Book One: Good Intentions
-- Fight As Though The Odds Aren't Against You --
(3)
It was going to be a long night.
Dick's headcam had a clear view of the Allinson house.
It meant that Barbara Gordon had dress-circle seats to something she really would rather not have seen. The weeping parents, the body bags being carried out by grim-faced officers, the stretchers with the convulsing bodies - or worse, utterly still ones - and the unhappy medics.
"Getting all this?" Dick asked her.
"Like a digital movie," she replied, and was proud when her voice didn't waver, although it echoed slightly in the hollow area of the Batcave.
"Horrible, isn't it?"
His revulsion relieved her of the need to put on a brave face. Her answer was frank, if not quite as revolted as his. "I think I'm about to be sick," she said. "At least I won't clog up the Cavendish house gutters if I puke, though. Good thing they're on holiday right now."
"It'll make for an interesting conversation at their next dinner party," Dick muttered, and affected Mary Cavendish's shrill voice - although on a considerably softer scale. "'You'll never guess what we found in our drains last week...'"
Babs grinned. Dick was priceless, in costume or out. "Charming idea of dinner conversation you have."
"Blame him," Dick retorted, lightly - a slander if Barbara had ever heard one. Bruce had exquisite manners when he 'remembered' to have them in his persona as Bruce Wayne. "You're sure he's on his way?"
"Quite sure." The voice that came over the communications system wasn't hers. "So pleased to know you've learned a thing or two in the last dozen years."
Babs grinned silently, covering her mouth to hide the smile, although neither man could see her.
"Yeah, well, I'm a chip off the old block," Dick retorted, and the smile faded from Barbara's mouth as swiftly as it had come. There was an element of bitter truth in Dick's words, and they all felt it, especially Bruce, although his next question was directed at her rather than Dick.
"What did they find?"
"Mostly cocaine," she replied, recalling the reports she'd picked up over the scanners and through Nightwing's video and sound feed. Parabolic microphones were a wonder of modern technology - it was amazing just how much you could pick up from across the road. Of course, the ambient noise of the vicinity could make distinguishing individual conversations difficult, but that was why samplers and synthesisers had been created, wasn't it? "Some marijuana, but nothing else."
"They haven't checked the freezer yet," Nightwing murmured, almost beneath his breath.
Babs chuckled lightly. "I doubt they'd find anything there."
"I'm not even going to ask how you two know that," Batman said, calmly, although there was a faintly threatening note in it - probably directed at Dick rather than her.
"We could ask the same thing of you," Nightwing retorted.
"Basic chemistry," was all the reply he got. "Have they found anything yet?"
Barbara swiftly scanned the feeds she had flowing in to the screens before her, all business. "GCPD has no leads on the matter," she added, passing the information on from one of the feeds. "The known outlets for drugs are quiet, and most of the suppliers seem to have faded into the woodwork."
"Any unusual transactions going through the shipping yards?"
Her hands flashed over the keyboards and she grimaced. "Define 'unusual,'" she muttered as she pulled up records she'd stored in the computer after Nightwing's foray into Gotham's shipping yards some three weeks previously. "I have a manifest of the pallets and where they went, but none of them are known fronts for drug activity. The twenty pallets that Nightwing ID'd were toy shipments."
"Ugly suckers."
"And then some." Babs had seen Dick's recorded feed of the toys and wondered who'd designed such a horrible-looking toy. "Other than that, there were twenty-five pallets of assorted computer parts, sixteen pallets of stationary, ten pallets of encyclopaedias - Americana, I think - and sixty pallets of rice."
"Rice?" Nightwing questioned.
"Jasmine rice from South-East Asia," Barbara read off the goods manifest. "Thailand, to be precise. All those new Asian restaurants popping up along Little Chinatown have to get their goods from somewhere, you know."
"I'll keep that in mind the next time I frequent one. Care to join me?"
A warm thrill ran through her at the invitation. Of course, he was probably just kidding around, but that didn't stop her from feeling all tingly about it. She opened her mouth to make a smart retort--
"Work now, play later, Nightwing, Batgirl." Babs felt a brief stab of resentment at her mentor for stopping the banter between her and Dick. Then, on the screen of the video feed, she saw another girl carried out on a stretcher, the lower half of her face streaked with the black lines of dried blood. The kid couldn't be more than eighteen, maybe not even that.
She shivered. The Batcave was suddenly a lot colder.
At college, Barbara Gordon had known enough people who did drugs, although she never had. She'd seen the devastating effects of drug use on families through the eyes of her dad and his cops and wasn't about to become another statistic.
"That's Petra Carletti," Nightwing muttered. "Final year at St. Agnes' Girls."
Babs was tempted to ask how Dick knew the girl, but bit down on the question. It wasn't her business, and Batman had already come down on them once for teasing. She began issuing commands to the Batcomputer, hacking into the police files as they scrolled data across the screens. The Gotham City Police Network was a wonderful thing - both for the Police and for her activities as Batgirl.
"They're beginning to put up a list of the kids," she said after a moment. "Encrypted, of course." Not that the encryptions were a problem for her.
"Of course," Batman said grimly.
As the list appeared on her screen, Bab's eyes widened. "Batman, this is like a junior Who's Who of Gotham... DiPietro, Winsor, Carletti, Dickson-Smith, Mitsiou, Belcourt..."
"Belcourt..." Nightwing pondered. "Not Jemima Belcourt?"
A quick glance confirmed it, and as she transmitted the information to them, he swore. "Damien Belcourt's one of the directors of Wayne Enterprises. His daughter's the apple of his eye."
Barbara winced. "Not anymore," she murmured, almost to herself.
On the screen, she saw more ambulance workers go into the house, returning for the last few kids. Some fifteen to twenty teenagers had partied hard while the Allinson adults were away on holiday - most were being carted away in the ambulances that pulled out into the night, their lights flashing in bleak urgency.
Her dad walked out of the house, his expression harsh as he escorted one of the Allinson boys out of the house. Tony or Toby or some name beginning with a T, Babs recalled. When she'd met him, the boy had been charming enough; he was hardly that now, his face all pale and frozen with fear, and his eyes hollow with the horror he'd witnessed tonight.
Another kid was brought out on a stretcher, and then there were just the remaining kids from the party, four or five who'd either been strong enough not to give in to peer pressure, or who'd had the fortune to be at the tail end of the drug handout queue. Some wept, some shivered, all were gently ushered into police cars even as the parents began converging on the scene, yelling for their kids.
Bad news travelled fast in Gotham.
"We're going to track the shipment that came in on Madeira Star," Batman said.
"All of it?"
"All of it."
"There have been other shipments since then," Nightwing protested. "Might have been one of them."
"Unlikely," Batman dismissed. "The increase in trading activity began two days after Star delivered her cargo. That's a day before Lolita unloaded."
"There was nothing on Madeira Star." Uh-oh.
"One hundred and twenty pallets of goods does not exactly equal 'nothing,'" Batman remarked dryly.
"We checked that--"
"Then we check it again," Batman said, and there was an ominous note in his voice. Babs winced, just as glad that neither man could see her expression. "We track every moment of it from the portside warehouses to the retailers and we account for every item in those shipments. Batgirl?"
"Batman?"
"Is any of the Star shipmentstill at the Port Authority?"
Babs pulled up another screen. "The encyclopaedias are still in storage - something about a lack of demand and there's an argument going on between the Port Authority and the trader..." She scrolled lightly through twenty pages of emails and winced, then hauled out another string of data and sent it to another screen. "And there's some trouble with ten of the computer pallets - one of the dealers went out of business and the stuff's still in the warehouse - Shed M."
"If it was drugs, they'd move it through as fast as possible."
"Maybe. Do the police have any leads?"
She was pretty sure they didn't, but she checked anyway. "Not yet." In a day or so, there'd be pressure to have leads as parents demanded that the GCPD find someone to blame for the delinquency of their children, and the leads would start pouring in: false, crazy, insane, unrealistic - it didn't matter to the Gothamites, just as long as someone was doing something about 'the situation.'
"Then we do it the hard way."
Nightwing huffed. "I guess it's another trip back to the docks then," he muttered. "At least it's not as far to get home."
Babs' cell phone, sitting on the desk a bare foot away, began beeping and buzzing. She didn't always keep it on and nearby when she was doing Bat-work, but she'd had a feeling her dad would call at some point tonight.
"Batgirl out, gotta take a private call." She switched the headphones off, knowing that everything that came through them was being recorded by the Batcomputer, and picked up the cell. "Hey, Dad."
"Babs." He sounded tired and stressed, and her heart went out to him. "Have you seen the news?"
"Yeah," she said, glancing up at the newscast being shown on a high-up screen. "Is it as bad as they're saying?"
"Worse," Jim Gordon said, grimly. "Much worse. Babs..."
"Good thing I don't have to sit up waiting for you to come home these days," she said, trying to inject a lighter note into the conversation.
"You never waited up for me."
"Are you sure of that, Dad?"
The silence on the other end of the phone meant he had a smile on his mouth. Then she heard and saw the reporter pushing through the police lines, trying to get a word with her father. "Commissioner! Commissioner Gordon!"
Detective Everett-Millar intercepted the reporter. Babs heard the reporter's protests and the Detective's cool refusals in the background of the call.
"Honey, I have to go. I just..." She heard the remainder of his words. I just wanted to say I love you.
"I know, Dad," she told him. "And get some sleep tonight, okay?"
He laughed briefly. "Sure, Babs."
They both knew he'd be out until long past midnight, sorting out the mess down at the Department. "Love you, Dad." She didn't say the words often, but tonight she figured he needed to hear them after seeing that.
"Same here, kiddo. Same here."
Batman and Nightwing were holding a politely tense conversation when she switched the headphones back on.
"--could do with her help."
"We can do this alone."
"Yes," Nightwing said, and his voice had the careful quality of someone who knew they were on thin ice - like a junior detective gently suggesting to a proud senior that maybe they needed to bring in outside resources to close the case. "But we can do this faster if we had Shadow. Security in and out of the place is tighter since our last attempt - the Port Authority may not be in on this deal, but something is going on."
The silence was deafening, and Babs concentrated on the news feed and the faint words that were coming from that. Nightwing's camera was showing Batman's profile as the young man used all the force of his dynamic personality to persuade his mentor to see things his way.
Babs had to admit, Batman looked dramatic and tense in that pose, the wind tugging at the edges of his cape, the garish lights of the police car washing over him with red-blue intensity. He also looked quite adamant as Nightwing continued.
"They wouldn't be expecting a meta, Batman," Nightwing said. "Humans, yes; metas, no."
"We don't need her. We don't need metas." There was a hard undercurrent of anger and, yes, pride, in Batman's voice. Babs understood - sort of. The world had a tendency to look as metas as either the heroes or the problem. Batman and his associates were managing Gotham without so much as a hint of meta ability.
"Maybe not," Nightwing said. "But they can be useful at times."
"Did you want to call in the Justice League while you're at it?"
"I'm just suggesting that some help might be in order." The visuals on the headcam swivelled back to the cops below. It looked like most of the teenagers had been taken away, and now it was just the cops cleaning up - and her dad looking tired and unhappy.
"Which part of 'we can do this ourselves' didn't you understand?" Batman growled.
"The part where you're so intent on maintaining your image that you wouldn't ask for help if it killed you. Or," Nightwing said, in what sounded like a sudden burst of inspiration, "The part where you're so intent on keeping her at arm's length that you're not even going to ask for her help."
Babs blinked, and quietly thumped her head against the heel of her hand. Dick, the ice is really thin where you're tap-dancing right now - and do you care to share your logic with the rest of the class?
"You have no idea what you're talking about." It was a standard Bruce denial, flatly given after a brief silence, nothing unusual.
"I know it wouldn't hurt to care a little. Loosen up." Nightwing developed an evil lilt to his voice. "Bend over and let someone remove that rod rammed up your ass."
Babs bit down on her lip to stop from laughing - or crying - she wasn't sure which it was going to be at this point in time.
"I think that's enough," Batman ground out, unimpressed with Dick's humour. "Batgirl, transmit the goods manifest off the Star to the Batmobile and pull what you can from the police reports of tonight - including any links back to the Star's cargo. Nightwing, confirm the remaining cargo from the Star is as listed. When you finish checking the docks, work with Batgirl to track the deliveries and check them out - all of them."
"And you'll be doing what?"
"Talking to some people I know." Informants.
"Damien's going to be wrecked about this," Nightwing muttered.
"That's not your concern. Do the docks inspection, then meet up with Batgirl."
"Yes, sir. Immediately, sir!" Nightwing's camera moved, heading up towards the roof. Then it turned back. "You know, Batman," he said, quite clearly, "your problem isn't that you don't care. You care; you just don't like other people to know it. Might ruin the image." And then he was gone down the other side of the roof and over two fences into the street on the other side, lithe as an athlete.
Babs winced. Trust Dick to get the last word in. She switched to a private channel and flipped the recording feature off. "That was harsh."
"Yeah, well, I'm tired of the 'too cool to care' shit I always get from him," Nightwing grumbled into his headset. "You going to be working from the cave or at home?"
Babs glanced around, "I might head home, actually," she said. "I can work from there just as easily as here, and it's not so big and empty."
"Pop upstairs and see if Alfred's baked any cookies, will ya," Nightwing said. "And don't eat them all before I get there."
"You're bringing the slushies," she warned him, searching out several documents and protocols that she'd need for the night's work.
"It's a date," he replied, and she heard the rev of his motorcycle in the background. "I'm turning this off - will call you if I need info. Otherwise, see you midnight."
"Midnight," she confirmed. "Batgirl out."
There'd been nothing from Batman during this time, and Babs switched back to the general channel. "Batman?"
"Have you transmitted the manifest to the Batmobile?"
"Done," she replied and hoped he hadn't heard the yawn at the end of her affirmation.
"Are you awake enough to do this? We can't afford mistakes."
Damn. "Yes."
"Send the report in on the destinations of the cargo when you're done."
"Will do."
"Batman out."
She wondered briefly if he'd stop by and talk to her dad before he left the neighbourhood, or if he'd save that for later. Probably later, around two in the morning when Dad was asleep on his feet and everything was looking bad.
Her dad had once confessed that Batman's visits were never uplifting - they usually meant that they were in the middle of something bad - but there was an almost comforting solidarity to them. They were both beleaguered criminal-chasers, trying to keep afloat in a sea of crime. Commissioner Jim Gordon simply did his job in the public eye, and Batman did his job out of it.
The news feed was showing her dad now, making a calm and weary statement about the Allinson incident. Babs didn't listen - there'd be enough newsfeeds of it in the next couple of days. The office talk was going to revolve around this - especially given the list of victims. Never let it be said that money and power couldn't achieve results as effective as the simple pursuit of justice.
Of course when money and power met the pursuit of justice...
Babs glanced up at the high ceiling of the Batcave, at the giant penny and the display cases of costumes, at the cave that had been birthed from tragedy and wrought with the Wayne fortune and Bruce's ghosts.
It was an obsession: she never forgot that. But it was an obsession worth following - at least, to some degree. Wasn't that why she put on the mask and costume of Batgirl and had gotten Bruce to train her up - one more caped vigilante in the streets of Gotham?
She saved her links, logged off the Batcomputer, and collected her phone. A quick glance around to check everything was left neat - Bruce could be anal about that - then upstairs to see if Alfred was making or had made cookies before heading back to the clocktower to do the research.
It was going to be a long night.
----