JIM BUTCHER - SMALL FAVOR

“You feel bad that your landlady’s building sometimes gets busted up because you live in it,” Thomas said. He shook his head and snorted. “Typical.”

“Well, yeah. But that’s not it.”

He frowned at me, listening.

I struggled to find the right words. “There are a lot of things I can’t control. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few days. I don’t know what I’m going to face, what kind of choices I’m going to have to make. I can’t predict it. I can’t control it. It’s too big.” I nodded at my shovel. “But that, I can predict. I know that if I pick up that shovel and clear the snow from the walkways, it’s going to make my neighbors safer and happier.” I glanced at him and shrugged. “It’s worthwhile to me. Give me a minute to shower.”

He regarded me for a second and then nodded. “Oh,” he said, with the tiniest of smiles. He mimed a sniff and a faint grimace. “I’ll wait. Gladly.”

I cleaned up. We were on the way out the door when the phone rang.

“Harry,” Murphy said. “What the hell is going on out there?”

“Why?” I asked. “What the hell is going on out there?”

“We’ve had at least two dozen…well, I suppose the correct term is ‘sightings.’ Everything from Bigfoot to mysterious balls of light. Naturally it’s all getting shunted to SI.”

I started to answer her, then paused. Marcone and the outfit were involved. While they didn’t have anywhere near the influence in civic affairs that they might have wanted, Marcone had always had sources of information inside the police department-sources his subordinates could, presumably, access as well. It would be best to exercise some caution.

“You calling from the station?” I asked her.

“Yeah.”

“We should talk,” I said.

Murphy might not want to admit that anyone she worked with could be providing information to the outfit, but she wasn’t the sort to stop believing the truth just because she didn’t like it. “I see,” she said. “Where?”

“McAnally’s,” I said. I checked a clock. “Three hours?”

“See you there.”

I hung up and started for the door again. Mouse followed close at my heels, but I turned and nudged him gently back with my leg. “Not this time, boy,” I told him. “The bad guys have a lot of manpower, access to skilled magic, and I need a safe place to come home to. If you’re here there’s no way anyone is going to sneak in and leave me a present that goes boom.”

Mouse huffed out a breath in a sigh, but sat down.

“Keep an eye on Mister, all right? If he starts getting sick, take the catnip away.”

My dog gave the door to the lab a dubious glance.

“Oh, give me a break,” I said. “You’re seven times as big as he is.”

Mouse looked none too confident.

Thomas blinked at me, and then at the dog. “Can he understand you?”

“When it suits him,” I grumped. “He’s smarter than a lot of people I know.”

Thomas took a moment to absorb that, and then faced Mouse a little uncertainly. “Uh, okay, look. What I said about Harry earlier? I wasn’t serious, okay? It was totally a joke.”

Mouse flicked his ears and turned his nose away from Thomas with great nobility.

“What?” I asked, looking between them. “What did you say?”

“I’ll warm up the car,” Thomas said, and retreated to the frozen grey outdoors.

“This is my home ,” I complained to no one in particular. “Why do people keep making jokes at my expense in my own freaking home ?”

Mouse declined to comment.

I locked up behind me, magically and materially, and scaled Mount Hummer to sit in the passenger seat. The morning was cold and getting colder, especially since I was fresh from the shower, but the seat was rather pleasantly warm. There was no way I’d admit to Thomas that the luxury feature was superior to armored glass, but gosh, it was cozy.

“Right,” Thomas said. “Where are we headed?”

“To where they treat me like royalty,” I said.

“We’re going to Burger King?”

I rubbed the heel of my hand against my forehead and spelled fratricide in a subvocal mutter, but I had to spell out temporary insanity and justifiable homicide , too, before I calmed down enough to speak politely. “Just take a left and drive. Please.”

“Well,” Thomas said, grinning, “since you said ‘please.’”

E xecutive Priority Health was arguably the most exclusive gym in town. Located in downtown Chicago, the business took up the entire second floor of what used to be one of the grand old hotel buildings. Now it had office buildings on the upper levels and a miniature shopping center on the first floor.

Not just anyone could take the private elevator to the second floor. One had to be a member of the health club, and membership was tightly controlled and extremely expensive. Only the wealthiest and most influential men had a membership card.

Oh, and me.

The magnetic stripe on the back of the card didn’t work when I swiped it through the card reader. No surprise there. I’d had it in my wallet for several months, and I doubt the magnetic signature stored on the card had lasted more than a couple of days. I hit the intercom button on the console.

“Executive Priority,” said a cheerful young woman’s voice. “This is Billie, and how may I serve you?”

Thomas glanced at me and arched an eyebrow, mouthing the words, Serve you?

“You’ll see,” I muttered to him. I addressed the intercom. “My card seems to have stopped working. Harry Dresden and guest, please.”

“One moment, sir,” Billie said. She was back within a few seconds. “I apologize for the problem with your membership card, sir. I’m opening the elevator for you now.”

True to her word, the elevator opened, and Thomas and I got in.

It opened onto the main area of Executive Priority.

“You’re kidding me,” Thomas said. “Since when do you go to the gym?”

It looked pretty typically gymlike from here. Lots and lots of exercise machines and weight benches and dumbbells and mirrors; static bikes and treadmills stood in neatly dressed ranks. They’d paid some madman who thought he was a decorator a lot of money to make the place look hip and unique. Maybe it’s my lack of fashion sense talking, but I thought they should have held out for one of those gorillas who has learned to paint. The results would have been of similar quality, and they could have paid in fresh produce.

Here and there men, mostly white, mostly over forty, suffered through a variety of physical activities. Beside each and every one of them was a personal trainer coaching, supporting, helping.

The trainers were all women, none of them older than their late twenties. They all wore ridiculously brief jogging shorts so tight that it had to be some kind of minor miracle that allowed the blood to keep flowing through the girls’ legs. They all wore T-shirts with the gym’s logo printed on them, also tight-and every single woman there had the kind of body that made her outfit look fantastic. No gym in the world had that many gorgeous girls in its employ.

“Ah,” Thomas said after a moment of looking around. “This isn’t a typical health club, is it?”

“Welcome to the most health-conscious brothel in the history of mankind,” I told him.

Thomas whistled quietly through his teeth, surveying the place. “I’d heard that the Velvet Room had been retooled. This is it?”

“Yeah,” I said.

A brown-haired girl jiggled over to us, her mouth spread in a beauty-contest smile, and for a second I thought her shirt was about to explode under the tension. Bright gold lettering over her left breast read, BILLIE.