Painkiller

by Robert J. Crane

  “You’ve been served,” she said, slapping another envelope against his chest.

  “What?” He blinked, taking the envelope and staring at it. “But I—I barely even fly!”

  “And now you won’t at all,” she said, walking away. “Have a good night.”

  “I think the ship has already kind of sailed off the edge of the world on that one,” I said, motioning to Reed. “Come on, we have to get to the airport before our flight.”

  “But it’s the Windy City,” Reed protested, looking completely crestfallen. “The updrafts between the buildings, the wind off the lake—I was practically born to fly there!”

  “Consider my offer, Ms. Nealon,” Mr. Chang said as I started to walk away. “We’ll talk soon.”

  I nodded at him, threading my arm through poor Reed’s and dragging him away, his face still fallen like someone had stolen his best toy. “Sounds good,” I said to Chang. Turning my attention to Reed, I said, “Come on, bro. One last adventure on the government dime.”

  “Why do they hate me?” he asked, sounding all broken and pathetic.

  “According to Kat, it’s because—”

  “Oh, shush,” he said, switching to sullen as we followed the rail toward the bar’s exit. He stopped me about ten feet from the door, taking hold of my elbow and pulling me gently around to look me in the eye. “Why are we doing this? We’re government employees leaving service at the end of the week. We don’t have to do anything. They can’t fire us, and even if by some miracle or act of Congress they could … who cares at this point?”

  I opened my mouth to answer with snark, but sincerity fell out instead. “Because this is what we do,” I said.

  He blinked like I’d slapped him across the face. “Okay, then,” he said after a moment.

  “Okay,” I repeated, and off we went to Chicago.

  4.

  I found myself standing in a back alley in Chicago in the early hours of the morning, next to an overripe dumpster that even the cold couldn’t contain the stink of. Fortunately for me, the smell of the murder victim was being contained by the cold, and was not yet overripe in spite of having his life’s blood splattered across the brick all the way to the mouth of the alley. I surveyed the scene from within the police tape barrier that fenced me in, casting wary glances as the CPD investigators milling around out on State Street as I looked up at the enormous buildings I could see in either direction.

  “Well, it’s certainly looking like Chicago is my sort of town, isn’t it?” I muttered to Reed, who stood with his arms folded next to me, apparently undeterred by the nearest dumpster’s wafting aroma of rot or the sight of the murder victim’s shattered jaw and the strange tilt of his neck.

  “I’d follow up on that,” Reed said, nodding at the photographers and video cameras lurking behind the police tape, “but we’d probably get sued for copyright violation or something.” He nodded at the body. “You think anyone’s going to come along and explain anything to us, or are we supposed to just start poking around the corpse ourselves for clues?”

  “I’ve always been met by the local cops at these things,” I said, folding my own arms in front of me to ward off the cold. It was better than lighting my skin on fire, probably. “They don’t typically love surrendering to federal involvement, but what choice do they have?”

  “Apparently a new, privatized option now,” Reed said sourly.

  I glanced at him. “You’re really cynical about this whole thing, aren’t you?”

  He grimaced. “A powerful, invisible ally sitting in the shadows and offering you everything you’ve ever wanted—essentially the same job, but without the government strings? I’m sorry, no.” He shook his head. “We had that once, remember, with the Directorate? Once the genie came out of the bottle on the meta secret and the world found out about us, working in the shadows went right out the window. This is either a fantasy daydream or your backer’s got ulterior motives, and either way … yeah, I’m suspicious about it.” He gave me a careful look, lips pursed. “And I’m trying to figure out why you’re not.”

  “I haven’t had much chance to think about it yet,” I said, brushing him off as I nodded to the corpse in front of us. “You know, soberly, with lots of time for reflection and consideration.”

  He rubbed his forehead, and I could tell he was feeling the “soberly” part of it. “Yeah. I’m kinda glad no one’s said anything to us yet. I feel like I need a little more time to regain my wits.”

  I knew what he meant; the flight certainly hadn’t helped. We’d breezed through security with our federal agent IDs and gotten on the small commuter plane just before it pulled back from the gate. We hadn’t even had time to stop off to grab a suitcase or a change of clothes.

  Or a toothbrush, which, I reflected as I breathed into my hand and felt like I’d been punched in the face by my own dragon breath, was a more pressing need.

  “Sienna Nealon?” I turned to see an older guy standing at the mouth of the alley, a traditional trench coat with the collar turned up and a wrinkled white shirt and khaki pants beneath. His badge hung on his belt, which was old and showed plenty of wear at its current notch, like he’d had it for years. The cop had a file in his hand, and he sauntered over to us. “I’m Detective Maclean.”

  “Nice to meet you, Detective,” I said with a nod, keeping my fingers firmly anchored inside my coat since I’d forgotten my gloves. Not because I minded him brushing my skin, but because it was chilly. “This is my brother—partner—Reed.”

  He frowned. “Uhh … nice to meetcha.” He had an accent that I would describe as Chicago by way of cop. “You taken a look at the scene yet?”

  “I’ve seen that this man is dead,” I said with a nod at the body. “Also, that this dumpster stinks, and that this night is dark. Everything else, you can feel free to explain to me.”

  Detective Maclean pursed his lips with an utter lack of amusement. “Fine,” he said, and I knew it wasn’t. “Victim is one Dr. Carlton Jacobs, a professor at a nearby college—”

  “Which one?” Reed asked, barely stifling a yawn as he spoke.

  “Northern Illinois Technical University,” Maclean said, looking down at the file to read it off. “It’s up Lakeshore drive a little. Medical school, science and tech research—looks like it’s only been around a few years now.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, “what was the victim a doctor of?”

  “Philosophy for all I care,” Detective Maclean said, holding off exasperation by a thin effort. “Will you just let me finish my bit and then ask?” He gave me a steady gaze until I nodded almost imperceptibly. “All right. Vic is age 45, he’s a professor at NITU, lives in a condo up on the Gold Coast—”

  “What’s—” I started to ask, drawing an irritable look from Detective Maclean.

  “It’s a neighborhood north of here on the lake, lots of condos and mansions and whatnot, really ritzy,” Reed said, and I turned to look at him. “I used to come down here a lot on assignment when I worked for Alpha.”

  “If I may?” Maclean asked. “Dr. Jacobs’s wallet was left on his person, along with a roll of cash in his front pocket in the amount of $4,000—”

  “Whoa,” I said, my eyebrows lurching up. “I guess robbery wasn’t the motive.”

  “We have no idea where he came from,” Maclean said icily, “and no idea where he was going, other than to State Street.” He flipped the folder closed. “Death, as you may have guessed, was probably the result of traumatic brain injury, either from the initial impact or when his head hit the wall. Either way, no sign of a weapon used. Preliminary forensics says the impact sight on the jaw shows hints of knuckles being the weapon, and so …” He extended the folder toward me. “Looks like it’s one of yours.”

  “Thanks,” I said and stepped up to take the folder from him. I opened it and skimmed; he’d done a pretty good job of summarizing what they had so far. “Does the professor have a car registered to him?”

  Maclean shrugged. �
��I can check if you want. Central’s pretty backed up, though, so it might take a while.”

  I sighed. “I miss J.J. already.”

  “Never thought you’d say that,” Reed chuckled.

  J.J. was my own personal tech geek. Well, maybe not my personal one, but he’d worked for our agency and had been instrumental in solving more cases than I could count. I looked around, hoping for an obvious surveillance camera. There wasn’t one. If there had been, J.J. could have cracked it in like two seconds and just given us our murderer on a silver platter. “Any chance you’ve got some uniforms digging up surveillance footage from the area?” I asked Detective Maclean.

  “Yeah, they’re canvassing, too,” Maclean said with a frown. “Probably be a few days on that, though.”

  “So …” I said, glancing down the file as I reached the end, “robbery’s not the motive, probably—”

  “Probably?” Reed looked at me like I was an idiot. “There’s like four grand on the guy, plus his wallet.”

  “That doesn’t mean something else wasn’t taken,” I said, staring at the folder, “or that the murderer wasn’t interrupted or scared off before he could do his thieving.”

  “Fair point,” Reed said with the air of a man who didn’t quite let go of his skepticism. “But unlikely.”

  “Agreed,” I said, closing the folder. “We’ll need to go to his place of work, and his home.” I looked around the alley, trying to reconstruct the event in my head. I wasn’t Sherlock, so it didn’t happen easily. I tried to imagine him flying, hitting the wall, and cast my eyes over the damp asphalt. “He probably got clocked somewhere over there,” I motioned to a few blood spots that had fallen in the alley, and I started over there, careful where I stepped so as not to disturb potential evidence.

  “Yeah,” Reed said, following along behind me, matching his steps to mine. “That’s a solid hit. You’re talking a high on the scale meta to hit like that.”

  “Scale?” Detective Maclean said, staying right where he was by the corpse.

  “There’s a scale of powers,” I answered idly as I threaded over to the place of attack. “Low-grade metas don’t hit much harder than a normal person. High scale, though …” I waved at the body next to him. “Like a car doing ninety. They’re also correspondingly faster, more dexterous, agile …”

  “Uh huh,” Maclean said, now with his arms folded in front of him. “When I was a beat cop, probably twenty-five years ago, I saw this guy pick another guy up with one hand and throw him ten feet. You think that was a meta?”

  “Probably,” I said, stooping to look at the blood spatter at my feet. I sniffed, catching a whiff of something that was neither a dumpster nor our corpse. I looked up at Reed, whose nose was twitching. “You getting this?”

  He frowned, wrinkling his nose as his nostrils flared. “Is that … cigarettes?”

  “Yeah,” I said, following my nose to the origin point of the scent, “and rosemary, I think.” The smell lingered faintly behind a dumpster maybe ten feet from the place where Professor Dr. Carlton Jacobs had met his fateful sucker punch.

  “Rosemary?” Detective Maclean called to us from where he stood near the mouth of the alley. “From what?”

  “Either the perp’s dinner or some sort of herbal remedy, maybe?” I asked, shrugging. “Not sure, it’s pretty faint and masked by the scent of smoked cigarettes.” I looked around but didn’t see any discarded butts. “I don’t think he smoked any here, he’s just trailing the aroma.” I sniffed and caught it lingering under the cold.

  “I don’t smell anything,” Maclean said, sniffing. He made a face like he’d gotten a brain freeze headache from huffing the Chicago air.

  “You wouldn’t,” I said, taking another whiff. Definitely rosemary. Weird.

  “Where should we go first?” Reed asked.

  “His college is closed at this hour, I’m assuming.” I stood up, looking back down the alley to catch Maclean’s nod. “To his place, I guess, so we can pore over the details of Professor Jacobs’s life, see if we might be able to find a motive for the killer.” I made my way carefully back to the body. “Because it looks to me like whoever did this … they waited for a while, either for him or someone else.”

  “Premeditation,” Maclean said, nodding.

  “They didn’t throw a love tap, that’s for sure,” I said, “and if he was the target, and they waited for him … it means they knew he was coming. And hopefully we’ll be able to find some idea of why he was here in this alley in the middle of the night,” I stared down at Professor Jacobs’s blank face, the blood wreathing his head like a crown of red, “and where exactly he was going when he got murdered.”

  5.

  I stepped out of the cab after about a five-minute ride onto a road overlooking Lake Shore Drive, which I had already realized was probably one of the swankier addresses for Chicago. Lake Michigan was glittering black, lights sparkling along its surface just across the street and over the freeway-like version of Lake Shore Drive that was separated from the residential one I was standing on by a waist-high barrier with fencing. Occasional cars were zooming past over there, while I stood on a much more placid residential drive, in front of a decidedly upscale apartment building.

  It was either an old and refurbished brick building, or it was a new building constructed to look old; either way, I could tell a lot of money had gone into it. A cop car was parked out front as Reed and I breezed our way in wordlessly to where a doorman waited behind a desk, talking to a couple of uniformed CPD officers.

  I flashed my badge at the guys waiting and Reed followed my lead. “Evening, gents,” I said. “I need to take a look at Professor Jacobs’s apartment.”

  “Sure thing,” the doorman behind the desk leapt to his feet. He was a little darker-skinned, bald like he shaved his head, probably just south of forty. “I already got the spare key for the officers here.” He nodded at the cops.

  “Breckinridge,” one of them, a fair-haired guy with a flat expression said, reaching out to shake my hand. I took it and he pumped firmly but not obnoxiously. He nodded at his partner. “This is Tanner.” Tanner was not, in fact, tan. He was the whitest dude I’ve ever laid eyes on, and he wore a completely implacable look that would not have been out of place on Andrew Phillips’s face.

  “You guys take a look upstairs yet?” Reed asked politely.

  Breckinridge seemed eager to please. “Not yet. We just came and delivered the news, rustled up the keys so the detective assigned could do the honors. We’ll bat cleanup once you get done, though, bag any evidence, get stuff sent off to the lab if we get any idea of clues.” He held up his hands, all excited. He already had blue latex gloves on.

  “All right, then,” I said and nodded toward the doorman. “You gonna take us up?”

  He looked torn for a second. “I’m supposed to watch the door …”

  “Not a problem,” I said, quickly snatching the keys out of his hand. “You keep an eye on that door in case a flood of burglars and junkies comes wandering through randomly right at this very moment.” I headed for the elevator. “I can probably find my way up. I’ll just keep knocking on doors at random until I find the right one.”

  The doorman shot me a pained expression. “Twelfth floor. Number fifteen.”

  “Awww,” I said, feigning disappointment. “It would have so fun to do it my way.” I headed for the elevators, Reed and Breckinridge trailing behind me. I glanced back and saw Tanner hanging by the front desk, watching me go with a healthy dose of suspicion. I brought that out in people.

  I waited until the reflective steel elevator doors slid shut on the three of us before I spoke. “Breckinridge, your partner seems like a shithead.”

  “Oh, he’s not that bad,” Breckinridge said, shaking his head. “He’s just stiff.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “after four hours, you’re supposed to call the hotline for that problem.”

  Breckinridge frowned at me as the elevator carried us up pretty q
uickly. Understanding dawned over his face and he snapped his fingers as he pointed at me. “Ohhh! Oh! Got it. Good one.”

  Reed just stood there shaking his head, face buried in one of his hands. “No. Just … no.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Reed pulled his hand out of his face to reveal an indulgent smile. “Breckinridge … you want to wait at the door while we scope out the apartment, please?”

  “Sure,” Breckinridge said, eager beaver that he was, as the elevator dinged and the doors slid open to reveal a pristine, well-lit white hallway. “I’ll be right outside if you need anything.” He followed us dutifully down the hall until we reached 1215.

  I fiddled with the keys until I found the right one. There were a lot of them on the ring, but fortunately they were each labeled, thus preventing me from losing patience and kicking down the door. I unlocked it and listened, hoping my job would be made easy by finding the murderer sleeping in the victim’s bed or something. I stuck my head in the door and waited. No such luck; it sounded quiet in there.

  “Okay, in we go,” I said, popping in the front door and flipping the light switch. I found myself in a small entryway, and suddenly wondering if Professor Jacobs was married. If so, this was about to be awkward. This is why I normally left this stuff up to local PD and just made my entrance after they’d done the scut work.

  The entry had a coat closet framed with a dark mahogany sliding door. I slid it open and looked to see a few coats hanging within. No women’s coats, though. All the shoes below were men’s, and there were only a half dozen pairs of varying kinds from dress to tennis shoes to snow boots, which probably ruled out a male domestic partner as well. I was also relieved to see no children’s shoes of any kind.

  “I think we’re on our own, here,” I said, stepping through the entry into a well-furnished living room area. There was a rug in the middle of the room that was squared to look like tile, each in a subtle different shade of grey moving across the spectrum to beige and brown. It was a little weird, but it kind of worked with the grey-scale sofa and two white leather chairs that stood with their backs to me. A coffee table anchored the middle of the room, cluttered with paperwork and further convincing me that Professor Jacobs lived alone.