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"The lights went out," I said. "People panicked. We heard screams. Rawlins went to help and I went with him."
"Why?" he asked.
"What?"
"Why," Greene said, his tone mild. "You're a civilian, Mr. Dresden. It's Rawlins's job to help people in emergencies. Why didn't you just head for the door?"
"It was an emergency," I said. "I helped."
"You're a hero," Greene said. "Is that it?"
I shrugged. "I was there. People needed help. I tried to."
"Sure, sure," Greene said, blinking his eyes. "So what were you doing to help?"
"Holding the light," I said.
"Didn't Rawlins have his own flashlight?"
"Can't have too many flashlights," I replied.
"Sure," Greene said, writing things. "So you held the light for Rawlins. What then?"
"We heard screams in here. We came in. I saw the attacker over that girl they just took out."
"Can you describe him?" Greene asked.
"Almost seven feet tall," I said. "Built like a battleship, maybe three hundred, three twenty-five. Hockey mask. Sickle."
Greene nodded. "What happened."
"He attacked the girl. There were other people behind him, already down. He was about to cut her throat with the sickle. Rawlins shot him."
"Shot at him?" Greene asked. "Since we don't have a dead bad guy on the floor?"
"Shot at him," I amended. "I don't know if he hit him. The bad guy dropped the girl and swung that sickle at Rawlins. Rawlins blocked it with his flashlight."
"Then what?"
"Then I hit the guy," I said.
"Hit him how?" Greene asked.
"I used magic. Blew him thirty feet down the aisle and through the projector and the movie screen."
Greene slapped his pen down onto the notebook and gave me a flat look.
"Hey," I said. "You asked."
"Or maybe he turned to run," Greene said. "Knocked the projector over and jumped through the screen to get to the back of the room."
"If that makes you feel better," I said.
He gave me another hard look and said, "And then what?"
"And then he was gone," I said.
"He ran out the door?"
"No," I said. "We were pretty much right next to the door. He went through the screen, hit the wall behind it, and poof. Gone. I don't know how."
Greene wrote that down. "Do you know where Nelson Lenhardt is?"
I blinked. "No. Why would I?"
"He apparently attacked someone else at this convention today and beat him savagely. You bailed him out of jail. Maybe you're friends with him."
"Not really," I said.
"Seems a little odd, then, that you dropped two thousand dollars to bail out this guy you're not friends with."
"Yeah."
"Why did you do it?"
I got annoyed. "I had personal reasons."
"Which are?"
"Personal," I said.
Greene regarded me with his watery blue eyes, silent for a long minute. Then he said, patiently and politely, "I'm not sure I understand all of this. I'd appreciate it if you could help me out. Could you tell me again what happened? Starting with when the lights went out?"
I sighed.
We started over.
Four more times.
Greene was never so much as impolite to me, and his mild voice and watery eyes made him seem more like an apologetic clerk than a detective, but I had a gut instinct that there was a steely and dangerous man underneath the tweed camouflage, and that he had me pegged as an accomplice, or at least as someone who knew more than he was saying.
Which, I suppose, was true. But going on about black magic and ectoplasm and boogeymen that disappeared at will wasn't going to make him like me any better. That was par for the course, when it came to cops. Some of them, guys like Rawlins, had run into something nasty at some point in their careers. They never talked much about it with anyone- other cops tend to worry about it when one of their partners starts talking about seeing monsters, and all kinds of well-intentioned counseling and psychological evaluations were sure to follow.
So if a cop found himself face-to-face with a vampire or a ghoul (and survived it), its only existence tended to be in the landscape of memory. Time has a way of wearing the sharpest edges away from that kind of thing, and it's easy to avoid thinking about terrifying monsters, and even more terrifying implications, and get back to the daily routine. If enough time went by, a lot of cops could even convince themselves that what happened had been exaggerated in their heads, bad memories amplified by darkness and fear, and that since everyone around them knew monsters didn't exist, they must therefore have seen something normal, something explainable.
But when the heat was on, those same cops changed. Somewhere deep down, they know that it's for real, and when something supernatural went down again, they were willing, at least for the duration, to forget about anything but doing whatever they could to survive it and protect lives, even if in retrospect it seemed insane. Rawlins would poke fun at me for "pretending" to be a wizard when there was a fan convention in progress. But when everything had hit the proverbial fan, he'd been willing to work with me.
Then there was the other kind of cop-guys like Greene, who hadn't ever seen anything remotely supernatural, who went home to their house and 2.3 kids and dog and mowed their lawn on Saturdays, who watch Nova and the Science Channel and subscribe to National Geographic, and keep every issue stored neatly and in order in the basement.
Guys like that were dead certain that everything was logical, everything was explainable, and that nothing existed outside the purview of reason and logic. Guys like that also tend to make pretty good detectives. Greene was a guy like that.
"All right, Mr. Dresden," Greene said. "I'm still kind of unclear on a few points. Now, when the lights went out, what did you do?"
I rubbed at my eyes. My head ached. I wanted to sleep. "I've already told you this. Five times."
"I know, I know," Greene said, and offered me a small smile. "But sometimes repeating things can jiggle forgotten little details loose. So, if you don't mind, can you tell me about when it went dark?"
I closed my eyes and fought a sudden and overwhelming temptation to levitate Greene to the ceiling and leave him there for a while.
Someone touched my shoulder, and I opened my eyes to find Murphy standing over me, offering me a white Styrofoam cup. "Evening Harry."
