Free Painkiller by Robert J. Crane

for people to be murdered in Streeterville!” he shouted at me through the phone.
    “Oak Street Beach is right over there,” Reed said, pointing out the window ahead of the driver.
    “Pay the cabbie,” I said and hung up as I threw my phone in my pocket and opened the door.
    “What the f—” the cab driver shouted in accented English as I stepped out onto Lake Shore Drive at fifty miles an hour.
    I know, that was dramatic. But I’d had my fill of riding around in cabs for a while, honestly. This shit was tiresome. I zoomed out of that door, slamming it behind me, but kept low, about ten feet off the ground, hoping the FAA wouldn’t notice. It’s not like they were that put out about those commercial drones all over the place nowadays, after all. Or if they were, they hadn’t issued a million cease and desist orders yet.
    I blew over the northbound lane of Lake Shore Drive, heard what sounded like a million horns but was probably closer to five blaring at me obnoxiously for flying over them. I shot over a chain-link fence toward the beach and zoomed over a sloping ramp that looked perfect for pedestrian traffic. I could hear faint, hyperventilating gasps coming from ahead, so I swooped down the ramp and found a woman dressed in way-too-tight yoga capris, holding her phone in her hand like it was her lifeline.
    “What happened?” I asked, hovering about a foot off the ground just outside of the tunnel she was staring into. I didn’t want to just race around the corner in case the murderer was lurking there.
    The woman swung around to look at me with her jaw already down around her skinny knees. “Mu—muh—muh—” she said, incapable of getting anything else out.
    “So you made the 911 call, then,” I muttered and drifted past her. There was definitely a corpse here, and it looked like one of her fellow fitness buffs. The guy’s head had been completely turned around on his shoulders, the neck at a sick angle. He should have been face-down on the concrete but he wasn’t, thanks to the anatomical rearrangement that the murderer had performed. “Where’s the killer?”
    I wasn’t expecting a cogent answer and I didn’t get one. She pointed, though, down the tunnel behind me, and I was off, zooming past the corpse.
    I came out on a walkway that overlooked a road. There was no one ahead of me, so I shot onward into a park complete with a wire-frame gazebo and racks full of those rental bikes that looked so ergonomically uncomfortable I felt like I’d need to be coerced at gunpoint into getting on one.
    Then again, if the FAA kept me grounded much longer, one of those sturdy bastards might just become my preferred means of transport, ET-style.
    I flew off the ground about ten feet and caught a glimpse of a guy who’d gone down the path ahead, toward the crosswalk to downtown. He was hoofing it, walking at a speed that betrayed him as not so much human. He was right at the corner of Lake Shore Drive and another road, next to what looked like a closed-off tunnel that headed under the street. There was a ramp leading down to it, all walled off at the bottom with cream-colored painted plywood, but he was above it at street level, looking back at me, clearly trying to plot out his next move.
    “Halt!” I shouted at him, and he knew I had him. I know this because he froze for a second, and it gave us a moment to get the measure of each other.
    He was a medium height guy, probably 5'10", reasonably tan for being a white guy at the end of winter in the Midwest. He certainly wasn’t as pale as I was, with my bleachy Nordic skin. He had his hands in the pockets of an old, worn black jacket that looked at least a decade out of style. His jeans were the wrong cut for this century, too, and they were worn in a lot of places. Not threadbare or hipster-faded, either, just well used. He had dark, short-cropped hair parted cleanly over in the style of guys that were in their forties or fifties or older. Everything