AUTHOR'S NOTE: HARRY DRESDEN Y'ALL.
Set Pre-SPN Satanpocalypse, Post-Ghost Story, with flashbacks circa Storm Front. This particular tale takes place during (and is written in the same style as) the events of Unfinished Business.
This chapter is set after Storm Front.
[Fifteen Years Earlier]
Hospitals were not Karrin's favorite place. Especially the ER. Television programs about good-looking and well-rested doctors made it seem glamorous but in the real, makeup-less world, it was hypochondriacs with head colds, addicts trying to score, and little kids with anxious parents.
The dark-haired toddler with the neon crazy straw stuck in his nose waved at her again. Murphy waved back. His mother was on the verge of an aneurysm, but Crazy Straw seemed content to color in his Highlights magazine.
She lingered near the exit and waited for a text message from Carmichael. Karrin had managed to get the interloping Mister Winchester, re-hydrated and bullet-free, transferred to SI, and she had managed to dodge the overly-cheerful ER discharge nurse with the wheelchair.
"Where the hell are you, Ron?" she hissed.
Cheerful Nurse wheeled by, looking around – Murphy ducked around the pillar she leaned against. The phone in her pocket buzzed. She tucked her release form under her slinged-and-bandaged arm and dug her cell out of her jacket.
Your ride should be there soon. He insisted.
She shoved her phone into her pocket and peered out the double glass doors.
"Oh god."
A ...mostly-blue VW Beetle pulled under the hospital awning and parked, one wheel up on the curb, windows down. A very tall man got out, leaning back against the passenger door as he read through a stapled stack of papers. His hair was dark and rumpled, he hadn't bothered to shave and his clothes were wrinkled, as if someone had rolled him out of REM sleep and into the big black coat that looked like he stole it off the set of Tombstone.
And as if he felt her eyes on him, he looked up, grinned and waved her out.
Murphy glanced around to make sure she wasn't being tailed by the ER nurse and darted out the doors.
Harry Dresden met her halfway and walked with her toward the car, one step for every two of hers. "Murph. Are we being followed?"
"They tried to put me in a wheelchair."
It was warm out and a thunderstorm threatened, a few raindrops were already pattering down outside of the hospital awning, sizzling on the asphalt, though the afternoon sun was still fighting through the clouds. A Foo Fighters song crackled through the Beetle's old speakers.
Dresden stared down at the sling on her arm and the blood on her clothes and his expression darkened. "The audacity."
"I'm okay," Karrin said. She waved the hospital discharge paper above her head where he could read it. "See. Just dislocated. Couple stitches. Regular Saturday night stuff."
"We need to hang out more often."
"So I can get poisoned and stitches?" She glared up at him. A perturbed, guilty line creased his brow as he handed her the stapled papers. She opened the passenger door. Long-legged strides took him around the car and into the driver's seat before she could get in, which was just as well.
There was a bag from Burger King and a drink in the passenger seat.
"You like diet, right? There's a burger and onion rings if you want 'em."
Harry was annoyingly nice when he wasn't getting caught in compromising positions at crime scenes. She picked up the food and got in the car, biting her lip.
"Thanks."
"No problem. Butters called me in pretty early this morning to take a look at the creepy corpses and Carmichael just so happened to be there when I showed up. I told him I'd be happy to take a look at the guy's file if he wanted, pro bono, and see if I could come up with anything."
"Really. Ron was okay with that?" Karrin stared into the paper bag for a moment. The food smelled amazing; she had missed breakfast and lunch. She grabbed the burger and unwrapped it clumsily with one hand.
"Well, he was okay with the fact that I said I'd do it for free."
The car stalled when he shifted gears. Harry swore and keyed the ignition, swore again, slammed the steering wheel with his palm. The Beetle's engine coughed and sputtered and the car rolled to a stop on the on-ramp. The Jeep behind them honked.
Karrin licked ketchup from her fingertips and flipped through the pages of the dossier Carmichael had sent with Harry, reading as she balanced the burger on her knee. There wasn't much on this Winchester guy at all. It was actually pretty boring. As if his record had been scrubbed, which was a little less boring. Who had that kind of access to national criminal databases?
The engine let out a rattle that sounded ominously like one of the zombie-vampire-things she had met the night before.
"Should I get out and push?"
Dresden turned toward her, glaring and trying not to smile and failing at both. She took a long drink from the Diet Coke before starting in on the onion rings. The little car finally started and he slammed his foot down on the accelerator and waved a one fingered salute out the window at the Jeep's driver, who tailgated them onto the freeway.
"So do you know this mystery John guy?"
"Nope."
"Ron couldn't find much on him, apparently. Served in the military, a few previous marks on his record. Fights, mostly." She finished the last few bites of hamburger, crumpled the wrapper and threw it back in the bag. "Found him injured on that roof. He choked out one of those things with my rosary and then chopped its head off."
"I saw that one in the morgue. Pretty impressive." He stomped on the gas again. "Probably a hunter."
"A what?" Karrin asked, wiggling out of the sling. Her jacket was too warm and the bloodstains were starting to smell a little rank.
"There are some...regular people who travel around the country. Here," Harry pulled her sleeve and tossed the jacket into the back seat. "Hunting the things that go bump."
"Normal people. Like me."
He smiled. "Are you, though?"
"Shut up." Murphy threw the sling out the half-open window. Her gray collared shirt didn't have as many stains on it, but it still covered her shoulder rig; technically, she was off-duty. The nurse had cut most of the left sleeve off before they x-rayed her arm. Karrin rolled the ragged edge up neatly over the top of the bandage on her wrist. "So it's kind of like what you do, only mobile and even less legal?"
"Pretty much. What?" Dresden demanded when she snorted.
"I just pictured you with a Great Dane and a Mystery Machine."
"I'll have you know," Harry said, flicking the turn signal with mock indignation, "I've never gotten so faded I thought Old Man Jenkins was actually a ghost."
She found this a little hard to believe, coming from a man with that haircut and a Led Zeppelin t-shirt.
Dresden sighed. "What?"
"You drive a Volkswagen and your sense of fashion ended abruptly in 1978. The evidence is stacked against you."
"Jinkies." He had a genuine smile, which was rare in a business rife with jaded, sarcastic jerks.
"So what were those things?"
"Judging from how disgustingly dead they were, and the fact that they were...y'know, eating people, I'd say Black Court vampires. Full-on Transylvania-style bullshit. The living dead. Nosferatu," he said with Bela Lugosi drama, wiggling his fingers and eyebrows and steering with one knee. Harry Dresden was probably going to get her killed in a really ridiculous way. "Vampires come in lots of flavors, like chewing gum, or the flu."
"So not zombies." Carmichael was going to be disappointed.
"No. Zombies require necromancers in the immediate vicinity. You would have noticed." He made a face. "Believe me. Necromancers loved to be noticed. They are, as a rule, kinda douchey."
"Like wizards," she mused.
"Yeah, like..." he said absently, then looked over at her, hurt. "Hey!"
"Kidding."
"Next time you get a case that weird, you should call me. Immediately." They passed a bus doing seventy. "You know, Murph, there are these newfangled things called 'telephones'. They even make ones that will fit in your pocket, now. Crazy, right?"
Karrin blinked at him. "You do realize I carry a loaded gun at all times, right?"
He smiled fiercely, undeterred. "If the phones don't work, I'm pretty sure I've got two tin cans and a really long string in the trunk—"
"And, even without the gun, I could still take you apart."
"Oh, I've got it!" Harry snapped his fingers. "Hear me out on this one, we could find an owl... "
"How much do I owe you for helping out with this—"
"You're not paying me for this."
"You drove all the way across town."
"It's not that far," he swept one hand out toward the windshield. There was traffic as far as she could see, and they were in the middle of it. The Beetle's little engine rasped. Lazy raindrops spattered against the windshield.
"Well, then I guess you'll have to let me buy you a beer."
"I...I guess that'd be okay. Here," he said again as he reached across the tiny car and opened the glove box. He held out a key, a copied one, and a strand of leather with a little wooden shield hanging from it. "You might need this if something happens and you need to get past the wards at my place again. Make sure you have both if you try to open the door or, uh. Well, you saw."
She wasn't sure what wards were, exactly, but his front door had zapped the bejeezus out of him when she tried to get him in the place with a concussion.
"Shield?" She asked, looking at the wooden charm hanging from his fingers. "Are we part of the Avengers Initiative now?"
"Closet nerd. It's okay to come out now, Karrin. Things are better." He gave her a sideways look, calculating. "Avengers. Psh. You're a DC fan if there ever was one."
Sometimes Dresden was so ridiculously good at his job, she wanted to punch him in the face. She wasn't so sure about magic, what it was or how it worked. Most of what he said was absolutely bizarre. And most of what he said ended up being absolutely right. Deduction, for the majority, was something learned, but for Harry, something in his dorky wizard brain did it automatically. Like breathing or blinking.
She wondered, sometimes, if he even realized how good he was and, if it ever occurred to him that she wasn't allowed to pay him what he was worth.
"Here," he said, putting it in her hand. "'Cause you're a cop. Get it?"
"Oh," A lot of effort had been put into it – the little carved piece of wood, no bigger than a quarter. It was shaped like a kite shield, simple, with a five-pointed star carved onto the front. There was a K carved into the back, and it was heavier than it looked, warmer than it should have been, like it had been worn against skin instead of stored in a glove box. "I like it, thanks."
Harry kept his eyes on the road, the stalled traffic had finally started to move again. "Hey, I still feel bad about throwing up in your office. And the thing with with the elevator and you getting poisoned. All of that."
He had shut down the drug ring. He hadn't done it the right way, but he had done it. God, the whole thing had just been strange. And it was only getting stranger, and he was the only person she knew who had any inside information that wasn't completely bogus. Strange as he was himself.
She tucked the key and the charm into her pocket with her broken rosary.
"For god's sake, Harry, you got hit in the head with a bat. It's okay to throw up if you have a concussion. The nurse-fantasy remarks were a little uncalled-for, though."
He stared innocently out the window. "I don't remember that."
"And the elevator thing? Thanks for reminding me, I still owe you an ass-kicking for that—"
"What's that Murph? Can't hear you!" He turned up the staticky radio and sang along, badly. "JUST A SMALL TOWN GIRL, LIVING IN A LONELY WOOORLD, SHE TOOK THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN GOING ANYWHERE —"
Murphy smacked him on the shoulder as they pulled into the SI's meager, potholed lot. "Park over there."
One of her officers was hauling two boys, barely teenagers, out of the back of a squad car. One had dirty blond hair and a spattering of freckles across a stubborn nose. The other was younger but gangly, with darker hair and a guilty look. He stared at his feet.
"Rawlins." She pushed the Beetle's door shut and walked over. The officer was a stocky black man and the boys were nearly as tall as he was, but Rawlins was Chicago-born and from a long line of cops, and didn't take shit from anybody. "This isn't juvie."
He started laughing. "Caught these two trying to climb around on the big-ass dinosaur down at the museum. And apparently they broke into the stadium last night looking for, and I quote," he grinned, "'that badass curse.' Night manager sent over the security tape. Stallings says it's popcorn-worthy."
"That badass curse," she and Dresden said in stereo. "At the stadium."
"The museum people were trying to get a hold of their folks, but this one," Rawlins shook Freckles by the shoulder, "Keeps telling me his name is Eddie Van Halen, and he's wiggled out of the handcuffs twice, and this one," he shook Gangly, "Won't say nothin' except to invoke his Fourth Amendment rights. Should have seen the knives I took off him."
Their clothes were worn and a little outdated, but clean. Freckles hair was neat, almost military. He watched her with grass-green eyes and stood as tall as he could, putting as much of himself between them and Gangly as he could; his younger brother, probably.
"Lieutenant, next time you decide to have a shootout on a rooftop, wait until Monday, will you?" Officer Rawlins herded the boys a little closer to the door. "I got called in to work the scene. What a mess. Interrupted my night off with the lady."
Freckles made a pained face and a disgusted noise.
"Well, you should have thought about that before you started trying to ride the goddamn fossils."
Harry collapsed against the squad car, cackling.
"Curse at the stadium, huh? Is that what kids do on weekends now?" Karrin pulled the dossier from Dresden's hand and pointed at a line. "What do you think, Stilts?"
Married. Wife deceased – house fire. Two children.
Dresden shrugged, nodded. "I'd say there's a resemblance."
She turned the page around and showed the photo to the boys. "You know this guy?"
Freckles' stubborn look softened and Gangly's dark eyes flickered toward the other boy.
"That's what I thought. Bring the Hardy Boys in, take the cuffs off. Pretty sure we're holding their dad."
to be continued...