Storm Front

I would have to keep this little un-beauty in mind as I tried to run this man down. It might well mean nothing. On the other hand, it might not. I looked up at the clock. A quarter after three. There was time to check with the local morgues to see if they had turned up any likely John Does – who knew, my search might be over before the day’s end – and then to get to the bank to deposit my money and fire off a check to my landlord.

I got out my phone book and started calling up hospitals – not really my routine line of work, but not difficult, either, except for the standard problems I had using the telephone: static, line noise, other people’s conversations being louder than mine. If something can go wrong, it will.

Once I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a twitch of motion from the dried scorpion that sat on my desk. I blinked and stared at it. It didn’t move. Cautiously, I extended my senses toward it like an invisible hand, feeling about for any traces of enchantment or magical energy.

Nothing. It was as dry of enchantment as it was of life.

Never let it be said that Harry Dresden is afraid of a dried, dead bug. Creepy or not, I wasn’t going to let it ruin my concentration.

So I scooped it up with the corner of the phone book and popped it into the middle drawer of my desk. Out of sight, out of mind.

So I have a problem with creepy, dead, poisonous things. So sue me.

Chapter Five

McAnally’s is a pub a few blocks from my office. I go there when I’m feeling stressed, or when I have a few extra bucks to spend on a nice dinner. A lot of us fringe types do. Mac, the pub’s owner, is used to wizards and all the problems that come along with us. There aren’t any video games at McAnally’s. There are no televisions or expensive computer trivia games. There isn’t even a jukebox. Mac keeps a player piano instead. It’s less likely to go haywire around us.

I say pub in all the best senses of the word. When you walk in, you take several steps down into a room with a deadly combination of a low clearance and ceiling fans. If you’re tall, like me, you walk carefully in McAnally’s. There are thirteen stools at the bar and thirteen tables in the room. Thirteen windows, set up high in the wall in order to be above ground level, let some light from the street into the place. Thirteen mirrors on the walls cast back reflections of the patrons in dim detail, and give the illusion of more space. Thirteen wooden columns, carved with likenesses from folktales and legends of the Old World, make it difficult to walk around the place without weaving a circuitous route – they also quite intentionally break up the flow of random energies, dispelling to one degree or another the auras that gather around broody, grumpy wizards and keeping them from manifesting in unintentional and colorful ways. The colors are all muted, earth browns and sea greens. The first time I entered McAnally’s, I felt like a wolf returning to an old, favorite den. Mac makes his own beer, ale really, and it’s the best stuff in the city. His food is cooked on a wood-burning stove. And you can damn well walk your own self over to the bar to pick up your order when it’s ready, according to Mac. It’s my sort of place.

Since the calls to the morgues had turned up nothing, I kept a few bills out of Monica Sells’s retainer and took myself to McAnally’s. After the kind of day I’d had, I deserved some of Mac’s ale and someone else’s cooking. It was going to be a long night, too, once I went home and started trying to figure out how whoever it was had pulled off the death spell used on Johnny Marcone’s hatchet man, Tommy Tomm, and his girlfriend, Jennifer Stanton.

"Dresden," Mac greeted me, when I sat down at the bar. The dim, comfortable room was empty, but for a pair of men I recognized by sight at a back table, playing chess. Mac is a tall, almost gangly man of indeterminate age, though there’s a sense to him that speaks of enough wisdom and strength that I wouldn’t venture that he was less than fifty. He has squinty eyes and a smile that is rare and mischievous when it manifests. Mac never says much, but when he does it’s almost always worth listening to.

"Hey there, Mac," I hailed him. "Been one hell of a day. Give me a steak sandwich, fries, ale."

"Ungh," Mac said. He opened a bottle of his ale and began to pour it warm, staring past me, into the middle distance. He does that with everyone. Considering his clientele, I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t chance looking them in the face, either.

"You hear about what happened at the Madison?"

"Ungh," he confirmed.

"Nasty business."

Such an inane comment apparently didn’t merit even a grunted reply. Mac set my drink out and turned to the stove behind the bar, checking the wood and raking it back and forth to provide even heating for it.

I picked up a prethumbed newspaper nearby and scanned the headlines. "Hey, look at this. Another ThreeEye rampage. Jesus, this stuff is worse than crack." The article detailed the virtual demolition of a neighborhood grocery store by a pair of ThreeEye junkies who were convinced that the place was destined to explode and wanted to beat destiny to the punch.

"Ungh."

"You ever seen anything like this?"

Mac shook his head.

"They say the stuff gives you the third sight," I said, reading the article. Both junkies had been admitted to the hospital and were in critical condition, after collapsing at the scene. "But you know what?"

Mac looked back at me from the stove, while he cooked.

"I don’t think that’s possible. What a bunch of crap. Trying to sell these poor kids on the idea that they can do magic."

Mac nodded at me.

"If it was serious stuff, the department would have already called me by now."

Mac shrugged, turning back to the stove. Then he squinted up and peered into the dim reflection of the mirror behind the bar.

"Harry," he said, "you were followed."

I had been too tense for too much of the day to avoid feeling my shoulders constrict in a sudden twinge. I put both hands around my mug and brought a few phrases of quasi-Latin to mind. It never hurt to be ready to defend myself, in case someone was intending to hurt me. I watched someone approach, a dim shape in the reflection cast by the ancient, worn mirror. Mac went on with cooking, unperturbed. Nothing much perturbed Mac.

I smelled her perfume before I turned around. "Why, Miss Rodriguez," I said. "It’s always pleasant to see you."

She came to an abrupt stop a couple of paces from me, apparently disconcerted. One of the advantages of being a wizard is that people always attribute anything you do to magic, if no other immediate explanation leaps to mind. She probably wouldn’t think about her perfume giving her identity away when she could assign my mysterious, blind identification of her to my mystical powers.