We got back into Chicago in the witching hour.
Ancient Mai and the Wardens were waiting at the dock, to escort Ebenezar, Injun Joe, and Morgan to Edinburgh—“in case of trouble.” They left within three minutes of me tying the Water Beetle to the dock.
I watched them go, and sipped water through a straw. Listens-to-Wind had cleaned my wounds and slapped several stitches onto my face, including a couple on my lower lip. He told me that I hadn’t lost the eye, and smeared the entire thing with a paste that looked like guano and smelled like honey. Then he’d made me a shoo-in for first place in the International Walking Wounded Idiot competition, by covering that side of my face and part of my scalp with another bandage that wrapped all the way around my head. Added to the one I needed for the damn lump the skinwalker had given me, I looked like the subject of recent brain surgery, only surlier.
Will and Georgia were sleeping it off under a spread sleeping bag on an inflatable mattress on the rear deck of the Water Beetle, when I walked down the dock, over to the parking lot, and up to a parked Mercedes.
Vince rolled down his window and squinted at me. “Did you curse everyone who desecrated your tomb, or just the English-speaking guys?”
“You just lost your tip,” I told him. “Did you get it?”
He passed me a manila envelope without comment. Then he leaned over and opened his passenger door, and Mouse hopped down from the passenger seat and came eagerly around the car to greet me, wagging his tail. I knelt down and gave the big beastie a hug.
“Your dog is weird,” Vince said.
Mouse was licking my face. “Yeah. Whatcha gonna do?”
Vince grinned, and for just a second, he didn’t look at all nondescript. He had the kind of smile that could change the climate of a room. I stood up and nodded to him. “You know where to send the bill.”
“Yep,” he said, and drove away.
I went back down to the boat and poured some Coke into the now-empty water bottle. I sipped at it carefully so that I wouldn’t break open one of the cuts and bleed some more. I was too tired to clean it up.
Molly fussed around the boat for a few minutes, making sure it was tied down, and then took two sets of spare shorts and T-shirts from the cabin’s tiny closet and left them where Georgia and Will would find them. She finally wound up sitting down on the other bunk across the cabin from me.
“The shield,” I said quietly. “When did you use it?”
She swallowed. “The skinw—the creature threw Thomas into the cabin and he . . .” She shuddered. “Harry. He’d changed. It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t him.” She licked her lips. “He sat up and started sniffing the air like . . . like a hungry wolf or something. Looking around for me. And his body was . . .” She blushed. “He was hard. And he did something and all of a sudden I wanted to just rip my clothes off. And I knew he wasn’t in control. And I knew he would kill me. But . . . I wanted to anyway. It was so intense. . . .”
“So you popped the shield.”
She swallowed and nodded. “I think if I’d waited much longer . . . I wouldn’t have been able to think of it.” She looked up at me and back down. “He was changed, Harry. It wasn’t him anymore.”
I left nothing behind. You don’t have words for the things I did to him.
Thomas.
I put the drink aside and folded my arms over my stomach. “You did good, kid.”
She gave me a tired smile. An awkward silence fell. Molly seemed to search for something to say. “They’re . . . they’re going to try Morgan tomorrow,” she said quietly. “I heard Mai say so.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“They expect us to be there.”
“Oh,” I said, “we will be.”
“Harry . . . we failed,” she said. She swallowed. “An innocent man is going to die. The killer is still loose. That entire battle took place and didn’t accomplish anything.”
I looked up at her. Then, moving deliberately, I opened the manila envelope Vince had given me.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Surveillance photos,” I said quietly. “Shot through a telephoto lens from a block away.”
She blinked at me. “What?”
“I hired Vince to take some pictures,” I said. “Well, technically Murphy hired him, because I was worried about my phone being bugged. But I’m getting the bill, so really, it was me.”
“Pictures? What pictures?”
“Of the Way to Chicago from Edinburgh,” I said. “Where it opens up into that alley behind the old meatpacking factory. I had Vince take pictures of anyone coming out of it, right after I informed Edinburgh about the meeting on the island.”
Molly frowned. “But . . . why?”
“Didn’t give them time to think, kid,” I said. “I was fairly sure the killer was in Edinburgh. So I made sure he or she had to come to Chicago. I made sure he didn’t have time to get here by alternate means.”
I drew out the pictures and started flipping through them. Vince had done a crisp, professional job. You could have used them for portraits, much less identification. McCoy, Mai, Listens-to-Wind, Bjorn Bjorngunnarson , the other Wardens were all pictured, both in a wide shot, walking in a Right Stuff group, and in tight focus on each face. “And I made sure Vince and Mouse were there to watch the only fast way into town from Scotland.”
While I did that, Molly puzzled through the logic. “Then . . . that entire scenario on the island . . . the meeting, the fight . . . the entire thing was a ploy?”
“Wile E. Coyote,” I said wisely. “Suuuuuper Genius.”
Molly shook her head. “But . . . you didn’t tell anyone?”
“Nobody. Had to look good,” I said. “Didn’t know who the traitor might be, so I couldn’t afford to give anyone any warning.”
“Wow, Obi-Wan,” the grasshopper said. “I’m . . . sort of impressed.”
“The smackdown-on-the-island plan might have worked,” I said. “And I needed it to get a crack at the skinwalker on friendly ground. But lately I’ve started thinking that you don’t ever plan on a single path to victory. You set things up so that you’ve got more than one way to win.
“What I really needed was a weapon I could use against the killer.” I stared at the last photo for a moment, and then flipped it over and showed it to her. “And now,” I said, a snarl coming unbidden into my voice, “I’ve got one.”
Molly looked at the picture blankly. “Oh,” she said. “Who’s that?”
Chapter Forty-seven
Morgan’s trial was held the next day, but since Scotland was six hours ahead of Chicago , I wound up getting about three hours’ worth of sleep sitting up in a chair. My head and face hurt too much when I lay all the way down.
When I got back to the apartment with Molly, Luccio was gone.
I had been pretty sure she would be.
I got up the next morning and took stock of myself in the mirror. What wasn’t under a white bandage was mostly bruised. That was probably the concussion grenade. I was lucky. If I’d have been standing where Lara had been when Binder’s grenade went off, the overpressure would probably have killed me. I was also lucky that we’d been outdoors, where there was nothing to contain and focus the blast. I didn’t feel lucky, but I was.
It could have been a fragmentation grenade spitting out a lethal cloud of shrapnel—though at least my duster would probably have offered me some protection from that. Against the blast wave of an explosion, it didn’t do jack. Having gained something like respect for Binder’s know-how, when it came to mayhem, I realized that he may have been thinking exactly that when he picked his gear for the evening.
I couldn’t shower without getting my stitches wet, so after changing my bandages, I took a birdbath in the sink. I wore a button-up shirt, since I would probably compress my brain if I tried to pull on a tee. I also grabbed my formal black Council robe with its blue stole and my Warden’s cape. I did my best to put my hair in order, though only about a third of it was showing. And I shaved.