Turn Coat

Chapter Eighteen

The handy part about riding with a cop was that she has the cool toys to make it simpler to get places quickly, even on a busy Chicago morning. The car was still bouncing from sweeping into the street from the little parking lot next to my apartment when she slapped a whirling blue light on the roof and started a siren. That part was pretty neat.

The rest of the ride wasn’t nearly as fun. Moving “fast” through a crowded city is a relative term, and in Chicago it meant a lot of rapid acceleration and sudden braking. We went through half a dozen alleys, hopped one bad intersection by driving up over the curb through a parking lot, and swerved through traffic at such a rate that my freshly imbibed coffee and donuts started swirling and sloshing around in a distinctly unpleasant fashion.

“Kill the noise and light,” I said a couple of blocks from the storage park.

She did it, asking, “Why?”

“Because whatever is there, there are several of them and Thomas didn’t think he could handle them.” I drew my .44 out of my duster pocket and checked it. “Nothing’s on fire. So let’s hope that nothing’s gone down yet and we’ll be all sneaky-like until we know what’s happening.”

“Still with the revolvers,” Murphy said, shaking her head. She drove past the street leading to the storage units and went one block past it instead before she turned and parked. “When are you going to get a serious gun?”

“Look,” I said, “just because you’ve got twice as many bullets as me—”

“Three times as many,” Murphy said. “The SIG holds twenty.”

“Twenty!? Look the point is that—”

“And it reloads a lot faster. You’ve just got some loose rounds at the bottom of your pocket, right? No speed loader?”

I stuck the gun back in my pocket and tried to make sure none of the bullets fell out as we got out of the car. “That’s not the point.”

Murphy shook her head. “Damn, Dresden.”

“I know the revolver is going to work,” I said, starting toward the storage park. “I’ve seen automatics jam before.”

“New ones?”

“Well, no . . .”

Murphy had placed her own gun in the pocket of her light sports jacket. “It’s a good thing you’ve got options. That’s all I’m saying.”

“If a revolver was good enough for Indiana Jones,” I said, “it’s good enough for me.”

“He was a fictionalcharacter, Harry.” Her mouth curved up in a small smile. “And he had a whip.”

I eyed her.

Her eyes sparkled. “Do you have a whip, Dresden?”

I eyed her even more. “Murphy . . . are you coming on to me?”

She laughed, her smile white and fierce, as we rounded a corner and found the white rental van where Thomas had left it, across the street from the storage park.

Two men in similar grey suits and grey fedoras were standing nonchalantly in the summer-morning sunshine on the sidewalk next to the van.

On second glance, they were wearing the exact same grey suit, and the exact same grey hat, in fact.

“Feds?” I asked Murphy quietly as we turned down the sidewalk.

“Even feds shop at different stores,” she said. “I’m getting a weird vibe here, Harry.”

I turned my head and checked out the storage park through the ten-foot-high black metal fencing that surrounded it.

I saw another pair of men in grey suits going down one row of storage units. Two more pairs were on the next. And two more on the one after that.

“That makes twelve,” Murphy murmured to me. She hadn’t even turned her head. Murphy has cop powers of observation. “All in the same suit.”

“Yeah, they’re from out of town,” I said. “Lot of times when beings from the Nevernever want to blend in, they pick a look and go with it.” I thought about it for a couple of steps. “The fact that they all picked the same look might mean they don’t have much going for them in the way of individuality.”

“Meaning I’d only have to go on a date with one of them to know about the rest?” Murphy asked.

“Meaning that you need a sense of selfto have a sense of self-preservation.”

Murphy exhaled slowly. “That’s just great.” She moved a hand toward her other pocket, where I knew she kept her cell. “More manpower might help.”

“Might set them off, too,” I said. “I’m just saying, if the music starts, don’t get soft and shoot somebody in the leg or something.”

“You’ve seen too many movies, Harry,” she said. “If cops pull the trigger, it’s because they intend to kill someone. We leave the trick shots to SWAT snipers and Indiana Jones.”

I looked at the booth beside the entrance to the storage park. There was normally an attendant there, during the day. But there was no one in the booth—or in sight on the street, for that matter.

“Where is your unit?” Murphy asked.

I waggled my eyebrows at her. “Right where it’s always been, dollface.”

She made a noise that sounded like someone about to throw up.

“First row past the middle,” I said. “Down at the far end of the park.”

“We have to walk past those two jokers by the van to see it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t think these suits have found it yet. They’re still here, and still looking. If they had located Morgan, they’d be gone already.” As we approached, I noticed that the two tires next to the curb on the white rental van were flat. “They’re worried about a getaway.”

“Are you sure they aren’t human?” Murphy asked.

“Um. Reasonably?”

She shook her head. “Not good enough. Are they from the spirit world or not?”

“Might not be able to tell until we get closer,” I said. “Might even need to touch one of them.”

She took a slow, deep breath. “As soon as you’re certain,” she said, “tell me. Shake your head if you’re sure they aren’t human. Nod if you can’t tell or if they are.”

We were less than twenty feet away from the van and there was no time to argue or ask questions. “Okay.”

I took a few more steps and ran smack into a curtain of nauseating energy so thick and heavy that it made my hair stand on end—a dead giveaway of a hostile supernatural presence. I twitched my head in a quick shake, as the two men in grey suits spun around at precisely the same time at precisely the same speed to face me. Both of them opened their mouths.

Before any sound could come out, Murphy produced her sidearm and shot them both in the head.

Twice.

Double-tapping the target like that is a professional killer’s policy. There’s a small chance that a bullet to the head might strike a target at an oblique angle and carom off of the skull. It isn’t a huge possibility—but a double tap drops the odds from “very unlikely” to “virtually impossible.”

Murphy was a cop and a competition shooter, and less than five feet away from her targets. She did the whole thing in one smooth move, the shots coming as a single pulsing hammer of sound.

The men in grey suits didn’t have time to so much as register her presence, much less do anything to avoid their fate. Clear liquid exploded from the backs of their skulls, and both men dropped to the sidewalk like rag dolls, their bodies and outfits deforming like a snowman in the spring, leaving behind nothing but ectoplasm, the translucent, gooey gel that was the matter of the Nevernever.

“Hell’s bells,” I choked, as my adrenaline spiked after the fact.

Murphy kept the gun on the two until it was obvious that they weren’t going to take up a second career as headless horsemen. Then she looked up and down the street, her cold blue eyes scanning for more threats as she popped the almost-full clip from the SIG and slapped a fully loaded one back in.

She may look like somebody’s favorite aunt, but Murph can play hardball.

A couple of seconds later, what sounded like the howls of a gang of rabid band saws filled the air. There were a lot more than twelve of them.

“Come on!” I shouted, and sprinted forward.

The grey suits weren’t individualists. It wasn’t unthinkable that they would possess some kind of shared consciousness. Whacking the look-outs had obviously both alerted and enraged the others, and I figured that they would respond the way any colony-consciousness does when one of its members gets attacked.

The grey suits were coming to kill us.

We couldn’t afford to run, not when they were this close to Morgan and Molly, but if the grey suits caught us on the open street, we were hosed. Our only chance was to move forward, fast, to get into the storage park while they went screaming out of it, looking for us. If we were quick enough, we might have time to get to the storage unit, collect Morgan and company, and make a quick escape through the portal in the floor and into the Nevernever.

I pounded across the street and through the entrance, with Murphy on my heels. I threw myself forward as the howls grew louder, and made it into the center row just as maybe twenty or twenty-five grey suits came rushing out of the other rows. Some of them saw us and slammed on the brakes, throwing up gravel with their expensive shoes, putting up a new tone of howl. The others belatedly began to turn as well, and then we were all the way into the center row of storage units, still moving at a dead run.

The grey suits rushed after us, but Murphy and I had a good forty-yard lead, and they didn’t appear to be superhumanly light on their feet. We were going to make it.

Then I remembered that the door to the storage bay was locked shut.

I fumbled for the key as I ran, trying to pull it out of the front pocket of my jeans so that it would be ready. I figured that if I didn’t get the door unlocked and open on the first try, the grey suits would catch up to us and kill us both.

So naturally I dropped the damn key.

I cursed and slid to a stop, slipping on the gravel. I looked around wildly for the dropped key, horribly aware of the mob of grey suits rushing toward us, now in eerie silence.

“Harry!” Murphy said.

“I know!”

She appeared beside me in a shooting stance, aiming at the nearest grey suit. “Harry!”

“I know!”

Metal gleamed amongst the gravel and I swooped down on it as Murphy opened fire with precise, measured shots, sending the nearest grey suit into a tumbling sprawl. The others just vaulted over him and kept coming.

I’d found the key, but it was already too late.

Neither of us was going to make it to the shelter of my hideaway.