Noonan's is shabby an' seedy, smoky an' smelly, the place is depleted, old an' crumbled. It is also the place I would call home. An' Sean Noonan, the old retired killer who owns it, is all the family I have. I headed straight for the bar.
"Moisture?" asked the demon from behind the bar. I nodded an' asked for Sean. The duke of hell screeched, "I am Baytor" an' gestured towards the back. I took my beer an' went lookin' for Sean.
I was not in the best of moods. It was the first time someone stole my kill. I mean in what kind of world are we livin'?
Yeah, I know, I know this is Gotham City, world capital of lunatics, madmen and the criminally insane. An' it's not only superfreaks like the Joker, Poison Ivy or the Penguin and God knows who else. Even worse are the supposedly good guys. I mean, look at the Batman, that psychopathic muscle man in tights.
An' somethin' of that black hole of insanity also effects the people on the street. Sometimes I think they ought to build a wall around the city limits an' put a roof on top of it. Voila, the Gotham City asylum.
But that was my kill, my money.... Ahww really. What a sick world.
I told Noonan about the whole business. He only shook his head an' started talkin' about the good old days, when a killer still ... I interrupted one of his stories to ask if he'd heard anything about MacLeod. Was I the only one after his head? I don't like riddles.
Sean couldn't help me much, but he'd ask round. I said goodbye and left.
Natt was visitin' his sis' an' left me his car, which is more than a little generous, if you knew what I'd done to the last two cars of his. Well this one was a piece of junk to begin with. Maybe that bein' the reason...
I drove around, thinkin' about what to do. The city looks different from this angle. The skyscrapers ought to be reaching high into the air catchin' the sunlight at day and the glitterin', dancin' streetlights at night and they do, in Metropolis or in New York. But here, they seem to reach down into the ground, suckin' in the light, nurturing shadows until they are able to walk in the sickly, orange daylight. There's always some monster loomin' above you. Most of the time, it's nothing but a gargoyle - but sometimes it is not.
In short, I was thinkin' dark thoughts. Until something happened that broke my musin's...
I wasn't drunk when I got into the car, well, not much anyhow. But you see, I had to try and drown the frustration of livin' in a sick world. Never mind. By the way, never let anyone say one bad word about Catwoman. She's got great "attributes"... and a good heart... and a skintight catsuit.
Uh, where was I. Yeah, I wasn't seriously drunk, so I wasn't hallucinatin'.
Still, there he was! Crossing the street in that crumbly, worn trenchcoat of his, not a care in the world and most of all, alive. He wasn't a zombie - I know a walkin' corpse when I see one.
"Oh, fer fucks sake!" I thought to myself "This IS Gotham city after all!" This is kinda weird, maybe, but I have seen freakier stuff. So I followed him. I worried for a while, that my slow drivin' and this useless heap of junk pretendin' to be a car where a tad bit noticeable.
But MacLeod was preoccupied. At every corner he stopped for a moment turnin' his head from one side to the other as if listenin' for somethin'. For all I know he listened to his inner child, or to a dogwhistle. Then he went into the proverbial dark alley. I love them places and Gotham breeds them, trains them and sends them out into the world as a stage for murder and slimy, rottin' alley-things.
I gave him a few yards headstart. Then I kicked the bucket o' rust 'round the corner and found out that the bucket could indeed speed up quite impressively.
MacLeod turned, and in turnin' he drew his sword from under his coat.
"Damn," I thought "he's fast!"
He had clearly expected something or someone else. Surprise was written on his face which looked white and strangely fragile in the glarin', merciless headlight.
Then the car hit him. His eyes met mine for an instant, as man met bumper.
The meeting was accompanied by an ugly, wet thud. The impact tossed him into the air and he hit first the hood and then the windshield in rapid succession before vanishin' into the night. The crashin', clankin' noise back there told me he had collided with a good old dumpster.
I brought the heap to a screechin' standstill and jumped out. Both my guns at the ready I slided across the bunk. As I reached the other side the guy came up lookin' annoyed. I realized that I had been misinformed.
That guy was definitely metahuman and I knew what that meant - I had seriously undercharged.
Still a bullet to the head stops most of the metahumans and it irritates the rest of the bunch mightily.
As I was following my own advice, I noticed something strange - strange even by my standards that include ten-armed gunwielding Nazi-demons and cuddly, man-eating zombie-baby-seals. This bastard ignored me.
Imagine: There is a killer, walking towards you, firing one bullet after the other, and even though some of them miss, most of them don't. So I'd expect you to dive for cover, draw a gun, or stand in a hail of bullets and laugh at the puny mortal, or simply die, which, by the way, happens most of the time. That guy was scampering about in the trash, desperately searchin' for somethin'.
His sword, I realized, he was searchin' for his sword, his fuckin' sword, and livin' in a world of superheroes and magic I wondered if he could only be killed by a swordthrust or something. Then I thought, oh, what the fuck. Let's see how he manages without his brains, and blasted half his head off from about two feet distance.
He fell like a, well like a dead body, facedown in the trash.
I didn't want to let go of my guns so I used my boot to turn him around. I was glad for the sticky darkness when I bent closer to make sure he was really dead. He was.
O-k.! Next try on the gory part. I went to Nat's car to fetch the machete. Of course, it had gotten stuck between between the explosives an' the beer. Took a moment to dig it out. Too long a moment.
When I returned the corpse was gone.
Again!