“Oh, right. Anyway, it showed up with several mortals and snatched him. We’ve got to get him back.”

Murphy nodded, still writing. “What happens if we don’t?”

“A bunch of serial killer–type ghosts start wandering around Chicago, looking for a good time. Ghosts like that can manifest—make themselves the next-best thing to real, Murph. Like the Nightmare. People will get hurt. A lot of them.”

Murphy’s mouth thinned into a line. She wrote on her notepad. “We’ll do triage in a minute. What else?”

“I found the gang who shot up your house last night,” I said.

The tip of Murphy’s pencil snapped against the notepad. She looked up at me, and her eyes were cold, furious. She spoke in a very quiet voice. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” I said. I paused for a moment to think about what I was going to say: Murphy’s temper was not a force to be invoked lightly. “I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about them anymore.”

“Why?” she asked, in her cop voice. “Did you kill them?”

There’d been a little too much intensity in that question. Wow. Murphy was clearly only too ready to go after these guys the minute she knew where they were.

I glanced at Butters, who looked like someone sitting near an armed explosive.

“No,” I said, working out my words carefully. If Murphy’s fuse was really as short as it seemed, I didn’t want her charging off to deal with Fitz and his poor crew in true Viking tradition. “But they don’t have the resources they had before. I don’t think they’re going to hurt anybody in the immediate future.”

“That’s your professional opinion, is it?”

“Yes.”

She stared at me for a minute, then said, “Abby was standing on my patio last night when they came by. She took a round in the belly during that attack. She didn’t get down fast enough. They don’t know if she’s going to live or not.”

I thought of the plump, cheerful little woman, and swallowed. “I… I didn’t know, Murph. I’m sorry.”

She continued speaking as if I hadn’t said anything. “There was a retiree living in the house behind mine. He used to give me tomatoes he grew in his garden every summer. He wasn’t as lucky as Abby. The bullet hit him in the neck while he was sleeping in bed. He had enough time to wake up, terrified, and knock the handset of his phone out of its cradle before he bled out.”

Hell’s bells. That put a different spin on things. I mean, I had been hoping to go for a no-harm, no-foul argument with Murphy. But if blood had been spilled and lives lost… Well. I knew Murphy. Whether or not she was a cop anymore, she wasn’t going to back away.

“Where are they?” she asked.

“This is not a time to kick down doors,” I told her. “Please hear me out.”

Her hand tightened into a fist, but she visibly took control of her anger, took a deep breath, and then nodded. “Go ahead.”