“Okay,” she said, and took a pull from the bottle. “Maybe Rudolph’s handler had already put the assassin in place as a contingency measure, in case you got loose despite Rudolph’s efforts.”

I shook my head. “It makes more sense if the assassin was already there, positioned to remove Rudolph, once he had served his purpose. Whoever his handler was, they would need a safety measure in place, a link they could cut out of the chain so that nothing would lead back to them. Only once Rudy calls them and tells them he isn’t able to keep me locked up, they have the shooter switch targets.”

Which meant . . . I had taken three bullets meant for Rudolph.

“Harry?” Murphy asked. “Why are you laughing?”

“I heard a joke yesterday,” I said. “I just got it.”

She frowned at me. “You need some rest. You look like hell. And you’re obviously tired enough to have gotten the giggles.”

“Wizards don’t giggle,” I said, hardly able to speak. “This is cackling.”

She eyed me askance and sipped her beer. She waited until I had laughed myself out before speaking again. “You find out about Maggie yet?”

“Sort of,” I said, abruptly sobered. “I think I know where she will be in the next few days.” I gave her what we had learned about the duchess’s intentions, leaving out the parts where I committed a bunch of crimes like theft, trespassing, and vandalism. “So right now,” I concluded, “everyone’s checking their contacts in Mexico while I’m talking to you.”

“Susan?” she asked.

“And Father Forthill,” I said. “Between them, they should be able to find out what’s going on at Chichén Itzá.”

Murphy nodded and asked, casually, “How’s she holding up?”

I took another pull from the bottle and said, “She thinks Molly has the hots for me.”

Murphy snorted. “Wow. She must have used her vampire superpowers to have worked that one out.”

I blinked at Murphy.

She stared at me for a second and then rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on, Harry. Really? Are you really that clueless?”

“Uh,” I said, still blinking. “Apparently.”

Murphy smirked down at her beer and said, “It’s always staggering to run into one of your blind spots. You don’t have many of them, but when you do they’re a mile wide.” She shook her head. “You didn’t really answer my question, you know.”

I nodded. “Susan’s a wreck. Maybe more so because of the whole vampire thing.”

“I don’t know, Harry. From what you’ve said, I don’t think you’d need to look any further than the whole mommy thing.”

“Could be,” I said. “Either way, she’s sort of fraying at the edges.”

“Like you,” Murphy said.

I scowled at her. “What?”

She lifted an eyebrow and looked frankly at me.

I started to get angry with her, but stopped to force myself to think. “Am I?”

She nodded slowly. “Did you notice that you’ve been tapping your left toe on the ground for the past five minutes?”

I frowned at her, and then down at my foot, which was tapping rapidly, to the point that my calf muscles were growing tired. “I . . . No.”

“I’m your friend, Harry,” she said quietly. “And I’m telling you that you aren’t too stable yourself right now.”

“Monsters are going to murder my child sometime soon, Murph. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night. Soon. I don’t have time for sanity.”

Murphy nodded slowly, then sighed like someone setting down an unpleasant burden. “So. Chichén Itzá.”

“Looks like.”

“Cool. When do we hit them?”

I shook my head. “We can’t go all Wild Bunch on these people. They’ll flatten us.”

She frowned. “But the White Council . . .”

“Won’t be joining us,” I said. I couldn’t keep a bit of the snarl out of my voice. “And to answer your question . . . we’re not sure when the ritual is supposed to take place. I’ve got to come up with more information.”

“Rudolph,” Murphy said thoughtfully.

“Rudolph. Someone who is a part of this, probably someone from the Red Court, is leaning on him. I plan on finding that someone and then poking him in the nose until he coughs up something I can use.”

“I think I’d like to talk to Rudolph, too. We’ll start from our ends and work toward the middle again, then?”

“Sounds like a plan.” I waved at Mac and pantomimed holding a sandwich in front of me and taking a bite. He nodded, and glanced at Murphy. “You want a steak sandwich, too?”

“I thought you didn’t have time to be sane.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t have time to be hungry, either.”

Chapter 24

“How does a police detective afford a place like this?” Molly asked.

We were sitting in the Blue Beetle on a quiet residential street in Crestwood. It was late afternoon, with a heavy overcast. The houses on the street were large ones. Rudolph’s place, whose address I’d gotten from Murphy, was the smallest house on the block—but it was on the block. It backed right up to the Cook County Forest Preserve, too, and between the old forest and the mature trees it gave the whole area a sheltered, pastoral quality.

“He doesn’t,” I said quietly.

“You mean he’s dirty?” Molly asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe his family has money. Or maybe he managed to mortgage himself to the eyeballs. People get real stupid when it comes to buying homes. Pay an extra quarter of a million dollars for a place because it’s in the right neighborhood. Buy houses they damned well know they can’t afford to make the payments on.” I shook my head. “They should make you take some kind of iota-of-common-sense quiz before you make an offer.”

“Maybe it isn’t stupid,” Molly said. “Everybody wants home to mean something. Maybe the extra money they pay creates that additional meaning for them.”

I grimaced. “I’d rather have my extra meaning come from the ancient burial ground under the swimming pool or from knowing that I built it with my own hands or something.”

“Not everyone puts as low a value on the material as you do, boss,” Molly said. “For them, maybe the extra material value represented by a higher price tag is significant.”

I grunted. “It’s still stupid.”

“From your perspective,” Molly said. “It’s really all about perspective, isn’t it.”

“And from the perspective of those in need, that extra quarter of a million bucks your material person spent on the prestige addition for his house looks like an awful lot of lifesaving food and medicine that could have existed if the jerk with the big house in the suburbs hadn’t blown it all to artificially inflate his sociogeographic penis.”

“Heh,” Molly said. “And their house is much nicer than your house.”

“And that,” I said.

Mouse grumbled quietly in his sleep from the backseat, and I turned to reach back and rub his ears until he settled down again.

Molly sat quietly for almost a minute before she said, “What else do we do?”

“Other than sit tight and watch?” I asked. “This is a stakeout, Molly. It’s what you do on a stakeout.”

“Stakeouts suck,” Molly said, puffing out a breath that blew a few strands of hair out of her eyes. “How come Murphy isn’t doing this part? How come we aren’t doing magic stuff?”

“Murphy is keeping track of Rudolph at work,” I said. “I’m watching his home. If his handler wanted him dead, this would be a logical place to bushwhack him.”

“And we’re not doing magic because . . . ?”

“What do you suggest we do?”

“Tracking spells for Rudolph and Maggie,” she said promptly.

“You got any of Rudolph’s blood? Hair? Fingernail clippings?”

“No,” she said.

“So, no tracking spell for him,” I said.

“But what about Maggie?” she said. “I know you don’t have any hair or anything from her, but you pulled a tracking spell for me using my mother’s blood, right? Couldn’t you use your blood for that?”

I kept my breathing steady, and prevented the flash of frustration I felt from coming out in my voice. “First thing I tried. Right after I got off the phone with Susan when this all started.”