Free Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher Page B

hand and vanished up under the sleeve of the jacket.
    She watched me with one eyebrow arched, waiting for me to react. Her posture and expression both made the effort to say that she was way too cool to care what I thought, but I could practically taste the uncertainty she was working to hide, and her anxiety.
    “Long time, no see,” I said, finally.
    “Hello, Harry,” she replied. The words came out a little thick, and I saw more gold flash near the tip of her tongue.
    Of course.
    “It’s odd,” I said. “From here, it doesn’t look like you’re in jail at all.”
    “I know,” she said. She managed to keep her voice mostly steady, but her face and throat colored pink in a guilty flush. She shifted her weight restlessly, and an odd clicking sound came from her mouth. Good grief. She’d picked up a tic of rattling her tongue piercing against her teeth when she was nervous. “Urn. I should apologize, I guess. Uh…”
    She floundered. I let her. A long silence made her look more flustered, but I had no intention of politely helping her out of it.
    Mouse sat down between me and Molly, watching her intently.
    Molly smiled at the dog and reached down to pet him.
    Mouse tensed up, and a low rumbling came from his chest. Molly moved her hand toward him again, and my dog’s chest suddenly rumbled with a deep and warning growl.
    The last time Mouse had growled at anything—for that matter, made much noise at all—it had been a crazed sorcerer who made fair headway toward eviscerating me, and summoned a twenty-foot-long demon cobra to kill my dog. Mouse killed it instead. Then, at my command, Mouse killed the sorcerer, too.
    And now he was growling at Molly.
    “Be polite,” I told him firmly. “She’s a friend.”
    Mouse gave me a look and then fell quiet again. He sat calmly as Molly let him sniff her hand and scratch at his ears, but his wary body language didn’t change.
    “When did you get a dog?” Molly asked.
    Mouse was spooked, though not the way he was when serious bad guys were around. Interesting. I kept my tone neutral. “Couple years ago. His name is Mouse.”
    “What breed is he?”
    “He’s a West Highlands Dogasaurus,” I said.
    “He’s huge.”
    I said nothing, and the girl floundered some more. “I’m sorry,” she said, finally. “I lied to you to get you to come down here.”
    “Really?”
    She grimaced. “I’m sorry. I just… I really need your help. I just thought that if I could talk to you in person about it, you might be… I mean…”
    I sighed. Regardless of how intriguingly rounded her tight shirt was, she was still a kid. “Call a spade a spade, Molly,” I said. “You figured if you could get me to come all the way down here, you’d have a chance to flutter your eyelashes and get me to do whatever it is you really want me to do.”
    She glanced aside. “It isn’t like that.”
    “It’s just like that.”
    “No,” she began. “I didn’t want this to be a bad thing…”
    “You manipulated me. You took advantage of my friendship. How is that not a bad thing?” My headache started rising up again. “Give me one reason I shouldn’t turn and walk away right now.”
    “Because my friend is in trouble,” she said. “I can’t help him, but you can.”
    “What friend?”
    “His name is Nelson.”
    “In jail?”
    “He didn’t do it,” she assured me.
    They never did. “He’s your age?” I asked.
    “Almost.”
    I arched an eyebrow.
    “Two years older,” she amended.
    “Then tell legal-adult Nelson he should call a bail bondsman.”
    “We tried that. They can’t get to him before tomorrow.”
    “Then tell him to bite the bullet and spend a night in the lockup or else to call his parents.” I turned to go.
    Molly caught my wrist. “He can’t ,” she said, desperation in her voice. “There’s no one for him to call. He’s an orphan, Harry.”
    I stopped walking.
    Well, dammit.
    I’d been an orphan, too. It hadn’t been fun. I could tell you