Dead Beat

Chapter Fifteen

Gentleman Johnnie Marcone was the most powerful figure in Chicago 's criminal underworld. If there was an illegal enterprise afoot, Marcone was either in charge of it or had been paid for the privilege of its operating in his territory. Bony Tony had done most of a dime in a federal penitentiary for trafficking in narcotics, and after that he'd moved into less politically incorrect areas of the business. He mostly dealt in moving stolen goods, everything from jewels to hot furniture.

I wasn't sure exactly where Bony Tony ranked in Marcone's criminal hierarchy, but Marcone wasn't the sort of person who would take the murder of one of his people lightly-not without his approval, at any rate. Marcone would know about Bony Tony's death soon, if he didn't already. He was sure to get involved in one fashion or another, and the best way for him to get to whoever had killed Bony Tony would be to get his hands on whatever it was they wanted.

I had to get Butters somewhere safe, the quicker the better. But until I knew what was on that storage device, I couldn't judge what would be safe for him and what wouldn't.

"Harry," Butters said, as if he was repeating himself.

I blinked a couple of times. "What?"

"Do you want to hang on to this?" he said in the same tone. He stepped over to me and offered me the little slip of plastic.

"No!" I snapped, and took two steps back. "Butters, get that the hell away from me."

He froze in place, staring at me, his expression somewhere between confused and wounded. "I'm sorry."

I took in a deep breath. Where the hell was my concentration? This was no time to start spacing out on trains of thought, no matter how relevant to the circumstances. "Don't be," I said. "Look, that thing doesn't have any moving parts, right? Electronic storage?"

"Yeah."

"Then I don't dare touch it," I said. "Remember how messed up my X-rays were?"

He nodded. "You're saying that the data on here could get messed up the same way."

"I couldn't ever have cassette tapes after I started working magic," I said. "They'd just fade away into static after a while. The magnetic strips on my credit cards stopped working in a day or two."

Butters chewed on his lip and nodded slowly. "The data on the jump drive would be even more fragile than a magnetic strip. It might make sense if it was some kind of erratic electromagnetic field around you. Every human body gives off a unique field of electromagnetic energy. It could be like with your cell replication, that your field is more-"

"Butters," I said, "no time for that now. The important thing is that I don't dare touch that toy." I frowned, thinking out loud. "Or take it back to my place, either. The wards keep magic out, but they keep it in, too. It would probably fry it to hang around in there for too long. Even working any heavy energy around it could be dangerous."

"Well, that's stupid," Butters said. "I mean, storing important wizard information on something that getting close to a wizard would destroy."

"It's not stupid if you want to sell it to a wizard and you're worried the buyer might off you instead of dealing in good faith," I said.

Butters looked at the corpse and then back at me. "You think Grevane killed Bony Tony?"

"Yeah," I said. "But Grevane knew that he couldn't get to the information on that jump drive on his own."

Butters swallowed. "Which explains why he needed me."

"Yeah." I chewed on my lip for a second and then said, "Get Bony Tony back in the fridge. We're leaving."

Butters nodded and went back to the examining table. He threw the cloth over the corpse. "Where?"

"Can you read that thing here?"

"No," Butters said. "This computer is too old. It has the wrong ports. We could go to one of the other offices, maybe-"

"No. We need to get out of here-now."

"We could go to my place," Butters suggested.

"No. Grevane will definitely have it under surveillance. Dammit."

"Why dammit?"

"We're short on options, and that means we have to go someplace I didn't want to go."

"Where?" he asked.

"A friend's. Come on."

"Right," Butters said, and promptly walked over to his polka suit. He heaved up a couple of pieces. The cymbals clashed tinnily against one another.

"What are you doing?" I demanded. "We've got to go."

"I'm not leaving it here for God knows what to mess with," Butters said. He grunted and threw a strap awkwardly over his shoulder. The bass drum rumbled.

"Yes, you are," I said. "We are not taking it with us. We don't have time for this."

Butters turned to face me, his expression stricken.

That stupid polka suit filled up most of the back of the SUV It was a pain to move it without making a bunch of noise, but in the end we managed to slip out the back door of the Forensic Institute and make a clean getaway. I watched the road behind us carefully, until I was sure that I wasn't being followed. Then I headed for the campus area, and Billy's apartment.

I pulled into the apartment's parking lot, leaned out, and yelled, "Hey!"

A young man with arms and legs a few sizes too large to match his body appeared from behind the corner of the building, frowning. He was dressed in sweats, a T-shirt, and boat shoes, standard easily discarded werewolf wardrobe for troubled times. He flipped an untidy mop of black hair out of his eyes and leaned against the SUV's door. "Hey, Harry."

"Kirby," I greeted him. "This is my friend Butters." Kirby nodded to Butters and asked me, "Did you spot me?"

"No, but Billy always has someone on watch outside when times are tense."

Kirby nodded, his expression serious. "What do you need?"

"Park this beast for me. I keep running into things."

"Sure. Billy and Georgia are upstairs."

I got out of the car, and Butters hopped out with me. "Thanks, man."

"Yeah," Kirby said. He got in the SUV and frowned. He looked around at all the doors.

"The door is ajar," the dashboard said.

"It won't shut up," I explained to him.

"It gets sort of Zen after a while," Butters said brightly. "Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is a jar."

Kirby gave him a skeptical look. I grabbed Butters by the shoulder and hauled him into the building and up to the apartment.

Billy opened the door before we even got to it, and looked out expectantly. He stepped a bit to one side, holding the door open for us, watching up and down the hallway. "Heya, Harry."

The apartment was a typical college place-small, a couple of bedrooms, nothing permanent on the walls, furniture that wasn't too expensive or hard to move, and equipped with an expensive entertainment center. Georgia sat on the couch reading from one of a small mountain of medical books. I walked in and introduced everyone.

"I need a computer," I told Billy.

He arched an eyebrow at me.

I waved a hand in a vague motion. "Tell him, Butters."

Butters pulled the jump drive from his pocket and showed it to Billy. "Anything with a USB port."

Georgia frowned and asked, "What's on it?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "I need to know."

She nodded. "Better let him use the one on the far wall of the computer room, Will. The farther from Harry the better."

"Feel the love." I sighed. I pointed at the little table next to the door and asked, "Can I make a few calls while I wait?"

"Sure." Billy turned to Butters. "Right this way."

They went into one of the bedrooms. Georgia went back to her book. I picked up the phone.

The phone at my place rang a dozen times before it rattled, and then Thomas slurred, "What?"

"It's me," I said. "You all right?"

"I was all right. I was asleep. Stupid Mouse woke me up to get the phone."

"Any sign of visitors? Calls?"

"No and no," he said.

"Get some more sleep," I said.

He made a grunting noise and hung up.

I called my answering service next. They had recently phased over to stored voice mail. I was suspicious of it on general principles. From a purely logical standpoint, I knew my issues with technology wouldn't extend all the way across town over the phone lines, but all the same I didn't trust it. I would much rather have dealt with an actual person taking messages, but it cost too much now to keep someone manning the phones when voice mail could do all the work. I punched the buttons and had to go through all the menus only twice to get it to work.

Beeeeeep. "Harry, it's Murphy. We got into Hawaii all right, and there was no problem with the hotel, so you can reach me at those contact numbers. I'll call in again in a couple of-" Her voice broke off into a sudden high-pitched noise. "Would you stop that?" she demanded, with a lot more laughter than anger in her voice. "I'm on the phone. In a couple of days, Harry. Thanks for taking care of my pants. Er, plants, plants." Beeeeeep.

I wondered what had caused Murphy to make a high-pitched noise and a big old Freudian slip. And I wondered what to read into the fact that she had left me a message instead of calling me at home. Probably nothing. She probably didn't want to wake me up or something. Yeah. She was probably only thinking of me.

Beeeeep. "Harry. Mike. The Beetle will be ready at noon." Beeeeep.

God bless Mechanic Mike. If I heard a car complaining about its closed doors being open one more time, I would have to disintegrate something.

Beeeeep. "Oh," said a young woman's voice. "Mister Dresden? It's Shiela Starr. We met at Bock Ordered Books last night?" There was the sound of her taking an unsteady breath. "I wondered if I could ask for a few minutes of your time. There have been… I mean, I'm not completely certain but… I think something is wrong. Here at the store, I mean." She let out a snippet of laughter that was half anxiety and half weariness. "Oh, hell, I probably sound crazy, but I would really like to speak to you about it. I'll be at the shop until noon. Or you can call my apartment." She gave me the number. "I hope you can come by the store, though. I would really appreciate it." Beeeep.

I found myself frowning. Shiela hadn't said it outright, but she had sounded pretty scared. That wasn't terribly surprising, given what she'd probably seen happening right outside Bock's shop the night before, but it made me feel uncomfortable to hear fear in her voice. Or maybe it's more correct to say that I'm not comfortable with fear in any woman's voice.

It's not my fault. I know it's sexist and macho, and it's retrograde social evolution, but I hate it when bad things happen to women. Don't get me wrong; I hate bad things to happen to anyone-but when it's a woman that's in danger, I hate it with a reflexive, bone-deep, primal mindlessness that borders on insanity. Women are beautiful creatures, and dammit, I enjoy making sure that they're safe and treating them with old-fashioned manners and courtesy. It just seems right. I'd suffered for thinking that way more than once, but it still didn't change the way I felt.

Shiela was a girl, and she was scared. Therefore, if I wanted to have any peace of mind, I was going to have to go talk to her.

I checked the clock. Eleven. She was still at the store.

I dialed one more number, and got an answering machine with no message, only a tone. "This is Dresden," I told the machine. "And we need to talk."

Butters and Billy reappeared. I hung up the phone and asked them, "Well?"

"Numbers," said Billy.

"More specific?" I asked.

Butters shook his head. "It's hard to be any more specific than that. There was only one file on the jump drive, and it was empty. The only information on it was the file name, and it was just a number." He offered me a piece of white paper with a string of numerals printed on it in his spidery scrawl. I counted. There were sixteen of them. "That's it."

I took the paper and frowned at the numbers. "That is spectacularly useless."

"Yeah," Butters said quietly.

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. "Okay. Let me think." I tried to prioritize. Grevane was out there looking for Butters. Maybe Marcone was looking for him too. Maybe the dead professor's two assistants to boot. "Butters, we have to get you behind my wards again."

He blinked at me. "But why? I mean, they wanted me so that they could get to the information. I'm useless to them now."

"You and I know that. They don't."

"Oh."

"Billy," I said, "could you please take Butters over to my place?"

"No problem," he said. "What about you? Won't you need wheels?"

"The Beetle is ready. I'll take a cab."

"I can drop you off," Billy offered.

"No. It's the opposite way from my apartment, and Butters needs to get there yesterday. Go around the block once or twice before you pull in. Make sure no one is watching the door."

Billy smiled. "I know the drill."

"Don't try to open the door yourself, Butters. Knock and wait for Thomas to do it."

"Right." Butters fretted at his lip a little. "What are you going to be doing?"

"Detective stuff. I have places to go and people to see."

And with a little luck, none of them would kill me.