“A little cross-town rivalry, huh?” Reed asked.
“Something like that,” Gustafson said, pulling the top note off with a sucking sound of adhesive peeling away. He offered it to us between two ink-stained fingers. “I’ll keep working on this, then.” He looked at his computer and sighed.
“What’s the matter, doc?” Reed asked, picking up the snarky stick for once. “All this translation stuff getting you down?”
“Like I said before,” Gustafson looked at us over his glasses, one lens stained with a fingerprint, “I’ll do what I can to help, whatever it takes.” He sighed again, looking back at the computer monitor. “Some of this, though … it’s a little beyond me.” He gave hint of a shrug and turned his attention back to the computer. “Check in with me later, if you haven’t solved this thing by then. Hopefully I’ll have some more boring technical detail for you by then.” And he settled back down to go to work.
“Cheer up,” I said, taking the snark torch for myself, “you’re an educator, after all.” He looked up at me curiously until I delivered my punch line. “And what nobler calling could you imagine for yourself than educating a couple of knucklehead federal agents on the finer details of DNA science?”
Gustafson actually snickered with good humor as Reed and I headed out, off to try and figure out how to put together this puzzle that seemed about five hundred pieces short of completion.
25.
I’d been in a lot of cities, but Chicago’s traffic was easily the worst I could recall. Of course, part of that might have been that I was seeing it from the backseat of the cab, but I’d recently experienced LA traffic and this seemed at least comparable if not worse. It made me glad we hadn’t gotten a rental car, because Reed probably would have been swearing profusely after the last hour spent in gridlock on the west-bound freeway.
“This is ridiculous,” Reed muttered, glancing up from his smartphone to look at the gridlock in front of us.
“You’ve been here before,” I said, keeping myself from nervously tapping a finger against the hand rest next to me. “Shouldn’t you be used to this?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as getting used to this. I mean, we’re not even over the river yet. I don’t even think 290 starts for another mile or so.” The cabbie shook his head, which I took to mean was him saying Reed was wrong, but my brother didn’t notice and I didn’t bother to point it out.
My phone rang, a welcome interruption from staring at the myriad cars locked in a holding pattern around me. I didn’t think we’d moved in minutes, and I wasn’t holding out hope that this situation was going to change anytime soon. I was so annoyed with the FAA right now. Not only was I presently costing the US government a fortune in cab fares, but I was stuck in traffic and wasting my precious time. I mean, for crying out loud, you’d think they’d be cool with the tradeoff—they don’t have to pay for my plane tickets or ground transport, all they have to do is pick up a Chipotle burrito to replenish the calories I lose by flying myself (it’s seriously a hard burn).
I looked at the screen and saw it was Detective Maclean calling. “Hello?”
“What the hell did you do?” Maclean launched right into it. I had a feeling he was that kind of guy.
“I assume vice called you, then?”
“This is why people don’t like it when you come visit their cities,” Maclean said, seething on the other side of the phone. “We’ve got six guys heading to a hospital from your little adventure at the casino.”
“Hey,” I said, a little defensively, “count yourself lucky they didn’t end up at the morgue. They got kinda uppity with us.”
“Ungh,” he grunted. “I have a preliminary forensics report for you.”
“From Jacobs?” I asked.
“No,” he said, voice sounding a little strangled. I looked out my window across lanes and lanes of unmoving traffic, then turned to look out Reed’s. I frowned. He had a view of the river beneath us, stretching out to the next bridge in the line. “From your hotel room, where our investigators are taking seriously an attempt to assassinate two federal agents. It’s drawing resources from other cases.”
“I’d feel guilty about that,” I said airily, “but since I didn’t hire assassins to kill myself in your city just to make your life miserable, I don’t.”
I could almost hear his eyes rolling, or maybe the steam coming out of his ears. “The bullets we pulled out of the wall and the couch were .44-40.”
My whole face furrowed so hard it practically folded in on itself. “.44-40?” I asked, just to be sure I’d heard him right.
“Yeah,” Maclean said. “I’d never heard of it, either.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of it,” I said. My mentor, Glen Parks, had introduced me to all sorts of guns and ammunition in an attempt to prepare me for whatever I ran across out in the world. His instruction had extended to weapons that were archaic and had fallen mostly into disuse. “It’s a pistol round that was also used in old rifles—specifically the Winchester 1873. I mean, it was used in other guns, too, but that’d be the most well-known rifle—”
“What the hell are you, a catalog of historical guns and ammo?” Maclean asked in disbelief.
“Just doing my job,” I said, thinking about the ammo used in the assassination attempt on me. Parks had had a Winchester 1873, and I’d shot it. He’d showed it to me with pride, after the other trainees—Scott and Kat—had left for the day. It was an old lever action rifle, the kind you’d see in a Western playing on a Sunday afternoon. It was a smooth, fun gun to shoot, but the pistol round meant it wasn’t an ideal gun for a sniper. Rifle rounds could go miles. Pistol rounds couldn’t travel nearly so far.
“We recovered the shells,” Maclean went on, irritation still bleeding through as he spoke. “Early report indicates a probable match with the slugs we dug out of the wall. Shot distance was somewhere on the order of a hundred yards. Looks like thirteen rounds fired in total.”
“The Winchester had a thirteen round capacity,” I said, puzzling through the information presented. So not only was my sniper old-fashioned, but he was good. The fact that he was carrying a little piece of Americana and trying to kill me with it gave me an awful lot of conclusions I could jump to. That he was a guy who’d been around when the Winchester 1873 had been invented and he’d carried one since, or that he was weirdly attached to the past. Given that he was a meta, the former wasn’t at all out of the realm of possibility. “Damn,” I whispered, a little stumped. “I guess I’ll keep my eyes peeled for a cowboy.”
“You do that,” Maclean said. “Do I even want to ask where you’re going to get into trouble next, or should I let it be a pleasant surprise?”
“I’m presently on 290 heading out of your jurisdiction,” I said, staring out Reed’s window at the river again. “But given the utter lack of speed with which I’m traveling, it may be a while before you’re safe from my havoc.”
“Uh huh,” Maclean said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to talk to Dr. Marabella Stanley at the Institute of something or another out in Naperville,” I said, “who evidently was something of a professional rival to Dr. Jacobs.”
Maclean waited a second before replying, and I couldn’t decide whether it took him that long to figure out what to say or if he was just keeping himself from saying something snotty. “Academic rivalry sounds like a mighty thin thread when it comes to motive.”
“I’ve got a lot of nothing else,” I said. “I mean, I’ve confirmed the vic met his killer at the gambling den, but that’s about it.”
“Wait, how did you confirm it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “But the killer’s name is Graves. Pair that with the sketch I helped your guys at the beach make, and maybe you can get a hit in an FBI database?”
“I’ll work on it,” Maclean said, and I could hear him jotting furiously. “I’m getting a preliminary report on the second vic put together right now. I suspect it
’ll be done before you return from suburbia.”
“Cool,” I said, glancing once more at the dull blue waters out Reed’s window. The darkening grey sky was not doing the river any favors, making it look pretty grim. “Maybe we if we can establish a link between that runner guy and Dr. Jacobs, we can …” I shrugged, even though Maclean obviously couldn’t see it. “I dunno. I’m starting to suspect this Graves might just be into random acts of violence on people who cross his path.”
“Well, stop by after you get back and we’ll hammer through this dossier my uniforms are compiling,” Maclean said. “Safe travels.”
“Thanks,” I said, and hung up. The lack of movement felt stifling, even though the car was actually a little cool. I looked out my window again. There was still no motion.
“Maclean thinks there might be a link between Jacobs and the guy Graves killed at Oak Street Beach?” Reed looked up from his phone to ask the question.
“He doesn’t know,” I said. “Did you catch that bit about the ammo our assassin used?”
“I did,” Reed said. “So we’re looking for an old-time, dimestore cowboy?”
“Or something,” I said, and something buzzed past my window so fast that it shook the car as it zoomed by. I started, nearly jumping out of my seat, the seatbelt jerking into action and yanking me back down. “What the hell?”
Reed snickered. “I think it was a moped.”
“This isn’t Europe,” I said, now more than a little annoyed myself. “That’s not allowed.”
“Why don’t you go give him a ticket, traffic cop?” Reed asked, clearly enjoying himself.
“Why don’t I just give you a—”
Sienna, Wolfe screamed into my mind, that was no moped!
The tiny hairs along the back of my neck prickled up as if someone had run an electric current down them. I looked out the window again, staring into a small gap between a truck and car just outside. I could see other vehicles on the other side of them, and the river across the nearly empty lane of traffic heading into the city. “What was it?” I said under my breath.
“What was what?” Reed asked the back of my head.
I didn’t get my answer in time, not nearly in time. A flash of green and grey shot through the gap between the truck and car next to us and slammed into the door of the cab, smashing it in like we’d just gotten T-boned. My window exploded, showering me in safety glass. The whole world jerked around me and we smashed through the guardrail and across the three feet of sidewalk, the back end of the taxi sliding first. It struck the bridge rail and kept going, the force of impact and the cab’s weight combining to drag us over the edge and down to the river below.
26.
Colin
Colin Fannon was not the patient sort, and he’d discovered it early on. When it came to getting things done, sooner was always better. Hesitation was not only his enemy, but lingering about with a task unfinished was just about the worst thing he could imagine. He was the easily agitated sort, too, not that he’d admit it.
He’d run from Seattle to Chicago after he’d gotten the call. He’d done it at a leisurely jog—for him, anyway—pacing himself somewhere around five hundred and fifty miles an hour. He’d stuck to the major highways, stopping a couple times to enjoy the endless vistas but getting bored in the dull flatlands of the Dakotas. He appreciated nature, but he appreciated the boring parts more from a distance.
He had other irons in the fire, of course. He was the sort that found himself deeply bothered by societal injustices, and he used his powers to rectify as many as he could in his off time. That was the nice thing about this job, though, was that it allowed for a lot of—in his view—do-gooding for a profit.
Take this task, for instance. Sienna Nealon was known the world over for being a self-righteous fist of the US government, a probably unthinking cog in the machine that reinforced oppression and structural inequality. That made her a useful idiot of the establishment at best and the enemy at worst. Therefore, killing her was practically a public service on his part.
And he got paid. That was useful, too.
He’d buzzed her taxi cab once just to be sure it was her in there. It hadn’t taken but one pass to confirm that. So then he’d looped around and figured, why not take advantage of the fact her cab was perfectly positioned to enjoy a watery grave? It wasn’t likely to kill her, sure, but it wasn’t likely to harm his chances, either. Water would slow him down, but it’d slow her more. He’d find it annoying, the resistance of water.
She’d find it impossible to work around. It’d destroy her ability to shoot a gun or burn him out with her fire power. That was a hell of an equalizer in his view.
The cab hit the water and rolled over onto its top. He could hear the river flooding in through the side windows he’d broken when he hit it, carefully aiming himself at the back door, at her. He didn’t want to hurt the driver, after all. That guy was a working man, just a poor Joe doing his job. A Henry, actually. He’d seen it on the man’s ID as he ripped him out of his own door before the cab had gone over the bridge.
“Wh … what just happened?” Henry asked, standing in the middle of farthest lane of the bridge, where his cab had been only a moment earlier. The car behind him honked for Henry to get the hell out of his way. Colin thrust a bird at the honking car. Where was this asshole’s compassion for his fellow man?
Colin had already almost forgotten Henry, disoriented, standing in the lane of traffic. That was the danger of moving fast, thinking fast. “Your car just went over,” Colin said, pointing down into the water. “Looks like you made it out in time.”
Henry blinked, looking around, shell-shocked. That happened sometimes when Colin moved someone faster than their senses could explain what happened. “I … there were people in my cab.” He had a thick accent, sounded Caribbean.
“Oh, yeah,” Colin said with a nod, “I’ll see if I can save ’em. You wait here.” He couldn’t have the cabbie following him, after all.
Colin leapt into the river. The jump was annoying, because he couldn’t move faster than his momentum carried him, and he hadn’t taken a running start. It took a couple seconds for him to hit the water. It took a quarter-second for him to get his bearings, to see through the dim water to the cab, sinking its way toward the riverbed. There was a lot of garbage down there, and it turned Colin’s stomach to see it. With a jolt, he realized he’d just caused an oil-and-gasoline filled vehicle to end up down here as well—he’d created his own personal ecological contamination because he’d acted quickly, without fully considering the consequences of his actions. Well, he’d clean it up as soon as he got done. Hauling the car out of the river wouldn’t be too hard, and running down the oil and gas leakage shouldn’t be too hard for someone with his speed. It’d take a little time, but he could spare it.
After he killed Sienna Nealon.
27.
Sienna
Man, this was not my day.
Cold river water rushed in through my broken window, shocking the hell out of me even though I’d known it was coming. It iced my flesh, my nerves screaming from the frigid chill. “This way!” I shouted to Reed as I ripped my seatbelt off before the water could completely surround it. The cab started sinking very quickly, and I paused before preparing to swim out the window, casting a last look back at Reed to make sure he was following me.
He wasn’t.
His neck was limp, his head slumped against the side of the cab. I looked for his seatbelt. It wasn’t fastened.
I grabbed him by the arm, clenching my chilled fingers around his sleeve and yanked him toward me as the water poured into the cab, now at face level. His eyes didn’t even flutter, he was so out of it. I pulled his head back so he could take a breath, then ripped him out of the cab as fast as I could, swimming clear of my window against the force of the water rushing in, and then tugged him out, my feet perched on the dented-in door.
Man, I hoped the cab company didn’t make me pay for this wreck.
I freed Reed from the cab and readjusted him in my grip. I could see the hint of the grey skies above as the cab continued toward the bottom of the river. I’d been inverted, upside-down, but I’d found my bearings again, the hint of light streaming from the surface tipping me off as to which way I should swim.
Then something hit me in the back, hard, and I tasted blood.
Speedster, Wolfe had whispered in the seconds between when we went off the bridge and when the cab had hit the water. Those were the seconds when most people would have been screaming, but I was too busy bracing myself and wondering where the hell the cab driver had disappeared to, because he sure as hell wasn’t in the vehicle anymore.
You mean like Akiyama or Weissman? I asked Wolfe.
No, he said. They played with time itself. This is a meta who simply goes fast.
Great. Figures I’d get the evil Barry Allen up my ass at a time when I already had Graves, the Dimestore Cowboy and Veronika on my tail. (I had no insulting nickname for Veronika, because truthfully, I had a feeling that if she hadn’t been hired to kill me, we might have been BFFs.)
My back spasmed in pain. Someone had hit me in the lower ribs on the right side, breaking at least two, if not three of them. It had been done quickly, and with full intention, I knew as I felt those bones push inward and clip the bottom of my lung.
Wolfe! I screamed in my head and sensed his assent as he went to work trying to fix the problem.
I spun, Reed clutched under my right arm and preventing me from using my hand to shoot a net blindly on that side, my left arm working feverishly to move me around, along with my legs. I wasn’t that good a swimmer, having not left my house until I was seventeen. Kinda hard to learn to swim in the bathtub. I basically used my considerable strength to flail enough to get the job done, but it was not pretty or efficient.
My flight power will help you, Gavrikov said, and I sensed the ability surging through me, preventing me from sinking further. I spun with the power, doing a zero-radius turn without needing to splash around to achieve it.
Painkiller Page 12