blush easy."
"Blow me, Kincaid," I growled.
"Don't you owe me enough already?" I heard him moving around. "You give any more thought to shutting down Mavra's sorcery?"
"Yeah," I said. Ebenezar's truck growled as it changed gears. "Our wheelman is going to handle it."
"You sure he can?"
"Yeah," I said. "Here he comes."
Kincaid stepped out of the van with guns strapped all over attachment points on a suit of black ballistic body armor that looked a generation or two ahead of the latest police-issue. He had one set of big-ass revolvers, a couple of those tiny, deadly machine guns that shoot so fast they sound like a band saw, and a bunch of automatics. They all came in matching pairs, presumably because he had an audition for the lead in a John Woo movie later that day.
Kincaid donned a second Red Cross jacket to help hide all the weaponry, and added his own matching cap like Murphy's. He watched Ebenezar's truck coming, and said, "So who is this guy?"
Just then Ebenezar's truck rolled up, its headlights in our eyes until it had all but passed. "So, Hoss," Ebenezar was saying through the open window. "Who is this hired gun?"
The old man and the mercenary saw one another and stared at each other from maybe seven or eight feet apart. Time stopped for one of those frozen, crystallized instants.
And then both of them went for their guns.
Chapter Thirty
Kincaid was faster. One of the guns he'd had on him got to his hand so quick it might have been teleported there from under his coat. But even as he raised the gun toward the old wizard, there was a flash of emerald light from a plain steel ring on Ebenezar's right hand. I felt a low, harsh hum in the air and a surge of dizziness, and Kincaid's pistol ripped its way out of his fingers and shot away into the shadows of the parking garage.
I swayed on my feet. Kincaid recovered before I did and a second gun came out from under the Red Cross jacket. I looked up to see Ebenezar settle the old shotgun's stock against his shoulder, both barrels squarely on Kincaid's head.
"What the hell!" I blurted, and threw myself between them. It put Kincaid's pistol in line with my spine and Ebenezar's shotgun in line with my head, which seemed like a positive at the moment. As long as I was in front of the weapons, the two couldn't get a clean shot at each other. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" I demanded.
"Hoss," snarled Ebenezar, "you don't know what you're dealing with. Get down."
"Put the shotgun down," I said. "Kincaid, put the pistol away."
Kincaid's voice, behind me, sounded no different than it had at breakfast. "That sounds like a fairly low-percentage move for me, Dresden. No offense."
"I told you," Ebenezar said, his voice different—cold and terrible and hard. I'd never heard the old man speak that way before. "I told you if I ever saw you again, I'd kill you."
"Which is one reason you haven't seen me," Kincaid answered. "There's no point to this. If we start shooting, the kid's going to get hit. Neither of us has an interest in that."
"I'm supposed to believe you give a damn about him?" Ebenezar snarled.
"Half a damn, maybe," Kincaid said. "I sort of like him. But what I meant was there's no profit for either of us in killing him."
"Put the damned guns down!" I choked. "And stop talking about me like I'm a kid who isn't here."
"Why are you here?" Ebenezar demanded, ignoring me.
"I'm a hired gun," Kincaid said. "Dresden hired me. Do the math, Blackstaff. Of all people you should know how it goes." The tone of Kincaid's voice changed to something thoughtful. "But the kid doesn't know what we do. Does he?"
"Harry, get down," Ebenezar said, speaking to me again.
"You want me down?" I said. I met Ebenezar's eyes and said, "Then I want your word you aren't going to open up on Kincaid until we've talked."
"Dammit, boy. I'm not giving my word to that—"
Anger made my voice lash out, hard and sharp. "Not him. Give me your word, sir. Now."
The old man's gaze wavered and he lifted his forward hand from the shotgun, fingers spread in a conciliatory gesture. He let the barrel ease down. "All right. My word to you, Hoss."
Kincaid exhaled slowly through his teeth. I felt his weight shift behind me.
I glanced back. His gun was half lowered. "Yours too, Kincaid."
"I'm working