Painkiller (13 page)

“That was a quick draw,” Veronika said, a hint of pain apparent in her voice. “And here I thought we could keep it a fair fight.”

“Ever been in a fair fight?” I asked, my aim not wavering.

“No,” she said with undisguised pleasure. “This was probably the closest I’ve had to one in a long while. I have to admit, I don’t love it, but the exhilaration? Not bad.”

“Yeah, I don’t love it, either,” I said, keeping my aim on her. She’d try and break the stalemate, that I was sure of. I’d known her for less than five minutes, but I was already certain that Veronika was a full-bore killer, and she wouldn’t pass up me turning my back, not even for a second.

“Well,” Veronika said, still looking out at me, “I hate to sound like your high school boyfriend, but … save yourself for me.”

“You missed that one by years, lady,” I said, frowning at her. “Oh. You … you meant I shouldn’t let anyone else kill me, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Veronika said, amused, “but thanks for making this weird.” She ducked back behind the table and it flipped up into the air, spilling both goons and all the assorted dice and sticks and other regalia of the game into the air several feet. I didn’t have to step back to dodge it, fortunately, but when it came back down it lay on its side, a perfect bulwark to prevent me from seeing what was going on behind it. I heard a door thump open behind it and a slot machine rattle as something hit it—I suspected it was Veronika on her way out, but there was no way I was going to just trust that she’d fled.

I eased around, flanking the table wide, trying to listen over the sounds of Reed’s scuffle at the other side of the room, not daring to look away from where I’d last seen Veronika. I shuffled my feet slowly sideways, bumping my hip against the bar and letting a grunt escape unintentionally. I navigated around it and the half dozen stools lined up along its side in order to get a clear line of sight around the craps table. My shoes crunched on broken glass from the bottles that had shattered when Veronika and I had clashed with our fists, and the sound jangled against my raw nerves. My mouth felt dry and my anxiety rose while I circled.

Veronika was gone. The door she’d escaped through had slammed back shut, and unless she’d deftly hidden around the side of the craps table while I circled around to check on her, she’d run. I saw a decent-sized bloodstain on the ground next to the craps table where she had peered over at me and traced it back to where she’d been when I’d shot at her originally. There was a smaller stain there, still wet, where I’d apparently tagged her with a bullet.

Whew. A sense of relief flooded over me, and I sagged slightly, the adrenaline starting to fade. I leaned back against the bar, collapsing on one of the stools, lowering my gun. That … had been tense.

“What the hell?” Reed asked, shuffling over to me, a pained look on his face and a trickle of blood running from his left eyebrow down his cheek. “Why didn’t you help me?” His lip was bloody, and it had smeared down his chin. He also had a thin cut along the side of his head, visible even through his hair, and his clothing was torn in three places.

“Did you see what I was up against?” I asked, looking past him. Bodies were strewn all over the place on his side of the room, including one that looked like he’d been crushed under a slot machine. Ouch. Guess that guy should have cashed out before the stakes got too high for him.

“No,” Reed said, his annoyance bleeding out like his scalp wound, painfully slowly. His eyes were all narrowed. “I was a little too busy fighting for my life against four armed thugs.” He scaled back the furious judgment a little. “Why? What happened to you? I thought it was only one person?”

“Yeah,” I said, not quite ready to return Shadow to its holster just yet. “One person. One highly trained assassin with the power to—I don’t even know, generate blue superheated plasma from her skin? She absorbed my Gavrikov fire like it was nothing and burned through my nets. She shrugged off the warmind like I’d thrown a glass of water in her face on a hot day.”

Reed’s face fell. “You really didn’t see any of my fight?”

I looked at him in disbelief. “I almost died, Reed. This woman’s a badass, and she confirmed assassins have been hired to kill me.” I shook my head. “Why does it matter if I saw your fight? It looks like you came through it okay.”

He looked a little … miffed. “I was … I think I was kinda at my best.” Hints of pride made their way through his facade. “I showcased my mad skeelz. Figured it looked cool.”

I took a long breath, and now that the adrenaline had fled, I felt exhausted again in spite of having just woken up. “Sorry. I’m sure it was awesome, like something out of a John Woo movie—but you know, without the slow mo.”

“Are you all right?” Reed asked, staring at me. I brought a hand up to touch my jaw, where his eyes had fallen, and I found blood there. It ached where Veronika had hit me, and my knuckles were covered in sticky crimson.

“Still alive,” I said, trying to force a smile. It was all I could muster, considering that for the first time in a while, I actually had someone worthy of being a little intimidated by lurking somewhere out there in the city of Chicago, someone who desperately wanted to kill me.

Someone who had a genuine shot at getting the job done.

The Chicago vice squad showed up to our crime scene a few minutes after we finished our battle in the casino. They picked over the wreckage of the place as Reed and I stood outside, glancing occasionally down the very alley where this had all started, where the man Thuggy had called Graves had killed Dr. Carlton Jacobs.

I still hadn’t quite figured out why that had happened. Not that Thuggy had been a wealth of information; his knowledge of Graves had been limited to polite niceties exchanged with the guy, who had been a regular patron of the casino. Detail was in short supply in Thuggy’s brain, though, and while he’d certainly noticed the look on Graves’s face when the decision had been made to kill Dr. Jacobs, he hadn’t seen it for what it was at the time. To him it was just a nasty look that followed Jacobs touching Graves. I only knew what it meant given the benefit of hindsight.

And I still didn’t really know what it meant, exactly. Did Graves kill him simply because Jacobs had touched him? I’d certainly known people who would kill for less, but they tended to leave more of a body count. Then again, Graves had already killed someone else today, and who knew how many unsolved murders in Chicago might be attributed to him. There could be tons of them; Chicago wasn’t short of unsolved murders. These two had just gotten attention because they happened in an area that murders didn’t typically happen, and because the first was so obviously committed by a metahuman that it forced them to call me in.

I had a headache, both from the fight I’d been involved in and all the crap that had flown my way in the last day. So much for a peaceful last week. I didn’t even know how to feel about having assassins after me. Clearly someone was upset that I’d come to town on this, and after clashing with Graves and having him tell me I was dead, my list of suspects was limited to just him at the moment. He’d made a pretty clear threat, after all, and I took him at his word that he wanted me dead.

I only wished he’d hired some less skillful assassins. Veronika looked to be one tough lady, and that sniper—Phinneus Chalke, she’d called him—had only missed me because I’d turned around at the last second because I heard—

I smacked myself in the forehead hard enough that I staggered backward, Wolfe chortling in my head as I did. Sometimes my souls liked to play tricks on me like sneaking their powers to the fore right before I did something stupid like hitting myself. I shook it off, using his healing ability to repair the minor damage I’d just done to my skull. “Ow.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Reed asked, arms folded, a look of irritation mingled with concern causing his brow to furl.

“I just thought of something,” I said, straightening up as I caught my balance. “Remember before our hotel got shot up—”

“Hard to forget that.”

“—you were watching the news?”

“Vaguely.”

“I heard something that caused me to turn around,” I said, words tripping out with enthusiasm, or possibly brain damage from my Wolfe-powered smack to my own head. “The reporter said that Dr. Jacobs worked on metahuman research.”

Reed frowned. “I didn’t hear that.”

“Probably because you were too busy ducking and covering for your life in the seconds after,” I said. “If that’s true, why do you think Dr. Gustafson or President Breedlowe wouldn’t have mentioned it to us, metahumans standing in their damned offices?”

Reed thought about it for a second, his head bobbing side to side as he did. “I don’t know. It does sound like a pretty big omission.” He puckered his lips. “Especially since we knew that his murderer was a meta.”

“And we told them that, didn’t we?” I racked my brain. “They had to know. It’s why they got questioned by us instead of the CPD.”

“I’m pretty sure we told them, yeah,” Reed said. “They leaned pretty hard on the ‘His research is so complex’ argument, though.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Now it kinda feels like it might be a smokescreen.”

“You want to go back and talk to them again?” Reed asked.

“Well, I don’t have a line on Graves, so—”

“What graves?” Reed asked, look of intense concentration on his face.

“Graves is the name of our perp,” I said, realizing I hadn’t told him. “I pulled it out of that thug’s mind.”

He made a face that expressed his disapproval for my mind-theft again. “Get anything else useful?”

“A pretty good recipe for guac.”

“… Really?”

“No, not really. I wouldn’t want to deprive our illicit casino manager of something useful, after all,” I said, heading back through the alley where Graves had killed Dr. Jacobs, intent on catching a cab on State Street. “Now let’s go shake a couple of lying college administrators and see what comes rattling out.”

We were halfway back to Northern Illinois Technical University, brainstorming ideas between the two of us for other avenues of investigation, Lake Michigan bursting with whitecaps to our right, when my phone rang, the screen lighting up with the name “Andrew Phillips” and a picture of a donkey.

Reed chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve seen that before.”

“J.J. taught me how to do it before he left to go work for that—whoever he took that job with,” I said, answering the phone. I thought about ignoring it, but I needed to talk to his ass anyway. “Hee-haw.”

“What?” Andrew Phillips’s, gruff, nearly emotionless voice came through my speaker.

“I’m glad you called,” I said, rushing right into what I wanted before he got snared up in chewing my ass, which I was sure was coming. An ass chewing my ass. The irony was not lost on me. “We’ve just had a couple run-ins with metahuman assassins that have been hired to kill us, so I need you to send Kat and Augustus down to Chicago right now to help me out.”

I could almost hear him struggling to shift gears, his desire to just steamroll me over with his own agenda warring with the fact I’d just told him that someone was coming to kill one of his employees. “I can’t do that,” he said, apparently letting the seriousness of my concern win out.

“Sure you can,” I said, “plane tickets to Chicago aren’t that expensive and the flight’s less than an hour. These assassins are serious and they’re still at large. Get on it.”

“I can’t do that because Kat and Augustus are no longer with the agency,” Phillips said, sounding annoyed. “Their paperwork has been processed and signed off on, and they’re no longer federal employees. They turned in their weapons, phones and badges at the FBI building in Minneapolis earlier today.”

“Well, then hire them back as contractors,” I said, letting my need for assistance win out over my desire to just hang up on this twat.

“I can’t do that,” Phillips said. “I’m not unsympathetic to your problem—”

“Yes, you are,” I said. “You are the very definition of unsympathetic. I just told you I’ve got assassins after me and you basically replied, ‘Pound sand.’”

“I did not say that,” Phillips replied, his voice strained. “If you need help, you’re going to have to get it from the CPD or the FBI, because your team is already dissolved. There is nothing I can do to help you in that regard.”

“Well, what the hell good are you, then?” I asked and hung up without further ado.

Reed looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Wow.”

“It’s my last week,” I said with a shrug. “What’s he going to do? Fire me? Give me a bad reference? Because I wasn’t going to include him on my resume regardless. Now, back to what we were talking about before we were so rudely interrupted—”

“Dr. Jacobs doesn’t have any family,” Reed said, holding up his phone, which had text displayed on it. “Maclean forwarded me his info. No next of kin listed, and they found a will leaving everything to charities. Parents are long deceased. So it doesn’t look like an inheritance bid.”

“Okay, so we rule out family,” I said, tapping my chin. “Not that I was considering them seriously anyway. Graves, when he looked at Jacobs—it was like he decided to kill him right there, at the casino. I don’t think he was working for any outside sources, and I don’t think he had anything we’d recognize as a real motive. It was very spur-of-the-moment.”

“Killing in the heat of passion,” Reed said, nodding. “But just for touching him? That’s a little weird, even by our standards.”

“It’s weird, but it’s not like it didn’t happen again when that runner hit him at the beach,” I said, shrugging. “Maybe this is Graves’s MO.”

“Because he doesn’t like to be touched?” Reed’s voice was skeptical. “That’s … well, that’s weird.”

“I get it,” I said, “I don’t like to be touched, either. At least not by strangers. Or most of the people I know.” Reed looked at me funny. “It’s a sensory thing,” I said. “Like rough sheets or—”

“No, I was just thinking,” he said, shaking his head like I’d misunderstood his look, “your touch does the killing for you if someone takes the liberty. Sorry, didn’t have anything to do with the case.”