Painkiller (18 page)

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.

“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 said.

“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.

“Shit,” Reed said, putting his face in his palms.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Worse things have happened.”

He raised his face out of his hands to give me a look of disbelief. “Not to her!”

Well, he had a point.

“So what’s our next move?” Reed asked, resignation settling over him.

“We find out who Dr. Stanley’s closest colleague was and get them over here to answer some questions,” I said, resolute, “and then after that, we go take Detective Maclean up on his invitation …” my face hardened, “… and ask him a few questions of our own about how these assassins keep figuring out where we’re going.”

It turned out that Dr. Stanley’s closest colleague actually lived in Milwaukee and commuted to Chicagoland only twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The campus administrator, Jeffrey Parker, an obsequious man in wire-framed glasses and a tweed jacket, was incredibly apologetic about it, and gave us this Dr. Erin Hope’s number and left a message for her that hadn’t been returned by the time we were ready to leave the campus. He’d given her our numbers as well, of course, but as neither of us had a functional phone at present, it wasn’t going to do us a hell of a lot of good.

“If she doesn’t answer our message by tomorrow,” Reed suggested as we were hiking out to catch a cab, “we could always drop by and surprise her.”

“Or we could go to Milwaukee tonight and pay her a visit,” I said. “Maybe have local PD pick her up and hold her until we get there.”

“Yeah, get the long arm of the law after her,” Reed said, by now nearly dry but still shivering, his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets against the vicious, chill wind whipping through the campus, rattling the trees around us. “Nothing like a little fear and intimidation to get the little people to cooperate.”

“Dr. Stanley was hiding something,” I said, not immune to the freezing ass cold myself. Minneapolis hadn’t even been this cold when we left, had it? “I’ve got no reason to believe her colleague isn’t in on it in some way.”

“You’ve got no reason to believe she is,” Reed said, giving me one of those superior looks that I hated on him, like he was making a reasonable suggestion or something.

“Whatever,” I said, blowing him off. “We need phones. First stop, that. Second stop, we grill Maclean. Third stop, if we haven’t busted this thing wide open by then—we go to Milwaukee.”

“Well all right, then, Sam-antha Spade,” Reed said, falling into step next to me, smirking at his own joke. “Let’s go solve this thing. After we get new cell phones, of course.”

“Maybe some dinner, too,” I said, prompting Reed to smile even wider. I was glad he was feeling happy again. I damned sure wasn’t. All I wanted to do was find this Graves bastard and put him in one of his own before anyone else got hurt.

It wasn’t in Harry’s nature to run from a fight, but then, it wasn’t in Harry’s nature to get in a fight in the first place. Fights were for idiots, for people who couldn’t see any way around them. They got in the way of good fun, and if you knew someone was going to be a problem, it was better, in Harry’s opinion, to just ice them quietly rather than let it become a long, drawn-out scuffle that attracted noise and attention.

Of course, he’d violated his own rules a few times lately, and that was the genesis of his current problem. Back to following the rules, Harry thought to himself glumly as he walked down the quiet alley in West Chicago.

He’d retreated out of downtown when Sienna Nealon had come. He’d long had a safe house of sorts in Chicago, a place he’d picked up on the cheap in the fifties and had never quite abandoned. He’d blow through town every couple years and stay there. It was worth keeping in his opinion; after all, it’d probably gone up in value a thousand percent over what he’d paid for it, even given the current somewhat sketchy nature of the neighborhood. He had investments like this all over the US, though he never thought of them as anything other than homes without the homey-ness, and he always sent enough to cash to the right account to make sure the lawyer he had on retainer paid the utilities and the taxes.

The nice thing about owning these properties was that it gave him a place to park his car when he was in town. Chicago was a nightmare in that regard. He’d seen the signs for the $15 valets and it made him a little sick. But, then, Harry could remember a time when you could almost buy an acre parcel of land in Chicago for that.

Night had shrunk in around him, and he was walking down the alley toward the back of his own house. They were little houses, a thousand square feet, but he didn’t need much space. He tended to travel real light, maybe leave three or four changes of clothes in each of his houses’ closets, and bring the ones on his back to the next locale he traveled to. Made packing a nonissue. Of course, some of the TVs in his dwellings weren’t exactly up to modern spec. The one here he’d bought in the fifties, with the house, and it didn’t even work anymore. Something about digital antennas nowadays. Not like he watched much TV, but it would have been nice to have right now, catch a little news of the manhunt that was probably underway for him.

Although, there were other reasons too. Harry had long prided himself on not paying attention to current events. They had a strange habit of sounding repetitive, the panics of the day. He could almost imagine himself watching cable news and shutting his eyes, harkening back to the day when a tinny voice on the radio was shouting about the impending destruction of the world. Harry had never yet seen it happen. It just wasn’t the nature of the world to go and get itself destroyed.

True, people died every day. He’d proven that with his own damned hand the last couple days.

But worldwide destruction? That was a fantasy concocted by a society with too much affluence and too little real thinking to do. Harry had seen the future arrive on time every morning, the change that every generation fearfully predicted would result in the end actually resulting in … not the end. Maybe he’d gotten jaded after all the doomsaying he’d heard in his long life.