Ghost Story

Chapter Twenty-five

I was ten minutes late to the meeting with Fitz, but he was still there, lurking at a nearby storefront, looking about as innocent as an only child near a fresh Kool-Aid stain. He had a huge, empty sports-equipment bag hanging over one shoulder. For the love of God. The kid might as well have been wearing a stocking cap and a black mask, with a giant dollar sign printed on the outside of his bag to boot.

I appeared next to him and said, “You look so relaxed and calm. I’ll bet any cop that rolls by will ask you for tips on self-control.”

Fitz twitched, clearly controlling an instant instinct to flee. Then he spat on the frozen ground and said, “You’re late, Harvey.”

“Forgot to wind my watch,” I said.

“And I was starting to think my brain had thrown a rod after all.” Fitz looked up and down the street and shook his head. “But nothing’s ever that easy.”

“Life can be a bitch that way,” I said.

“So, you’re real.”

“I’m real.”

Fitz nodded. “You said you would help. Were you serious about that?”

“Yes,” I said.

A gust of wind pulled his longish, curly red hair out to one side. It matched his lopsided smirk. “Fine. Help.”

“Okay,” I said. “Turn left and start walking.”

Fitz put a fist on his hip and said, “You were going to help me with the guns.”

“Never said that,” I said. “You need help, kid, not tools. Guns aren’t gonna cut it.” I waited for him to begin to speak before I interrupted him. “Besides. If you don’t play along, I’ve arranged for word to get to Murphy about where you and your band of artful dodgers are crashing.”

“Oh,” he snarled. “You . . . you son of a bitch.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You can go fuck yourself.”

“You need help. I’ve got it to give. But there ain’t no free lunch, kid,” I said in a calm and heartless tone. “You know that.”

“You can kiss my ass is what you can do,” he said, and turned away.

“Go ahead and walk,” I said. “But you’re throwing away your only chance to get your crew out from under Baldy.”

He stopped in the middle of taking a step.

“If you bug out now, where are you going to go—back to Baldy? He’ll kill you for failing to get the guns. And after that, Murphy’s crew and the Rag Lady will take out the whole building. Baldy will probably skate out on your buddies, and do the same thing to some other batch of kids.”

Fitz turned his head in my general direction, his eyes murderous. But he was listening.

“Look, kid. Doesn’t have to be the end of the world. If you work with me, everything’s peachy.”

I was lying, of course. The last thing I wanted was to hand Murphy a convenient target in her present frame of mind. And I really did want to help the kid—but I’ve been where he was mentally. He wouldn’t have believed in a rescuer on a white horse. In his world, no one just gave anyone anything, except maybe pain. The best you could hope for was an exchange, something for something, and generally you got screwed even then. I needed his cooperation. Handing him a familiar problem was the best way to get it.

“I’m not a monster, Fitz. And honestly, I don’t care about you and your goons or what happens to you. But I think you can help me—and I’m willing to help you in return if you do.”

The young man grimaced and bowed his head. “It’s not as though I have a lot of choice, is it?”

“We’ve all got choices,” I said calmly. “At the moment, yours are limited. You gonna play ball?”

“Fine,” Fitz spat. “Fine. Whatever.”

“Groovy,” I said. “Hang a left and get going. We’ve got some ground to cover.”

He shoved his hands into his pockets, his eyes sullen, and started walking. “I don’t even know who the hell you are.”

“My name is Harry Dresden,” I said.

Fitz stumbled. “Holy shit,” he said. “Like . . . that Harry Dresden? The professional wizard?”

“The one and only.”

He recovered his pace and shook his head. “I heard you were dead.”

“Well, yeah,” I said, “but I’m taking it in stride.”

“They say you’re a lunatic,” Fitz said.

“Oh yeah?”

Fitz nodded. “They also . . .” He frowned. I could see the wheels spinning. “They also say you help people.”

“So?”

“So which is it?”

“You’ve got half a clue, Fitz,” I said. “You know that talk is cheap. There’s only one way to find out.”

Fitz tilted his head to one side and then nodded. “Yeah. So. Where we going?”

“To visit an old friend.”

We went to a street toward the north end of the South Side. Seedy wasn’t a fair description for the place, because seeds imply eventual regrowth and renewal. Parts of Chicago are wondrous fair, and parts of Chicago look postapocalyptic. This block had seen the apocalypse come, grunted, and said, “Meh.” There were no glass windows on the block—just solid boards, mostly protected by iron bars, and gaping holes.

Buildings had security fences outside their entrances, literally topped with razor wire. You’d need a blowtorch to get through them. At least one of the fences in my line of sight had been sliced open with a blowtorch. Metal cages covered the streetlights, too—but they were all out anyway. Tough to make a cheap metal cage that stops rounds from a handgun.

Every flat, open space had been covered in spray-painted graffiti, which I guess we’re supposed to call urban art now. Except art is about creating beauty. These paintings were territorial markers, the visual parallel to peeing on a tree. I’ve seen some gorgeous “outlaw” art, but that wasn’t in play here. The thump-thud of a ridiculously overpowered woofer sent a rumbling rhythm all up and down the block, loud enough to make the freshly fallen snow quiver and pack in a little tighter.

There was no one in sight. No one. Granted, it was getting late, but that’s still an oddity in Chicago.

I watched as Fitz took in the whole place and came to the same conclusion I had the first time I’d seen it—the obvious squalor, the heavy security, the criminally loud music with no one attempting to stop it.

“This is territory,” he said, coming to an abrupt halt. “I’m alone, I’m unarmed, and I’m not going there.”

“Vice Lords,” I said. “Or they were a few years ago. They’re a long-term gang, so I assume they still are.”

“Still not going there,” said Fitz.

“Come on, Fitz,” I said. “They aren’t so bad. For a gang. They almost always have a good reason to kill the people they kill. And they keep the peace on this street, if you aren’t too far behind on your payments.”

“Yeah. They sound swell.”

I shrugged, though he couldn’t see it. “Police response time for this place is way the hell after everything has already happened. People here are more likely to get help from a gang member than a cop if they’re in trouble.”

“You’re a fan?”

“No,” I said. “It shouldn’t be like this. The gangs are dangerous criminals. They rule through force and fear. But at least they don’t pretend to be anything else.”

Fitz grimaced and looked down to stare at his open palms for a moment. Then he said, “Guess I’m not in a place where I can throw stones.”

“You couldn’t break anything if you did,” I said. “You’re of no use to me dead, kid. We’re not going down the block. First place on the right. If you don’t walk past there, you won’t be crossing any lines.”

Fitz frowned. “The place with the metal shutters?”

“Yeah. You remember what I told you to say?”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember the script,” Fitz said, scowling. “Can we get this over with?”

“I’m not the one who can knock on the door.”

He scowled more deeply and started walking.

The building he went to was part of a larger building that had once held four small businesses. One had been a clinic, one a lawyer, and one a small grocery. They were gutted and empty now. Only the fourth one remained. The metal shutter over the doorway held the only thing that looked like actual art: a nearly life-sized portrait of a rather dumpy angel, the hem of his robe dirty and frayed, his messy hair doing nothing to conceal his oncoming baldness. He held a doughnut in one hand and had a sawed-off shotgun pointing straight toward the viewer in the other.

“Heh,” I said. “That’s new.”

Fitz regarded the painting warily. “What is this place again?”

“A detective agency,” I said. “Ragged Angel Investigations.”

“Looks kinda closed,” Fitz said.

“Nick can’t afford an apartment,” I said. “He sleeps here. He drinks sometimes. You might have to be loud.”

Fitz eyed the block and then the door. “Yeah. Great.” He rapped on the metal shutter. Nothing happened. He repeated it, knocking slightly louder and longer. Still nothing.

“Ticktock, kid.”

He glowered in my direction. Then he started pounding on the shutter in a heavy, steady rhythm.

Maybe five minutes later, there was the click of a speaker, evidently small enough to be concealed virtually in plain sight. “What?” said a cranky, whiskey-roughened voice.

“Um,” Fitz said. “Are you Nick Christian?”

“Who wants to know?”

“My name is Fitz,” the kid said. He’d pitched his voice slightly higher than usual. It made him sound a hell of a lot younger. “Harry Dresden said that if I was ever in trouble, I could come to you.”

There was a long silence. Then Nick’s voice said heavily, “Dresden is history.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Fitz said. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Nick sounded annoyed. “Dammit. He told you to say that, didn’t he?”

Fitz looked slightly bemused. “Well. Yes, actually.”

“I am getting too old for this crap,” he growled. Then there were several loud clicks and a short, heavy screech of metal, and the shutter rolled up.

Nick Christian hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen him. He was short, out of shape, well past his fiftieth birthday, and had sharp, quick, dark eyes that seemed to notice everything. His bald spot was larger. So was his stomach. He was dressed in a white undershirt and boxer shorts, and he held an old wooden baseball bat in his right hand. He shivered and glared at Fitz.

“Well, boy. Get in out of the cold. And keep your hands in sight, or I’ll brain you.”

Fitz held his hands up in plain sight and went in. I followed. There was a threshold at the doorway, but it was flimsy as hell, and felt more like a sheet of Saran Wrap than a wall. The muddling of business and home life in the same space was probably responsible. I pushed through it, following Fitz.

“Right,” Nick said. “Close the shutter and the door. Turn all the locks.”

Fitz eyed Nick for a moment. Streetwise and cynical, the kid didn’t like the idea of locking himself into a strange building with a strange old man.

“It’s all right, Fitz,” I said. “He might kick your ass out his door if you give him trouble, but he won’t do anything to hurt you.”

Fitz glowered in my general direction again, but he turned and followed Nick’s instructions.

We stood in his one-room office. It looked . . . Hell, it looked almost exactly like mine had, though I’d never compared the two in my head before. Old filing cabinets, a coffee machine, a desk, and a couple of chairs that had been pushed all the way to one wall to make room for a simple folding cot on an aluminum frame. Nick also had a computer and a television set, features my office never had. Nick was no wizard—just an old detective with a set of iron principles and a self-appointed mandate to help people find their lost children.

There were also seven pictures on his wall, every one of them an eight-by-ten school photo of a child between the ages of six and thirteen. The first few were faded, the hair and clothing styles in them clearly aged.

Nick went around to the back of his desk, sat down, pulled a bottle of rye from the top drawer, and slugged back a swallow. He capped it, put it back, and eyed Fitz warily. “I don’t get involved in Dresden’s line of work,” he said. “I know my limits.”

“The magic stuff,” Fitz said.

Nick shuddered and glanced at his top drawer. “Yeah. That. So if you came here for that, you’re out of luck.”

“No,” Fitz said. “It’s about gangs. Dresden said you knew them.”

Nick shrugged one shoulder. “Some.”

“A man I know was abducted,” Fitz said. “There’s a description of the guy we think did it.” Fitz dished out what I remembered about the thug who had broken into Morty’s house.

Nick listened to it all without saying a word. Then he nodded once. Then he asked, “Who is this man to you?”

“No idea,” Fitz said. “You’re the expert.”

“Not the kidnapper.” Nick sighed. “The victim.”

Fitz hardly hesitated. “My uncle.”

Nick mused over that. Then he said, “I am too old to get up in the middle of the night and get conned. Get out.”

“Wait,” Fitz said, holding out a hand. “Wait, please.”

Nick opened the top drawer again, but this time he came out with an old 1911. He didn’t point it at Fitz. “Good try, kid. But I’ve been in this town a while. Walk back to the door and let yourself out.”

“Dammit,” I muttered. “Fitz, listen to me. Tell him this, word for word.”

Fitz listened, nodded, and then said, “I can’t tell you everything for a reason, Mr. Christian. Dresden said you and he had an understanding. That you wanted nothing to do with his side of the street.”

“I don’t,” he said. “Get out.”

I fed Fitz his next line.

“He also said that you owed him a favor.”

Nick narrowed his eyes to slits. “What favor?”

Fitz listened to me, then said, “All the money and fame the Astor case brought you.”

Nick arched an eyebrow. “All the . . .” He looked away and shook his head. He couldn’t keep the smile off his mouth, until he finally snorted. When he spoke, there was laughter under his words. “That sounds like Harry.”

The Astor case had been about a little girl lost. Her parents cared more about the fame of having an abducted daughter than they did about her, and when she ran off one day, they hired the child-recovery specialist Nick Christian and his apprentice, Harry Dresden, to find her. We did. She hadn’t been kidnapped, but the Astors had reported her so, and, in the absence of an actual perpetrator, fingered Nick and me. It had been a trick and a half to get her safely back into her parents’ custody without going to jail. There was a lawsuit afterward. The judge threw it out. But, all in all, finding that little girl had cost Nick about two thousand bucks.

Nick hadn’t wanted to take the case. I had talked him into it. He had wanted to cut and run the moment I confirmed the kid was at liberty. I had talked him into seeing it through, being sure she was safe. When I’d completed my apprenticeship, Nick’s graduation present had been to forgive me the two grand I owed him.

“You were tight with him?” Nick asked.

“He was sort of my adviser,” Fitz said. “Sometimes it’s almost like he’s right there next to me, still.”

Nick grunted. “Investigation apprentice or the other kind?”

Fitz put on a sober face. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Hngh,” Nick said, nodding. “Heard he’d picked up an apprentice. You’re holding back to keep me distanced from the situation.”

“Yes.”

“And you just want the information? You don’t want me to work the field on it?”

“That’s right.”

“A wwww,” Nick said. He scratched at his ear and said, “Yeah. I guess. What else can you tell me about this guy?”

I fed Fitz his lines. “He was crazy.”

Nick snorted. “Whole hell of a lot of gangers are crazy, kid. Or the next best thing.”

“Less money-drugs-sex-violence crazy,” Fitz said. “More creepy-cult crazy.”

“Hngh,” Nick said. Lines appeared on his brow. “There’s one, where they all wear the hoodies with the hoods up all the time. Got rolling maybe three or four years back. They don’t call themselves anything, but the gangs call them the Big Hoods. No one knows much about them.”

“Perfect,” I said to Fitz. “Sounds like the assholes we’re looking for. Ask him where they’re set up.”

“A tunnel under the Eisenhower Expressway, on the south end of the Meatpacking District. The other gangs think they’re crazy to be where the cops move so freely, but the Big Hoods never seem to attract any police attention.” He scrunched up his eyes. “Don’t think they even claim any territory. That’s all I got.”

“Because they aren’t a gang, per se,” I said. “Excellent, Fitz. Let’s move.”

“Thank you,” Fitz said to Nick.

“Thank Dresden. Wouldn’t have said that much to anyone else.”

“I’ll do that.” Fitz stared intently at Nick for a moment and then said, “What do you do here?”

“As a private cop?” Nick asked. “Take some cruddy work to keep the lights on—divorces and so on. But mostly I look for lost kids.”

“Doing it a while?” Fitz asked.

“Thirty years.”

“Find any?”

“Plenty.”

“Find any in one piece?”

Nick stared hard at Fitz for a long time. Then he pointed a finger up and behind him, to the row of portraits on the wall.

“Seven?” Fitz asked.

“Seven,” Nick said.

“In thirty years? You live like this and . . . Seven? That’s it? That’s all?”

Nick leaned back in his chair and gave Fitz a small smile. “That’s enough.”

Outside, Fitz said, to me, “He’s crazy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And he helps people.”

Fitz frowned and moved hurriedly back out of the Vice Lords’ domain. He was silent for several blocks, seemingly content to walk beside me and think. Eventually, he looked up and asked, “You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. I helped you. Pay up.”

“Okay,” I said. “Take a right at the next corner.”

“Why?”

“So I can introduce you to someone who will help.”

Fitz made a rude sound. “You really love not telling people things, don’t you?”

“I don’t love it, so much as I’m just really good at it.”

Fitz snorted. “Does this guy drink, too?”

“Nah. Sober as a priest.”

“Fine,” Fitz sighed, and kept trudging.