Side Jobs

the hell out of me, touching on some instinctual level that Ray, in all his repulsive mass, had not. I felt myself shudder, despite my effort not to do so.

“Whatever,” I said, trying to sound bored. “Even if you could do it, it gets you nothing. But hey, no skin off my ass either way.”

There was a long silence on the other end of my phone. I thought I felt some kind of pressure building behind my eyelids. I told myself it was my imagination.

“Yo, anyone there?” I complained. “Listen. Are you up for doing some business, or did I just waste my time?”

After another pause, the voice hissed something in a bubbling, serpentine tongue. The phone rustled, as if changing hands, and a very deep male voice said, “Twenty thousand. Each.”

“I’m not selling the female for less than thirty.”

“Fifty total, then,” rumbled the new voice. It sounded entirely human.

“Cash,” I demanded.

“Done.”

I kept tracking the street with my eyes, looking for their spotter, but saw no one. “How do you handle delivery?”

“There’s a warehouse.”

“Fat chance. I pull in there, you’ll just pop me and make the body disappear along with the freaks.”

“What do you suggest?” rumbled the voice.

“Buttercup Park. Thirty minutes. One carrier. Carrier hands me half the cash. Then carrier verifies the merchandise in the back of my truck. Carrier hands me the rest of the money. I hand him the keys to the vehicle carrying the merchandise. We all walk away happy.”

The deep-voiced man thought about it for a moment and then grunted. Translation: Agreed. “How will you identify me?”

I snorted and said, “Park isn’t huge, tough guy. And it ain’t my first rodeo.”

I hung up on him, then went back to my motorcycle and left, heading for Buttercup Park. A lighted sign hanging outside a bank told me it was a quarter after nine. The metro traffic grid was dying down for the night. I got there in a little more than fifteen minutes, parked my Harley in a garage, and made my way to where Georgia’s high-dollar SUV was waiting in the same structure. I went around to the back and opened the hatch. Will was just finishing wrapping Marcy in what appeared to be several layers of duct tape, covering her in a swath from her hips to her deltoids, trapping her arms against her sides. She was wearing a simple sundress with, I assumed, nothing underneath. I guess when you change into a wolf, you don’t take your ensemble with you—being trapped in undies made for a different species could prove awkward in a fight.

Will looked up and gave me a quick nod of greeting. “All set?”

“So far. You’re sure you won’t have a problem getting out?” I asked.

Will snorted. “Claws, fangs. It’ll sting a bit, when it tears out the hair. Nothing serious.”

“Spoken like someone who’s never had his legs waxed,” Marcy said in a nervous, forcedly jovial tone. She might have looked like a skinny little thing, but the muscles showing on her legs were lean and ropy.

Will tore off the end of the duct tape and passed the roll to me. He sat down on the open floor in the back of the SUV, the seats of which had been folded away to make room for the “prisoners.” He stripped out of his shirt, leaving only a pair of loose sweats. I started wrapping him.

“Tighten your muscles,” I said. “When I’m done, relax them. It should leave you enough room to maintain blood flow.”

“Right,” Will said. “Houdini.” He contracted the muscles in his upper body and the duct tape creaked. Damn, the kid was built. Given that I was more or less leaning against his naked back to reach around him with the roll of tape, it was impossible not to notice.

Dresden hadn’t been muscled as heavily as Will. Harry’d had a runner’s build, all lean, tight, dense muscle that . . .

I clenched my jaw and kept wrapping tape.

“One more time,” I said. “I meet the contact, then bring him here.” I held up the SUV’s remote control fob. “I’ll disarm the security system so you know we’re coming. If you hear me say the word red, it means things aren’t going well. Get loose and help me jump the contact. We’ll question him, find out where the other specials are being kept. Otherwise, sit tight, and make like you got hit with tranquilizer darts. I’ll shadow you back to their HQ.”

“What then?” Marcy asked.

“We’ll have to play that by ear,” I said. “If there aren’t many of them, we’ll hit them and get your people out. If they’ve got a lot of muscle, I’ll make a call. If I can get a large force here, they’ll run rather than fight.”

“Can you be sure of that?” Will asked.

“Dresden said that to the supernatural world, bringing in mortal authorities was equated with nuclear exchanges. No one wants to be the one to trigger a new Inquisition of some kind. So any group with a sense of reason will cut their losses rather than tangle with the cops.”

“The way they didn’t tangle with FBI headquarters?” Will asked.

I had sort of hoped no one would notice that flaw in my reasoning. “That was an act of war. This is some kind of profit-gaining scheme.”

“Come on, Karrin,” Will said. “You’ve got to know better than that.”

“This is a professional operation,” I said. “Whoever is behind it is depending on distraction and speed to enable them to get away with it. They’ll already have their escape plan ready to go. If a bunch of cars and lights come at them, I think their first instinct will be to run rather than fight.”

“Yeah,” Marcy said, nodding. “That makes sense. You’ve always said supernatural predators don’t want a fight if they can avoid one, Will.”

“Lone predators don’t,” Will said, “but this is an organization. And you might have noticed how a lot of supernatural types are a couple of french fries short of a Happy Meal. And I’m talking about more than here, tonight. More than Georgia and Andi. More than just Chicago.”

I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

He leaned forward, his eyes intent. “I mean that if Dresden just blew up the Red Court . . . that means the status quo is gone. There’s a power vacuum, and every spook out there is going to try to fill it. The rules have changed. We don’t know how these people are going to react.”

A sobering silence fell over us.

I hadn’t followed the line of reasoning, like Will had. Or rather, I hadn’t followed it far enough. I’d only been thinking of Dresden’s cataclysm in terms of its effect on my city, upon people who were part of my life.

But he was right. Dear God, he was right. The sudden demise of the Red Court, with consequences that would reach around the whole world, would make the fall of the Soviet Union look like a minor organizational crisis.

“So, what?” I asked. “We back out?”

“Are you kidding?” Will said. “They took my wife. We go get her and anyone else they’ve taken.”

“Right,” Marcy said firmly, from where she lay on the bed of the vehicle.

I felt a smile bare my teeth. “And if they fight?”

Will’s face hardened. “Then we kick their fucking ass.”

“Ass,” said Marcy, nodding.

I finished wrapping Will in the duct tape. He exhaled slowly and relaxed. He took a few experimental breaths and then nodded. “Okay. Good.”

“Lie down, both of you. I’ll be back with the buyer.”

“Be careful,” Will said. “If you aren’t back in twenty minutes, I’ll come looking.”

“If I’m not back in twenty minutes, there won’t be much point in finding me,” I said.

Then I shut them into the SUV and headed for the park.

BUTTERCUP PARK WASN’T exactly overwhelming. There were grass, playground equipment, and a tree or two on an island bordered by four city streets. That was pretty much it. It was the sort of place my low-life persona would choose. It was out in the open, and there was not much to break up the line of sight. It was a good