a blanket and some hot food, for starters,” I said. “Look, kid, I’m giving you my A game here. Forthill’s a decent guy. This is what he does.”

Fitz clenched his jaws. “This isn’t getting me the guns back. I can’t go back without them. If I can’t go back, I can’t get my crew out.”

“Go inside,” I told him. “Talk to Forthill. Get some food in you. If you decide you want to go back and try to sneak the guns out of that drift on your own, you’ll have plenty of time before dawn.”

Fitz set his jaw stubbornly.

“Your choice, man,” I said. “But going hungry in cold like this is hard on the body. You had, what—seven weapons? Most of them submachine guns? Comes out to maybe forty pounds. Call it fifty if you bring back all the clips and ammo. Think you can burrow into a half-frozen snowbank, get all those guns out, load them up, and walk for most of an hour in the coldest part of the night? On an empty stomach? Without a cop spotting you and wondering what a guy your age is doing on the dark streets so late, carrying a really heavy bag?”

He grunted.

“At least have a damned sandwich.”

Fitz’s stomach gurgled audibly, and he sighed. “Yeah. Okay.”

It took Fitz five minutes to get anyone to answer the door, and when it finally opened, a dour, sour-looking elderly man in a heavy brown bathrobe vaguely reminiscent of a monk’s habit opened the door. His name was Father Paolo, and he took himself very seriously.