Storm Front

It figured. It was just the kind of day I was having.

I felt his foot on the back of my neck. Felt him lift the baseball bat. And then it came whistling down toward my skull with a mighty crack of impact.

Except that it missed my motionless head, and whacked into the concrete next to my face, right by my eyes, instead.

"Listen up, Dresden," my attacker said. His voice was rough, low, purposefully hoarse. "You got a big nose. Stop sticking it where it doesn’t belong. You got a big mouth. Stop talking to people you don’t need to talk to. Or we’re going to shut that mouth of yours." He waited a melodramatically appropriate moment, and then added, "Permanently."

His footsteps retreated up the stairs and vanished.

I just lay there watching the stars in front of my eyes for a while. Mister appeared from somewhere, probably drawn by the groaning noises, and started licking at my nose.

I eventually regained my mobility and sat up. My head was spinning, and I felt sick to my stomach. Mister rubbed up against me, as though he sensed something was wrong, purring in a low rumble. I managed to stand up long enough to unlock my apartment door, let Mister and myself in, and lock it behind me. I staggered over to my easy chair in the darkness and sat down with a whuff of expelled breath.

I sat motionless until the spinning slowed down enough to allow me to open my eyes again, and until the pounding of my head calmed down. Pounding head. Someone could have been pounding on my head with a baseball bat just then, pounding my head into new and interesting shapes that were inconducive to carrying on businesslike pursuits. Someone could have been pounding Harry Dresden right into the hereafter.

I cut off that line of thought. "You are not some poor rabbit, Dresden!" I reminded myself, sternly. "You are a wizard of the old school, a spellslinger of the highest caliber. You’re not going to roll over for some schmuck with a baseball bat because he tells you to!"

Galvanized by the sound of my own voice, or maybe only by the somewhat unsettling realization that I had begun talking to myself, I stood up and built up the fire in the fireplace, then walked unsteadily back and forth in front of it, trying to think, to work out the details.

Had this evening’s visits triggered the warning? Who had reason to threaten me? What were they trying to keep me from finding? And, most importantly, what was I going to do about it?

Someone had seen me talking to Linda Randall, maybe. Or, more likely, someone had seen me showing up at Bianca’s place, asking questions. The Blue Beetle may not be glitzy, but it is sort of difficult to mistake for anyone else’s car. Who would have reason to have me watched?

Why, hadn’t Gentleman Johnny Marcone followed me so that he could have a word with me? So he could ask me to keep out of this business with Tommy Tomm’s murder? Yes he had. Maybe this had been another reminder from the mob boss. It had that kind of mafioso feel to it.

I staggered to my kitchenette and fixed myself a tisane tea for the headache, then added in some aspirin. Herbal remedies are well and good, but I don’t like to take chances.

Working on that same principle, I got my Smith & Wesson.38 Chief’s Special out of its drawer, took the cloth covering off of it, and made sure it was loaded. Then I stuck the revolver in my jacket pocket.

Wizardry aside, it’s tough to beat a gun for discouraging men with baseball bats. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to roll over for the tiger-souled Johnny Marcone, let him push me around, let him know that it was all right to walk all over me whenever he felt like it. No way in hell or on earth, either.

My head was throbbing, and my hands were shaking, but I went down the ladder to my workroom – and started figuring out how to rip someone’s heart out of his chest from fifty miles away.

Who says I never do anything fun on a Friday night?

Chapter Eleven

It took me the rest of the night and part of the morning, but I worked out how I could murder someone in the same manner that Tommy Tomm and Jennifer Stanton had been killed. After the fifth or sixth time I’d checked the figures, I stared at my calculations.

It didn’t make any sense. It was impossible.

Or maybe we were all underestimating just how dangerous this killer was.

I grabbed my duster, and headed out without bothering to check my looks. I don’t keep any mirrors in my home. Too many things can use mirrors as windows – or doors – but I was pretty sure I looked like a wreck. The Studebaker’s rearview mirror confirmed this. My face was haggard, with a shadow of a beard, deep circles under bloodshot eyes, and hair that looked as though it had been riding a speeding motorcycle through a cloud of greasy smoke. Smoothing your hair back with sweaty palms as a study habit will do that to you. Especially if you do it for twelve or fourteen hours straight.

It didn’t matter. Murphy wanted this information, and she needed to have it. Things were bad. They were very, very bad!

I made quick time down to the station, knowing Murphy would want to hear this from me face-to-face. The police station Murphy worked in was one in an aged complex of buildings that housed the metro police department. It was run-down, sagging in places like an old soldier who nonetheless stood at attention and struggled to hold in his gut. There was graffiti along one wall that the janitor wouldn’t come to scrub off until Monday morning.

I parked in the visitors’ parking – easy to do on a Saturday morning – and headed up the steps and into the building. The desk sergeant wasn’t the usual mustached old warhorse who I had run into before, but a greying matron with steely eyes who disapproved of me and my lifestyle in a single glance, then made me wait while she called up Murphy.

While I waited, a pair of officers came in, dragging a handcuffed man between them. He wasn’t resisting them – just the opposite, in fact. His head was down, and he was moaning in an almost musical way. He was on the thin side, and I got the impression that he was young. His denim jeans and jacket were battered, unkempt, as was his hair. The officers dragged him past the desk, and one of them said, "That DUI we called in. We’re going to take him up to holding until he can see straight."

The desk sergeant passed a clipboard over, and one of the officers took it under his arm, before the two of them dragged the young man up the stairs. I waited, rubbing at my tired eyes, until the sergeant managed to get through to someone upstairs. She gave a rather surprised "Hmph," and then said, "All right, Lieutenant. I’ll send him on up." She waved a hand at me to go on past. I could feel her eyes on me as I went by, and I smoothed my palm self-consciously over my head and jaw.

Special Investigations kept a little waiting area just within the door at the top of the staircase. It consisted of four wooden chairs and a sagging old couch that would probably kill your back if you tried to sleep on it. Murphy’s office was at the end of a double row of cubicles.