Free Painkiller by Robert J. Crane Page B

meandered, he browsed, and then he stepped out to find police cars, ambulances and fire trucks swarming near the park. As expected.
    He raised his hand and hailed the first cab he saw, popping in the back. He gave an address in the Loop and then leaned back to think.
    When he’d been in the store, he’d been focused on the next move and the next move only. Harry could only concentrate so far into the future, planning it out. Now he knew he was safe for a little bit at least, and he could open his mind to the next move. He looked back and saw the lights flashing behind him, red and blue and white, and he sighed again. A simple bump-off in an alley wasn’t supposed to get this complicated. This was going to require … desperate measures.

11.
Sienna
    A hard hand slapped across my face, snapping me out of a sweet, blissful nap and back into a world of pain and discomfort. I ached all over, and my face was sticky with blood. I could smell it, the pungent scent flooding into my sinuses and threatening to overwhelm me.
    “Owwwww,” I said, looking up at Reed’s deeply concerned eyes. He was crouched over me, in silhouette, pretty much like my attacker had been when I’d gone out. I wanted to make a joke about the Mack Truck that had hit me, but for all my much-vaunted superiority, my own stupidity had been the culprit in this particular injury.
    Wolfe , I moaned inside.
    Yesssss , Wolfe said, already working on it. You shouldn’t go charging into—
    “Spare the lecture,” I said for the benefit of my psycho and also my brother. Two for one. My wounds started to knit themselves together and my right leg jerked back into alignment as it healed itself. “Yowwwww.”
    “What happened?” Reed asked, voice thick with worry.
    “I thought the bad guy was running but it turned out he was lying in wait,” I said as I got up and dusted myself off. It required a lot of dusting.
    “You didn’t consider an ambush to be a possibility?”
    “I consider a lot of possibilities,” I said, trying to brush some particularly stubborn wood dust off my knee. “The most likely one when I see someone running from me is that they’ll continue to wisely haul ass away, not take the 1.2 seconds I give them to escape as an opportunity to bushwhack me without so much as a weapon at their disposal.” I turned my neck and heard a crack as bone set back into place. “That guy said he was going to kill me.”
    “I heard him run off as I caught up,” Reed said. His eyes flared with anger. “You know, if you’d waited for me—”
    “If I’d waited for you,” I said, breaking into run toward the opposite end of the tunnel, where light was flooding down from my assailant’s likely exit, “I’d feel like I was running with weights on my legs.”
    “I caught up with you, didn’t I?” Reed snapped, hurrying after me.
    “Because I had to stop and try and converse with a witness who had been so traumatized by the sight of a corpse that she couldn’t construct a sentence with heavy machinery. Talk about a drag on your speed.”
    I burst out of the walkway at the other end of the street and shot into the air, scouring the sidewalk for hints of my foe. The streets weren’t exactly packed, but they were damned busy, and it seemed like every fourth person had dark hair and a black jacket. “Son of a …” I muttered.
    Reed drifted up next to me, only fifteen feet up or so, his hands throwing off massive amounts of wind in order to keep him levitating. “See anything?”
    I sighed as I looked in all four directions. I saw something, all right. Desperation. My own desperation and about a hundred people of medium height in black coats, only half of whom were actually looking at me at the moment. “This guy’s gone,” I said, letting myself slowly drift back to the ground at the corner of Michigan and Lake Shore. “He got away.”

12.
Veronika
San Francisco, California
    It was a dismal day outside Veronika’s mother’s window, her