Murphy looked at me. “Like maybe Marcone knew something was happening already, and that’s why he said he didn’t need to kill you. It wasn’t him, but it was still something he was aware of.”
I grunted. Marcone ran Chicago like his own personal clubhouse. He had legions of employees, allies, and flunkies. His awareness of what happened in his city wasn’t supernatural; it was better than that. He was rational, intelligent, and more prepared for a crisis than any man I’d ever seen. If the Eagle Scouts had some sort of Sith equivalent, Marcone was it.
If someone’s wet-work specialist had come to town, Marcone was very likely to have learned of it. He and his underworld network missed little.
“Dammit,” Murphy said, evidently coming to the same conclusions I had. “Now I have to talk to the scum.” She got out her little notepad and scribbled on it. “Butters, you said that Lindquist’s house had burned down?”
“Big-time,” said Butters.
I nodded. “According to the ghosts hanging around it, the Grey Ghost showed up—I didn’t tell you about the Grey Ghost, did I?”
“Mr. Lindquist filled us in after the shooting,” Butters said.
“Oh, right. Anyway, it showed up with several mortals and snatched him. We’ve got to get him back.”
Murphy nodded, still writing. “What happens if we don’t?”
“A bunch of serial killer–type ghosts start wandering around Chicago, looking for a good time. Ghosts like that can manifest—make themselves the next-best thing to real, Murph. Like the Nightmare. People will get hurt. A lot of them.”
Murphy’s mouth thinned into a line. She wrote on her notepad. “We’ll do triage in a minute. What else?”
“I found the gang who shot up your house last night,” I said.
The tip of Murphy’s pencil snapped against the notepad. She looked up at me, and her eyes were cold, furious. She spoke in a very quiet voice. “Oh?”
“Yeah,” I said. I paused for a moment to think about what I was going to say: Murphy’s temper was not a force to be invoked lightly. “I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about them anymore.”
“Why?” she asked, in her cop voice. “Did you kill them?”
There’d been a little too much intensity in that question. Wow. Murphy was clearly only too ready to go after these guys the minute she knew where they were.
I glanced at Butters, who looked like someone sitting near an armed explosive.
“No,” I said, working out my words carefully. If Murphy’s fuse was really as short as it seemed, I didn’t want her charging off to deal with Fitz and his poor crew in true Viking tradition. “But they don’t have the resources they had before. I don’t think they’re going to hurt anybody in the immediate future.”
“That’s your professional opinion, is it?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me for a minute, then said, “Abby was standing on my patio last night when they came by. She took a round in the belly during that attack. She didn’t get down fast enough. They don’t know if she’s going to live or not.”
I thought of the plump, cheerful little woman, and swallowed. “I . . . I didn’t know, Murph. I’m sorry.”
She continued speaking as if I hadn’t said anything. “There was a retiree living in the house behind mine. He used to give me tomatoes he grew in his garden every summer. He wasn’t as lucky as Abby. The bullet hit him in the neck while he was sleeping in bed. He had enough time to wake up, terrified, and knock the handset of his phone out of its cradle before he bled out.”
Hell’s bells. That put a different spin on things. I mean, I had been hoping to go for a no-harm, no-foul argument with Murphy. But if blood had been spilled and lives lost . . . Well. I knew Murphy. Whether or not she was a cop anymore, she wasn’t going to back away.
“Where are they?” she asked.
“This is not a time to kick down doors,” I told her. “Please hear me out.”
Her hand tightened into a fist, but she visibly took control of her anger, took a deep breath, and then nodded. “Go ahead.”
I told her about Fitz and his gang. I told her about Aristedes.
“I notice, Harry,” she said, “that you didn’t tell me where they are.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I, uh. I sorta told the kid I would help him. That you would help him.”
Murphy narrowed her eyes. “You did what?”
“They’re
“They’ve killed at least one person, maybe more,” Murphy said. “There are still laws in this town, Dresden.”
“Send the cops in and it’ll get ugly. I’m not sure how much juice their boss has, but even if he can’t shoot, he’d be a nightmare for the police—even SI.”
Murphy frowned. “How sure are you about that?”
“Guys like him use fear and violence as daily tools. He won’t think twice about hurting a cop.”
Murphy nodded. “Then I’ll deal with him.”
“Murph, I know you can handle yourself, but—”
“Dresden, I’ve dealt with two men since you . . . since the shooting, who were skilled enough for Carlos to call them the next-best thing to full Council-quality warlocks. I’ve handled several lesser talents, too. The Fomor like to use them as officers and commanders. I know what I’m doing.”
“You’ve killed them,” I said quietly. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
She looked away. It was a moment before she answered. “With someone that powerful . . . there’s not really a choice. If you try to take them alive, they have plenty of time to kill you.”
I winced in sympathy for her. She might not be a cop anymore, but it was where her heart lay—with the law. She believed in it, truly believed that the law was meant to serve and protect the people of Chicago. When she was a cop, it had always been her job to make sure that those laws worked toward that purpose, in whatever way she could manage.
She loved serving her city under the rule of law, and that meant judges and juries got to do their job before the executioner stepped in. If Murphy had dispensed with that belief, regardless of how practical and necessary it had been, regardless if doing so had saved lives . . .
Butters had said that she was under stress. I now knew the nature of that stress: guilt. It would be ripping away steadily at her insides, at her conscience, scraping them both raw.
“They were all killers,” she said, though I don’t think she was talking to me. “Killers and kidnappers. And the law couldn’t touch them. Someone had to do something.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Someone always does.”
“The point is,” she continued, “that the way you deal with this kind of problem is to hit it with absolutely everything you’ve got, and to do it immediately. Before those spell-casting yahoos have enough time to fort up, bend people’s minds into defending them, or to start coming after you or someone you care about.” She looked up at me. “I need the address.”
“You don’t,” I said. “I’ll bring the kids to you. Once you get them away from Aristedes, he’s out of help and vulnerable. Then you can help Fitz and company.”
“Fitz and company,” she said in a flat tone, “are murderers.”
“But—”
“No, Harry. Don’t give me any rap about how they didn’t mean it. They opened fire with deadly weapons in a residential neighborhood. In the eyes of the law and anyone the least bit reasonable,
“I know,” I said. “But these aren’t bad kids. They’re just scared. It drove them to a bad choice.”
“You’ve just described most of the gang members in this town, Harry. They don’t join the gang because they’re bad kids. They do it because they’re frightened. They want to feel like they belong somewhere. Safe.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter if they started out as good kids. Life changes them. Makes them something they weren’t.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Take a team to their hideout. Deal with the sorcerer. We’ll make every effort to avoid harming the others.”
