Officer Dean pursed his lips. Then he leaned forward slightly and listened.
The client wanted me to meet him at a site in the Ouachita Mountains in eastern Oklahoma. Looking at them, you might not realize they were mountains, they’re so old. They’ve had millions of years of wear and tear on them, and they’ve been ground down to nubs. The site used to be on an Indian reservation, but they don’t call them reservations anymore. They’re Tribal Statistical Areas now.
I showed my letter and my ID to a guy in a pickup, who just happened to pull up next to me for a friendly chat at a lonely stop sign on a winding back road. I don’t know what the tribe called his office, but I recognized a guardian when I saw one. He read the letter and waved me through in an even friendlier manner than he had used when he approached me. It’s nice to be welcomed somewhere once in a while.
I parked at the spot indicated on the map and hiked a good mile and a half into the hills, taking a heavy backpack with me. I found a pleasant spot to set up camp. The mid-October weather was crisp, but I had a good sleeping bag and would be comfortable as long as it didn’t start raining. I dug a fire pit and ringed it in stones, built a modest fire out of fallen limbs, and laid out my sleeping bag on a foam camp pad. By the time it got dark, I was well into preparing the dinner I’d brought with me. The scent of foil-wrapped potatoes baking in coals blended with that of the steaks I had spitted and roasting over the fire.
Can I cook a camp meal or what?
Bigfoot showed up half an hour after sunset.
One minute, I was alone. The next, he simply stepped out into view. He was huge. Not huge like a big person, but huge like a horse, with that same sense of raw animal power and mass. He was nine feet tall at least and probably tipped the scales at well over six hundred pounds. His powerful, wide-shouldered body was covered in long, dark brown hair. Even though he stood in plain sight in my firelight, I could barely see the buckskin bag he had slung over one shoulder and across his chest, the hair was so long.
“Strength of a River in His Shoulders,” I said. “You’re welcome at my fire.”
“Wizard Dresden,” River Shoulders rumbled. “It is good to see you.” He took a couple of long steps and hunkered down opposite the fire from me. “Man. That smells good.”
“Darn right, it does,” I said. I proceeded with the preparations in companionable silence while River Shoulders stared thoughtfully at the fire. I’d set up my camp this way for a reason: It made me the host and River Shoulders my guest. It meant I was obliged to provide food and drink, and he was obliged to behave with decorum. Guest-and-host relationships are damned near laws of physics in the supernatural world: They almost never get violated, and when they do, it’s a big deal. Both of us felt a lot more comfortable around each other this way.
Okay. Maybe it did a wee bit more to make me feel comfortable than it did River Shoulders, but he was a repeat customer, I liked him, and I figured he probably didn’t get treated to a decent steak all that often.
We ate the meal in an almost ritualistic silence, too, other than River making some appreciative noises as he chewed. I popped open a couple of bottles of McAnally’s Pale, my favorite brew by a veritable genius of hops back in Chicago. River liked it so much that he gave me an inquisitive glance when his bottle was empty. So I emptied mine and produced two more.
After that, I filled a pipe with expensive tobacco, lit it, took a few puffs, and passed it to him. He nodded and took it. We smoked and finished our beers. By then the fire had died down to glowing embers.
“Thank you for coming,” River Shoulders rumbled. “Again, I come to seek your help on behalf of my son.”
“Third time you’ve come to me,” I said.
“Yes.” He rummaged in his pouch and produced a small, heavy object. He flicked it to me. I caught it and squinted at it in the dim light. It was a gold nugget about as big as a Ping-Pong ball. I nodded and tossed it back to him. River Shoulders’s brows lowered into a frown.
You have to understand. A frown on a mug like his looked indistinguishable from scowling fury. It turned his eyes into shadowed caves with nothing but a faint gleam showing from far back in them. It made his jaw muscles bunch and swell into knots the size of tennis balls on the sides of his face.
“You will not help him,” the Bigfoot said.
I snorted. “You’re the one who isn’t helping him, big guy.”
“I am,” he said. “I am hiring you.”
“You’re his father,” I said quietly. “And he doesn’t even know your name. He’s a good kid. He deserves more than that. He deserves the truth.”
He shook his head slowly. “Look at me. Would he even accept my help?”
“You aren’t going to know unless you try it,” I said. “And I never said I wouldn’t help him.”
At that, River Shoulders frowned a little more.
I curbed an instinct to edge away from him.
“Then what do you want in exchange for your services?” he asked.
“I help the kid,” I said. “You meet the kid. That’s the payment. That’s the deal.”
“You do not know what you are asking,” he said.
“With respect, River Shoulders, this is not a negotiation. If you want my help, I just told you how to get it.”
He became very still at that. I got the impression that maybe people didn’t often use tactics like that when they dealt with him.
When he spoke, his voice was a quiet, distant rumble. “You have no right to ask this.”
“Yeah, um. I’m a wizard. I meddle. It’s what we do.”
“Manifestly true.” He turned his head slightly away. “You do not know how much you ask.”
“I know that kid deserves more than you’ve given him.”
“I have seen to his protection. To his education. That is what fathers do.”
“Sure,” I said. “But you weren’t ever there. And that matters.”
Absolute silence fell for a couple of minutes.
“Look,” I said gently. “Take it from a guy who knows. Growing up without a dad is terrifying. You’re the only father he’s ever going to have. You can go hire Superman to look out for Irwin if you want to, and he’d still be the wrong guy—because he isn’t you.”
River toyed with the empty bottle, rolling it across his enormous fingers like a regular guy might have done with a pencil.
“Do you want me on this?” I asked him. “No hard feelings if you don’t.”
River looked up at me again and nodded slowly. “I know that if you agree to help him, you will do so. I will pay your price.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me about Irwin’s problem.”
“WHAT’D HE SAY?” Officer Dean asked.
“He said the kid was at the University of Oklahoma for school,” I said. “River’d had a bad dream and knew that the kid’s life was in danger.”
The cop grunted. “So … Bigfoot is a psychic?”
“Think about it. No one ever gets a good picture of one, much less a clean shot,” I said. “Despite all the expeditions and TV shows and whatnot. River’s people have got more going for them than being huge and strong. My guess is that they’re smarter than humans. Maybe a lot smarter. My guess is they know magic of some kind, too.”
“Jesus,” Officer Dean said. “You really believe all this, don’t you?”
“I want to believe,” I said. “And I told you that you wouldn’t.”
Dean grunted. Then he said, “Usually they’re too drunk to make sense when I get a story like this. Keep going.”
I GOT TO Norman, Oklahoma, a bit before noon the next morning. It was a Wednesday, which was a blessing. In the Midwest, if you show up to a college town on a weekend, you risk running into a football game. In my experience, that resulted in universal problems with traffic, available hotel rooms, and drunken football hooligans.