“Torelli!” Bart screamed, throwing up his arms. “Jesus, it was Torelli! Torelli wanted the job done! He’s been getting ready to move on Marcone!”

“Since when?” I demanded.

“I don’t know. Couple of weeks, maybe. That’s when they brought me in! Oh, Jesus!”

I closed my hand and snuffed out the sphere of fire before it could do more than scorch the sleeves of Bart’s coat. He lay there on the ground breathing roughly, and refused to lower his arms.

The sound of sirens ghosted through the streets. It was time to go.

“He been talking to anyone lately?” I demanded. “Anyone new? Setting up an alliance?”

Bart shook his head, shuddering. “I ain’t one of his full-timers. I ain’t seen nothing like that.”

“Harry!” Molly screamed.

I’d gotten too intent on the conversation with Bart, and I’d been too worried about Murphy to remember to take everybody’s guns away. The gunman on the ground had recovered his shotgun and worked the action, ejecting a spent shell and loading a new round. I spun toward him, raising my shield bracelet. The problem was that my spiffy redesigned bracelet, while better in a lot of ways than the old one, took a lot more power to use, and as a result I could bring it up only so fast. I threw myself to the ground and tried to put Bart between me and Torelli’s hitter. Bart scrambled frantically to clear the line of fire, and I knew that I wasn’t going to get the shield up in time.

Mouse must have darted off to the side at the beginning of the confrontation, because he appeared out of the shadows and came bounding through nearly three feet of snow as if he’d been running on racetrack turf. He was moving so fast that a bow wave of flying snow literally preceded him, like when a speedboat cuts through the water. He hit Torelli’s hitter just as the man pulled the trigger.

Shotguns are loud . Bart screamed an impolite word.

Mouse seized Torelli’s man by his wounded leg, the one I’d shot a minute ago, and began wrenching him around by it, shaking him as easily as a terrier shakes a rat. The goon had another ear-piercing scream left in him, a high-pitched thing that sounded like it had come from a slaughterhouse hog. The shotgun flew from his fingers, and he began flopping like a rag doll, unconscious from the pain.

The sirens grew louder, and I pushed myself back to my feet. Bart lay on the ground, rocking back and forth and screaming. The wild shotgun blast had hit him right in the ass. There was a lot of blood on his jeans, but he didn’t seem to be gushing anything from a major artery. Granted, depending on how much of the shot he’d caught, the wound could potentially maim, cripple, or maybe even kill him if there was any internal bleeding. But there are worse places to get hit, and with all the adrenaline surging through me, it seemed pretty hilarious.

Cackling, I called to Mouse and ran for the car.

Molly already had Murph buckled into the passenger seat. I had to crawl across her to get to the driver’s side. She let out a blistering curse as I accidentally bumped her arm. The driver’s chair was practically touching the steering wheel, and for a second I thought I was going to have to push down the pedals with one hand and drive with the other, but I managed to find the lever that made the seat slide back, and the car started on the first try.

“Dammit, Dresden,” Murphy wheezed. “There were weapons involved. We have to go back.”

Mouse sailed into the backseat through the open door, and Molly closed both doors on that side of the car. I rocked the steering wheel and wiggled the Saturn loose from the snow, then started off down the street. I still had an irrational smile plastered on my face. My cheeks hurt. “Not a chance, Murphy.”

“We can’t just let them go .”

I suppressed another round of adrenaline giggles. “They aren’t going anywhere. And I’m persona non grata, remember? You want to get caught at the scene of a shooting with me mixed up in it?”

“But-”

“Dammit, Murphy,” I said, exasperated. “Do you want me to go to jail? If we go back now, Torelli’s goon tells them I shot him. They take my gun, and if they can find the bullet, or if it’s still in his leg, it’s assault with a deadly weapon.”

“Not if you were defending yourself,” Murphy grated.

“In a fair world, maybe,” I said. “As it is, if there’s no one but outfit goons there, two guys with records and a known association, both of them wounded, the cops are going to assume that they quarreled and shot each other. Two bad guys go away, you keep your job, and I don’t get pulled off of this case-which is the same thing as getting killed.” I glanced aside at her. “Who loses?”

Murphy didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Everyone loses, Harry. The law is there to protect everyone. It’s supposed to apply equally to everyone.”

I sighed and paid attention to the road. I’d drive for a few minutes to be sure we were in the clear, and then circle back to Michael’s place. “That’s wishful thinking, Murph, and you know it. Pretty sure Marcone’s lawyers love that attitude.”

“The law isn’t perfect,” she replied quietly. “But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to make it work.”

“Do me a favor,” I said.

“What?”

“Hold your nose shut, put on a Philadelphia accent, and say, ‘I am the law.’”

Murphy snorted and shook her head. I glanced aside at her. Her face was pale with pain, her eyes a little glassy. Her left arm was wrapped up in what looked like strips torn from Molly’s T-shirt.

I checked the rearview. My apprentice was, indeed, wearing nothing but a green lace bra under her winter coat. She was crouched down with both arms around Mouse, her face buried in his snow-frosted fur.

“Hey, back there,” I said. “Anyone hurt?”

Mouse yawned, but Molly checked him over anyway. “No. We’re both fine.”

“Cool,” I said. I looked over my shoulder for a second to give Molly a smile. “Nice veil back there. Fast as hell. You did good, grasshopper.”

Molly beamed at me. “Did my face look like that when you did that little ball-of-fire thing to me?”

“I prefer to think of it as a little ball of sunshine,” I said. “And you were stoic compared to that guy, grasshopper. You did a good job too, furface,” I told Mouse. “I owe you one.”

Mouse opened his mouth in a doggy grin and wagged his tail. It thumped against Molly, scattering a little snow against bare skin. She yelped and burst into a laugh.

Murphy and I traded a look. If the gunman had squeezed the trigger a hundredth of a second sooner or later, Murphy would be dead. The blast could have taken her in the head or neck, or torn into an artery. Without Mouse I’d probably be dead, too. And if they’d gotten me and Murphy, I doubted they’d have left Molly behind to testify against them.

That one had been close-no supernatural opposition necessary. Molly might not realize that yet, but Murphy and I did.

“How’s the arm, Murph?” I asked quietly.

“Just hit muscle,” she said, closing her eyes. “It hurts like hell, but it isn’t going to kill me.”

“You want me to drive you to the emergency room?”

Murphy didn’t answer right away. There was a lot more to the question than the words in it. Doctors are required by law to report any gunshot wound to the authorities. If Murph went in for proper medical treatment, they’d report it to the cops. And, since she was a cop, it would mean that she had to answer all kinds of questions, and it would probably mean that the truth of what happened behind us would come out.

It was the responsible, law-abiding thing to do.

“No, Harry,” she said finally, and closed her eyes.

I exhaled slowly, relieved. That answer had cost her something. My hands had started shaking on the wheel. Generally speaking I’m fine when there’s a crisis in progress. It’s afterward that it starts getting to my nerves. “Sit tight,” I said. “We’ll get you patched up.”

“Just drive,” she said wearily.

So I drove.