Painkiller (17 page)

He looked at my hair, and I saw a subtle grimace that told me everything about how I looked. “Yep,” was all he dared to say.

“Let’s go, you ass.”

I could see the grin he didn’t quite bother to hide out of the corner of my eye. “Sure you don’t want to try and—”

“No.” I hit a steady clip, walking with a little more care and with a little less steam than I normally would have, because of the shoes. “We need to question the doctor, and now. I want to get to the bottom of this case …” I let my voice fade off dramatically then finished by muttering. “… so I can go home and dress myself in a manner that doesn’t look like I’ve just raided a psychotic clown’s wardrobe.”

Phinneus set up at his vantage point after having crept across the campus, hiding his weapons under his coat. The pistol was easy; the rifle took a little more work, but he pulled it off. Pretty soon he had a nice view through a big-ass window of an office building on a campus out in the suburbs.

He’d gotten the tipoff as he’d been pondering what to do next. He’d considered making calls to all the hotels frequented by government employees downtown, but he didn’t want to do that. Not only was the success rate low (Nealon was unlikely to check in under her own name after an assassination attempt) but it’d involve sitting on the phone like one of those damned telemarketers for hours.

Yeah, getting this tipoff from the guy who’d hired him was way, way better, even if he might have to deal with a little competition in the process.

Plus, now he had a side job to complete.

But for the moment he was just sitting, watching the window a few hundred feet away, seeing the mousy little doctor lady behind the desk pecking away at her keyboard. If the man who’d hired him was right, Sienna Nealon would show her pretty face here in just a few short minutes. Phinneus looked over the iron sights of his Winchester and took a deep breath. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

“I still say we should have gotten phones and Ubered it over here,” my brother groused as we stepped out of the cab at the campus where Marabella Stanley worked, me still in my clown clothes and him still dripping slightly.

“Stick with the classics,” I said as he collected his credit card from the cabbie.

“You are the very enemy of progress,” Reed said as the cab headed off down the tree-lined drive and we headed up into the administration building. “You’re like an angry old man ranting about how that newfangled television thing is ruining the world.”

“It does rot the brains of you whippersnappers,” I agreed as I opened the door for him. He frowned and went inside.

After getting assistance from a weary-looking undergraduate who seemed like he had better things to do, we headed on a short walk across campus toward the science building, a flimsy little visitors’ map in hand. The campus was lovely, if a little chilly, and Reed was shuddering by the time we’d reached the science building and climbed the three floors to Marabella Stanley’s office.

It wasn’t difficult to find, being clearly marked and all that. The frosted glass-paned door was propped open to the outer office when we got there, revealing that Dr. Stanley shared a receptionist with about six or seven other professors. The waiting area was clean and carefully maintained, suggesting that either janitorial was on top of things in this building or the receptionist was some sort of neatnik. I looked at the desk and saw not a paperclip out of place. A nameplate with “Stephanie Bruszek” written in white lettering was perfectly squared off, equidistant from each of the sides of the desk, giving me my answer.

Reed led the way to the lone office with the lights still on, a frosted glass window with Dr. Stanley’s name printed on it in gold letters telling us we might just be in luck. He rapped lightly on the glass. I let him because I still had a tendency to break windows by accident.

“Come in,” Dr. Stanley said in a brusque tone, and Reed opened the door and stepped in. I followed him a moment later and caught her frown as she took us both in with a glance. He, still dripping slightly and shivering, and me dressed like an idiot and wobbling on these heels. “Oh my,” she said. It fit.

“Dr. Stanley?” I asked, wishing I had my badge to flip out. I was going to surrender it in less than a week anyway, and everyone knew who I was by now, hopefully. “I’m Sienna Nealon. This is Reed Treston—”

“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.

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.

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.

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 that 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.

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.