Painkiller (23 page)

“At some point,” I said, losing my patience, “you have to decide whether you’re going to let Greedo take that first shot in hopes he’ll miss. Because I don’t have a crew of visual effects wizards to make my head tilt out of the way in a cheesy, claymation-style effect, which means next time she comes at me, she might just kill me.” I stared him down. “Now you have to decide whether you want that to happen, or whether you’re going to just
man up and
shoot first, Han Solo
.”

My brother blinked at me, then steadied his aim and started firing, running through the whole magazine in about five seconds. I turned my head in time to see Veronika stagger, and I knew he’d pegged her at least once. She jumped into an exit and disappeared. I didn’t dare follow her into that blind corner.

“Well,” I said, staring after her, “it was a good effort.

“I just shot a retreating woman in the back,” Reed said, his voice as soft as puff pastry.

“I’m proud of you, Han,” I said.

He gave me a hard glare. “No matter how you say that, it sounds like Vader to me.”

I lowered my voice to as close to the James Earl Jones signature hiss as I could replicate. “Come to the sensible side, dumbass, where we don’t let murderous assassins take free shots at us in hopes that they have terrible aim.”

“What the hell did you do?” Maclean yelled at me as he came running up, breathing heavy. He had a bevy of patrolmen behind him, and all of them, without exception, were looking around at the wrecked Soldier Field like one of their relatives had died, their faces ashen.

“I just delivered an ass-whipping to the visiting team like you would not believe,” I said. No one seemed to find it amusing. “What? I’m still alive.” No one found that amusing, either. Reed handed me his long coat to put over my naked body. None of the cops was even looking at me; they were too horrified by the destruction of their football stadium to even care that my pretty ass was hanging out. I looked at Reed as I buttoned up the coat, thus closing the gate on any of these guys getting their own sort of free shot.

“You are not part of the home team,” Maclean said, grabbing his grey hair and running his hands through it with a clear wish to just tear it out. He looked at the ruin of the stands around him and stomped a foot on the field of glass experimentally.

“My last week in government service is going super well,” I said, turning to Reed, who didn’t look any happier than the rest of them. “How much do stadiums cost again?”

I slept like the dead. I wasn’t dead, fortunately, but I slept like I was. I hadn’t been able to leave the scene of the carnage for hours after the Soldier Field showdown, and when I had, it had required me to cross a line of reporters and locals who all looked angry and offended in equal measure, like I’d murdered their mothers or something. I really thought they were going to throw things, but they didn’t, which was fortunate. I’d definitely exhausted some rage on Colin the speedster and Veronika the terrible, but my tank wasn’t exactly running on empty yet. In fact, an argument could be made that the sun might burn out of the sky before I ran out of furious anger.

The sleep was a beautiful thing, though. Reed and I had retreated to a hotel way on the outskirts of town and told no one, not even Maclean (actually, especially not Maclean) where we were going. Reed wasn’t really speaking to me, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because I’d convinced him to shoot Veronika in the back as she was fleeing or because I’d blown up da Bears stadium. I doubted it was the latter, but I didn’t want to probe.

At least I knew their team colors. I’d burned them right off the scoreboard, and that’s the sort of thing I remember. Navy and orange. I doubted that was going to get me any points with Bears fans, though.

I closed my eyes when the sky was dark and didn’t open them again until I heard the knock at the door at eleven-thirty in the morning. I knew what time it was because of the clock by my bedside, glowing red right in my face. My cheek was wet with drool, which was something that happened a lot, and I still smelled like something had burned all around me. That smell was impossible to get off, it took like fifty million showers, or maybe a good dip in the Chicago River, though that was a little like trying to get the funny smell out of your house by burning it down.

“Reed,” I moaned as the knocking came at the door again, very polite, like someone was just a little too effete to knock like a man.

He didn’t answer, and I looked up. The hotel we were staying in was another suite, though smaller and less impressive than the one downtown. I could see his door through the main living room. It was closed, and there was no light coming from beneath it. For all I knew, he was the one knocking.

The knock came again, a little more insistent this time, and I groaned. My head hurt, either from the fight or the untold fumes I’d inhaled last night while I was vaporizing the stadium and flying around a collapsing police station. I exhaled. My morning breath was pure dragon fire, and not of the Gavrikov variety. “Ungh. Reed!”

I still heard nothing from the other room, and the knocking came once more. I sloughed off the covers and wrapped the bedspread around my naked skin (I still hadn’t gotten replacement clothes, and I’d be damned if I was going to send Reed to do so again, not after what had happened last time). I padded across the floor of my room and out into the living room. The knock sounded again, still quiet, like the person doing it didn’t have an ounce of self-confidence to their name.

No assassin would knock like this, I was sure, and by now I was so irritated that whatever hotel employee was disturbing me at this ungodly hour of nearly noon that I was intending to give them a piece of my mind. I dragged my makeshift toga’s tail behind me as I went to the door, ripped it open …

… and my mouth dropped in shock as I saw who was waiting on the other side.

Following the chaos wasn’t terribly difficult for Harry, especially when he was paying attention to the world around him. It was the sort of thing that intruded whether he wanted it to or not, but with a little careful practice, a little effort toward indifference, he’d learned to keep his head down and shut it out, keep it from mucking up his life too much. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than having to see the jangly, sharp edges of the world as he went about his preferred business of gambling, drinking and smoking.

Some things, however, were too much for even him to ignore, and the eruption of a massive explosion at Soldier Field was one of them. Keeping his head down was one thing. Ignoring enormous detonations was another, and Harry wasn’t in the business of turning his face away from all danger at his own peril. No, the destruction of Soldier Field would have been the sort of thing to break through his shield of disinterest, even if he hadn’t more or less shrugged it off back at the garage where he’d beaten Paul Beckman to a pulp.

No, in his search for Sienna Nealon, the explosion of a Chicago landmark had been something akin to a flashing sign saying, “Here I am!”

He’d arrived on the scene with the rest of the reporters and lookiloos, people who wanted to pick over the carnage and people who wanted to look on in horror at this piece of their life that had been ripped apart. Harry could sympathize with the second sentiment, at least. He used to bet big on the Bears back in the day. Now he tended to bet against them, but the sight of the stadium destroyed, pieces of concrete falling off the sides, the entire exterior fried to a crisp, had caused him more than a small cringe.

When Sienna Nealon had come out clad in a trench coat, he’d noticed her lack of shoes or pants pretty much immediately. Even for Harry, that was a hard detail to escape. He hadn’t gotten too good a look at her before, down by the beach, when he’d been working his ass off to waylay her so he could get away. She was cute. More than cute, really, though her hair was kind of a mess. It was kind of a good look on her, though, even though she was scanning the crowd with penetrating eyes. He could see the glacier blue from where he stood, and he nonchalantly dodged a couple times to guarantee she didn’t spot him.

It hadn’t been the time for a confrontation, after all. He could see the weariness on her, the shuffling way she walked. She was ready to collapse, and he could sympathize with that, too.

Plus, she was naked, and he envisioned any scenario in which he approached her at that moment would end with her coming out of her trench coat, and as much of a dog as Harry was, he still prided himself on being a gentleman of the old school, and making a lady jump out of clothes was not something he cared to do if it didn’t lead to a mutually consensual and enjoyable action afterward.

So, instead, he stalked her like a creeper, dimly aware as he hopped a taxi and said, “Follow that cab,” that this wasn’t likely to end any better if the cabbie got overexcited in one direction or another. Harry sussed out exactly what to say to keep the man calm and do what needed to be done, though, and a hundred bucks in cab fare later they ended up at a hotel in the sticks. Sienna Nealon and her brother, a tall guy with a look on his face like he’d just had a stiff drink right out of a dill pickle jar, walked into the hotel.

Harry had waited twenty minutes and followed, checking in right after them. He’d asked a couple questions of the clerk and got him to go into the back room long enough to get a moment with the computer. He’d fished for the number for Ms. Nealon’s hotel room and found it with thirty seconds to spare. When the clerk came back, Harry was leaning with his elbow on the front desk, just smiling politely, a perfectly patient customer.

Harry glanced at the clock when he got to his room. It was a quarter past two. He sighed, staring in annoyance at the non-smoking sign prominently propped up on the desk, and shuffled over to the minibar. He chose two little bottles of the whiskey and got a plastic cup out of the bathroom. He poured himself a glass, a tall one, and settled onto the bed with his clothes still on. He set the alarm for eleven-thirty in the morning, figuring that’d be enough sleep to guarantee a rested, measured response from Nealon, and then waited for sleep to take him.

Tomorrow, he’d see this thing settled one way or another.

Graves was outside my damned door, and I was standing there wearing nothing but a bedspread. He had his hands on his hips, his eighties jacket all puffed out around his arms and chest, his old jeans looking ragged and tattered and kinda like they weren’t from recent decades, and an indifferent look on his face. His hair was a little messy, too, and his skin had that sallow tone that smokers sometimes get after years of use, like the tobacco was just oozing out of every pore. I could smell it, along with hints of rosemary, and it didn’t go well with the burnt scent wafting off my skin.

“You cheeky son of a bitch,” I pronounced, dropping the bedspread and raising my hands to fight.

His eyes went south. All the way south. “Whoa,” he said, eyebrows heading in the opposite direction.

I did the only thing I could think of to respond to that. I threw a punch at his face.

And the bastard dodged it, not fast, but well enough that I didn’t even graze him. He did it confidently, like it was the easiest thing. I, naturally, followed up with another punch as his eyes continued to run unhampered over my naked body.

He dodged it again.

“Hold still, you asshole!” I shouted as I came at him again and the bastard dipped right out of the way just in time. I shouted at him more out of frustration than any actual belief he’d hold still and let me jack him in the jaw.

He sniffed as my arm went flying past his face, and broke into a wide grin. “Is that … man, it smells like someone lit a stick of Teen Spirit on fire.”

I grunted in aggravation as I started to come at him again. He was grinning at me in a sheepish but not really sort of way, like maybe a little guilt but not enough to get his damned searching eyes to stop. “Hey,” he said, “knock it off, will you? I’m here to surrender.”

I actually did stop before throwing another punch at him. “You’re here to what?”

“To surrender,” he said, putting his hands up in front of him. “To throw in the towel.” He paused. “Actually, if I had a towel I would absolutely give it to you right now—” He waved a hand up and down to indicate me, standing there, in the hallway of the hotel, starkers.

“Get back to the surrendering thing or I’m going to start throwing fire at you.”

“Right,” he said, nodding and bringing his gaze back to my eyes. “I give up. You’ve got me.” He thrust his hands forward like he expected me to handcuff him. “I yield to your authority, and I am your prisoner.”

I just stood there for a minute, staring at him. This schtick was familiar, and I was every sort of suspicious. “Why?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, and now he was serious, “you’re going to die.” He must have sensed my immediate instinct to punch him, because he held the hands up in front of his face to remind me of his surrender. “I’m not threatening you.”

“It sure sounds like it,” I said, “so you might want to explain yourself.”

“I’m a Cassandra,” he said, the look on his face at once urgent and clouded with a hint of … worry? “So when I say you’re going to die, I mean it … I mean that I’ve seen your future, and I can tell you that somehow, some way, in the next couple of days … you and your brother are going to die … and I think a lot of other people … innocent ones … are going to go with you as well.”

Phinneus wasn’t quite blind, but he couldn’t exactly see real well, either. His vision had certainly improved overnight, and now if he squinted he could make out most of the details on the television screen—the newscaster’s pretty face, the outline of the graphic at her shoulder—it was all coming back to him, but a little slower than he needed it to.

Phinneus spun the cylinder of his Colt Peacemaker idly, then spun it again. It was good and lubed up, six rounds loaded, ready for the next fight. Phinneus was ready for the next fight, too, but in a city as big as Chicago, his tracking skills weren’t as useful as they’d been on his last job, which had been in West Texas. That had been fun, following his quarry’s footsteps like he might have a wounded deer. He’d gotten to use the Peacemaker then, too, which wasn’t something that happened all that often.