Working for Bigfoot by Jim Butcher Read Free Book Online

enough to deal with already.”
    River Shoulders spread his hands, as if my own words had spotlighted the truth.
    I nodded, thought about it, and said, “We aren’t that different. Even among my people, a boy misses his father.”
    “A voice on a telephone is not a father,” he said.
    “But it is more than nothing,” I said. “I have lived with a father and without a father. With one was better.”
    The silence stretched extra-long.
    “In time,” the giant responded, very quietly. “For now, my concern is his physical safety. I cannot go to him. I spoke to his mother. We ask someone we trust to help us learn what is happening.”
    I didn’t agree with River Shoulders about talking to his kid, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t hiring me to get parenting advice, about which I had no experience to call upon anyway. He needed help looking out for the kid. So I’d do what I could to help him. “Where can I find Irwin?”
    “Chicago,” he said. “St. Mark’s Academy for the Gifted and Talented.”
    “Boarding school. I know the place.” I finished the Coke and rose. “It will be my pleasure to help the Forest People once again.”
    The giant echoed my actions, standing. “Already had your retainer sent to your account. By morning, his mother will have granted you the power of a turnkey.”
    It took me a second to translate River Shoulders’ imperfect understanding of mortal society. “Power of attorney,” I corrected him.
    “That,” he agreed.
    “Give her my best.”
    “Will,” he said, and touched his thick fingertips to his massive chest.
    I put my fingertips to my heart in reply and nodded up to my client. “I’ll start in the morning.”
     

     
    It took me most of the rest of the night to get back down to Chicago, go to my apartment, and put on my suit. I’m not a suit guy. For one thing, when you’re NBA sized, you don’t exactly get to buy them off the rack. For another, I just don’t like them—but sometimes they’re a really handy disguise, when I want people to mistake me for someone grave and responsible. So I put on the grey suit with a crisp white shirt and a clip-on tie, and headed down to St. Mark’s.
    The academy was an upper-end place in the suburbs north of Chicago, and was filled with the offspring of the city’s luminaries. They had their own small, private security force. They had wrought iron gates and brick walls and ancient trees and ivy. They had multiple buildings on the grounds, like a miniature university campus, and, inevitably, they had an administration building. I started there.
    It took me a polite quarter of an hour to get the lady in the front office to pick up the fax granting me power of attorney from Irwin’s mom, the archeologist, who was in the field somewhere in Canada. It included a description of me, and I produced both my ID and my investigator’s license. It took me another half an hour of waiting to be admitted to the office of the dean, Doctor Fabio.
    “Doctor Fabio,” I said. I fought valiantly not to titter when I did.
    Fabio did not offer me a seat. He was a good-looking man of sober middle age, and his eyes told me that he did not approve of me in the least, even though I was wearing the suit.
    “Ms. Pounder’s son is in our infirmary, receiving care from a highly experienced nurse practitioner and a physician who visits three days a week,” Doctor Fabio told me, when I had explained my purpose. “I assure you he is well cared for.”
    “I’m not the one who needs to be assured of anything,” I replied. “His mother is.”
    “Then your job here is finished,” said Fabio.
    I shook my head. “I kinda need to see him, Doctor.”
    “I see no need to disrupt either Irwin’s recovery or our academic routine, Mister Dresden,” Fabio replied. “Our students receive some of the most intensive instruction in the world. It demands a great deal of focus and drive.”
    “Kids are resilient,” I said. “And I’ll be quiet like a