Painkiller

by Robert J. Crane

  “Yes, I know who you are,” she said, and I sensed a pinch of nervousness in her reply. She didn’t ask us to sit down, she just sat in her chair, suddenly looking like she wanted to crawl out the window onto the darkening campus.

  Marabella Stanley was a larger woman. Her plus-size blazer was draped over the back of her chair, her pale arms, made visible by her sleeveless maroon blouse, showed more than a hint of loose skin on her upper arms. Her auburn hair looked like it fell past her shoulders a few inches, she had a very classy looking gold chain around her neck, and she was certainly dressed in a much more flattering manner than yours truly, even on my best days. She had one mole just above her left eyebrow, and a bead of sweat positioned opposite it on her right eyebrow.

  She also looked like she’d rather be anywhere else at the moment, maybe including at the bottom of the Chicago River. I wouldn’t recommend it, personally, but that was the kind of nervous she looked.

  “We’ve got a few questions for you, Dr. Stanley,” I said, lingering at the door. I was polite enough not to just barge into someone’s office, after all.

  “What about?” she asked, and her voice was just about taut enough to break a vocal cord.

  Reed and I traded a look. Was this just nerves at having us show up unexpectedly? Or was it something else? Something like … guilt?

  I took another step inside her office. She was right in front of us, the streetlamps shining into her office’s windows behind us. The door blocked me from a full view of the campus out her window, but I could see movement out there, just past the door hanging open, as students wandered around on the concrete pathways below, presumably on their way to evening classes.

  I focused my attention back on Dr. Stanley as Reed took up the interrogation with the obvious question. “Is there some reason you’re breaking out in a sweat right now, Doctor?” Reed asked, walking slowly across the office to stand at the other side, against the overstuffed bookshelves that ran between her desk and the windows.

  “No,” she said, the only person in the room who couldn’t see how obviously she was lying.

  35.

  Phinneus

  Dr. Stanley was talking to Sienna Nealon and her brother, and it was obvious to Phinneus even a building away that whatever she was saying, she was lying through her teeth. It was written all over her face, which was breaking out in a flop sweat of the sort Phinneus hadn’t seen since his days of sitting in ratty old wooden casinos out on the Western frontier with a shot of whiskey in his hand and his Colt Peacemaker still warm in his belt from the killing he’d done.

  He could just see Nealon’s shoulder through the window. The office door was between her and him, in addition to the glass window of Stanley’s office. It wasn’t an optimal shot, but if he wanted to start a fight and not necessarily finish it with one bullet, this might be the way to go about it.

  Naw, he decided, there were others on the job now. As much as he wanted to have a real shootout with this girl, there were others involved at this point. He’d heard it was Veronika Acheron, that cold-blooded bitch, and Colin Fannon, that damned sprout-loving hippie. However badly Phinneus wanted a solid fight, a real shooting match, he didn’t want it badly enough to let either one of those Johnny-Come-Latelies pull the contract right out of his hands.

  “Bad luck, girlie,” he whispered over the open sights. This time he wouldn’t miss.

  36.

  Sienna

  Reed turned his head to look out the window to my left about two seconds before it shattered. His hand was already up when it burst, and a gust of wind shoved me like someone had grabbed me and flung me out of the room, slamming the door to Marabella Stanley’s office behind me. The frosted glass window with her name on it burst into a million pieces and showered down on me courtesy of Reed’s wind, causing a dozen superficial cuts.

  “The hell!” I yelled at him, even as my brain started processing what had just happened. That window I’d been standing in front of had broken, and a crack had sounded over the roar of his wind blast.

  Dimestore Cowboy had just tried to kill me. Again.

  “You okay?” Reed called from inside Dr. Stanley’s office. I could tell from his voice that he was on the floor, hiding with the brick wall between him and the shooter. So was I, for that matter, flat on my back in the reception area, a window above me with the blinds shut.

  “Fine,” I said, rolling to my feet and crouching beneath the window. I didn’t have Shadow, thanks to speedster dropping me into the river, and my desire to return fire was rising by the moment. I’d seen a building not a hundred feet away out Dr. Stanley’s window, a perfect perch for a sniper. Clearly, Dimestore Cowboy had either been waiting for us or he’d set up remarkably quickly for his shot. I suspected the former.

  “What now?” Reed called through the broken door. “My gun’s all wet, and, uh—”

  “You’re not that good with it anyway,” I finished for him.

  “Hey, I’m all right with it—”

  Something sparked in my head about our situation. We were under fire—

  … under fire …

  I grinned in what could only be described as a feral manner as I decided on my next move. I readied both my hands and called out in my mind. Eve, Gavrikov … I felt them respond, putting themselves at my disposal.

  “What are you doing?” Reed asked, probably getting the hint from my silence that bad things were about to unfold.

  I made little play guns out of both hands, index fingers up, the rest of my fingers knuckled into a fist, just like the kids get expelled from school for doing nowadays. “Nothing,” I said innocently.

  Then I fired a net of light from my left hand as I spun away from the wall. It hit the solid white blinds and jarred them, jangling them—

  Giving Dimestore Cowboy motion for a target.

  The return fire from him was immediate, and by the sound, as well as the holes in the blinds caused by my net of light bunching up the vinyl to form cracks, I knew exactly where he was as I crouched, peeking up with my right finger extended.

  I opened fire with a concentrated burst of Gavrikov’s power, a sizzling blast of superheated air the size of a bullet that punched through the glass in front of me, heading right for Dimestore Cowboy on the rooftop opposite us.

  37.

  Phinneus

  He’d been a little too itchy on the trigger, he decided after he landed a solid shot in that glowing spot in the blinds. The first miss had been honest, after all; her damned brother had gone and blown Sienna out of the room as he’d shot. He didn’t usually miss, but this wasn’t a circumstance under his control. He chalked it up to an oops and moved on.

  The second shot, though, that had been a little clever bit of red cape twirling on Nealon’s part. She’d put it out there, whipped and twirled it right before his eyes, jetting out one of those nets of light into the blinds, and he’d shot before he thought, putting a round right through the middle of the anomalous-looking shape without waiting to see if it resolved into a person shape.

  Whoops, twice. Probably a mark of his eagerness to get this job done. He’d already accidentally finished the side job, after all.

  The first burst of fiery heat hit the knee-high brick wall that encircled the rooftop, right in front of his damned face. It didn’t take him more than a second to realize what it was, because it made a hot, hissing noise when it smacked the brick, and glowing shards of superheated clay and mortar burst everywhere.

  She didn’t stop with one shot, either. That damned girl blasted his position with a good half-dozen bursts of concentrated heat. It burned the air, singeing Phinneus’s mustache and beard, filling his nose with a smoky smell. He squinted his eyes shut, but too late. Chunks of hot brick had already got him, burning his eyes, burning his face.

  Phinneus fell to his side and hissed through gritted teeth. It burned like hell, like sin, and he pawed at himself in panic, dropping the Winchester, rolling to the side as fast as he could manage, hoping tha
t the cover provided by the brick lip of roof would keep her from drawing a bead on him and peppering him with more of that hell.

  Phinneus could feel the burned skin, and knew blisters would be rising pretty quick. He could barely open his eyes, pulling the lids apart only enough to see a hazy sky above him—and he knew the haze had nothing to do with the sky and everything to do with the damage Nealon had just done to his face.

  Dammit, she’d near-blinded him, at least for a little while.

  More shots demolished the brick in front of the vantage he’d been occupying only moments earlier with a hard, cracking, hissing sound, and Phinneus didn’t really want to chance going back over there, not even for the Winchester.

  Shit.

  It was a little bit of a tug-of-war between his rifle or his life, and he knew which one he valued more. It hurt powerfully, though, the thought of leaving that beauty behind for the cops to lay their grubby, unappreciative hands on. Still, the choice was clear to him even through his clouded eyes, and he looked for the door to the stairs and started crawling on his belly toward it, pride as forgotten for the moment as the thought of killing Sienna Nealon. He’d get back to both, though, and real soon. That was for sure.

  38.

  Sienna

  I probably went a little overboard shooting at the brick that ringed the top of the building across the way, but I didn’t want to take any more chances than I had to that our sniper would get away to menace me again later. I didn’t know that I was having any luck at it, but I was damned sure trying to spatter his position with enough literal fire to keep him from returning his lead-filled version of it my way.

  I stopped after about five minutes, having demolished a good ten-foot section of the rooftop barrier. The brick all around it was smoking, my efforts creating a wicked, compact, outdoor version of a kiln to glass the edges. They glinted in the lamplight, revealing a bare section of rooftop, bereft of human occupancy.

  “You think he ran?” Reed asked, shouting at me from inside Dr. Stanley’s office.

  “Like a rabbit and without a single look back, if he’s smart,” I shouted back, crouched under as much cover as I could beneath the now heat-shattered window in the receptionist’s office. Man, Stephanie Bruszek was going to be pissed when she got to work tomorrow.

  “Anyone there?” a voice called out from the roof that Dimestore Cowboy had presumably been standing on moments earlier. The voice sounded youthful, tentative, and understandably nervous.

  “My name is Sienna Nealon and I’m a federal agent,” I called out the window. “Who are you?”

  “Uhh … Greg Strucker with campus security,” came the voice in reply. “Are … are you really Sienna Nealon?”

  “Step up to the edge, Greg,” I called back, and he did, very hesitantly, step out where I could see him. He was probably in his late twenties, big glasses, a few extra pounds. He had a Taser gun gripped in his hands, and he was peering across the void at me.

  I stood up, staring out at him through the massive hole I’d burned in the blinds and the window. It was like looking out a small tunnel. “You see anyone else over there, Greg?”

  He looked around, pausing at the damage to the roof’s edge. “Gahhhh,” he said, his neck falling limply down in surprise, his glasses going straight to the end of his nose. He caught them with one hand. “Oh, man. That’s …”

  “Stay with me here, Greg,” I said. “No one’s on the roof with you?” I could see his campus security uniform, and there was no sign of a gun anywhere on it, not even under his canvas coat with the fuzzy interior that stuck out on his lapels and collar.

  “No,” he said, turning around in a complete circle. “There’s a gun here, though.” He peered down at the last few inches of surviving brick where Dimestore Cowboy had been crouched. I’d only destroyed it far enough down to be sure that no one was hiding there, I hadn’t leveled it all the way to the roof. “Old one, with wood … uh, handles and stuff.”

  “It’s called furniture, Greg,” I said, stepping over to Dr. Stanley’s office and pulling open the door. Reed was crouched down in the far corner in front of me, his Glock 17 in hand. Even after all the practice we’d done, he still looked uncomfortable being in the same zip code with it, let alone holding it. I started to step up onto the broken window’s ledge, but a girlish scream from across the way stopped me.

  “What the—” Greg cried. “Dr. Stanley!”

  I turned, one foot already up on the glass-covered ledge, and saw what had caused the campus security man to cry out. Dr. Marabella Stanley sat in her chair, arms hanging limply over the sides, her maroon blouse now crimson red just above her left breast, her face slack and pale, guaranteed not to answer a damned single question now that she was dead.

  39.

  “As far as last weeks on a job go, this one has to be a record-breaker of some sort,” Reed opined after we’d given our statements to the Naperville PD.

  “I feel like it deserves a superlative,” I agreed. “‘Most Sucktacular,’ maybe?”

  “That’s a winner,” he said with a nod.

  We were standing outside the crime scene because there was no reason to stay in the thick of it. Neither one of us were forensic pathologists, after all, though the paramedics were already carting Dr. Stanley off in a black bag, the gurney rattling as it took up her weight. We’d positioned ourselves in Stephanie Bruszek’s reception area, figuring it was already good and shot to hell, and that it was unlikely that just by lingering on the couches in the corner we’d do any damage to the one piece of evidence in the place. It was the bullet Dimestore Cowboy had shot at my light net, and it was in the far wall, having torn through Stephanie Bruszek’s copy of an Ansel Adams photo. Personally, I hoped she would invest in a nice Chagall print to take its place, but based on what I was seeing of her workspace, I doubted it would fit with her personality.

  “So, we’ve got another dead end,” Reed said, like I didn’t already know that.

  “Yes,” I said simply, since I had pretty much nothing to say to elaborate on that obvious fact.

  “So …” Reed said, “… what do we do now?”

  “Well,” I said, “it seems to me someone set us up here.”

  He frowned, then the furrow in his brow lightened as he got it. “Dimestore Cowboy was waiting for us.”

  I winked at him and made a clicking noise with my tongue. “You got it. Who knew we were coming here and has a severe irritation with us at the moment?”

  “Detective Maclean?” Reed asked. Now he was back to frowning. “I don’t know about that.”

  “He also knew where we were when the speedster assassin attacked,” I said.

  Reed shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Say … you don’t think the speedster is waiting out there, do you?” He paused. “Also, we should probably come up with a name for him.”

  “I didn’t see him, otherwise I’d be all over it,” I said. “But between him, Dimestore Cowboy and Veronika—”

  “Wait,” Reed said, “is Veronika the one that smacked you around the casino?”

  I stared at him with a look of lead-melting intensity before I answered. “Yes.”

  “Three assassins after us,” Reed said, not looking too thrilled. I couldn’t blame him. “Yay.”

  “After me,” I corrected. “Dimestore Cowboy has passed up on the easy kill on you twice now. I think we can rule you out as a target.”

  He pursed his lips, eyes moving back and forth as he processed that. “I don’t know whether to be grateful or insulted.”

  “You’re alive. I’d just sort of be glad about that, personally.” I took a deep breath. “Maclean was promising to talk to us about Graves’s other victim before we headed out here.”

  “Dr. Stanley was looking awfully guilty about something before she caught a bullet to the chest,” Reed said.

  “You called this a dead end,” I reminded him.

  “Well, we should get some paddles and see if we can resuscitate it,” he sa
id.

  “That doesn’t work,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I know it won’t work,” he said, like he was explaining things to an idiot. “I watched them work on her with the paddles for like ten minutes—”

  “I was talking about your metaphor,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You can’t revive a dead end, it’s an inanimate object, like a cul-de-sac. You’d need to make a new exit out of it, maybe go off-roading—”

  “You’ve got three assassins after you but you take time to nitpick my metaphors?”

  “Just because death is hounding my footsteps doesn’t mean I’m going to pass up on opportunities to remind you that I’m smarter than you—”

  He chortled at that. “As a younger sister should. Seriously, though—what do we do?”

  “Well, try as he might, Gustafson didn’t seem to be too helpful in shedding light on what Dr. Jacobs was up to,” I said. “And he’s still working on that, so I feel like asking him to decipher whatever the late Dr. Stanley was working on is just going to be more of the same sort of pain in my ass.”

  “So you’re looking for a new type of pain in your ass?” Reed smirked. “We need another expert. They’re dropping like flies.” The paramedics rolled by with the gurney carrying Dr. Marabella Stanley’s earthly remains. “You think Dimestore Cowboy killed her on purpose or was it an accident?”

  “Accident,” I said quickly. He looked at me funny, and I knew I wasn’t going to get off that easy. I took a breath before explaining. “You blew me out of the room—”

  He closed his eyes hard as he got it. “My gust sent his bullet off course.”

  “Ricocheted right into her, yeah,” I said, trying to be as gentle as possible. The angle had been all wrong for Dimestore Cowboy if he’d been trying to plant Dr. Stanley on purpose. He’d definitely been aiming for me; she’d just been collateral damage, dragging whatever she’d been stonewalling us about with her into the grave.