'N-no, but-'
'But what?' I asked him, keeping my tone reasonable while facing him with an equal amount of ready-to-kick- your-ass Martian body language. You do not intimidate me. 'You came to me for help. I'm giving it to you. Either you work with me or you tell me you want to go it alone. Right now.'
He backed off, unclenching his hands and looking away. I relaxed as well. Will hadn't meant to deliver a threat to me, as such, but he was a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than I was. Stronger isn't everything, but simple mass and power mean a lot in a fight, and Will had the ferocity and killer instinct to make them count even more heavily than most. He'd never considered-hell, probably never noticed-the full depth of the statement he was making with his stance and clenched fists.
It's another in a long list of things that Martians hardly ever think about: Almost any woman knows that almost any man is stronger than she is. Oh, men know they're stronger, but they seldom actually stop to think through the implications of that simple reality-implications that are both unnerving and virtually omnipresent, if you aren't a Martian. You think about life differently when you know that half the people you see have the physical power to do things to you, regardless of whether you intend to allow it-and even implied threats of physical violence have to be taken seriously.
Will hadn't intended to frighten me. He just wanted to find his wife.
'I know it's frustrating,' I told him, 'but it's the best way to find out something we didn't know before.'
'We've been through the whole building,' he snapped. 'The most we've got is a neighbor a couple of floors up who heard a thump.'
'Which tells us there wasn't much of a fight,' I said, 'or they'd have probably heard it. Fights are loud, Will, even when only one person is fighting. A building like this, everyone knows it when the neighbor beats his wife.'
'Somebody should have heard her scream.'
'Maybe it wasn't as loud as you thought. It was right in your ear. And it upset you. If it ended quickly enough, it might not even have woken anyone up.'
I looked out the hallway window, toward more of the same sort of apartment building across the parking lot. Will wasn't going to be terribly helpful in his current state. 'I'm going to check across the lot, see if anyone happened to see or hear anything last night. I want you to call Andi and Marcy. Get them over here if you can reach them. After that, go over your phone's caller ID, Georgia's cell phone's caller ID, her e-mail. See if anyone odd has been in contact with her.'
'Okay,' he said, frowning-but nodding.
'Control your emotions, Will. Stay calm,' I told him. 'Calm's the best way to think, and thinking's the best way to find Georgia and help her.'
He inhaled deeply, still nodding. 'Look, Sergeant… One of the guys in that building… Maybe you shouldn't go over there by yourself.'
I smiled sweetly at him.
He lifted his empty hands as if I'd pointed a gun. 'Right. Sorry.' THREE BUILDINGS HAD apartments in them that faced out on the common parking lot in general, and had a view of the Bordens' apartment in particular. I stood in the parking lot, looking up at the windows for a moment, and then started with the building on the left.
Most of an hour later, I hadn't learned anything else, and I figured out my main problem: I wasn't Harry Dresden.
Dresden would have looked around with a vague expression on his face and wandered around, bumping into things and barely comporting himself with professional caution, even at a crime scene. He'd ask a few questions that wouldn't make much sense on the surface, make a few remarks he thought were witty, and glibly insult anyone who appeared to be a repressive authority figure. Then he'd do something that didn't make any goddamn sense, and produce results out of thin air, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat.
If Harry were here, he could have taken some hairs out of Georgia's hairbrush, done something stupid-looking with them, and followed her across the town or the state or, for all I knew, to the other side of the universe. He could have told me more about what had happened at Georgia's than I could have known, maybe even identified the perp, in general or specifically. And, if things got hot when we went after the bad guy, he would have been there, throwing fire and lightning around as if they were his own personal toys, created especially and exclusively for him to play with.
Watching Dresden operate was usually one of two things: mildly amusing or positively terrifying. On a scene, his whole personal manner always made me think of autistic kids. He never met anyone's eyes for more than a flickering second. He moved with the sort of exaggerated caution of someone who was several sizes larger than normal, keeping his hands and arms in close to his body. He spoke a little bit softly, as if apologizing for the resonant baritone of his voice.
But when something caught his attention, he changed. His dark, intelligent eyes would glitter, and his gaze became something so intense that it could start a fire. During the situations that changed from investigation to desperate struggle, his whole being shifted in the same way. His stance widened, becoming more aggressive and confident, and his voice rose up to become a ringing trumpet that could have been clearly heard from opposite ends of a football stadium.
Quirky nerd, gone. Terrifying icon, present.
Not many 'vanillas,' as he called nominally normal humans, had seen Dresden standing his ground in the fullness of his power. If we had, more of us would have taken him seriously-but I had decided that for his sake, if nothing else, it was a good thing that his full capabilities went unrecognized. Dresden's power would have scared the hell out of most people, just like it had scared me.
It wasn't the kind of fear that makes you scream and run. That's fairly mild, as fear goes. That's Scooby Doo fear. No. Seeing Dresden in action filled you with the fear that you had just become a casualty of evolution-that you were watching something far larger and infinitely more dangerous than yourself, and that your only chance of survival was to kill it, immediately, before you were crushed beneath a power greater than you would ever know.
I had come to terms with it. Not everyone would.
In fact… it might be for that very reason that someone had put the hit on him. A bullet that strikes from long range and goes cleanly through a human body, and then through the hull of a boat, twice, leaving a series of neat holes, is almost certainly a very high-powered rifle round. A professional rifleman shooting from a good way out was one of the things Dresden had acknowledged had a real chance of taking him out cleanly. He might be a wizard, a wielder of tremendous power and knowledge (as if they're any different), but he wasn't immortal.
Quick, tough, tricky as hell, sure. But not untouchable.
Not in any number of senses. I should know, having touched him-even if I hadn't touched him anywhere near soon or often enough…
And now I never would.
Dammit.
I pushed thoughts of the man out of my head before I started crying again. It's hard enough to pull off an air of authority when you're five feet tall, without also having red, watery eyes and a running nose.
Dresden was gone. His cheesy jokes and his corny sense of humor were gone. His ability to know the unknowable, to fight the unfightable, and to find the unfindable was gone.
The rest of us were just going to have to carry on as best we could without him.
I KNOCKED ON doors and talked to a lot of people, most of them college-age kids attending school in town. I got a whole lot of nothing about Georgia, though I did get tips on some drug sales that had gone down in the parking lot. I'd pass them on to the right people on the force, where they would become more scenery for the endless march of the war on drugs and wouldn't amount to anything. The tips did prove the point I'd made to Will, though: Neighbors see things. Maybe I just hadn't talked to the right neighbor yet.
When I hit building three, I felt the change in climate as I went through the door. It was more run-down than the other apartments. Some fresh graffiti marked an interior wall. More of the doors had double dead bolts on them. The carpet was old and stained. The pane of a window had been broken out and replaced with a piece of wood. The whole place screamed that unpleasant sorts were lurking about, making the building's super reluctant to maintain the halls and foyer, maybe forcing him to continue dealing with problems and damage over and over
