I picked up the phone and growled, "Screw thinking positive," into the handset.
"Urn," said a woman's voice. "What did you say?"
"Screw thinking positive!" I half shouted. "What the hell do you want?"
"Well. Maybe I have the wrong number. I was calling to speak to Harry Dresden?"
I frowned, my mind taking in details despite my temper's bid to take over the show. The voice was familiar to me; rich, smooth, adult-but the speaker's speech patterns had an odd hesitancy to them. Her words had an odd, thick edge on them, too. An accent?
"Speaking," I said. "Annoyed as hell, but speaking."
"Oh. Is this a bad time?"
I rubbed at my eyes and choked down a vicious response. "Who is this?"
"Oh," she said, as if the question surprised her. "Harry, it's Molly. Molly Carpenter."
"Ah," I said. I clapped one palm to my face. My friend Michael's oldest daughter. Way to role-model, Harry. You sure do come off like a calm, responsible adult. "Molly, didn't recognize you at first."
"I'm sorry," she said.
The "s" sound was a little bit thick. Had she been drinking? "Not your fault," I said. Which it hadn't been. For that matter, the interruption might have been a stroke of luck. If my head was still too scrambled from that afternoon's automobile hijinks to remember to unplug the phone, I didn't have any business trying to cast that spell. Probably would have blown my own head off. "What do you need, Molly?"
"Urn," she said, and there was nervous tension in her voice. "I need... I need you to come bail me out."
"Bail," I said. "You're being literal?"
"Yes."
"You're in jail?"
"Yes," she said.
"Oh my God," I said. "Molly, I don't know if I can do that. You're sixteen."
"Seventeen," she said, with sparks of indignation and another thick
"s."
"Whatever," I said. "You're a juvenile. You should call your parents."
"No!" she said, something near panic in her voice. "Harry, please. I can't call them."
"Why not?"
"Because I only get the one call, and I used it to call you."
"Actually, I don't think that's exactly how it works, Molly." I sighed.
"In fact, I'm surprised that..."I frowned, thinking. "You lied about your age."
"If I hadn't, Mom and Dad would be here already," she said. "Harry, please. Look, there's... there's a lot of trouble at home right now. I can't explain it here, but if you'll come get me, I swear, I'll tell you all about it."
I sighed again. "I don't know, Molly..."
"Please?" she said. "It's just this once, and I'll pay you back, and I'll never ask something like this of you again, I promise."
Molly had long since earned her PhD in wheedling. She managed to sound vulnerable and hopeful and sad and desperate and sweet all at the same time. I'm pretty sure she wouldn't need half that much effort to wrap her father around a finger. Her mother, Charity, was probably a different story, though.
I sighed. "Why me?" I asked.
I hadn't been talking to Molly, but she answered. "I couldn't think who else to call," she said. "I need your help."
"I'll call your dad. I'll come down with him."
"Please, no," she said quietly, and I didn't think she was feigning the quiet desperation in her voice. "Please."
Why fight the inevitable? I've always been a sucker for ye olde damsel in distress. Maybe not as big a sucker now as I had been in the past, but the insanity did not seem much less potent than it had always been.
"All right," I said. "Where?"
She gave me the location of one of the precincts not too far from my apartment.
"I'm coming," I told her. "And this is the deal: I'll listen to what you have to say. If I don't like it, I'm going to your parents."
"But you don't-"
"Molly," I said, and I felt my voice harden. "You're already asking me for a lot more than I feel comfortable with. I'll come down there to get you. You tell me what's up. After that, I make the call, and you abide by it."
"But-"
"This isn't a negotiation," I said. "Do you want my help or not?"
There was a long pause, and she made a frustrated little sound. "All right," she said. After a beat she hurried to add, "And thank you."
"Yeah," I said, and eyed the candles and incense, and thought about all the time I'd thrown away. "I'll be along within the hour."
I would have to call a cab. It wasn't the most heroic way to ride to the rescue, but walkers can't be choosers. I got up to dress and told Mouse, "I'm a sucker for a pretty face."
When I came out of the bedroom in clean clothes, Mouse was sitting hopefully by the door. He batted a paw at his leash, which hung over the doorknob.
I snorted and said, "You ain't pretty, furface." But I clipped the leash to his collar, and called for a cab.
Chapter Eight
The cabby drove me to the Eighteenth District of the CPD, on Larrabee. The neighborhood around it has seen a couple of better days and thousands of worse ones. The once-infamous Cabrini Green isn't far away, but urban renewal and the efforts of local neighborhood watches, community groups, church congregations from several faiths, and cooperation with the local police department had changed some of Chicago's nastier streets into something resembling actual civilization.
The nasty hadn't left the city, of course-but it had been driven away from what had once been a stronghold of decay and despair. What was left behind wasn't the prettiest section of town, but it bore the quiet, steady signs of a place that had a passing acquaintance with law and order.
Of course, the cynical would point out that Cabrini Green was only a short walk from the Gold Coast, one of the richest areas of the city, and that it was no coincidence that funds had been sent that way by the powers that be through various municipal programs. The cynical would be right, but it didn't change the fact that the people of the area had worked and fought to reclaim their homes from fear, crime, and chaos. On a good day, the neighborhood made you feel like there was hope for us, as a species; that we could drive back the darkness with enough will and faith and help.
That kind of thinking had taken on whole new dimensions for me in the past year or two.
The police station wasn't new, but it was free of graffiti, litter, and shady characters of any kind-at least until I showed up, in jeans and a red T-shirt, bruised and unshaven. I got a weird look from the cabby, who probably didn't get all that many sandalwood-scented fares to drop off there. Mouse presented his head to the cabby while I paid through the driver's window, and got a smile and a polite scratching of the ears in reply.