24

Harvey Bullock steered his dented Mercury Marquis along the boulevard. The lit stump of a cigar was lodged in the corner of his mouth and a mournful Chet Baker tune played low on the car’s tape deck.

In the trunk were the items he’d assembled for the takedown, including ones confiscated from the special evidence lockup. As he drove, he gave Thea Montclair a squeeze on her knee. She sat next to him, wearing jeans and tennis shoes. Her features were drawn tight.

“Relax, we got this,” he said. “Right?”

“It’s just… what if something goes wrong, Harvey?”

“Then we make it up as we go.” He took the cigar from his mouth and blew a stream of smoke out the partially rolled-down driver’s side window. “You can do it.”

“I got too much riding on this.”

“I know,” he said. “We both do.” He smiled reassuringly at her.

“I need a hit,” she said. “I gotta calm my nerves.”

“No, you don’t.” He glanced at her.

She looked back. “You’re right, I don’t.”

He pulled the Mercury to a stop amid a row of low-slung buildings, none more than two stories high. Except one.

The Novick Novelty works stood out in the near distance at three stories high. Putting the car into park, Bullock killed the engine, took the key out of the ignition, got out, and unlatched the trunk. He pulled out a thick duffle bag and closed the trunk lid. There was a growl nearby as a worker guided a noisy diesel-powered forklift.

“Okay, countdown to success,” he said, handing her the keys through the passenger side window. She slid over behind the steering wheel.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Good luck to us both,” Bullock amended, hefting the duffle bag over his shoulder.

Montclair started the car and drove away. The man with the forklift removed a pallet of plastic-wrapped cartons from a semi. He paid no attention to Bullock, dressed in a wrinkled cotton shirt and khakis. Given his build, the detective could easily be mistaken for a worker delivering machine parts.

He got to the corner and looked down the block. The “empty” novelty company faced out onto Andru Street and took up most of the short block. The first two stories of windows were blocked out with a reflective material that kept him from seeing inside, but Bullock was pretty sure anyone inside could see out. Closer to where he stood was a single-story warehouse with a large rollaway door in front—storage for frozen produce, busy at the beginning of the day with trucks arriving steadily for pick-ups by local restaurants and grocers. Since it was early afternoon, however, most of the day’s business already was done.

Just past the warehouse he turned and followed a narrow passageway that led between the buildings. About midway to the next block he reached his objective, on the side of but toward the rear of the Novick building. He bent down and unzipped his duffle, which he’d set on the ground. Bullock extracted five mechanical items that resembled reptiles. These were geckos created by Winslow Shott, also known as the Toyman. His usual stomping grounds were in Metropolis, but for a price he helped finance his own endeavors by supplying gadgets to other criminals.

The gizmos had been made for a crew of arsonists who employed controlled fires to pull off their heists. Confiscated when the gang was caught in the act, the mechanical lizards could climb walls and were designed to explode into fireballs.

“All right, you little bastards,” Bullock said, “it’s time to do your thing.” He flipped a switch on each of the robots, and slit irises glowed red in their artificial eye sockets. He’d listened and taken notes on the taped interrogation of one of the arsonists, describing how to program them. Bullock sent the mechanical reptiles scurrying up the outside wall of the novelty works. Each went toward a different destination, identified via the building schematics kept in the public records.

Wearing a lopsided grin on his face, Bullock removed two more objects from his bag—a semi-auto Mossberg shotgun and a Batman mask. The mask was the cheap sort, picked up in the kids’ section of a chain drug store. He appreciated the irony as he pulled the stretchy material over his blockish head. Checking the weapon, he returned it to the duffle, then secured the bag onto his back.

“Time to rock and roll,” he muttered as he psyched himself up. From previous reconnoitering, he knew there were piles of old crates and pallets strewn all about the building. He heaped some of them up under a set of built-in rungs that scaled upward to the Novick building’s rooftop. While he wasn’t in the best of shape, Bullock managed to haul himself up onto one of the crates. Standing and balancing as best he could, he reached for the first rung. The crate creaked and shifted under his weight.

“Shit.” He’d purposely laid off the chili fries and extra cheese lately, but who was he kidding—he was far removed from the days when he’d been an offensive tackle, back in high school.

“Come on, goddammit,” he grumbled. Sweat ran out from under the rubbery cowl on Bullock’s unshaven face, and he considered pulling the itchy thing off, but he didn’t dare take that kind of chance. The crate began to splinter beneath him, but stretching as far as he could, he got a hold on the lowest rung.

Feet propped against the wall to support his weight, he sucked in air for several moments. Then he started climbing upward, passing between windows of the second floor without incident. As he got toward the third floor there was a flutter behind a curtain at a window off to one side.

He froze.

There stood Python Palmares, staring out over the rooftops of the shorter buildings. He hadn’t seen Bullock, yet. Heart beating in his mouth, the detective remained stock still. The curtain partially blocked him from view, but if Palmares turned even the slightest amount, he’d be screwed.

Time stopped.

Bullock’s dry tongue touched his dry lips.

He couldn’t even produce enough saliva to swallow.

Finally Palmares moved away from the window. Sucking in air, Bullock clambered up to the roof faster than he thought he could move and went over the low parapet.

Taking a knee with a thump, he wiped away as much sweat as he could. Adjusting the eye holes in his Halloween mask, he checked his watch. By now his robot geckos would be in place. Lurching to his feet he walked to the square structure that held the roof access door. It was locked, but he pulled out a small container, also “liberated” from GCPD storage. It was a vial of the acid the Joker liked to use on random victims, and just a few drops dissolved the padlock.

He reached to open the door, but then stopped. Examining the hinges, he confirmed that they were covered in rust. Bullock damn sure didn’t want to alert Palmares and his boys downstairs—his plan relied on catching them off guard. In another page from the Batman playbook, he took out a small can and placed the nozzle against the hinges, squeezing out a generous amount of oil on each one.

That done, he slowly worked the door back and forth, loosening up several years of decay. The result wasn’t entirely silent, but it was quiet enough that he slipped inside without raising an alarm. He descended the stairwell to the third floor, then the second. Regarding his watch again, he began a countdown in his head.

“Showtime,” he muttered gleefully.

*   *   *

One of the women packing the Giggle Sniff happened to look up. She was originally from a small village in the Mexican highlands, and had seen plenty of lizards in her lifetime, though she hadn’t noticed any in Gotham. Shrugging, she lowered her head and returned to her repetitive task. The swing door leading to the lab opened near her as a fresh batch was wheeled out.

Without warning, where there had been a gecko, a fireball appeared with a deafening bang. The explosion shattered numerous windows in the large room. A second blast erupted toward the unoccupied end of the room where the crates and supplies were stacked, while a third burst forth from the laboratory, knocking the swing doors off their hinges. The concussive force sent packets of Giggle Sniff flying everywhere.

She screamed and dove under the long table. Other women raced for the exits, some of them with frightful-looking burns on their bare, unprotected skin. By some miracle, no one seemed to have been killed. As they clustered at the doors, the crush made it impossible for them to get any further. There was more screaming as some of them were trampled in the crush, but all still managed to get back on their feet.

Two of the drug cookers wearing rubber aprons raced out of the lab, screaming, engulfed in flames. The women assemblers scattered in every direction to avoid them.

“Hold up!” a guard bellowed, raising his assault rifle. No one paid him any attention, and he was quickly knocked to the ground by the force of the mob.

A second guard, leaning his rifle against a wall, tried to help the first one when the door to the stairwell was blown open by a shotgun blast. The guard grabbed for his weapon as an overweight man in a weird Halloween mask rushed into view. Before he could reach it, the intruder hit him in the head with the stock of his shotgun. The guard collapsed instantly.

The fire was spreading.

*   *   *

This wasn’t going down quite like Bullock had planned, but there you had it. As the chump he slugged hit the ground, Bullock pointed the business end of the Mossberg at the one already on the floor.

“Where’s the money?” he demanded.

If the guard was scared, he didn’t show it.

“You don’t know the kind of trouble you’re in, asshole,” he said defiantly. Clearly he needed some more encouragement. There wasn’t much time, Bullock realized.

He pressed the barrel against the guy’s shoulder.

“You wanna be called Lefty?”

The man thought about it, then jerked his chin toward the burning lab.

“Go ahead, tough guy,” he growled. “Your ass is—”

Bullock kicked him in the face. Grabbing up the assault rifle, he held it in his free hand and ran toward the smoke-filled room.

A bullet zinged off an upturned assembly table. He spun and saw that two more hoods were there, standing in the doorway and shooting at him with their handguns. Instantly Bullock was on a knee and returning fire with the AR-15, temporarily forcing the other two to seek cover. Twisting around he flopped down on the floor. With the oily smoke rising and drifting over him, he belly crawled into the lab, and found the fire climbing a wall like runaway kudzu. There was no telling how long he had before the place went up in a huge blast or burned to the ground around him.

Clambering to his feet he searched the metal cabinets in the room, and knew the guard had lied to him. There was no money here—it had to be upstairs in Palmares’ office.

“Shit,” he growled. Since the scratch would be the first thing the gangster would grab he had to double time it. The masked plainclothesman began to pick his way back out of the lab when one of the light fixtures dropped from the ceiling, grazing his arm. The fluorescent tubes popped, wires dangling from the fixtures, crackling with electricity as Bullock pushed past.

Back in the assembly room the women had all made it out, and as he had hoped, there were no bodies. Visibility was compromised by the fire and smoke, and as he crept closer to the exit, he heard a cough. Glancing around he spotted a tennis shoe that was on fire—somebody had bolted out of here that fast.

Scooping it up and holding it away from him, he moved over a patch of sagging floor, the beams underneath creaking beneath his weight. The guard swung into view from the hallway, and Bullock hurled the shoe at him. Instinctively the man ducked aside, and the rumpled cop peppered his lower legs with buckshot.

“Shit!” the guy bellowed as he dropped to the floor. He still held onto his weapon, though, and rattled off a few rounds. But Bullock moved like he was chasing a naked woman carrying a plate of barbequed ribs. He used the Mossberg like a baseball bat and connected solidly with the side of the guard’s jaw, sending him over and out.

Off in the distance, there was the sound of sirens.

Crap!

Abandoning the assault rifle, he hit the stairs moving as fast as his bulk allowed.

*   *   *

“Sounds like the fire department, and the cops won’t be far behind,” Palmares said to Frankie Bones. “Let’s get the hell outta here.” He gestured to another man, too—a thick-necked individual who went by “Scale.” The bruiser brandished an Ingram MAC-10. “Bad enough I gotta deal with the goddamn Scarecrows, now this,” he said. “If they’re behind it, there’s gonna be blood.”

“Told you we should have kept the sprinklers working,” Bones said, lifting a duffle bag stuffed with cash, settling the strap on his shoulder. “All these damn chemicals.”

“Yeah, yeah, next time,” Palmares said. “This was supposed to be a deserted warehouse,” he added, looking up. Through the skylight fifteen feet above, they could see black smoke rising into the sky.

“If there is a next time.”

The three thugs spun to find a guy standing in the doorway, wearing a cheap Batman mask. The newcomer didn’t wait for a reply, and shot Scale in the kneecap, cartilage and blood exploding from his tattered cotton pants. Moving fast for a fat guy, he crossed the room and kicked the Ingram away. It came to a stop against the wet bar.

“Fuck,” Scale shouted, landing on his side, both hands gripping what remained of his bloody kneecap. “I’m gonna fix you, dickwad.”

*   *   *

“Uh-huh,” Bullock said, but he wasn’t paying attention to the wounded gangster. He eyed the three full duffle bags, two of them lying on the floor.

“The hell you supposed to be, beer belly?” Palmares said. “Batman’s hillbilly relation?”

“Your mama’s a hillbilly, punk,” Bullock replied, trying to figure out how to carry all three bags. Briefly he considered forcing one of the thugs to carry them for him, but common sense interceded.

One bag would have to do.

“Back the hell up,” he said to Palmares and his sidekick. He recognized Frankie Bones.

“You ain’t gonna get away with this, scumbag,” Bones said.

“You want to join big boy on the floor?” Bullock shook the shotgun he held in both hands. Bones and Palmares took a few steps back. “I didn’t think so. Now drop the bag.” Bones let his duffle drop to his side, leaning it against him as it stood on end.

The sirens were getting closer.

Abruptly there was a whoosh of turbines, and fire-retardant foam began sliding down the windows. Like the GCPD, the Gotham Fire Department had been experimenting with the use of blimps. One of their aircraft had to be hovering near the building, spraying it to keep the flames contained.

One hand still on the trigger of his Mossberg, Bullock bent down to take hold of a duffle bag of cash.

“I thank you for your contribution,” he said, straightening up with the prize.

Bones barely twitched his upper body as he threw his bag at Bullock.

“What the fu—” the masked cop blared, leveling a blast at the bag. Hundreds, fifties, and twenties erupted into the air as the shotgun pellets tore through the canvas. Green-tinged confetti rained down as Bullock reared back. Before he could recover, both hoods were on him.

Bones socked him in his flabby middle, doubling him over. Palmares grabbed what was left of the tattered duffle bag to slam it down on Bullock’s head. He staggered, bent over like a drunk sailor with osteoporosis. Bones swung at him again, but Bullock fended off the blow and countered with a punch to the man’s chin, sending him backward.

Bullock turned, dropping into an amateur’s version of a boxing stance, figuring to defend himself as Palmares came at him again. The drug lord grabbed a desk lamp and cracked it against Bullock’s skull. Stunned, pinwheels cascading behind his eyes, he sagged and Frankie Bones got his arms pinned behind him.

Palmares unloaded a salvo of blows to his face and gut.

“Teach you to mess with me,” the tattooed gang chief raged. Bones let him go. Blood and saliva dripping from his gaping mouth, Bullock sagged to the carpet. A grinning Palmares took a knee, grabbing the cop by the shirt and pulling him into a sitting position.

“I’ve been itching to try these out.”

What the fuck? Bullock’s eyes went wide, and he blanched at the sight of snake-like steel fangs shining in the crime boss’s mouth. Only in Gotham, he thought, realizing he was about to die.

“Let’s see if you still got something funny to say after I take a bite out of your face.”

“Aw, sweet Lord,” the detective muttered, damn near wetting himself as the fangs bore down.

There was a crash above them, and glass rained down as the skylight burst. The thugs looked up, and Bullock figured the building must be collapsing around them.

“Looks like a party,” a female voice said brightly. “Did you forget to send me my invitation?”

Batgirl swung down on her grapple line. Bones dove to the side, his arms over his head to protect him from the falling shards of glass. Palmares got to his feet, and was rewarded with a Batarang to the side of his head.

“Ke-rist,” the gangster swore.

Not wishing to waste an opportunity, Bullock lurched upward and jammed the heel of his hand under the man’s jaw, shoving him off as he scrambled to get back on his feet.

*   *   *

Frankie Bones pulled his pistol and shot at the costumed newcomer. She whipped her Kevlar cape around for added protection of her upper body, the shots ricocheting wildly. As she went into motion, she glanced at the heavyset figure grappling with Palmares.

Is that Harvey Bullock in that cheap Batman mask? Sure enough, she recognized a body nurtured by fried food and rotgut. What the heck is he doing here?

Frankie Bones took another shot at her, and she reminded herself to focus. Pulling a tear gas capsule from her belt, she hurled it at Bones. The thing exploded directly at his feet and he was consumed with a coughing fit. Unlike regular tear gas, this compound was designed to cling to body heat even as the target tried to fan the fumes away.

She heard movement behind her, spun, and blocked a knife thrust as Palmares tried to gut her. He grinned as he did so, and she was momentarily startled by his grotesque silver incisor implants glinting in the light. Recovering quickly, she used a standing sideswipe kick to knock the drug lord aside. He dodged, however, and it was only a glancing blow.

“Ain’t no slip of a broad gonna best the Python,” he gritted, coming at her again. Going low, avoiding a slash of the blade, Batgirl kicked Palmares in the nads and he doubled over, howling.

“You… bitch,” he wheezed. “Gonna kill you… for that.”

He peered at her with raw hate, and lurched in her direction, but for all of his determination, he was still off balance. Batgirl launched a series of strikes to his head and shoulders. Most of them were for punishment, but one struck a specific nerve, and Palmares collapsed on his expensive rug.

Behind her she heard a loud thump, someone let out a grunt, and a shot glanced off her shoulder’s body armor. Spinning, she saw Bullock, still wearing that ridiculous mask, holding a heavy duffle. Frankie Bones staggered to the side, his gun held up.

The gangster took a shot at the detective, who moved quicker than his bulk suggested. He dove behind the wet bar as rounds from the pistol shattered decanters filled with top shelf whiskies and bourbons.

While the gunman was distracted, she closed the distance between them and landed a solid blow to the side of his neck. Even that didn’t stop him, and when he turned she landed a right hook to the jaw.

That put him down.

There was a clatter in the doorway. Bullock was running. She pulled a bolo line and used it to snare his legs. He fell face-first to the floor and the bag he was carrying flew out of his hands. It broke open, and bundles of cash flew out, scattering around him.

What the…? Checking to make sure the gangsters were, indeed, out for the count, she stepped over to the fallen cop. “Why, Detective Bullock, what have we here?” she asked, hands on her hips. “Can you give me a good reason not to turn you in?”

He just looked at her, his eyes pleading behind the eye openings in the knockoff rubber mask.