to me and said, “Fine, Dresden. I’ll help. And in return, I expect you to get your allies to look out for me.”
“Deal,” I said. I looked at Sir Stuart. “Thank you.”
“One hour,” Mort said. “You get one hour.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” Mort echoed, evidently speaking mostly to himself. “I mean, it’s not like I’m trying to join the Council or anything. It’s one hour. Just one little hour. What could happen in one hour?”
And that’s how I knew that Mort was telling the whole truth when he said he wasn’t a hero.
Heroes know better than to hand the universe lines like that.
Chapter Seven
Mort drove one of those little hybrid cars that, when not running on gasoline, was fueled by idealism. It was made out of crepe paper and duct tape and boasted a computer system that looked like it could have run the NYSE and NORAD, with enough attention left over to play tic-tac-toe. Or possibly Global Thermonuclear War.
“Kinda glad I’m dead,” I muttered, getting into the car by the simple expedient of stepping through the passenger’s door as if it had been open. “If I were still breathing, I’d feel like I was taking my life into my hands here. This thing’s an egg. And not one of those nice, safe, hard-boiled eggs. A crispy one.”
“Says the guy who drove Herbie’s trailer-park cousin around for more than ten years,” Mort sniped back.
“Gentlemen,” Stuart said, settling rather gingerly into the tiny backseat. “Is there a particular reason we should be disagreeable with one another, or do you both take some sort of infantile pleasure in being insufferably rude?”
Now that the fighting was done, Sir Stuart’s mannerisms were reverting to something more formal. I made a mental note of the fact. The Colonial Marine hadn’t started off a member of proper society, wherever he’d been. The rather staid, formal, archaic phrasing and patterns of speech were all something he’d acquired as a learned habit—one that apparently deserted him under the pressure of combat.
“Okay, Dresden,” Mort said. “Where to?” He opened his garage door and peered out at the snow. It was coming down even more thickly than earlier in the night. Chicago is pretty good about keeping its streets cleared in winter weather, but it was freaking May.
From the deep piles of old snow that had apparently been there for a number of weeks, I deduced that the city must have become increasingly beleaguered by the unseasonable weather. The streets were covered in several inches of fresh powder. No plow had been by Mort’s house in hours. If we hit a patch of ice, that heavy, crunchy little hybrid was going to skitter like a puppy on a tile floor.
Thinking, I referenced a mental map of the city. I felt a little bad making Mort come out into weather like this—I mean, given that he wasn’t dead and all. I was going to feel like crap if something bad happened to him, and it wouldn’t be a kindness to ask him to go farther than he absolutely had to. Besides, with the weather worsening, his one-hour time limit seemed to put further constraints on my options.
“Murphy’s place,” I said quietly. I gave him the address.
Mort grunted. “The ex-cop?”
I nodded. Murph had gotten herself fired by showing up to help me one too many times. She’d known what she was doing, and she’d made her own choices, but I still felt bad about it. Dying hadn’t changed that. “She’s a pretty sharp lady. Better able than most in this town to look out for you.”
Mort grunted again and pulled out into the snow, driving slowly and carefully. He was careful to keep his expression blank as he did it.
“Mort,” I said. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Driving over here,” he said.
I made a rude sound. Then I looked back over my shoulder at Sir Stuart. “Well?”
Sir Stuart reached into his coat and drew out what looked like a briar pipe. He tapped something from a pouch into it, struck an old wooden match, and puffed it to life. The smoke rose until it touched the ceiling of the car, where it congealed into a thin coating of shining ectoplasm—the residue of the spiritual when it becomes the physical.
“To hear him tell it,” he said, finally, indicating Mort, “the world’s gone to hell the past few months. Though I’ve got to admit, it doesn’t seem much different to me. Everything’s been madness since those computers showed up.”
I snorted. “What’s changed?”
“The scuttlebutt says that you