Painkiller

by Robert J. Crane

  I took it all in, sniffing for the smell of cigarette smoke and finding instead some kind of faint vanilla scent mingled with one of the prominent brands of men’s deodorant.

  Reed stepped up next to me, still shaking his head.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “Still stuck on your erection joke back there,” he said, looking at me with faint disappointment. “I haven’t been this embarrassed since I had that party for the last Packer/Viking game, when you asked me which team was which.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, stepping around the wall at the far end of the living room to find myself in a kitchen separated by a long counter from another livingroom-esque space, this one coupled with a glass kitchen table sitting just on the other side of the counter. Beyond the brown leather couch in this room was a view of Lake Michigan on one side and to my right a commanding view back down the lakeshore toward downtown. “I know we’re the Vikings.”

  “Uh huh,” Reed said. “What are the team colors?”

  I looked out the windows, taking in the view. This place was expensive. “Uh … red and … green?”

  “Not even close,” Reed said. “That’s the colors for the North Pole Santas.”

  I blinked. “There are no North Pole Santas in the NFL.”

  “I bet you don’t know that for a fact,” he said, breaking off from me to go rummage through the kitchen. He pulled on a pair of leather gloves as he did so, opening the drawers and giving each a quick glance before shutting them again.

  I found myself drawn to the view. This was a corner apartment with a stunning view of both the lake and the city. “Reed?” I asked, looking at the Hancock tower glinting like a black obelisk in the distance, “what do you figure a place like this runs per month?”

  “A lot,” he said, opening drawers and closing them again. “Twenty, thirty grand a month, maybe?”

  “Does that strike you as a lot for a college professor?” I asked, turning my back on the view.

  “Four grand of cash rolled up in his pocket strikes me as a lot for a college professor,” Reed said, glancing up from his search to look at me. “Twenty or thirty K for rent on a monthly basis seems absurd.”

  “We should get his bank records,” I said, wishing I could call J.J. and get them right now. “Something funny’s going on there.”

  “Might be easier to get his payroll info from the college when they open,” Reed said idly, picking through a drawer. “Hmm. Receipts here.”

  “Anything interesting?” I asked, making my way past Professor Jacobs’s pretty damned luxurious furniture in order to take a look for myself.

  “Guy shops at the Whole Foods down on the Mag Mile,” Reed said, pulling a half dozen receipts out and laying them on the spotless counter, which was a hell of a contrast to the strewn mess he’d left in the living room. “Not exactly budget grocery shopping.”

  “So maybe he’s loaded outside of his job,” I said, glancing toward the bedroom door to my left. It was cracked open, the view of Lake Michigan sparkling visible through the door. “He could come from money.”

  “Could be,” Reed said. “Everything we’re picking up here so far is about money, which is weird considering this doesn’t look like a robbery.”

  “Maybe,” I said, heading for the bedroom door. “It’s just strange to kill someone in an alley and not take the four grand they’ve got in their pocket.”

  “Well, what are the options if it wasn’t for money?” Reed asked as I pushed open the bedroom door to step inside. “Personal grudge?”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking over the bedroom. “Friend, co-worker, family member, lover, the usual suspects.”

  “Maybe someone killed him so they could buy his apartment,” Reed called after me.

  “Maybe,” I said, not ruling anything out. I flipped the light switch and the lamp at the bedside snapped on, glaring against the reflective windows and giving me a dark, mirrored reflection of myself alone in the empty bedroom. “It could be anything at this point.”

  I wandered through the room, riffling through drawers in the dresser and finding clothes. I was no fashionista, clearly, but this guy’s closet was pretty top shelf stuff, name brands that I recognized even in my limited capacity. “You were living quite the high life, Mr. Jacobs,” I said quietly as I ran my fingers over one of five Brooks Brothers suits.

  “Find anything?” Reed called from the main room.

  “More money spent than any number of third world countries have in their entire budget,” I said at a normal volume, which was all I needed in order for Reed to hear me. I looked between two of the suits and found something in the back of the closet that was hidden back there. I pushed the clothing aside, the hangars making a rattling noise as they slid along the metal bar, revealing a black metal safe at the back of the closet. “Hello,” I said.

  “Did you find something?” Reed asked from the doorway. I nodded and he came wandering over and looked in. “Hmmm. How do we get into this bad boy?”

  “With greatest ease,” I said, looking it over.

  Reed gave me a blank stare. “It’s a safe.”

  I smiled. “It’s a safe that’s pre-meta.”

  Safe tech had taken a leap in both cost and quality in the last four years since metahumans had been announced to the world. Mostly it was stupid, in my opinion, since the majority of metas in the world couldn’t have cracked an old-school home safe if they had a gun to their head. What were they going to do? Push their flesh and blood fingers into the centimeter wide crack of the door and try and rip it open? Only a Wolfe-type could do that without tearing their fingers apart, and the only Wolfe left in the world was a prisoner in my head.

  Sure, there were other ways, but the truth was that the newer, anti-meta safes did nothing to keep us serious metas out. Once again, panic had ruled the day and cost people tons of money to little purpose. It's not like most metas had embraced careers in safecracking anyway.

  “This should be good,” Reed said, folding his arms in front of him as I squatted down to look at the safe door at face level. “Hey, we found another employable skill for you if this works—you could be a bank robber.”

  I grunted as I stretched my fingers out. The mechanism was one of those classic spin dials rather than one of the newer electronic ones. The safe looked kinda old, actually, but definitely solid, with thick steel around the edges. “Good to know I’ve got options,” I said as I lit up my index finger like a blowtorch, a stream of fire extending an inch from it, blue and hot enough that I could feel it on my face. I applied it to the front side of the safe, intending to slice about three-quarters of the way through.

  “So,” Reed said as I started to cut into the metal with my makeshift blowtorch, “what are you going to do? I mean really. If you don’t take this job you just got offered?”

  “Why wouldn’t I take this job I just got offered?” I asked, sparks flying from the blackened metal, hot, liquid steel sloughing down to the carpet. I extended my other hand and sapped the heat from the metal as it fell, causing it to turn solid before it hit the carpet and caused a fire. It made no noise as it dropped in tiny ovoid pieces onto the soft pile carpeting.

  “Because you’d be crazy to take it,” Reed said, and he sounded certain. “You don’t know who you’d be working for.”

  “And you assume the devil I know—Gerry Harmon, President of the United States and ginormous tool—is better than a devil I don’t?”

  “Why work for a devil at all?” Reed asked, sounding like he was fighting disbelief. “You’d be better off working as a guard at the Federal Reserve.”

  “I’d be bored working as a guard,” I grunted, about half the face of the safe cut off. “I’d feel like I was wasting my life and my talents.”

  “Well, you could potentially live a long time, so wasting a fraction of your life doesn’t seem that unwise to me,” Reed said, “especially since it could potentially be lucrative. You could play meta security consultant to half the
major corporations in the world, rack up a bank account that would see you through your entire long life without working another day in it—”

  “I still could do that,” I said, peeling back the front layer of the safe as I went, working the malleable, heated steel like I was folding paper. “It sounds like this job offer would allow all that and more.”

  “Which is why you should be cautious,” Reed said. “Haven’t you ever heard that old saying about fearing the Greeks when they bring gifts?”

  “Sounds kinda racist against the Greeks,” I muttered. “Also, there’s no Trojan horse here …” I paused. “Wait. Is that where the ‘Gift horse in the mouth’ thing comes from, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Reed said, suddenly impatient. “I don’t care. The point is—”

  “It’s all suddenly so clear,” I said, finishing ripping the front of the safe open, “because if they’d looked in the mouth of the Trojan horse, they would have seen all the Greek guys hiding inside—”

  “I think you’ve lost the plot, as the Brits say,” Reed interrupted, sounding a little huffy.

  “Where do you think ‘lost the plot’ comes from?” I asked. “Like, people, chasing after a nefarious scheme and trying to uncover—”

  “Unghhhh,” Reed said, low, at a growl, “why are you doing this?”

  “Because I need to get into this safe, duh—”

  “You’re pushing off this job offer question like it’s no big deal,” Reed said, almost as hot as the safe panel I had just sheared off, “like it’s a perfectly normal thing to come waltzing through your door, when in fact it’s weird. It’s abnormal. It’s bizarre. It’s—”

  “It’s a traaaaaaaaaap?” I asked, setting the sheared front panel of the safe, the heat all drawn off it, aside.

  Reed looked right at me, and I could tell he was unamused. “You don’t seem concerned that it might be.”

  “Probably because I haven’t given it much thought yet,” I said, turning back to the safe. I’d stripped away all but a few centimeters of the steel at the front in order to protect the contents from being flambéed by my fire finger. “I’ve been kinda busy for the last few hours since the offer was made. Also, I haven’t exactly been inundated with job opportunities, and the news of my leaving government service broke like … weeks ago.”

  “You can’t just jump onto the first thing you see,” Reed said. “If they’re offering this now, it’ll still be there a month from now. You need to consider carefully. You need to think it through.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, and I called Wolfe forward in my mind to harden my hand. “All due consideration, of course. When have I ever acted hastily?” I shot him a dipshit grin and slammed my hand through the front of the safe, bursting through the remaining steel up to my wrist. I then pulled, ripping the remainder of the door off with one good yank.

  “When have you not?” Reed muttered. We both knew I could hear him and chose to ignore his commentary.

  “Well, well,” I said, looking at the neatly stacked bills within the safe. It was all cash, piled from bottom to top of the approximately three-foot by two-foot steel encasement. I let it fall out in a puddle at my knees, eyeing it as it slid, looking for anything hidden within. “If whoever killed this guy knew him, like really knew him, they’d have to know he was swimming in money.”

  “Not necessarily,” Reed said. “Lots of people live a lavish lifestyle on credit. He could be up to his eyeballs in debt for all we know. He could poorer than us.”

  I frowned. “He lives in a palatial apartment and has—” I looked down and did a quick estimation of the money at my feet, “—at least a million in cash, shops at high end stores, and has a wardrobe that would instantly turn you from ‘Meh’ to ‘YEH!’ in any gold-digger’s eyes—”

  “What? I am already so ‘YEH!’—”

  “How is he poorer than government employees who haven’t even been on the pay scale for more than a few years?” I finished.

  “Ugh,” Reed said, rubbing his face. “Look … there’s a difference between income and wealth, okay? You can make a lot of money, but if you spend it all and more so you can live the high life, you’re actually poor, okay? If you’re making a million a year but owe ten million to creditors and have nothing in assets to your name, you’re poor. Period. If you’re in that situation, the guy working at the corner store who has two grand in his 401k is actually, measurably wealthier than you. You just look better from the outside.”

  I blinked, thinking that over. “But … the guy working at the corner store doesn’t live in this swank pad.”

  He frowned. “You’ve become the Kat of finance. Stop being so damned superficial.”

  “Hey!” I said, feeling insulted just by the comparison and responding like one of my captive souls. “This guy’s got money. Clearly. At least some.” I gestured to the pile on the floor.

  “You’re right. CPD will dig into the bank records to confirm it, but …” Reed let a heavy sigh. “We’ve got a murder victim that appears not to have been robbed in spite of being fully loaded.”

  “Yep,” I said, coming to my feet, a pile of cash discarded at my feet. “Which means so far … we’ve got nada.”

  6.

  When we showed Breckinridge the pile of cash in the closet, his eyes nearly jumped out of his head. A million bucks was quite the windfall to a young patrolman, I was sure, and we carefully counted it out and put it all in a garbage bag before we left it with him, taking a receipt for the amount with us. No offense to the young officer, but almost anyone would have been tempted to solve their financial woes by pocketing some of it, and I was very clear when I took the piece of paper with the full amount written on it and put it in my coat. Reed did the same, and we left Breckinridge with the cash, trusting that his personal integrity would be backed up by the knowledge that the three of us had perfect, precise counts of how much money had been recovered at the scene. I suspected he would watch that money like his career depended on it, because the odds were good that it did.

  “It was tempting, though, wasn’t it?” Reed asked me in the back of the cab, staring out along Lake Shore Drive as we headed back toward downtown, the sun already up.

  I yawned. “Not really.”

  He gave me a look like I was a sucker. “A million bucks and you weren’t even tempted?”

  “I prefer to make my money the honest way,” I said, staring out at Lake Michigan before I fumbled for my cell phone and checked the time, “by beating the hell out of scoundrels for a government paycheck.” It was half past seven. “Take us to Northern Illinois Technical University,” I said to the driver.

  He made a low grunt and turned the car around at the next intersection. We had been heading to a hotel downtown, one booked for us by Phillips’s secretary in her unfortunate after-hours, no overtime work session.

  “I was so looking forward to getting a shower and fifteen minutes of sleep,” Reed said, yawning.

  “No rest for the wicked,” I said pointing to me, “or the weary,” and I pointed to him. “The campus is probably opening up right about now, and we’ve got to get a clearer picture of the vic.” I called him the ‘vic,’ like I was in one of those hardboiled cop shows.

  Reed made a face at me. “You know you’re not much of a detective, right?”

  “Shhh,” I said, as we rolled down Lake Shore Drive’s residential street, “let me live the fantasy. I’ll need a bottle of bourbon and a forty-five, naturally.”

  Reed sighed. “If this keeps up, I’m gonna need the forty-five to blow my own brains out later.”

  We pulled up to Northern Illinois Technical University a few minutes later. It was a little north of downtown and the campus was surprisingly green and lush considering that spring had not exactly sprung around here just yet. The trees certainly weren’t showing signs of new life, but the grass appeared to be stirring out of its winter doldrums. There wasn’t any ivy growing on the brick buildings, but the whole place had an old campus fee
l to it, with tall, red-brick buildings crammed into a smaller area than they would have occupied if the college had been built out in suburbia with more land to strew itself over.

  There were actual gates, too, wrought iron, a perfect sort of illustration that this campus either meant to keep the peasants out or knowledge in. Or maybe they just meant to send a message to keep vagrants out, I dunno. Either way, it didn’t look super welcoming.

  I led the way up to the campus administration building, helpfully labeled as such by a giant sign that was visible from where the cab let us out. I could see worker bees moving around through the glass lobby doors, and when I pulled the handle I found it unlocked. We stepped through a glass entry and into the lobby itself, heat blasting down on us as we came in. It was a nice hedge against the morning chill, and I made my way to the front desk with a purpose.

  “Good morning,” said the chipper woman behind the desk. “How can I help you today?”

  “Who’s in charge here?” I asked, leaning an elbow against the desk.

  “Of the reception area?” she asked, still bright, blue eyes shining. “Me! How can I help you?”

  “I need to speak to the person in charge of the campus,” I said.

  Here I saw the first trace of gatekeeper resistance start to show itself. “I’m afraid President Breedlowe has appointments all day—”

  I flipped my badge out and saw her smile flicker then fade. “Tell the president to start cancelling. This might take a while.”

  The lady looked from my badge to me, and her gatekeeper instincts were fighting back hard. “Can I tell her what this is about?”

  “Sure,” I said, feeling just the tiniest bit of relish at ruining this lady’s day, and by extension, her boss’s. “One of your professors, Dr. Carlton Jacobs, was murdered last night.” I didn’t smile. I’m not that ghastly.