His eyes narrowed. “Or what?”
I exhaled. “I could threaten you, but you’re the kind of scum I wouldn’t even enjoy scraping off my shoe,” I said. “Let’s just say that you put off a lot of negative energy. It’s the kind of thing tends to come back home. Hard.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” he demanded.
I shrugged. “You get what you give, Tripp,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “You think you scare me, Harry Dresden?”
“A smart man would be scared of me.”
“Well, I’m fucking not,” Tripp said.
“Pass. That one’s too easy,” I said. “Look, man. Maya seems like a nice enough person. And I looked at Sunflower, and they seem like nice people. The kind of people guys like you should stay away from.”
“Don’t end a sentence in a fucking preposition,” Tripp said.
“Wow,” I said. “You just aren’t getting the picture at all, here.”
He showed me his teeth. It wasn’t a smile. And he wasn’t scared. He genuinely wasn’t. Now that was a little perplexing. Either he didn’t know me, or he didn’t know men like me or…
Or maybe there was something wrong with this guy. I felt a little more wary.
Tripp stood up casually, lifted his chin, and eyed me. “Harry Dresden, huh.”
“That’s my name,” I said. “Don’t wear it out.”
“Well Harry fucking Dresden,” he said. “You’re fucking with the wrong guy.”
“Wow, do I not like you,” I said. “Honestly. It’s remarkable.”
“Like I give a fuck if you like me,” he sneered. “If you’re gonna do something, do it. Otherwise, you go tell that little whore either she shows up here tonight, with my fucking money, or I’ll see her in court.”
“There is no fucking money,” I said.
“So, she lied to you, too,” he said. “Women. Guess you’re just dumb fuck enough to believe them.”
My knuckles ached. They just ached to punch this guy in the face.
But I realized, as they did, that it wouldn’t change his mind. I’ll give it to Tripp, he was tough-minded. Maybe it was stupidity making that happen, and maybe it was some kind of pathology, but he wasn’t going to be moved. A display of wizardly power might be enough to crack through his exterior—but that wasn’t going to happen with my talent waiting outside his threshold.
So much for going right at the problem. I’d have to look for another angle.
“Think about what I said, Tripp,” I told him. “It would save you a world of trouble.”
“You can talk to my fucking lawyer, Harry Dresden,” he sneered. “Or pay the whore’s money for her. Now get the fuck out of my house.”
He was the rightful owner, and that carried a certain amount of power in the supernatural world. I felt a little impulse to leave as he said it, which I suppressed.
But then I left without saying another word, of my own free will. I went back to the Munstermobile, the old purple-black hearse I had been driving around Chicago lately, complete with a blue and violet flame job, and rumbled off.
Maybe my intimidation powers were on the fritz. Or maybe Tripp was a little bit crazy.
I needed to think this one over. Time for a skull session.
Chapter Four
I headed down to my lab.
When my old boarding house had burned down and Marcone had built the castle on its smoldering ruins, one thing of the old place had survived: the subbasement. One of the first things I’d done when I’d returned to the site was to get that dank little subbasement chamber cleaned out, fixed up, and restored to what I had been used to: cinder block walls, three of them lined with tables and shelving units that held my new, slowly growing collection of wizardly gewgaws and exotic objects. I could use them in researching, designing, and producing any number of magical tools and handy constructs.