Painkiller by Robert J. Crane

Author:Robert J. Crane
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2016-03-24T07:00:00+00:00

32.

I spent the next twenty minutes coiled up behind a mini-mall in suburbia as Reed went and bought me new clothes and shoes. Fortunately my scales kept me warm as I lay on the cold pavement. A car came around the corner once and saw me draped in a giant mass at the rear of the mall. I lifted my head to look and let my forked tongue slide out to hiss at them. Needless to say, they hit reverse and peeled out, never to return.

Reed came back with an armful of stuff in a plastic shopping bag. He was still dripping, his hair plastered in an unflattering way across his scalp. He nodded toward a stand of bushes nearby and I floated toward them, shrinking back into human form and diving behind them for cover as my scales turned into naked skin.

“Here you go, Eve,” he said, and tossed me the bag. “Women are not easy to shop for, by the way.”

“I told you I don’t care what you got me,” I said, tugging on a t-shirt first on the assumption that if the cops came wheeling up to investigate reports of a giant snake menacing shoppers, it’d be more workable to tug the tail of the shirt down to cover myself than to try and do so by tugging up on an underwear waistband. Priorities, people. I tore into a three pack of cotton panties that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a grandma and held up one of them so Reed could see it. “Okay, I’m revising that. Really?”

“It was cheap,” Reed muttered, glancing at me, clearly trying desperately to give me some small measure of privacy even as he nervously watched the road. “Hurry up. I want to go get replacement phones so we can call an Uber.”

“A what?” I halted, my granny panties halfway on. I shivered in the cold April air. The midwest clung stubbornly to winter, breaking only occasionally for breaths of spring. I didn't find it at all reassuring that Chicago was just as schizophrenic as Minneapolis in this regard.

“Uber,” he said, kicking at the pavement, scuffing his shoes and causing dust to cling to their leathery black surface. “It’s this whole new thing replacing cabs.”

“Why couldn’t we just get a cab?”

“Stop being such a stick in the mud.”

“Listen, brother o’ mine, there’s only one of us who almost became a stick in the mud, as in river bottom mud, and it wasn’t me, okay?” By now I was floating my way into my too-tight jeans and hoping he’d gotten me shoes that fit.

“I’d be more excited if we hadn’t gotten dumped in the Chicago River to begin with. Why does this shit always happen to you?”

“Like you’re blameless. I seem to remember Phillips being pissed off about having to try and settle with some Chinese buffet you tore up in the north metro during your manhunt for Anselmo Serafini—”

“Fine, whatever,” he said, trying to shut off the conversation before I went and hammered him with any of his own countless acts of destruction.

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