Painkiller

by Robert J. Crane

  “Stop saying ‘vic,’” Reed said. “And you heard Gustafson. It’s not a problem if you’re always up at the tables, is it? Because if so, that’s the kind of problem I want to have.”

  “It certainly beats the hell out of our current problem,” I said, giving him a side-eye as we headed back to the road in the distance, hoping to catch a cab. He looked at me questioningly until I answered. “Too many theories and not a speck of evidence so far.”

  “Yeah,” Reed said, shoving his hands into his pockets as we walked, a newfound determination running over him. “Let’s go find this gambling den and start taking care of that problem right now.”

  8.

  Harry

  The waiting man’s name was Harrison Graves, but no one called him Harrison and only a few people called him Graves. Almost anyone who knew him called him Harry, and if any of them had been asked if Harry was the sort to murder a man in an alley with his bare hands, not one of them would have believed it possible.

  Harry Graves stood on Oak Street Beach, the Drake Hotel looming behind him, Hancock tower rising above that building, cup of plain coffee steaming in his hand, staring out across the white-capped waters of Lake Michigan. It was a gusty day on the lake, not the sort he’d want to be on a boat for. To his left and right there were concrete quays running on either side of the sandy beachfront, water spraying over the top with violent force. The wind rushed over Harry where he stood on the top of a dune, just looking out.

  He hadn’t been able to sleep after punching the professor to death in the alley. It wasn’t that he was beset with a regret. He didn’t regret it any more than he regretted spilling coffee on the walk over here. It was just a thing that happened, an inevitable result of the fact that the barista in the too-fancy coffee shop decided to fill his cup to the brim. Predictable and unavoidable unless he’d either dumped some coffee out or sipped it before it was cool. He valued his tongue not being burned more than he worried about the drip running down the side of the Styrofoam, and so here he was, wet fingers, sticky cup, and standing on the beach contemplating, very idly, the unavoidable thing that he’d done last night.

  “Shit happens,” he said to the air in front of him. A lady walking her dog behind him heard it, though, and made a face. She was distracted for just a second and stepped in a small dune in the sand, a pit a few inches deep—just deep enough to turn her ankle. She swore and stumbled before recovering her footing.

  Harry had already moved on, though. He turned and headed back down the path toward the underpass leading under Lake Shore Drive and back to Michigan Ave. He walked briskly, still not ready to sip the blazing hot coffee yet. That way probably lay pain, though he couldn’t be sure without testing it himself.

  He made his way down the walkway ramp toward the underpass, studiously trying to ignore the WWII-era painting of Uncle Sam pointing his finger right at Harry. He’d ignored that particular call at the time that it was first issued and hadn’t really regretted it. As he descended down the concrete walkway toward the covered underpass, the smell of urine practically jumped out at him. The ground was wet. It probably wasn’t all piss, since it had rained a lot lately, but there was enough of it to cause the strong scent to crawl up his metahuman nose and linger there.

  Distracted by the stink, he came around the corner and bumped into a guy in running clothes. Harry was walking at normal speed, human speed, and when he collided with the runner, Harry didn’t move much. The runner, though, bounced right off as Harry set his feet by instinct.

  “Hey,” the guy said, headphones plugged in, talking artificially loud as he pulled his butt off the pissy, wet concrete in the underpass, “watch where you’re going.”

  “Sorr—” Harry started by instinct, burning coffee running down his fingertips—

  And suddenly … he wasn’t sorry.

  “Yeah, yeah,” the runner disregarded him, getting off the ground, his lime-orange shorts and grey tank top spattered with coffee and other liquid. “Asshole.” He brushed his hands off and started to go around Harry.

  Harry reached out and shoved him lightly with the tips of his fingers, smearing coffee onto the grey shirt as he pushed the runner.

  “What the—” The runner fell down again, rolling hard, his legs and ass coming up over his head. He landed on his knees like he’d done a backwards flip, and Harry hadn’t even tried very hard. He just wanted to stop the guy for a second, by instinct. The guy’s face had scuffed on the concrete, and he had road rash on his cheek. “What the hell are you doing?” the guy asked, more outraged than scared.

  Harry just stood there, coffee cup in hand, and then he sighed, decision made. He threw the coffee cup sideways and it splashed out of the cup and out of the tunnel. Harry took two sharp steps forward toward the runner and grabbed him around the jaw. The guy couldn’t avoid it; he wasn’t strong enough and he wasn’t fast enough, not nearly.

  “What the—” the guy started to say, but he barely got even that out before Harry twisted, hard and fast, and broke the runner’s neck, turning his face around a hundred and eighty degrees and guaranteeing death.

  His work done, Harry pushed the runner’s body away, disgusted. He shook his own head considerably more conservatively than he’d just shaken the runner’s and sighed again. He looked sidelong at his wasted coffee, and his ears perked up as he heard the sound of a telephone dialing behind him.

  “911 Emergency,” came a faint, faded voice. “Do you need police, fire or ambulance?”

  Harry spun to see a woman in her mid-twenties, dressed for a jog of her own, yoga pants and a tight-fitting workout shirt running down her wrists to where she clutched her cell phone. She wore a horrified look and her phone had fallen away from her ear. Her breaths were coming in sharp gasps. “Oak Street Beach—the underpass—there’s a murder—ohmi—”

  He hadn’t even heard her coming, hadn’t sensed her behind him, hadn’t been paying an ounce of attention the whole way until the runner he’d just killed had jarred him out of his self-imposed reverie and forced him into action.

  Harry looked right at the woman, and she looked right at him. Her cell phone still squeaked, the speaker blaring, but quietly enough that only his meta ears picked it up at this distance. “Ma’am? Are you still there?”

  “Shit,” Harry said.

  9.

  Sienna

  I was on the phone with Detective Maclean, in the back of a cab rolling toward downtown, listening to the skepticism in his voice as I went over what we’d found. The air in this particular cab reminded me of a school bus I’d once looked over in the course of an investigation in Utah. It was weird and grossly rubbery smelling, like they’d made the seats out of recycled poop cut with plastic.

  My conversation with Maclean was starting to feel as if it were manufactured out of similar components. “There’s a gambling den off State Street,” I told him. I could hear him breathing disapproval on the other end of the line. “That’s where Dr. Jacobs was coming from when he got popped.”

  “Uh huh,” Maclean said, his faith in my investigative skills shining through in his tone. “A gambling hall right off State Street. Of all the places someone could put an illegal operation, they chose there. Sure. I’ll get right on investigating that.”

  “If I wanted to make up fibs, I’d come up with something better than that,” I said.

  “Sure you would,” Maclean said.

  “Listen, ass,” I said. The cabbie’s head turned around sharply. “Not you. This is Illinois, all right? How many of your former governors have ended up behind bars?”

  Maclean grunted at the other end of the line. “I think we’re running four out of the last seven at the moment.”

  “See, in most places, that would defy belief,” I said, “but here, it’s just ‘the Chicago way,’ right?” Maclean ground his teeth. I could hear it through the phone. “Also, I fly and can shoot fire from my fingers. Time was, that would be believed impossible. Now we just accept it as fact. So …
why are you having so much trouble believing me when I say there might be a gambling hall off State Street?”

  “I’ll talk to Vice,” he said, still nonplussed. “See if they’ve heard any rumors. Where are you going to be?”

  “Downtown at my hotel. Thanks,” I said. I heard a rustle in the background behind him as I hung up.

  “I think technically ‘the Chicago way’ is, ‘He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue,’” Reed said, looking out the window at the Gold Coast scrolling by on our right.

  “Cops get antsy when you say that kind of thing to them,” I said, looking out at Lake Michigan on the left. My phone rang and I answered before I even realized it was Maclean. “Go.”

  “We just got a 911 call from someone at Oak Street Beach,” Maclean said. “Down on one of the walking paths. They said ‘murder.’”

  “That’s … usual, right?” I asked cautiously, trying not to be too much of an ass.

  “No, it is not usual for people to be murdered in Streeterville!” he shouted at me through the phone.

  “Oak Street Beach is right over there,” Reed said, pointing out the window ahead of the driver.

  “Pay the cabbie,” I said and hung up as I threw my phone in my pocket and opened the door.

  “What the f—” the cab driver shouted in accented English as I stepped out onto Lake Shore Drive at fifty miles an hour.

  I know, that was dramatic. But I’d had my fill of riding around in cabs for a while, honestly. This shit was tiresome. I zoomed out of that door, slamming it behind me, but kept low, about ten feet off the ground, hoping the FAA wouldn’t notice. It’s not like they were that put out about those commercial drones all over the place nowadays, after all. Or if they were, they hadn’t issued a million cease and desist orders yet.

  I blew over the northbound lane of Lake Shore Drive, heard what sounded like a million horns but was probably closer to five blaring at me obnoxiously for flying over them. I shot over a chain-link fence toward the beach and zoomed over a sloping ramp that looked perfect for pedestrian traffic. I could hear faint, hyperventilating gasps coming from ahead, so I swooped down the ramp and found a woman dressed in way-too-tight yoga capris, holding her phone in her hand like it was her lifeline.

  “What happened?” I asked, hovering about a foot off the ground just outside of the tunnel she was staring into. I didn’t want to just race around the corner in case the murderer was lurking there.

  The woman swung around to look at me with her jaw already down around her skinny knees. “Mu—muh—muh—” she said, incapable of getting anything else out.

  “So you made the 911 call, then,” I muttered and drifted past her. There was definitely a corpse here, and it looked like one of her fellow fitness buffs. The guy’s head had been completely turned around on his shoulders, the neck at a sick angle. He should have been face-down on the concrete but he wasn’t, thanks to the anatomical rearrangement that the murderer had performed. “Where’s the killer?”

  I wasn’t expecting a cogent answer and I didn’t get one. She pointed, though, down the tunnel behind me, and I was off, zooming past the corpse.

  I came out on a walkway that overlooked a road. There was no one ahead of me, so I shot onward into a park complete with a wire-frame gazebo and racks full of those rental bikes that looked so ergonomically uncomfortable I felt like I’d need to be coerced at gunpoint into getting on one.

  Then again, if the FAA kept me grounded much longer, one of those sturdy bastards might just become my preferred means of transport, ET-style.

  I flew off the ground about ten feet and caught a glimpse of a guy who’d gone down the path ahead, toward the crosswalk to downtown. He was hoofing it, walking at a speed that betrayed him as not so much human. He was right at the corner of Lake Shore Drive and another road, next to what looked like a closed-off tunnel that headed under the street. There was a ramp leading down to it, all walled off at the bottom with cream-colored painted plywood, but he was above it at street level, looking back at me, clearly trying to plot out his next move.

  “Halt!” I shouted at him, and he knew I had him. I know this because he froze for a second, and it gave us a moment to get the measure of each other.

  He was a medium height guy, probably 5'10", reasonably tan for being a white guy at the end of winter in the Midwest. He certainly wasn’t as pale as I was, with my bleachy Nordic skin. He had his hands in the pockets of an old, worn black jacket that looked at least a decade out of style. His jeans were the wrong cut for this century, too, and they were worn in a lot of places. Not threadbare or hipster-faded, either, just well used. He had dark, short-cropped hair parted cleanly over in the style of guys that were in their forties or fifties or older. Everything about this guy screamed, “Vintage!” except for his skin, which was a really good sign that he was an older meta.

  He looked at me, and I looked back at him, hovering, ready to strike. I couldn’t see his eye color from here, but I could see him making the calculation: Should I run?

  He ran.

  Actually, he didn’t so much run as he pitched himself sideways over the railing and dropped the ten feet or so down the onto the ramp below. He landed adroitly and then sprinted into the faded wooden planks that blocked off the pedestrian walkway under Lake Shore Drive. He smashed right through them without letting it slow him down and disappeared into the darkness within.

  “Why is it always idiots they send me after?” I wondered aloud. That wasn’t really true, though. I’d run across plenty of people who hadn’t been idiots, who had in fact given me a run for my money in the badass department, that had laid well-crafted traps that had occasionally cost me limb and once even life. Still, I had this thing in me where I couldn’t let myself quit, so every time someone ran from me, I would doggedly run their ass down and refuse to let them escape, even if it caused me pain. Which it often did.

  I shot after him and blasted through the hole in the wood with a fury. I figured he was panicked, running, maybe he knew my rep for chaos and destruction and would wisely want to get the hell away from me regardless of how dumb running from someone who could fly actually seemed on a logical level.

  But that was before I flew headlong into his fist, which was waiting for me on the other side of the wooden barricade, along with the fugitive himself.

  It halted my momentum in a flash, that punch, took me from sixty to zero in about 3.2. It was like a clothesline from hell, and I felt it on my chin, my jaw, my cheek, and all along the rest of me as I spun off and hit the concrete wall after busting some more boards with my legs.

  I landed in a heap, stunned, with more than a few broken bones. If I’d been able to speak, I might have said, “Well, that was stupid.” Because it was.

  Instead I lay there, on the edge of consciousness, not quite able to summon up Wolfe to heal me, when a shadow appeared above me, looming with a grey sky behind him, the light silhouetting him and robbing his features of clarity.

  “You’re going to die,” he said, his voice low and quiet, and my eyes fluttered closed.

  10.

  Harry

  Harry stared down at Sienna Nealon, who was bleeding out of her nose and her ears, her right leg broken and pointed off at a sickening angle. A cavalcade of emotions thundered through him as he stood there, but stunned horror was probably right at the top of the list.

  The fact that she was here, in Chicago, was not unexpected. The fact that she was here, right here, right now, where he was—that was alarming, concerning, worrisome—he was pretty sure he’d need a thesaurus to fully express the level of UH OH he felt pouring over him.

  She was out, that much clear by the fact that he was still breathing, but the fact that she was there, that she could—she could heal, she’d be fine from this once she woke up—that was … well, he was down to disquieting.

  None of this was any good.

  The professor had needed to die last night. Needed to. But this? He stare
d down at her, scarcely trusting to believe his eyes. This was …

  Frightening. Disturbing. Where was that thesaurus?

  Harry didn’t even know what to do, but he could feel help coming. He looked back and knew it was seconds away. He jumped over her insensate body and ran, smashing up through the walkway on the other side with perfect timing as her backup came in through the ramp on the other side.

  She’d caught him because he’d been moving too fast on foot. Well, he wouldn’t make that mistake again. He surveyed the area for a second as he burst out onto Michigan Avenue and then walked three blocks, casually, before stepping into a store for five minutes. He meandered, he browsed, and then he stepped out to find police cars, ambulances and fire trucks swarming near the park. As expected.

  He raised his hand and hailed the first cab he saw, popping in the back. He gave an address in the Loop and then leaned back to think.

  When he’d been in the store, he’d been focused on the next move and the next move only. Harry could only concentrate so far into the future, planning it out. Now he knew he was safe for a little bit at least, and he could open his mind to the next move. He looked back and saw the lights flashing behind him, red and blue and white, and he sighed again. A simple bump-off in an alley wasn’t supposed to get this complicated. This was going to require … desperate measures.

  11.

  Sienna

  A hard hand slapped across my face, snapping me out of a sweet, blissful nap and back into a world of pain and discomfort. I ached all over, and my face was sticky with blood. I could smell it, the pungent scent flooding into my sinuses and threatening to overwhelm me.

  “Owwwww,” I said, looking up at Reed’s deeply concerned eyes. He was crouched over me, in silhouette, pretty much like my attacker had been when I’d gone out. I wanted to make a joke about the Mack Truck that had hit me, but for all my much-vaunted superiority, my own stupidity had been the culprit in this particular injury.