Small Favor

I didn’t answer him immediately. Gard watched me from where she sat on the edge of her cot, now dressed and upright, if not precisely healthy-looking. Hendricks sat at the workbench again, although he was sharpening a knife this time. Weapons nuts are always fiddling with their gear. Murphy, seated down the bench from Hendricks, was cleaning her gun. She wasn’t moving her wounded arm much, though she apparently had full use of that hand. Sanya loomed in a corner near the workbench, patiently working some kind of leather polish into Esperacchius’s scabbard.

"I don’t think this is where they’ll try to stick in the knife," I said quietly. I turned my eyes to Luccio. "I also don’t think it would be stupid to have a couple of Knights on standby, in case I’m wrong."

Luccio’s head rocked back a little.

"No reason not to hedge our bets," I told her quietly. "These people don’t play nice like the Unseelie fae, or the Red Court. I’ve seen them in action, Captain."

She pursed her lips, and her eyes never wavered from my face. "All right, Warden," she said, finally. "It’s your city."

"I did not agree to this," Gard said, rising, her expression dark.

"Oh, deal with it, blondie," I told her. "Beggars and choosers. The White Council is backing you up on this one, but don’t start thinking it’s because we work for you. Or your boss."

"I’m going to be there too," Murphy said quietly, without looking up from her gun. "Not just somewhere nearby. There. In the room."

Pretty much everyone there said, "No," or some variant of it at that point, except for Hendricks, who didn’t talk a lot, and me, who knew better.

Murphy put her gun back together during the protests and loaded it in the silence afterward.

"If you people want to have your plots and your shadowy wars in private," she said, "you should take them to Antarctica or somewhere. Or you could do this in New York, or Boise, and this isn’t any of my business. But you aren’t in any of those places. You’re in Chicago. And when things get out of hand, it’s the people I’m sworn to protect who are endangered." She rose, and though she was the shortest person in the room, she wasn’t looking up at anyone. "I’m going to be there as a moderating influence with your cooperation. Or we can do it the other way. Your choice, but I know a lot of cops who are sick and tired of this supernatural bullshit sneaking up on us."

She directed a level gaze around the room. She hadn’t put the gun away.

I smiled at her. Just a little.

Gard looked at me and said, "Dresden."

I shrugged and shook my head sadly. "What? Once we gave them the vote, it went totally out of control."

"You’re a pig, Harry," Murphy growled.

"But a pig smart enough to bow to the inevitable," I said. I looked at Gard and said, "Far as I’m concerned, she’s got a legitimate interest. I’ll back it."

"Warden," Luccio said in a warning tone, "may I speak to you?"

I walked over to her.

"She can’t possibly know," Luccio said quietly, "the kind of grief she could be letting herself in for."

"She can," I replied as quietly. "She’s been through more than most Wardens, Captain. And she’s sure as hell covered my back enough times to have earned the right to make up her own mind."

Luccio frowned at me for a moment, and then turned to face Murphy. "Sergeant," she said quietly. "This could expose you to a…considerable degree of risk. Are you sure?"

"If it were your town," Murphy said, "your job, your duty? Could you stand around with your fingers in your ears?"

Luccio nodded slowly and then inclined her head.

"Besides," Murphy said, half smiling as she put her gun in her shoulder holster, "it’s not as if I’m leaving you people much choice."

"I like her," Sanya rumbled in his deep, half-swallowed accent. "She is so tiny and fierce. I don’t suppose she knows how to-"

"Sanya," Michael said, his voice very firm. "We have talked about this."

The dark-skinned Russian sighed and shrugged. "It could not hurt to ask."

"Sanya."

He lifted both hands in a gesture of surrender, grinning, and fell silent.

The door to the house banged shut, and running footsteps crunched through the snow. Molly opened the door to the workshop and said, "Harry, Kincaid’s on the phone. He’s got the location for the meeting."

"Kincaid?" Murphy said in a rather sharp voice.

"Yeah, didn’t I mention that?" I asked her, my tone perfectly innocent as I headed for the door. "He showed up last night."

Her eyes narrowed. "We’ll talk."

"Tiny," Sanya rumbled to Michael, clenching a demonstrative fist. "But fierce."

Chapter Twenty-eight

P eople think that nothing can possibly happen in the middle of a big city-say, Chicago-without lots of witnesses seeing everything that happened. What most people don’t really understand is that there are two reasons why that just ain’t so-the first being that humans in general make lousy witnesses.

Take something fairly innocuous, like a minor traffic accident at a busy pedestrian intersection. Beep-beep, crunch, followed by a lot of shouting and arm waving. Line up everyone at that intersection and ask them what happened. Every single one of them will give you a slightly different story. Some of them will have seen the whole thing start to finish. Some of them will have seen only the aftermath. Some of them will have seen only one of the cars. Some of them will tell you, with perfect assurance, that they saw both cars from start to finish, including such details as the expressions on the drivers’ faces and changes in vehicle acceleration, despite the fact that they would have to be performing simultaneous feats of bilocation, levitation, and telepathy to have done so.

Most people will be honest. And incorrect. Honest incorrectness isn’t the same thing as lying, but it amounts to the same thing when you’re talking about witnesses to a specific event. A relative minority will limit themselves to reporting what they actually saw, not things that they have filled in by assumption, or memories contaminated by too much exposure to other points of view. Of that relative minority, even fewer will be the kind of person who, by natural inclination or possibly training, has the capacity for noticing and retaining a large amount of detail in a limited amount of time.

The point being that once events pass into memory, they already have a tendency to begin to become muddled and cloudy. It can be more of an art form than a science to gain an accurate picture of what transpired based upon eyewitness descriptions-and that’s for a matter of relative unimportance, purely a matter of fallible intellect, with no deep personal or emotional issues involved.