Painkiller

by Robert J. Crane

  He just grunted, and before I could make good on my threat, or do much more than raise a hand, Reed caught my wrist. He didn’t catch it hard enough to stop me, just enough to get my attention. “Cool off,” he said, a yellow drink in his hand.

  “Is that for me?” I asked, and he pushed it toward me, sloshing a little over the rim of the tallboy glass. “Okay. Why don’t I tag out and you can play good cop for a few minutes.” I looked back at Thuggy. “I’m going to drink this, and let me tell you, I’m a mean drunk—”

  “You’re a mean sober,” he spat back at me, complete with blood from those missing teeth.

  “Yeah, so imagine how much worse I’ll be when I finish this and it kicks in,” I replied, remorseless. “No, really. You think about that. It didn’t have to go this way. You could have just told us about this dead professor, maybe hinted at anyone who would have wanted to do him harm, and we would have left when we were done, no broken limbs, no bloodshed. But you had to prove what a big man you are.” I smiled sweetly. “I have this thing about big men who decide they want to prove how badass they are by going knuckle to knuckle with me. Maybe it’s a blind spot, maybe it’s just pride, maybe it’s my competitive streak—”

  “Or your mean streak,” he said, drooling red.

  “Could be,” I agreed. “Because that’s a big damned streak. But whatever it is … it guarantees that I’m not leaving until one of us breaks. Care to guess which one of us will break first?” I relaxed my hand before I broke the glass I was holding. “Because when my desire to inflict pain in order to get you to talk collides with your willingness to take it in order to keep your mouth shut, I’m going to tell you right now that you’ll lose, and it’s going to be an open question whether you ever walk again when this is over.”

  “Big … talk,” he said, but he wasn’t nearly as confident as the first time he’d taunted me with that one.

  “You’ve got a lot of bravado for a guy missing four teeth and a finger,” I said. I strolled over to the nearest slot machine before I yielded to my temptation to stick fingers in his nose and start ripping.

  I stared at the little row of cherries on the machine, two above the line and one below, and wondered if that meant the last person to play here had won. I doubted it, and even if they did, I suspected the slots here didn’t pay much. I cast a look around the room and saw Reed leaned in close to whisper to the guy I’d worked over. They were both looking furtively at me, like I was going to stalk back over and skin them both at any moment. It could happen, I suppose.

  I took a stroll toward the door at the far end of the room that Thuggy had come in through, kicking it open. I found a back room of the sort you might find in a warehouse, roughly the size of a single garage stall, but this one was filled with booze in boxes, and a few kegs that probably went under the bar for the stuff on tap. No one was back there, and I listened for a second just to be sure no one was hiding behind one of the crates, waiting to ambush me with an AK-47 or something.

  I headed to the next door and knocked it open to find an office. It was an old-school office, paper everywhere, with nondescript scrawl on everything. I read the top few sheets, and they all had stuff written on them that looked like this:

  J. MAGNUSSON—5k—GB v. CHI—BEARS BY 7.

  I rolled my eyes with a supreme lack of caring. Thuggy out there was so busy protecting his turf that he probably didn’t realize I didn’t give a damn about his illicit activities. He didn’t strike me as a strong listener in any case, but I suspected it was going to take a lot more infliction of pain to get him to pull his head out of his ass and open an ear to me now. In spite of what I’d said to him, I had mixed feelings about beating the hell out of some low-level douche who probably didn’t have any connection to my case. I mean, my feelings were mixed between, “Sure, why not kick the crap out of him for shits and giggles?” and “If you beat him enough, information will come out like wine or blood” … but they were mixed.

  OH, FINE. Guilt was settling in for beating the crap out of a guy who couldn’t possibly hurt me, discounting the time that he pulled the gun. I sighed, loud and long, and was about ready to move on to the double doors across the room to give them a quick look-see when I realized they said “Exit” above them and were right on the side of the building. Because naturally an illegal casino should adhere to the fire code.

  “I think we should call vice and head out,” said Reed, pretty tightly, from where he stood over Thuggy. I gave a look at the guy on the table, and … yeah, I’d done a number on him. His shaved white head was streaked with red from all the places blood had spattered and run.

  “He’s not talking to you, either, huh?” I made my way over to find Thuggy leering at me from between bleeding lips. I was actually surprised he wasn’t being more of an asshole, considering the circumstances he was in. I would have thought more swearing would be in order, but maybe he was too concussed to think properly.

  “You can knock every tooth out of my head,” he slurred, blood running out of his lips, “break every bone in my body, rip out my organs—”

  “Don’t go giving me ideas,” I said.

  “—I ain’t saying anything.” Blood bubbled out from between his lips. “I’ll go to my grave screaming in pain, but I won’t say a word about nothing.”

  “I admire your loyalty,” I said, not rolling my eyes for once.

  He blinked at me. “Wh … what?”

  “I believe you,” I said, shuffling my feet and looking down. “You’re tough, I’ll give it to you. You’re a real badass among humans. You not only don’t scare easily, I think you might be the first person I’ve met who maybe doesn’t scare at all, and I salute you for it.” I came up and looked right at him for that bit.

  He looked at me with bleary eyes, like he was trying to work out a puzzle on my face. “H … uh?” He couldn’t even put together a word out of that, I’d messed him up so bad.

  “Take a nap, Thuggy,” I said and gently reached over to put my hand on his forehead. He swiped at it futilely, smacking his palm against my wrist, but I didn’t let loose. I pushed his head back against the table, slowly but forcefully, and with more strength than he could resist. I didn’t press against his nose or block his ability to breathe, just pushed him back to restrain him, pinning the back of his head against the green felt table.

  Clouded though his mind was, he figured out what I was doing pretty quickly and tried to buck his body to escape my hold. He didn’t have any luck, and when he brought his hands up to try and rip mine off his forehead, I batted his attempts away with my free hand while I waited for my power to work.

  The burning at the tips of my fingers followed a spit of red that came geysering out of his mouth and splashed across the back of my hand. Eww. A tingling sensation ran up from my fingertips into my hand, and suddenly I felt like I’d pushed through his skull and was falling down into his face, sucked into a vortex where my fingers met his skin—

  This was hardly the first time I’d used my powers to invade a person’s mind. I didn’t like to do it very often, because in my experience, a guy as rough as Thuggy wasn’t exactly hiding happy memories of sunny days spent with his parents watching parades roll down an idyllic, small town main street. When it came to the bitter memories and broken dreams that made a person violent and unpleasant, I had plenty enough of my own without diving deep into the heads of others searching for surplus. And if there weren’t already enough traumas in my own past, I had six other damaged people in my head in addition to the stolen memories of who-knew-how-many others just waiting to be sifted if the mood struck me.

  I am not damaged, Zack said with more than a little irritation.

  I am, Bjorn said, really owning it. He sounded proud.

  I dove into Thuggy’s mind and found just about what I expected, plus or minus a little childhood abuse. The requisite neglect was there, along with a strong father figure in the form of a local criminal that gave him an outlet for his shitty and unsatisfying
family life.

  I vacuumed up those memories almost accidentally on the road to my objective. I doubted the lack of them would make him a better person, but why not at least try? You know, for science or humanity or in the name of a better Chicago or something.

  I zipped past a bunch of memories that had zero practical application to what I was doing and popped into one that was exactly what I was looking for. Thuggy’s name was David Sadler, and in his work life, he wasn’t just an enforcer for this casino, he was actually a front-of-house guy, the face of the gambling hall and a manager. He greeted customers, schmoozed, and took pride in being the secret-keeper for the establishment. He acted like a bartender, sucking up patrons’ secrets and keeping them to himself, which felt like an odd attribute for a crook, but there it was. He didn’t use any of the personal information he gleaned in the commission of his job against his customers. Ever.

  I plopped into the memory of the middle of his evening last night, the casino rollicking, filled with people. I was led to this memory almost unwittingly by Thuggy’s own mental guidance systems, like he knew what I wanted and was trying to so hard not to look at it that he brought me to it by mistake.

  Thuggy wandered between patrons, sidling up to the poker table, where I saw Dr. Carlton Jacobs looking very much alive, with sunglasses on to hide where he was looking. He was playing Texas Hold ’Em, and had a big stack of chips in front of him.

  “Mr. Jacobs,” Thuggy said in a silky smooth voice. I sensed that Thuggy always used the silk, unless he had to intervene with a customer who had reached his credit limit. “Always a pleasure to see you.” I realized that Thuggy was calling him “Mister,” not “Doctor,” and it wasn’t because he didn’t know his title. It was because he didn’t feel the need to extend that information to others who might be eavesdropping. The table was full of other players, and most of them didn’t have near the stack of chips that Jacobs did.

  Only one did, in fact. A guy who wore a black coat that was decades out of date and had his hair parted crisply down one side in a style that no one but Captain America really wore anymore. It was our killer, and he was sitting with his own fat stack in front of him, fingers resting on the two cards lying on the green felt table.

  “Mr. Graves,” Thuggy said to the murderer in greeting.

  Mr. Graves looked up, giving Thuggy just a hint of a smile. “How’s it going, David?” Graves—our murderer—asked.

  “Exceptionally well, sir,” Thuggy replied, moving down the line to slap him lightly on the shoulder in a friendly manner. “And for you?”

  “This guy keeps cockblocking me,” Graves said, nodding to Dr. Jacobs, smile widening slightly. “Other than that …” I shuddered mentally as I realized that the murderer had just said that about his victim.

  “It doesn’t look like you’re doing too bad,” Dr. Jacobs said, smiling faintly himself. He reached over and gently clapped the murderer on the shoulder—

  And Graves got a look in his eyes like something happened, a thousand-yard stare that penetrated into the distance.

  I watched for another few seconds, but Graves pulled himself together, stammering when the bet came to him, and folded before cashing out. He looked rattled, but when he got up to leave, clutching his money, Thuggy caught a glimpse of the look he gave Dr. Carlton Jacobs as Graves left the table.

  It was hard like steel, unyielding, a glance that ran over him as he got up to go—there was a decision in it that was as plain to me as it had been to Thuggy when he saw it, even if he hadn’t understood what it meant until later, when he’d seen the cops milling around the alley like flies to a carcass.

  Graves had decided to kill Jacobs right then and there.

  18.

  I came out of Thuggy’s head with my usual feeling of ugh, like I’d just taken a dip in a slime pit and come out covered in slick green algae. Also, my headache was not improving by doing the mental version of a dumpster dive, and as I let loose of Thuggy’s forehead, I grasped my own and moaned softly.

  “You all right?” Reed asked, and I assumed without looking that he was talking to me.

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice kind of low, “just wish I could get into a decent person’s head for once, maybe see what it looks like when people have a normal, well-adjusted childhood.”

  “Scott didn’t have a normal childhood?”

  “I didn’t steal his childhood memories,” I said, squeezing an eye open to see Reed looking at me with judgy eyes. “Just the adult ones.” Very, very adult ones, in some cases.

  “You know what they’re gonna call you if anyone finds out what you just did here?” Reed asked, lowering his voice either in case there was surveillance in place or because he thought I was suffering from a brain-drain hangover. It was a considerate move, either way. “A vigilante.”

  “That’s next week,” I said, shaking my head to rid myself of that ugh feeling. “This week I’m just another overreaching, possibly incompetent government employee that they can’t seem to fire.”

  He gave me his best jaded look. “Why is it we’re leaving government service if they can’t fire us?”

  “Because our jobs are relocating to the malarial swamp that is Washington DC, duh.”

  He pursed his lips in disapproval. “Look, I don’t want to rehash old arguments—”

  “Then don’t.”

  “—but,” he went on, apparently undeterred, the bastard, “but what you just did there was—”

  “Cruel, I know,” I said.

  “Unconstitutional,” he said.

  “I’m pretty sure the law isn’t settled on taking someone’s memories, since the framers probably didn’t have that in mind when they were drafting—”

  “You deprived that guy of his rights,” Reed said, folding his arms, looking more disappointed than anything. “No trial, no—”

  “Yeah, I did,” I said. “But I caught him operating an illegal gambling establishment, so—”

  “That’s not an excuse for what you did to the guy,” Reed said, looking at the mess I’d made of Thuggy. He had a point.

  “What the hell?” Four guys came sweeping in through the exit doors on the side of the building. None of them were as big as Thuggy, but they weren’t small, either. They looked like the casino’s security detail, and they filed in with angry looks on their faces as they took the sight of the two of us and their co-workers on the craps table next to me.

  “He did it,” I said, pointing at Reed as someone else came in the main door. I turned my head to look and it was a woman in a grey pantsuit with a pink halter-top looking shirt underneath it. She had long reddish-brown hair and wasn’t carrying a purse or anything. The look on her face said she was not someone’s girlfriend, or the concierge, or a bartender.

  Her face said she meant business, a tight smile and dark eyes that were focused on me and me alone.

  “You might want to save the lecture on violence for later,” I said to Reed. “You take the guys and I’ll dance with the lady?” I caught his nod of agreement out of the corner of my eye.

  “Hi, Sienna,” the woman said, easing toward me, arms awkwardly straight at her side.

  “Howdy, stranger,” I said, watching her, “I love your look. It’s says, ‘I’m here for serious business, but I’m ready to party, too.’”

  “I like your look, too,” she said, nodding at the bloody mess just beneath my jacket on my side where I’d been shot. “It says I’m not too late … to kill you myself.”

  19.

  Veronika

  There she stood, Sienna Nealon, plain as day, looking righteous and defiant all at once. It was a pretty common look on her, at least judging by the press photos. Veronika hadn’t paid her that much more attention than she paid to any other celebrity, just enough to know that everyone thought of the girl as some kind of cross between a superhero and a supervillain, depending on who you were asking and when you asked.

  Veronika didn’t feel a need to ask. She didn’t care. Hero, villain,
it was all the same to her. She needed to reduce the girl to a corpse to collect on the contract, and anything beyond that was just noise.

  Still, caution was warranted.

  “You know who ruined my shirt?” Nealon asked, pointing at the bloody stain and rip at her side, hidden beneath the dark fabric of her coat. Pristine, pale skin showed from the hole in the cloth.

  “It was probably Phinneus Chalke,” Veronika said, stepping a little closer as she peered at the sight of the former injury. “He uses this Old West rifle, one of the ones with a lever on it.” She made the motion like she was holding up a gun and racking it the way she’d seen Phinneus do it when they’d been in competition for another job once. “He’s an Artemis. Good shooter.” She looked back to Nealon’s blue eyes, glowing like ice under a winter sky. “I honestly didn’t think he ever missed.”

  “He couldn’t put me down,” Nealon said, sounding a little too pleased with herself.

  “Never send a man to do a woman’s job,” Veronika said, a smile twisting her rose-red lips. Nealon’s brother was off to deal with the thugs who had come in through the other door. From the way the voices were rising, it sounded like the tense standoff might be about to break out into violence.

  “You said it, sister.” Nealon smirked at her. “I can’t say I’ve ever met a woman who could go toe to toe with me, though. Most don’t even try. The last couple that did? One was a Russian lady that just got out of prison—she begged me to kill her mercifully. The one before that …” She put a finger to the side of her lip as she thought it over. “I think she was Czech? Russian trained, though. Stabbed me a bunch of times. Regretted it, probably, before the end.”

  “I didn’t realize we were going to summarize all of our battles in an epic recitation before we fought or I would have brought a list, maybe taken some time to compose it into a poem,” Veronika said, still smirking.

  “I kinda like you,” Nealon said, smiling. “What’s your name?”