Chapter 7 - Your worst nightmare.
Harvey Bullock woke with a start. His eyes dancing around the room as sweat cooled his skin and he shook the last vestiges of sleep from his system. The TV was still running on infomercials, casting an eerie glow around his apartment. The remains of the Thai food had spilled across his gut.
With a groan, he sat up and ran a hand down his scraggly beard. Tried to recall the nightmare that had left him a shaking mess.
It wasn't hard to picture the scene - it was captured in the photographs. Bright spring day, the sun was shining, flowers everywhere - bodies littered as far as the eye could see. Mangled, bloody sundresses hanging from trees and mottled limbs. The smell of burning hair and the eerie silence.
The people he'd get to first were always different. The people he saw when the bodies were rolled over to reveal the face were always different. Could have been anyone from a case he was working to his closest friends and colleagues. Could have been Alvares, Essen, Ed. It wouldn't have surprised him. Hell, once it had been Bernie - her thick glasses askew on her surprised little face - her freckles standing out against the morgue white skin.
This time it had been the unknown prostitute. Her bleached blonde hair plastered to her face with blood. Her overly done make-up made her look like a painted doll. When he'd approached, she had been wearing the whitest of sundresses, but when he saw her face - that had changed to the streetwalker attire she'd been found wearing when they'd opened the box.
He stumbled back at the sight of the lifeless eyes and the bobbing, unsupported head as the body settled into the new position.
He stumbled back, tripped on a tree root and into another body - that of a six year old whose torso had been torn open by the bomb in her egg. Slimy, still warm entrails fell into his hair and he yelled in terror and went vertical so fast that he was sure his spine had snapped and hastily tried to rub the blood and the entrails from his hands.
And then he'd woke up - cold sweat cooling his damp forehead. He sat up and spent a few minutes wiping the remains of dinner from his fingers and grumbled.
Forgotten to turn the thermostat down again, hadn't he? He still shivered all the same, but it had nothing to do with the blizzard going on outside his grimy window again.
He wasn't going to sleep tonight. He didn't think it was possible after that nightmare. His eyes once again fell onto the photographs of that day in the park - the Easter egg hunt that Julian Day had rigged and felt something in his gut twist.
That bastard wasn't going to get away again.
As he stood to get another beer from the fridge to cool him down, he felt something shift in his pocket and dug a hand through the various napkins and receipts he kept. It came out with a little booklet that he remembered Alvarez had given him. It was his list of protection paying pimps.
If you wanted to remain in business in Gotham you paid the mob and you paid the cops a percent of your earnings to ignore you. A cop has to have another source of income since Aubrey James had once again cut all bonuses for the serving police, raided their pension pot and downsized the force to fund all his promises and projects.
There were plenty of good, honestly policemen who would show Aubrey James the meaning of the words "Police Brutality".
He looked to the fridge as an idea seemingly struck him - most streetwalkers worked late into the night, as did their pimps. Would it be so hard if he paid them a personal, face to face visit?
At 9 am exactly, Harvey Bullock poured himself into his desk chair and groaned heavily. From across the adjoined desks, Gordon raised an eyebrow.
'What?' Bullock growled at his partner.
'You look like crap.' Gordon noted, his eyes roving from Harvey's wrinkled, noodle stained suit to the enormous bags under his eyes, 'Did you get any sleep last night?'
'I had a few hours.' Harvey acknowledged and sniffed his heavy duster jacket. It reeked of bad bars - cheap beer and cigarettes.
Gordon remained silent, drawing him out but Harvey was too good for that technique to work - besides the silent treatment only aided his ongoing headache.
'Come on man, where've you been?' Gordon demanded.
'Detecting.' Bullock replied. 'You know, my actual job?'
'Right.' Gordon sat back as Bullock closed his eyes and pulled his hat down over his face.
'Her name was Stacey Mook.' He mumbled from underneath the hat.
'What?'
'The prostitute's name, genius. Stacey Mook. Run it.'
'How the hell do you know that?' Gordon demanded to know.
'I'm a cop. I get nosy. People who have things they'd rather hide like to tell me what I want to know so I don't go poking around.' He yawned.
'Alright, where's my file?' Gordon asked.
'Gee, I don't know.' Bullock muttered, sarcasm dripped from his tone. 'Why don't you go chase up the master file from Allen and his pet bitch?'
'They keep fobbing me off, that's why.' Gordon replied with an angry grunt.
Typical. The MCU were playing dirty with the files. Hard to run an investigation without the master file. It's a good way to make the lead detectives waste extra time and make them look incompetent. If he wasn't absolutely exhausted, he'd go straighten out Montoya and Allen right now but he'd been working all bloody night on his own dime and he'd gotten a name they could tug at.
'Well,' He grunted as he settled in his chair, 'Go be a big boy and run Mook for priors if you're too scared to get the file.'
'Why don't you just hand over the backup?' Gordon demanded. Bullock cracked open an eye, ready to come back with something barbed when he spotted Ed approaching and groaned as the technician coughed to get their attention.
'Yeah, Ed?' Gordon sighed.
'I just wanted to ask Detective Bullock some questions on a file he returned.' Ed smiled.
Bullock cursed as Gordon turned with manic cheerfulness and said 'Oh? He returned a file, did he?'
'The Day file.' Ed nodded. 'Detective, I don't think I have to remind you about inter-department rules, do I?'
'If I ever need reminding Ed, I'll ask.' He huffed.
'Section eight, subsection B - any and all sensitive information regarding crime and/or criminals should remain on premises.' Ed rebuked gently.
Bullock huffed.
'When were you going to tell me that you'd handed it back?' Gordon demanded.
'Never,' Bullock returned honestly.
'Are you purposefully trying to hamper this investigation to hand it off to Montoya and Allen?' Gordon accused and that speared straight through his defenses.
Bullock sat forward and snarled 'I fought for this case. I wanted it bad enough to grovel at Essen for it. I'm not going to screw it over because I want the flyboys at MCU to take such a big, heavy case off my little baby-cop hands.' He hissed.
'Then why?' Gordon demanded. 'Ever since Santa, you've been acting like a Grinch. I thought it was because you hated Christmas but it's not, is it?'
'Detectives,' Ed backed away as they glared at each other so fiercely over the desks that the piles of paper between them should have burst into flames.
'It seems to me,' Gordon muttered lowly and carefully. 'That this case is eating you up inside. You're screwing yourself up over this and I can't help unless I know what happened. Tell me what happened.'
Bullock sighed and sat down heavily on his deskchair. 'Scram Ed,'
The gangly technician took one look at the two of them, unsure about the hostilities he'd just seen and whether or not they were still over a misplaced file before he rather jerkily took steps and walked away to leave them in tensioned silence.
'Come on man, tell me what happened.' Gordon pressed.
Bullock knew that he wasn't going to get away this time. Ed had taken the file with him and MCU weren't going to give them back the master file. Still, talking about it was like picking at a scab.
'The egg-heads in Arkham classify him as a terrorist, because they hate to think there isn't a psychopath that doesn't fit their formulas.' He grunted. There wasn't a classification for Day that couldn't be held under the universal umbrella of Nutjob. 'A couple of years ago was the first time we'd started seeing wierd shit. Wasn't too long after the Spirit of the Goat killer bit the big one.'
'What happened?' Gordon asked.
'It was Easter.' Bullock muttered quietly. 'During the Mayor's annual Easter Egg hunt.' The words were still stiff, Gordon still had to prod him along, but they were loosening up, starting to come easier to him.
'What happened?' Gordon's tone had dropped, became serious - so he knew what was coming, good. The kid had some instinct.
'Like I said, we'd been dealing with some whack-job crimes of late. A guy apparently risen from the grave, a crucifixion - we thought it was some kind of religious nut,' And the worst of it all, the kids. He struggled to get his throat to work as the memory threatened to overtake him like it had in his nightmare last night. 'And then there was the Easter egg hunt,' He grunted. 'The bastard had managed to get his hands on the plastic eggs with chocolate inside and replaced them with bombs. At least two dozen. When you cracked them open-' Boom. He didn't need to say it. Gordon looked stricken. He must've had some experience with bombs, being an army-boy. But there is nothing - nothing like attacks in your homeland. A place of safety and security. It's all well and good over there but in your country, in your home city, it's different.
Domestic terrorists are scum.
Julian Day was scum.
He remembered responding, he remembered the carnage and blood and tears. He remembered thinking - but they were just kids, what the hell do they know? Why the hell did they deserve to die?
'Did you catch the guy?' He asked lowly.
'If I had, I wouldn't have thought twice about capping that fucker in the head,' Bullock snarled. 'Six kids died and an Au Pair who couldn't resist sneaking a bite or two.'
Bullock sat back and ran a hand down his face. 'That was the first time I'd had experience with a national crisis. After the Easter Egg Hunt, Day was spotted haring it over the state border and it wasn't our problem anymore.'
'But you blamed yourself.' Gordon replied sympathetically.
Yeah. He did.
A/N: look at that! A full length chapter! And here's where we see part of Bullock's obsession with Julian. No-one likes seeing dead kiddies.
