Side Jobs

one by maybe a hundred yards. It still wasn’t the kind of place you’d want to hang around outside after dark. I didn’t have a key to get into the building, so I pressed buttons one at a time until someone buzzed me in, and I took the stairs up.

As I neared the apartment door, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t that I saw or heard anything, magical or otherwise, but when I stopped before the door, I had a nebulous but strong conviction that something bad had gone down.

I knocked. The door rattled and fell off the lower hinge. It swung open a few inches, drunkenly, upper hinges squealing. Splits and cracks, invisible until the door moved, appeared in the wood, and the dead bolt rattled dully against the inside of the door, loose in its setting.

I stopped there for a long second, waiting and listening. Other than the whirring of a window fan at the end of the hall and someone playing an easy-listening station on the floor above me, there was nothing. I closed my eyes for a moment and extended my wizard’s senses, testing the air nearby for any touch of magic upon it.

I felt nothing but the subtle energy that surrounded any home, a form of naturally occurring protective magic called the threshold. Billy and Georgia’s apartment was the nominal headquarters of the Werewolves, and members came and went at all hours. It was never intended to be a permanent home—but there had been a lot of living in the little apartment, and its threshold was stronger than most. I slowly pushed the door open with my right hand.

The apartment had been torn to pieces.

A futon lay on its side, its metal frame twisted like a pretzel. The entertainment center had been pulled down from the wall, shattering equipment, scattering CDs and DVDs and vintage Star Wars action figures everywhere. The wooden table had been broken in two precisely at its center. One of the half-dozen chairs survived. The others were kindling. The microwave protruded from the drywall of an interior wall. The door of the fridge had taken out the bookcase across the room. Everything in the kitchen had been pulled down and scattered.

I moved in as quietly as I could—which was pretty damn quiet. I had done a lot of sneaking around. The bathroom looked like someone had taken a chain saw to it and followed up with explosives. The bedroom used to house computers and electronic stuff looked like the site of an airplane crash.

Billy and Georgia’s bedroom was the worst of all of them.

There was blood on the floor and one wall.

Whatever had happened, I had missed it. Dammit. I wanted to kill something, I wanted to scream in frustration, and I wanted to throw up in fear for Georgia.

But in my business, that kind of thing doesn’t help much.

I went back into the living room. The phone near the door had survived. I dialed.

“Lieutenant Murphy, Special Investigations,” answered a professional, bland voice.

“It’s me, Murph,” I told her.

Murphy knows me. Her tone changed at once. “My God, Harry, what’s wrong?”

“I’m at Billy and Georgia’s apartment,” I said. “The place has been torn apart. There’s blood.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Georgia’s missing.” I paused and said, “It’s her wedding day, Murph.”

“Five minutes,” she said at once.

“I need you to pick something up for me on the way.”

MURPHY CAME THROUGH the door eight minutes later. She was the head of Chicago PD’s Special Investigations Department. They were the cops who got to handle all the crimes that didn’t fall into anyone else’s purview—stuff like vampire attacks and mystical assaults, as well as more mundane crimes like grave robbing, plus all the really messy cases the other cops didn’t want to bother with. SI is supposed to make everything fit neatly into the official reports, explaining away anything weird with logical, rational investigation.

SI spends a lot of time struggling with that last one. Murphy writes more fiction than most novelists.

Murphy doesn’t look like a cop, much less a monster cop. She’s five nothing. She’s got blond hair, blue eyes, and a cute nose. She’s also got about a zillion gunnery awards and a shelfful of open-tournament martial arts trophies, and I once saw her kill a giant plant monster with a chain saw. She wore jeans, a white tee, sneakers, a baseball cap, and her hair was pulled back into a tail. She wore her gun in a shoulder rig, her badge around her neck, and she had a backpack slung over one shoulder.

She came through the door and stopped in her tracks. She surveyed the room for a minute and then said, “What did this?”

I nodded at the twisted futon frame. “Something strong.”

“I wish I were a big-time private investigator like you. Then I could figure these things out for myself.”

“You bring it?” I asked.

She tossed me the backpack. “The rest is in the car. What’s it for?”

I opened the pack, took out a bleached-white human skull, and put it down on the kitchen counter. “Bob, wake up.”

Orange lights appeared in the skull’s shadowed eye sockets, and then slowly grew brighter. The skull’s jaws twitched and then opened into a pantomime of a wide yawn. A voice issued out, the sound odd, like when you talk while on a racquetball court. “What’s up, boss?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Murphy swore. She took a step back and almost fell over the remains of the entertainment center.

Bob the Skull’s eyelights brightened. “Hey, the cute blonde! Did you do her, Harry?” The skull spun in place on the counter and surveyed the damage. “Wow. You did! Way to go, stud!”

My face felt hot. “No, Bob,” I growled.

“Oh,” the skull said, crestfallen.

Murphy closed her mouth, blinking at the skull. “Uh. Harry?”

“This is Bob the Skull,” I told her.

“It’s a skull,” she said. “That talks.”

“Bob is actually the spirit inside. The skull is just the container it’s in.”

She looked blankly at me and then said, “It’s a skull. That talks.”

“Hey!” Bob protested. “I am not an it! I am definitely a he!”

“Bob is my lab assistant,” I explained.

Murphy looked back at Bob and shook her head. “Just when I start thinking this magic stuff couldn’t get weirder.”

“Bob,” I said, “take a look around. Tell me what did this.”

The skull spun obediently and promptly said, “Something strong.”

Murphy gave me an oblique look.

“Oh, bite me,” I told her. “Bob, I need to know if you can sense any residual magic.”

“Ungawa, bwana,” Bob said. He did another turnaround, this one slower, and the orange eyelights narrowed.

“Residual magic?” Murphy asked.

“Anytime you use magic, it can leave a kind of mark on the area around you. Mostly it’s so faint that sunrise wipes it away every morning. I can’t always sense it.”

“But be can?” Murphy asked.

“But he can!” Bob agreed. “Though not with all this chatter. I’m working over here.”

I shook my head and picked up the phone again.

“Yes,” said Billy. He sounded harried, and there was an enormous amount of background noise.

“I’m at your apartment,” I said. “I came here looking for Georgia.”

“What?” he said.

“Your apartment,” I said louder.

“Oh, Harry,” Billy said. “Sorry—this phone is giving me fits. Eve just talked to Georgia. She’s here at the resort.”

I frowned. “What? Is she all right?”