Free Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher

answered. “I couldn’t think who else to call,” she said. “I need your help.”
    “I’ll call your dad. I’ll come down with him.”
    “Please, no,” she said quietly, and I didn’t think she was feigning the quiet desperation in her voice. “Please.”
    Why fight the inevitable? I’ve always been a sucker for ye olde damsel in distress. Maybe not as big a sucker now as I had been in the past, but the insanity did not seem much less potent than it had always been.
    “All right,” I said. “Where?”
    She gave me the location of one of the precincts not too far from my apartment.
    “I’m coming,” I told her. “And this is the deal: I’ll listen to what you have to say. If I don’t like it, I’m going to your parents.”
    “But you don’t—”
    “Molly,” I said, and I felt my voice harden. “You’re already asking me for a lot more than I feel comfortable with. I’ll come down there to get you. You tell me what’s up. After that, I make the call, and you abide by it.”
    “But—”
    “This isn’t a negotiation,” I said. “Do you want my help or not?”
    There was a long pause, and she made a frustrated little sound. “All right,” she said. After a beat she hurried to add, “And thank you.”
    “Yeah,” I said, and eyed the candles and incense, and thought about all the time I’d thrown away. “I’ll be along within the hour.”
    I would have to call a cab. It wasn’t the most heroic way to ride to the rescue, but walkers can’t be choosers. I got up to dress and told Mouse, “I’m a sucker for a pretty face.”
    When I came out of the bedroom in clean clothes, Mouse was sitting hopefully by the door. He batted a paw at his leash, which hung over the doorknob.
    I snorted and said, “You ain’t pretty, furface.” But I clipped the leash to his collar, and called for a cab.

    Chapter Eight

    The cabby drove me to the Eighteenth District of the CPD, on Larrabee. The neighborhood around it has seen a couple of better days and thousands of worse ones. The once-infamous Cabrini Green isn’t far away, but urban renewal and the efforts of local neighborhood watches, community groups, church congregations from several faiths, and cooperation with the local police department had changed some of Chicago’s nastier streets into something resembling actual civilization.
    The nasty hadn’t left the city, of course—but it had been driven away from what had once been a stronghold of decay and despair. What was left behind wasn’t the prettiest section of town, but it bore the quiet, steady signs of a place that had a passing acquaintance with law and order.
    Of course, the cynical would point out that Cabrini Green was only a short walk from the Gold Coast, one of the richest areas of the city, and that it was no coincidence that funds had been sent that way by the powers that be through various municipal programs. The cynical would be right, but it didn’t change the fact that the people of the area had worked and fought to reclaim their homes from fear, crime, and chaos. On a good day, the neighborhood made you feel like there was hope for us, as a species; that we could drive back the darkness with enough will and faith and help.
    That kind of thinking had taken on whole new dimensions for me in the past year or two.
    The police station wasn’t new, but it was free of graffiti, litter, and shady characters of any kind—at least until I showed up, in jeans and a red T-shirt, bruised and unshaven. I got a weird look from the cabby, who probably didn’t get all that many sandalwood-scented fares to drop off there. Mouse presented his head to the cabby while I paid through the driver’s window, and got a smile and a polite scratching of the ears in reply.
    Mouse has better people skills than me.
    I turned to walk up to the station, stubbornly putting my money back in my wallet with my stiff left hand as I walked, and Mouse walked beside me. The hair on the back of my neck