Just then, the room flooded with green chemical light. I eyed the Smart Gunman, who had just fired up a chemical glow stick from a pocket. I nodded at him, holding it a moment, and said, “I’m Dresden.”
He pushed himself up from the floor with his left arm, holding his right in close to his side. It bore long lacerations, and the blood looked black in the green light. He nodded back to me and said, warily, “Riley.”
I twisted my upper body just enough to drag Tania around a little. She let out a squeaking sound. “Can you see the score here, Riley?”
He studied the room, wincing, and said, “Yeah. How you want to play it?”
“Guns down,” I said. “Me, the wolf, the girl, and Miss Raith here will walk out. No one comes after us. Once we’re on the street, I’ll let her go.”
He stared at me, and I could see the wheels turning. I didn’t like that. The guy had been too capable to give him time to work something out.
“You boys just gave me a twenty-one-gun salute, and the front door to the club was broken open, Riley,” I said. “Police response time around here is about four minutes. How long do you think it will take someone to call it in?”
Riley grimaced. “Give me your word.”
“You have it,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. He looked around the room and said, “Stand down. We’re going to let them leave.”
“Damn you, Riley!” Tania snarled.
I pressed the still uncomfortably hot copper bracelet against her ear, and she yipped. “Come on, Miss Raith,” I said. I stood up, keeping her head locked in my arm. She could have made a fight of it. White Court vampires can be unbelievably strong, if only in bursts. She didn’t seem up for a physical fight, but I wasn’t taking chances. I moved carefully and kept my balance, ready to move instantly if she tried anything.
“Come on, honey,” I said to the little girl. I extended my free hand to her. “I’m going to take you home.”
She stood up and reluctantly took my hand.
Will padded out of the shadows to walk on the other side of the girl, his teeth bared. On a wolf, that is an absolutely terrifying expression.
As I went by Riley, I asked, “Lara giving Tania here a lesson?”
“Something like that,” he said. “You hurt her, things will have to get ugly.”
“I get it,” I said. “You’d have had me if I hadn’t cheated.”
“You aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying hard enough,” he replied. “Another time, maybe.”
“I hope not,” I told him sincerely.
And I walked out with a vampire in a headlock and a little girl overlapped in the protective shadows of a wizard and a werewolf, while Lara Raith’s soldiers looked on.
“YOUR HONOR,” THE foreman of the jury said to the judge. She paused to turn to me and give me a deadly glare. “After two days of deliberation, the jury has been unable to reach a unanimous verdict in the case.”
Luther, lonely at his table, blinked and sat up straighter, his eyes opening wider.
The assistant DA made an almost identical expression. Beside him, Tania sat staring stonily forward, with her hair combed over her singed ear.
The judge eyed the jury box with weary resignation, and her gaze settled on me.
“What?” I said, and folded my arms. “I believed him.”
She rubbed at her eyes with one hand and said something beneath her breath. I listened closely, which is much closer than most people can, and thought I heard her mutter, “Goddamned supernatural assholes …”
She lifted her eyes again and spoke in that rote-repetition voice. “That being the case, I have no choice but to declare a mistrial. Mr. Tremont, the prosecution’s office will need to notify me about whether the people mean to continue pursuing this case against the defendant.”
I eyed Tania, smiling.
If the White Court tried to push this trial again, I could produce the girl, Maria, as a witness. Maria was currently being watched by a number of werewolves and wasn’t going to go anywhere. If they continued pushing Luther, I could drag their ugliness out into the light—and if there was anything the White Court hated, it was looking ugly.
Tania gave me a sulking glance. Then she muttered something to Tremont, who blinked at her. They had a brief, heated discussion conducted entirely in whispers. Then Tremont looked back up at them. “Ah, Your Honor. The state would like to drop all charges.”
“It would?” the judge asked. Then she rolled her eyes and said, “Of course it would. All right, people. Justice is served; court is adjourned.” She banged her gavel down halfheartedly and rose. We all stood up as she left the courtroom, and then we began filing out.
Luther sat there dazed as the bailiff approached and removed his handcuffs. Then he was buried by a pair of quietly squealing children who piled onto him, and were shortly joined by a woman with tears in her eyes. I heard him start laughing as he hugged them.
I left, because there was something in my eyes.
Outside, in the parking lot, someone approached me and I felt a tug at my sleeve. It took me a second to recognize the judge in her civilian clothes—a plain pair of slacks and a white shirt.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Someone found the girl.”
“The girl from what’s-his-name’s testimony?” I asked, guilelessly.
“And if the girl had gotten up in front of everyone and answered questions, it would have made things awkward for whoever was behind Black. Am I right?”
I scratched at my nose with one finger and said, “Maybe.”
She snorted and turned to walk away. “Worst jurist ever.”
“Thanks,” I said.
She stopped and looked at me over her shoulder with a faint smile. “You’re welcome.”
I hung around long enough to see Luther, a free man, leaving the building with his family.
Maybe Will had been right.
Justice served.
Waldo Butters was never supposed to amount to much.
No, seriously. He was a throwaway character. I had a particularly gruesome morgue scene that I wanted to leaven with a little humor, so I more or less swiped the medical examiner from the movie The Prophecy, dyed his hair black and curly, made him a Jewish polkaphile, and had him start spreading levity.
A while later, I was writing a story that was going to have a pretty good dramatic high point, and was going to be filled with necromancers. I wanted it to be a particularly tough ride for Dresden, so I looked around for the perfect sidekick for this story—someone who would be thematically appropriate yet be able to do almost nothing to actually help Dresden in a fight. I had necromancers and animated corpses, and I had this goofy but highly intelligent medical examiner who had already been planted into the series. As a bonus, Waldo Butters was a newbie to the world of the supernatural, but was bright and could be counted on to ask smart questions—and since this book was going to be my first hardback, it was also going to be the Dresden Files’ introduction to a slew of new readers, and Butters’s questions would make it easy for them to get into the structure of the story world. Kind of made it a no-brainer that Butters needed to be the guy.
But, my brain said, as it does endlessly, that’s not quite enough, is it? And so I looked at Butters and started making plans.
At the end of the day, the greatest power Harry has is in lifting up the people around him. As he has gone through his story, the people he trusts and has befriended have themselves grown in knowledge and in power. He’s never really meant to do it, but this little community of people with brains, backbones, and good hearts has developed around him, and Butters is one of the foremost members of that community.
The little guy has grown a lot over the course of this story. He was entirely unexpected, and I just couldn’t be more pleased with how his story is going. Here’s a small but important piece of Butters’s tale: his first day on the job as a Knight.