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“Classic college prank,” I said.
He grunted. “Usually when that happens, it hasn’t made big holes in the exterior wall.”
“Someone was avoiding the cliché?” I asked.
He looked at me for a moment, and said, “What about all the blood?”
“There were no injuries, were there?”
“No,” he said.
“Then who cares? Some film student probably watched Carrie too many times.”
Officer Dean tapped his pencil’s eraser on the tabletop. It was the most agitated thing I’d seen him do. “Six separate calls in the past three hours with a Bigfoot sighting on campus. Bigfoot. What do you know about that?”
“Well, kids these days, with their Internets and their video games and their iPods. Who knows what they thought they saw.”
Officer Dean put down his pencil. He looked at me, and said, calmly, “My job is to protect a bunch of kids with access to every means of self-destruction known to man from not only the criminal element but themselves. I got chemistry students who can make their own meth, Ecstasy, and LSD. I got ROTC kids with access to automatic weapons and explosives. I got enough alcohol going through here on a weekly basis to float a battleship. I got a thriving trade in recreational drugs. I got lives to protect.”
“Sounds tiring.”
“About to get tired of you,” he said. “Start giving it to me straight.”
“Or you’ll arrest me?” I asked.
“No,” Dean said. “I bounce your face off my knuckles for a while. Then I ask again.”
“Isn’t that unprofessional conduct?”
“Fuck conduct,” Dean said. “I got kids to look after.”
I sipped the coffee some more. Now that the shivers had begun to subside, I finally felt the knotted muscles in my belly begin to relax. I slowly settled back into my chair. Dean hadn’t blustered or tried to intimidate me in any way. He wasn’t trying to scare me into talking. He was just telling me how it was going to be. And he drank his coffee old-school.
I kinda liked the guy.
“You aren’t going to believe me,” I said.
“I don’t much,” he said. “Try me.”
“Okay,” I said. “My name is Harry Dresden. I’m a professional wizard.”
Officer Dean pursed his lips. Then he leaned forward slightly and listened.
* * *
The client wanted me to meet him at a site in the Ouachita Mountains in eastern Oklahoma. Looking at them, you might not realize they were mountains, they’re so old. They’ve had millions of years of wear and tear on them, and they’ve been ground down to nubs. The site used to be on an Indian reservation, but they don’t call them reservations anymore. They’re Tribal Statistical Areas now.
I showed my letter and my ID to a guy in a pickup, who just happened to pull up next to me for a friendly chat at a lonely stop sign on a winding back road. I don’t know what the tribe called his office, but I recognized a guardian when I saw one. He read the letter and waved me through in an even friendlier manner than he had used when he approached me. It’s nice to be welcomed somewhere, once in a while.
I parked at the spot indicated on the map and hiked a good mile and a half into the hills, taking a heavy backpack with me. I found a pleasant spot to set up camp. The mid-October weather was crisp, but I had a good sleeping bag and would be comfortable as long as it didn’t start raining. I dug a fire pit and ringed it in stones, built a modest fire out of fallen limbs, and laid out my sleeping bag on a foam camp pad. By the time it got dark, I was well into preparing the dinner I’d brought with me. The scent of foil-wrapped potatoes baking in coals blended with that of the steaks I had spitted and roasting over the fire.
Can I cook a camp meal or what?
Bigfoot showed up half an hour af
ter sunset.
One minute, I was alone. The next, he simply stepped out into view. He was huge. Not huge like a big person, but huge like a horse, with that same sense of raw animal power and mass. He was nine feet tall at least and probably tipped the scales at well over six hundred pounds. His powerful, wide-shouldered body was covered in long, dark brown hair. Even though he stood in plain sight in my firelight, I could barely see the buckskin bag he had slung over one shoulder and across his chest, the hair was so long.
