The commissioner's phone rang, and she lifted it to her ear. "This is-"
"Commissioner Gordon," the lilting voice on the other side completed. "You sound so cute, Barbara! Tell me, is Batman there with you?"
Barbara Gordon's eyes narrowed over the table of photographic evidence. "Who is this?"
"Be a dear and hand him the phone, would you?"
Barbara glared at the wall for a moment, quietly repressing her utter loathing for such unabashedly patronizing tones of voice. Then she turned and bitterly offered the phone to to the black-suited man perched in the window. "It's for you."
Batman was fortunately much too angry and tunnel-visioned to make any attempt at reassuring her. He lifted up the phone. "Who is this?" he repeated her demand in a stabbing growl.
"Why hello Bats!"
"Where is the child?" Batman demand.
"You mean your daughterrr?" the clown drawled. "You know, funniest thing, would you believe I wasn't actually there and had absolutely nothing to do with it?"
"Don't play games with me. You wouldn't be calling me now otherwise."
"I~wasn't~therreee~! Accept that first, or I'll say nothing else!"
It took everything in him not to crush the phone. "But you know something."
"I know the men who took her were ambushed at the corner of Creece and Baywild about six hours ago, and that she was apparently abducted by someone else after that."
"Who?" he demanded.
"You know, you seem really unsurprised to hear I'm back in Gotham. Oh dear. Did you know? You mustn't have snuck very near to take any peeps, or I'd have known... Or am I getting rusty? Which is it: am I losing my touch, or are you losing yours?"
"I'll rectify that now. Either talk, or hang up laughing already."
"You're going to laugh." The Joker glanced over from the newspaper stand where he'd just purchased a cheap prepaid phone card to ward off police tracers. On the curb rested his modest green hatchback. Terra perched over the shoulder and headrest of the passenger seat, entertaining a grumpy and tear-streaked Helena Wayne with a deck of cards and sleight of hand. The little girl had a bandage snugly over her head from where she'd taken a bump in the accident, and her leg was scraped and bruised, but the nurses at poison control had reassured him there'd been no concussion. "She took a pretty mean shot of Fentalyn while I pried her out of the wreckage, so I took her to the ER. But she's up and shouting at me for daddy already."
Batman was silent.
"I'm going to take her to the McDonald's on the I-403 turnoff. It's incredibly mundane. You can pick her up there."
"What do you want?" the Bat asked him hoarsely.
"Nothing. I want you to take her back off my hands, now, please. Nicely and quickly. Come alone, please, and in plain clothes, and you may have her back as easily as if she had been attending a sleepover."
"The last time you sent me anywhere to 'pick someone up'—"
"Look Bats, like I said, I had nothing to do with this. Someone else waylaid those thugs, and I just dug the girl out in the aftermath. I didn't even know who she was at the time."
"Mighty altruistic of you."
"I had my daughter with me. She suckers me into things: Good deeds, leaving out cookies for Santa, the whole rigmarole. I'll hang around at the McDonalds for about thirty minutes, but any longer than that and I'll be assuming our little 'truce' is broken and that you plan to arrive in force."
"That you'd put a timer on this suggests you intend to ambush our expose me."
The Joker sneered. "I'm not going to take her; if you aren't there, I'll just abandon her at the joint. At worst, you'll suffer a publicity hit when the cashiers call the cops, but I'm sure you can bribe off any judge that Social Services tries to slap you with." He took a deep breath. "My intent was to fly under the radar and now I am being forced to talk to you, so that gives me two choices: Either I can uproot my daughter again and drag her cross-country again and down another rabbit hole, or I can... trust you not to ambush or expose me. Pick your poison."