The shotgun roared and spat fire.
The blast smashed Murphy to the ground like a blow from a sledgehammer.
At the sight my scrambled brain congealed. I drew up my will, flung out a hand, and screamed, "Ventas servitas!"
Wind roared forth from my outstretched fingers. I directed it at the snow-covered ground in front of our attackers, and a sudden storm of flying bits of ice and snow engulfed the gunmen.
I kept the pressure on them, maintaining the spell, as I shouted, "Molly! Get to Murphy! Veil and first aid!"
Molly shook her head and gave me a glassy-eyed stare, but she climbed out of the car and staggered over to Murphy. A second later both of them vanished from sight.
I let up on the wind spell. Moving enough air to keep a gale-force wind going is a lot more work than anyone thinks. The air went still again except for swirling eddies of wind, frost devils that danced about in half a dozen whirling helices of snow. The two gunmen were revealed, crouching low, their arms still upraised to shield their eyes from the wind and stinging flakes of ice.
I missed my staff. I missed my duster. But I wasn't missing the.44 revolver I drew from my coat's pocket and aimed at the bad guys, while I raised my left hand, shaking the shield bracelet there out from under the sleeve of my coat.
I recognized one of the two gunmen, the one with the brace of pistols. His name was Bart something or other, and he was muscle for hire-cheap muscle, at that, but at least you got what you paid for. Bart was the kind of guy you called when you needed someone's ribs broken on a budget.
The other guy was familiar, too, but I couldn't put a name to him. Come on, it wasn't like I hung around in outfit bars, getting to know everyone. Besides, all I really needed to know was that he'd shot Murphy.
I started walking forward, straight at them, and stopped when I was maybe fifteen feet away. By the time I got there they were finally getting the ice and snow out of their eyes. I didn't wait for them to get their vision back. I aimed carefully and put a bullet through shotgun boy's right knee.
He went down screaming, and kept screaming.
Bart turned toward me and raised both guns, but my shield bracelet was ready. I made an effort of will, and a hemisphere of shimmering, translucent silver force flickered to life between Bart and me. He emptied both automatics at me, but he might as well have been shooting water pistols. My shield caught every shot, and I angled it to deflect the rounds up into the air rather than into one of the houses in the neighborhood around us.
Bart's guns clicked empty.
I lowered the shield and lifted my revolver as he fumbled at his pockets for fresh magazines. "Bart," I chided him, "Think this one through."
He froze in place, and then slowly moved his hands away from his pockets.
"Thank you. Guess what I want you to do next?"
He dropped his guns. Bart was in his late thirties and good-looking, tall, with the frame of a man who spent a lot of his time at the gym. He had little weasel eyes, though, dark and gleaming. They darted left and right, as if seeking possible avenues of escape.
"Don't make me shoot you in the back, Bart," I said. "Bullet could hit your spine, paralyze you without killing you. That would be awful." I moseyed over to him, keeping the gun trained on him and making sure I always had a clear view of the other gunman. He was still screaming, though it had a hoarse, thready sound to it now. "Do you know who I am?"
"Dresden, Jesus," Bart said. "Nothing personal, man."
"You tried to kill me, Bart. That's just about as personal as it gets."
"It was a job," he said. "Just a job."
And I suddenly remembered where I'd seen the other guy before: unconscious in the hallway outside Demeter's office at Executive Priority. He was one of Torelli's flunkies, and he did not appear to have much more savvy than his boss.
"Job's gonna get you killed one day, Bart," I said. "Maybe even right now." I called out, "Molly? How is she?"
Murphy's voice came back to me instead of Molly's. "I'm fine," she said. The words were clipped, as if she were in pain. "Vest stopped all but one of the balls, and that one isn't bad."
"Her arm is bleeding, Harry," Molly said, her voice shaking. "It's stopping, but I don't think there's anything else I can do."
"Murph, get back to the car. Stay warm."
"Like hell, Harry. I will-"
I completed the sentence for her. "-go into shock. Don't be stupid, Murph. I can't lug your unconscious body around and keep these guys under control."
Murphy growled something vaguely threatening under her breath, but I heard Molly say, "Here, let me help you."
Bart's beady eyes were all but bugging out of his head as he searched for the source of the sound of Molly's voice. "What? What the hell?"
By now, I was sure, people in the houses around us had called the police. I was sure that the cops would be a few moments longer than usual arriving, too. I wanted to be gone by then, which meant that I didn't have much time. But Bart didn't have to know that. Just like Bart didn't have a clue what he'd gotten himself involved in.
I most likely didn't have time to grill even one of the gunmen. Torelli's goon was hurt and probably mad as hell at me. He was probably more loyal to Torelli, too, if he was a personal retainer. That really left me only one smart option for gathering information.
I stepped forward, shifting my gun to my left hand, and held out my right. I spoke a quiet word and a sphere of fire, bright as a tiny sun, kindled to life in the air above my right hand. I turned a slow stare on Bart and stepped close to him.
The thug flinched and fell onto his ass in the snowy street.
I released the sphere of fire, and it drifted closer to Bart. "Look, big guy," I said in an amiable tone. "I've had a tense couple of days. And I've got to tell you, burning someone's face off sounds like a great way to relax."
"I was just a hire!" Bart stammered, scooting back on his buttocks from the little sphere of fire. "Just a driver!"
"Hired to do what?" I asked him.
"I was just supposed to put you off the road and cover the shooter," Bart half screamed. He pointed a finger at the wounded man. "Him."
I spread my fingers a little wider, and the flaming sphere jumped a few inches closer to the goon's face. "Bart, Bart. Let's not change the focus here. This is about you and me."
"I'm just a contractor!" Bart all but screamed, writhing to get his face farther away from the fire. "They don't tell guys like me shit!"
"Guys like you always know more than you're told," I said. "So you've got something you can give the cops to keep yourself out of jail."
"I don't!" Bart said. "I swear!"
I smiled at him and pushed the fire sphere a little closer. "Inhale blue," I said. "Exhale pink. Hey, this is relaxing."
"Torelli!" Bart screamed, throwing up his arms. "Jesus, it was Torelli! Torelli wanted the job done! He's been getting ready to move on Marcone!"
"Since when?" I demanded.
"I don't know. Couple of weeks, maybe. That's when they brought me in! Oh, Jesus!"
I closed my hand and snuffed out the sphere of fire before it could do more than scorch the sleeves of Bart's coat. He lay there on the ground breathing roughly, and refused to lower his arms.
The sound of sirens ghosted through the streets. It was time to go.
"He been talking to anyone lately?" I demanded. "Anyone new? Setting up an alliance?"
Bart shook his head, shuddering. "I ain't one of his full-timers. I ain't seen nothing like that."
"Harry!" Molly screamed.
I'd gotten too intent on the conversation with Bart, and I'd been too worried about Murphy to remember to take everybody's guns away. The gunman on the ground had recovered his shotgun and worked the action, ejecting a spent shell and loading a new round. I spun toward him, raising my shield bracelet. The problem was that my spiffy redesigned bracelet, while better in a lot of ways than the old one, took a lot more power to use, and as a result I could bring it up only so fast. I threw myself to the ground and tried to put Bart between me and Torelli's hitter. Bart scrambled frantically to clear the line of fire, and I knew that I wasn't going to get the shield up in time.
Mouse must have darted off to the side at the beginning of the confrontation, because he appeared out of the shadows and came bounding through nearly three feet of snow as if he'd been running on racetrack turf. He was moving so fast that a bow wave of flying snow literally preceded him, like when a speedboat cuts through the water. He hit Torelli's hitter just as the man pulled the trigger.
Shotguns are loud. Bart screamed an impolite word.
Mouse seized Torelli's man by his wounded leg, the one I'd shot a minute ago, and began wrenching him around by it, shaking him as easily as a terrier shakes a rat. The goon had another ear-piercing scream left in him, a high-pitched thing that sounded like it had come from a slaughterhouse hog. The shotgun flew from his fingers, and he began flopping like a rag doll, unconscious from the pain.
The sirens grew louder, and I pushed myself back to my feet. Bart lay on the ground, rocking back and forth and screaming. The wild shotgun blast had hit him right in the ass. There was a lot of blood on his jeans, but he didn't seem to be gushing anything from a major artery. Granted, depending on how much of the shot he'd caught, the wound could potentially maim, cripple, or maybe even kill him if there was any internal bleeding. But there are worse places to get hit, and with all the adrenaline surging through me, it seemed pretty hilarious.