Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

to town on you,” I growled. “Someone needs to push his face in.”

Her eyes glittered as she gave me a sharp look. “Dresden . . . when, exactly, am I going to fight someone my size and strength?”

“Um.”

“If you want to wrestle hostile mooses—”

“Moose,” Butters corrected absently. “Singular and plural, same word.”

“Gorillas,” Murphy continued, hardly breaking stride, “then the best way to train for it is by wrestling slightly less hostile gorillas. Skaldi’s two hundred pounds heavier than me, almost two feet taller, and he has going on two millennium—”

“Millennia,” Butters said. “Millennium is the singular.”

Murphy pushed a breath out through her nose and said, “Millennia of experience in breaking the backs of annoying little doctors with annoying little grammar fetishes.”

Butters grinned.

“I’m not going to beat him, Harry. Ever. That isn’t the point.” She looked away and her voice became quiet. “The point is that the world isn’t getting any kinder. A girl’s got to take care of herself.”

The expression on her face? It hurt. Hearing the words that went with it felt like a knife peeling back layers of skin. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t let it show. Murphy would have been offended at the notion that she needed my protection, and if she thought I felt guilty for not being there to protect her, to help her, she’d be downright angry.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t think Murphy was a princess in a tower. But at the end of the day, she was just one person, standing in defiance of powers that would regard her with the same indifference as might an oncoming tsunami, volcanic eruption, or earthquake. Life is precious, fragile, fleeting—and Murphy’s life was one of my favorites.

“Okay, Harry,” Murphy said. “Where do we get started?”

I felt awkward standing there while she and Butters sat at the table, but it wasn’t like I could pull out a chair. “Um. Maybe we get started with what you know about my . . . my shooting.”

She nodded and pulled on her cop face—her expression professionally calm, detached, analytical. “We don’t have much, officially speaking,” she said. “I came to pick you up and found the blood and a single bullet hole. There wasn’t quite enough to declare it a murder scene. Because the vic . . . because you were on the boat and it was in motion, there was no way to extrapolate precisely where the bullet came from. Probably a nearby rooftop. Because the bullet apparently began to tumble as it passed through your body, it left asymmetric holes in the walls of the boat. But forensics thinks it was something between a .223 assaultrifle round and a .338 magnum-rifle round; more likely the latter than the former.”

“I never got into rifles. What does that mean?”

“It means a sniper rifle or a deer rifle,” Butters clarified. “Not necessarily military. There are plenty of civilian weapons that fire rounds in those calibers.”

“We never found the bullet,” Murphy said. She took a deep breath. “Or the body.”

I noticed that both Murph and Butters were staring at me very intently.

“Uh,” I said. “I . . . sort of did that whole tunnel-of-light thing—which is a crock, by the way.” I bit down on a mention of Murphy’s father. “Um, I was sent back to solve the murder. Which . . . sort of implies a death. And they said my body wasn’t available, so . . .”

Murphy looked down and nodded.

“Huh,” Butters said, frowning. “Why send you back?”

I shrugged. “Said what came next wasn’t for whiners or rubberneckers.”

Murphy snorted. “Sounds like something my father would say.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Heh.”

Butters arched an eyebrow. His dark eyes flickered between me and Murphy, and thoughtful lines appeared on his face.

“Anyway,” I said. “That’s what you know officially, right? So . . . what else do you know?”

“I know it wasn’t Marcone,” Murphy said. “All of his troubleshooters have alibis that check out. So do he and Gard and Hendricks. I know which building the shot probably came from, and it wasn’t an easy one.”

“Four hundred and fifty yards,” Butters said. “Which means it was probably a professional gunman.”

“There are amateurs who can shoot that well,” Murphy said.

“As a rule, they don’t do it from buildings at their fellow Americans,” Butters replied. “Look, if we assume it’s an amateur, it could be anyone. But if we assume it was a professional—which is way more likely, in any case—then it gives us the beginning of an identity, and could lead us back to