Painkiller Read Free Page A

misunderstand my purpose.” He reached into his coat and pulled out envelope, this one white and long, a letter envelope that looked thick. “I’m not here about anyone suing you.” He placed the envelope on the table next to me as I watched him carefully. “I have a job offer for you.”

3.
    I gave Jonathan Chang, esquire, attorney at law, blah blah blah, a wary, cocked eye. “You want to hire me? Because my registration with the Minnesota bar is sadly nonexistent.”
    “Who do you work for again?” Reed asked, voice cloudy with booze and suspicion. “Wolfram and Hart?”
    “No,” Mr. Chang said coolly, still with that faint smile, “my firm is named Rothman, Curtis and Chang. But I’m not making the offer on our own behalf. I’ve been contracted by an employer who would like to hire you.”
    “As what?” I asked, looking right at him. “A security guard? Muscle? An assassin?”
    “Hardly,” Mr. Chang said, looking very slightly affronted. “We only deal with legal and aboveboard entities.”
    “So says every lawyer, I’m sure,” Augustus said, looking extremely amused, “even the ones that deal with murderers and rapists.”
    “We don’t work in the realm of criminal law,” Mr. Chang said.
    “So you defend big, dirty corporations in lawsuits?” Reed asked, suspicion far outpacing the booze.
    “Sometimes,” Mr. Chang said, “and sometimes we defend big, clean corporations against some idiot who wants to sue them because they shoved the staple remover the company manufactured into their own eye and think someone else should pay for their stupidity.”
    “Eye for an eye,” Reed said. “That’d fix it.”
    “Yes, and then no one would make staple removers,” Mr. Chang said, and shifted his attention away from Reed. “And while I’m sure that a world without staple removers would be a better world for all, clearly … that has little to do with why I’m here.”
    “What’s the job?” I asked, frowning. I kept my face carefully neutral.
    “A Non-Governmental Organization is forming,” Mr. Chang said, “backed by someone with considerable resources and focused on assisting with metahuman threats that the United States Government is unable or unwilling to address.”
    “So wait,” Augustus asked, his brown furrowing, “what would she be doing?”
    “In her current capacity with the government,” Mr. Chang said, utterly calm, “Ms. Nealon presently assists state and local jurisdictions because they’re unable to handle metahuman threats. After her exit for—the agency, I think you call it—the U.S. government will be tasked with replacing her, and thus assisting these state and local jurisdictions will fall to this new FBI-led task force, should the state and local governments desire the help. However, they may be finding their assistance somewhat lacking, since the only metahuman available to assist them now will be—”
    “Guy Friday,” I said. “Which, I mean, he can probably handle some of the stuff we dealt with, but … he’s a blunt instrument. Like, really blunt. Like, his head is a hammer and everything else in the world is a nail—”
    “As you say,” Mr. Chang nodded, “the U.S. government approach will be somewhat one-dimensional for the foreseeable future, leaving state and local jurisdictions without anyone to turn to in a time of crisis. For example, if the recent incident in Los Angeles had been left to Mr. Friday, as you call him—”
    “He would have played skee-ball at Santa Monica pier while the Elysium neighborhood went kablooey,” Kat gurgled, unable to hold her head up straight. “And I would have died horribly, too.”
    “Furthermore,” Mr. Chang said, “if the events of last January, the robbery at the Federal Reserve, had been left to Mr. Friday—”
    “We’d be off the gold standard permanently,” Reed said. “But maybe they’d finally audit the—”
    “Reed, shut it,” I said, focusing on Mr. Chang. “So what does this …