Dresden 5 (17 page)

"Tomorrow," she said.

"With Martin?"

She nodded. "He's a coworker. He's helping me move, watching my back. I have to put everything in order here. Pack some things from the apartment."

"What kind of work?"

"Pretty much the same kind. Investigate and report. Only I report to a boss instead of to readers." She sighed and said, "I'm not supposed to tell you anything else about it."

"Hell's bells," I muttered. "Will I be able to reach you?"

She nodded. "I'll set up a drop. You can write. I'd like that."

"Yeah. Stay in touch."

Long minutes after that, Susan said, "You're on a case again, aren't you?"

"Does it show?"

She leaned a little away from me, and I drew my arm back. "I smelled it," she said, and stood up to add wood to the fire. "There's blood on you."

"Yeah," I said. "A woman was killed about five feet away from me."

"Vampires?" Susan asked.

I shook my head. "Some kind of demon."

"Are you okay?"

"Peachy."

"That's funny, because you look like hell," Susan said.

"I said no scolding."

She almost smiled. "You'd be smart to get some sleep."

"True, but I'm not all that bright," I said. Besides, I didn't have a prayer of falling asleep now, after talking to her.

"Ah," she said. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Don't think so."

"You need rest."

I waved a hand at the stationery pad. "I will. I just have to run down a lead first."

Susan folded her arms, facing me directly. "So do it after you get some rest."

"There probably isn't time."

Susan frowned and picked up the pad. "Marriott. The hotel?"

"Dunno. Likely."

"What are you looking for?"

I sighed, too tired to stick to my confidentiality guns very closely. "Stolen artifact. I think the note is probably about a site for the sale."

"Who is the buyer?"

I shrugged.

"Lots of legwork, then."

"Yeah."

Susan nodded. "Let me look into this. You get some sleep."

"It's probably better if you don't-"

She waved a hand, cutting me off. "I want to help. Let me do this for you."

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I guess I could relate. I knew how much I'd wanted to help her. I couldn't. It had been tough to handle. It would have been a relief to me to have done her some good, no matter how small it was.

"All right," I said. "But just the phone work. Okay?"

"Okay." She copied down the word and the number on a sheet she tore from the bottom of the memo pad and turned toward the door.

"Susan?" I said.

She paused without turning to look back at me.

"Do you want to get dinner or something? Before you go, I mean. I want to, uh, you know."

"Say good-bye," she said quietly.

"Yeah."

"All right."

She left. I sat in my apartment, in front of the fire, and breathed in the scent of her perfume. I felt cold, lonely, and tired. I felt like a hollowed-out husk. I felt as if I had failed her. Failed to protect her to begin with, failed to cure her after the vampires had changed her.

Change. Maybe that's what this was really about. Susan had changed. She'd grown. She was more relaxed than I remembered, more confident. There had always been a sense of purpose to her, but now it seemed deeper, somehow. She'd found a place for herself, somewhere where she felt she could do some good.

Maybe I should have gone with her after all.

But no. Part of the change was that she felt hungrier now, too. More quietly sensual, as if every sight and sound and touch in the room was occupying most of her attention. She'd smelled drops of blood on my clothing and it had excited her enough to make her move away from me.

Another change. She had an instinctive hunger for my blood. And she could throw vampires twenty feet through the air. She sure as hell wouldn't have any trouble tearing my throat out in an intimate moment if her control slipped.

I washed my face mechanically, showered in my unheated shower, and went shivering to my bed. The routine hadn't helped me. It only delayed me from facing the harshest truth of my relationship with Susan.

She had left Chicago.

Probably for good.

That was going to hurt like hell in the morning.

Chapter Fifteen

I had bad dreams.

They were the usual fare. Flames devoured someone who screamed my name. A pretty girl spread her arms, eyes closed, and fell slowly backward as dozens of fine cuts opened all over her skin. The air became a fine pink spray. I turned from it, into a kiss with Susan, who drew me down and tore out my throat with her teeth.

A woman who seemed familiar but whom I did not recognize shook her head and drew her hand from left to right. The dream-scenery faded to black in the wake of her motion. She turned to me, dark eyes intent and said, "You need to rest."

Mickey Mouse woke me up, my alarm jangling noisily, his little hand on two and the big hand on twelve. I wanted to smack the clock for waking me up, but I reined in the impulse. I'm not against a little creative violence now and then, but you have to draw the line somewhere. I wouldn't sleep in the same room with a person who would smack Mickey Mouse.

I got up, got dressed, left a message for Murphy, another for Michael, fed Mister, and hit the road.

Michael's house did not blend in with most of the other homes in his neighborhood west of Wrigley Field. It had a white picket fence. It had elegant window dressings. It had a tidy front lawn that was always green, even in the midst of a blazing Chicago summer. It had a few shady trees, a lot of well-kept shrubberies, and if I had found a couple of deer grazing on the lawn or drinking from the birdbath, it wouldn't have surprised me.

I got out of the Beetle, holding my blasting rod loosely in my right hand. I opened the gate, and a few jingle bells hanging on a string tinkled happily. The gate swung shut on a lazy spring behind me. I knocked on the front door and waited, but no one answered. I frowned. Michael's house had never been empty before. Charity had at least a couple kids who weren't old enough to be in school yet, including the poor little guy they'd named after me. Harry Carpenter. How cruel is that?

I frowned at the cloud-hazed sun. Weren't the older kids getting out of school shortly? Charity had some kind of maternal obsession with never allowing her kids to come home to an empty house.

Someone should have been there.

I got a sick, twisty feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I knocked again, put my ear against the door, and Listened. I could hear the slow tick of the old grandfather clock in the front room. The heater cycled on for a moment, and the vents inside whispered. There were a few sounds when a bit of breeze touched the house, the creaks of old and comfortable wood.

Nothing else.

I tried the front door. It was locked. I stepped back off the porch, and followed the narrow driveway to the back of the property.

If the front of the Carpenter home would have qualified for Better Homes and Gardens, the back would have been fit for a Craftsman commercial. The large tree centered on the back lawn cast lots of shade in the summer, but with the leaves gone I could see the fortresslike tree house Michael had built for his kids in it. It had finished walls, an actual window, and guardrails anywhere anyone could possibly have thought about falling. The tree house had a porch that overlooked the yard. Hell, I didn't have a porch. It's an unfair world.

A big section of the yard had been bitten off by an addition connected to the back of the house. The foundation had been laid, and there were wooden beams framing what would eventually be walls. Heavy contractor's plastic had been stapled to the wooden studs to keep the wind off the addition. The separate garage was closed, and a peek in the window showed me that it was pretty well filled with lumber and other construction materials.

"No cars," I muttered. "Maybe they went to McDonald's. Or church. Do they have church at three in the afternoon?"

I turned around to go back to the Beetle. I'd leave a Michael a note. My stomach fluttered. If I didn't get a second for the duel, it was likely to be a bad evening. Maybe I should ask Bob to be my second. Or maybe Mister. No one dares to mess with Mister.

Something rattled against the metal gutters running the length of the back of the house.

I jumped like a spooked horse and scrambled away from the house, toward the garage at the back of the yard so that I could get a look at the roof. Given that in the past day or so no less than three different parties had taken a poke at me, I felt totally justified in being on edge.

I got to the back of the yard, but couldn't see the whole roof from there, so I clambered up into the branches, then took a six-foot ladder up to the main platform of the tree house. From there, I could see that the roof was empty.

I heard brisk, somewhat heavy footsteps below me, and beyond the fence at the back of the little yard. I froze in place in the tree house, Listening.

The heavy footsteps padded up to the fence at the back of the yard, and I heard the scrape of chain link dragging against dry leaves and other late-winter detritus. I heard a muted grunt of effort and a long exhalation. Then the footsteps came to the base of the tree.

Leather scraped against a wooden step, and the tree shivered almost imperceptibly. Someone was climbing up.

I looked around me but the ladder was the only way down, unless I felt like jumping. It couldn't have been more than nine or ten feet down. Odds were I could land more or less in one piece. But if I misjudged the jump I could sprain an ankle or break a leg, which would make running away both impractical and embarrassing. Jumping would have to be a last resort.

I gathered in my will and settled my grip on my blasting rod, pointing it directly at where the ladder met the platform. The tip of the blasting rod glowed with a pinpoint of bright red energy.

Blond hair and the top half of a girl's angelic young face appeared at the top of the ladder. There was a quiet gasp and her blue eyes widened. "Holy crap."

I jerked the tip of the blasting rod up and away from the girl, releasing the gathered energy. "Molly?"

The rest of the girl's face appeared as she climbed on up the ladder. "Wow, is that an acetylene torch or something?"

I blinked and peered more closely at Molly. "Is that an earring in your eyebrow?"

The girl clapped her fingers over her right eyebrow.

"And your nose?"

Molly shot a furtive look over her shoulder at the house, and scrambled the rest of the way up to the tree house. As tall as her mother, Molly was all coltish legs and long arms. She wore a typical private-school uniform of skirt, blouse, and sweater-but it looked like she'd been attacked by a lech with razor blades where fingers should have been.

The skirt was essentially slashed to ribbons, and underneath it she wore black tights, also torn to nigh indecency. Her shirt and sweater had apparently endured the Blitz, but the bright red satin bra that peeked out from beneath looked new. She had on too much makeup. Not as bad as most kids too old to play tag but too young to drive, but it was there. She wore a ring of fine gold wire through one pale gold eyebrow, and a golden stud protruded from one side of her nose.

I worked hard not to smile. Smiling would have implied that I found her outfit amusing. She was young enough to be hurt by that kind of opinion, and I had a vague memory of being that ridiculous at one time. Let he who hath never worn parachute pants cast the first stone.

Molly clambered in and tossed a bulging backpack down on the wooden floor. "You lurk in tree houses a lot, Mister Dresden?"

"I'm looking for your dad."

Molly wrinkled up her nose, then started removing the stud from it. I didn't want to watch. "I don't want to tell you how to investigate stuff, but generally speaking you won't find him in tree houses."

"I came over, but no one answered the door when I knocked. Is that normal?"

Molly took out the eyebrow ring, dumped the backpack out onto the floorboards, and started sorting out a long skirt with a floral print, a T-shirt, and a sweater. "It is on errands day. Mom loads up the sandcrawler with all the little snot-nosed Jawas and goes all over town."

"Oh. Do you know when she's due back?"

"Anytime," Molly said. She hopped into the skirt, and wriggled out of the tattered skirt and tights in that mystifyingly modest way that girls always seem to manage to acquire sometime in their teens. The shirt and pink sweater went on next, and the ripped up sweater and, to my discomfort, the bright red bra came out from under the conservative clothes and got tucked back into the backpack.

I turned my back on the girl as well as I could in the limited space. The link of handcuff Anna Valmont had slapped onto my wrist chafed and pinched. I scratched at it irritably. You'd think I'd been cuffed enough times that I should have gotten myself a key by now.

Molly took a wet-wipe from somewhere and started peeling the makeup from her face. "Hey," she asked a minute later. "What's wrong?"

I grunted and waved my wrist vaguely, swinging the cuff around.

"Hey, neat," Molly said. "Are you on the lam? Is that why you're hiding in a tree house, so the cops won't find you?"

"No," I said. "It's kind of a long story."

"Ohhhh," Molly said wisely. "Those are fun-time handcuffs, not bad-time handcuffs. I gotcha."

"No!" I protested. "And how the hell would you know about fun-time handcuffs anyway? You're like ten."

She snorted. "Fourteen."

"Whatever, too young."

"Internet," she said sagely. "Expanding the frontiers of adolescent knowledge."

"God, I'm old."

Molly clucked and dipped into the backpack again. She grabbed my wrist firmly, shook out a ring of small keys, and started trying them in the lock of the cuffs. "So give me the juicy details," she said. "You can say 'bleep' instead of the fun words if you want."

I blinked. "Where the bleep did you get a bunch of cuff keys?"