THROWAWAY CARD
Chapter 10
Disclaimer: Batman and related characters are the property of DC comics.
Author's Note: Just got back from my holidays and have this new chapter to share with you. Hope you enjoy! On a side note, I'm overjoyed to see that I just got my 99th review for this story: thankyou all so much for being so kind and for continuing to read. Review Responses at the end of the chapter, as before.
Alfred regarded the computer: the computer, with its usual silicon impassiveness, regarded him back. One lone screen glowed with life at the right-hand side of the console, and the massive screens above that the news reports had splashed across so vibrantly earlier were dark and dead.
"Wretched machine," Alfred muttered as he sat down in the vastly overdramatic high-backed chair in front of the shining machine, "and the very devil to dust, too."
Despite his outward animosity for it, the computer and Alfred actually got along quite well. People not aware of Alfred's somewhat unique skills base would probably have been quite surprised by the ease with which he interrogated the Batcave's massive database. The soft rattle of his fingers over the keys echoed up into the vaulted, endless roof of the cave, and the returned clusters of common bats rustled their wings dryly and prepared for sleep in the coming dawn.
It took him a little over twenty minutes to be sure that what the computer was telling him was true and not some elaborate digital misconception, and his expression maintained its usual carefully blank butler's mask as he punched up the code to connect to his master's car.
"Sir? I have some information for you."
Gotham Plaza, 6.46 am.
Batman was crouched immobile on his haunches in the relative shelter of a tattered restaurant awning. The eatery had been closed for over two months now: nobody had really wanted to pay fancy prices at a venue halfway down a narrow alley on the very furthest outskirts of the popular nightlife district. The remains of the specials boards hung, rotting, from each side of the peeling, navy-painted doors.
Batman extended a glove, carefully, and plucked at the aging paintwork,.
Unless I've stumbled across the pitch of a beggar with a really expensive dye job…
The three green hairs on his palm stirred in the damp wind.
He was here.
He ran his hand over the door and eyed the concrete step below it. Something had recently brushed against the door, pulled loose a scattering of old paint which lay on the rain-darkened step like week-old wedding confetti.
He ran in here, fell here, his shoulder scraped the door as he fell…I'm close. I'm close, and he's tiring.
His belt bleeped once, rapidly and quietly. The car was paging him, telling him that he had a call coming in. Batman cast the green hairs to the wind and strode back up the street to where the Batmobile's sleek shape was parked.
"Ah, there you are, sir. For a moment there I thought something unfortunate had happened to you," came Alfred's utterly unruffled tones from the speaker.
It already has, Alfred.
"I have some information for you," the butler continued, "however, I must say I hope it means more to you than it does to me, as it struck me as singularly opaque."
"Tell me."
His master's low, level tone checked Alfred's inclination to elaborate.
"The name Sam Wright is not listed in any of the likely sections of your database," he said, eyes flicking to the glow of the screen to his left which contained what seemed to Alfred to be a pitifully small amount of information. "There are twenty Sam, Samuel or Samantha Wrights in Gotham's telephone listings. None of them have any criminal record save one Sam Wright of 245 Mountbatten Avenue who was arrested for – ahem – soliciting twenty-three years ago. It was a first offence and there has been no recurrance. "
"Go on."
"Samantha Wright who now works in a meat processing plant on the industrial estate beyond the Island, was crowned Miss Minnesota in an apparently unheard-of landslide victory three years ago," Alfred went on dutifully. "There is an illuminating colour picture of her in the Gotham Star, shortly after she arrived here."
A failed prostitute and a homecoming queen. Great. "Is there more?"
"Indeed. It seems the young lady likes dogs, chocolate, the colour pink and abhors the environmental standpoint of the government on nuclear power – or did you mean more on any of the other Sam Wrights?"
Sometimes Batman had the distinct impression he was being teased: sometimes he wasn't so sure. "Thankyou, Alfred."
"There is only one more Sam Wright who appears to be of any small note, sir." Alfred scrolled to the microfiche. "Sam Wright, of Kerr, Assizes & Wright, Tobacco and Gifts, 53 Lower Hart Boulevard. "
The whore, the model and the tobacconist…whatever happened to the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker?
"What about him?"
"He's dead, sir."
Marvellous.
"Send everything over, Alfred. All the names and addresses and all the police and press records."
The screen to the left of the steering column flared into life as the file transfer began. Batman raised an eyebrow at the "illuminating colour picture" and returned to the list of names.
Twenty people…all of whom are probably utterly innocent of anything to do with this situation. It may be an alias. Sam Wright. An ordinary name for an ordinary man. What criminal hasn't called himself Jim Jones or John Smith when questioned too deeply about his character?
He found his eye drawn to the copied microfiche. The snippet was from the Gotham Globe, and was pathetic in its brevity. Mr Sam Wright (43) of Kerr, Assizes & Wright, found dead at his tobacco counter late yesterday afternoon. Police were not treating his death as suspicious. There was a picture of a slightly balding, smiling man holding a box of expensive cigars. Nothing unusual.
Not treating his death as suspicious… Batman rubbed at his brow with one finger. This is ridiculous.
The sound of a car backfiring loudly made the eyes under the cowl narrow abruptly. Smoke from the offending exhaust curled in choking streams around the corner ahead.
Joker. I have to find him.
A touch extinguished the screen, and the Batmobile swung out onto the main avenue, passing the stalled Porsche with a satisfied purr of its powerful engine.
Moreston Block, 6.53a.m.
Selina Kyle backed into the elevator on the second floor, two floors down from her apartment, and got in the way of the doors as they tried to slam shut.
Funny, she thought, as she by turns bullied and dragged the now conscious and giggling Joker into the elevator, I never wanted to have children for exactly this reason. The little demons never do what you tell them and yet you've somehow appointed yourself their nanny for the rest of your life. Ugh. I feel dirty just having touched him. I need a bath.
"What's new, pussycat? Woah-ohh-ohh…"
The Joker's voice, weak but beginning, to Selina's alarm, to strengthen, echoed tinnily in the confines of the metal box as he sang.
She peeped out into the corridor on her floor as the doors opened with a doleful chime. No-one. Thank God. There were three other flats on this side of the corridor besides hers: one belonging to an unsuccessful drug dealer, one to a widow, and one currently occupied by a trio of street children, the oldest of whom couldn't be more than thirteen.
"Pussycat, pussycat, you're so pretty, you're my little kitty…"
"Don't make me gag you. I don't even wanna touch you."
"Sweetcakes, you love me. Don't you ever watch those movies where the gal and the guy spend all but the last twenty minutes wanting to kick each other's cute lil' asses? You just know they're gonna get it together because - " the mad green eyes batted once, conspiratorially - "they hate each other. And we all know what that reeeeeaaally means…"
Catwoman folded her arms and glared at him as he leant against the dirty elevator back wall. If looks could kill, the Joker would have been going home in a pine box. "That does it. I'm hauling you out in the street and calling the cops."
"Oh, I don't think so."
He straightened abruptly, thin shoulders slamming back, skinny chest puffed out. Like a puppet whose slack strings have been taken up, the Joker unfolded with dreadful poise and grace, the hunched, painful posture fled. He tucked his own good arm across the sling, tilting his hips girlishly in conscious mockery of her, and Catwoman felt a sudden chill race along her neck and down her arms. One hand involuntarily twitched towards the grip of her whip.
"If you were going to do that, you'd have left me in the street," said the Joker, and coughed, once. "Don't try and get smart with me, girl. I invented smart." He stepped forward, one step, and swayed a little on his feet. His voice dropped to a mock-seductive purr. "I'm here because you wanted me here…"
Memories of having stepped unwittingly into one of the Joker's heists early in her career flared in Selina's mind. She had been less confident, less knowledgeable. With her hands buried in the safe, the voice from the dark behind her had purred "What ho! Take a look, boys, I'm being robbed!" A crow of laughter. "How beautifully ironic. How delightfully droll. How saccharinely sweet she is."
He had to have been watching her for the entire time it had taken her to crack the safe. Two large men wearing identical, blankly benevolent grinning masks, had emerged from the darkness surrounding the safe and laid hands on her. She had fought, digging her claws into them and trying to throw them, but they were surprisingly strong and she had been taken by surprise. They dragged her, kicking and indignant, to the feet of one of the oddest-looking men Selina had ever hoped to never see.
She'd heard of him, of course. He was part of it all - the dark side of Gotham, the fantastical side she'd joined where all the most gruesome parts of genuine fairytales came true.
He was clicking his tongue loudly. "Naughty, naughty. That's my burglary you're burglarising, young lady."
Selina had hissed defiantly at him. "How the hell was I supposed to know? Let me go!"
"Oooh," the Joker had cooed, a delighted grin splitting his sharp face, "I like her. She's feisty."
The goons forced her to her knees in front of him: he had hunkered down to her level and tapped her on the nose with the head of his swagger stick. Even the cane's head was shaped like a grinning jester. "I likes a girl with spirit," said the Joker in a terrible British falsetto, and unzipped the front of her suit. Selina twisted in a mix of fury and revulsion as a purple gloved hand dove inside and extracted the large heart-shaped diamond she'd put there for safe keeping. "Well, look at that! So simple. And there was me expecting a booby-trap."
"That's mine, give it back –"
The heavy golden head of the cane had smashed into her face before the words were even out of her mouth. The vision in her left eye exploded in a bolt of black, little flares of sharp white agony dancing at the edges of her sight. She crumpled in the grip of the goons with a wail, clutching her face.
He's blinded me he's blinded me he's…
"Oh dear," she heard the Joker say. "I can't possibly keep a darling little one-eyed kitten. I just don't have the room, I'm out at work all the time, what would Animal Welfare say?"
With the vision in her right eye blurred and watery and the left already swelling shut, she had looked up as he knelt in front of her. The facets of the diamond gleamed as he held it up between both of them and pressed a loving kiss to its shining surface. "And I'm far, far too poor too feed it. It's not fair on the animal," he said, so close his breath brushed her face. "I know! This city is full of charming good citizens! Surely one of them will give my Fluffles a home."
Selina had got a good view of his lanky, purple-clad legs and flamboyant expensive shoes as he stood up and strode away, bouncing the diamond in one hand. "Boys. Let's do the right thing."
The expensive clothes were sooty and torn now, the trouser cuffs ragged and singed. As he stared her down, grinning, fever warring with lunacy for which would burn the brightest in his eyes, she wanted to spit at him. She wanted to grab him by the collar and shake him while she spoke the words that boiled through her brain:
It took me over an hour to untie myself from the ropes your goons tied me with. I couldn't see at all out of that eye. And I climbed out of the cardboard box you'd left me in on the street corner and with my good eye I could see you'd written "Free Kittens. Lovably Crippled" on the side in Magic Marker.
I hated you so much…I hated you because you frightened me and you made me feel small and helpless in a way I'd sworn was in the past for me. But you didn't know, and if you had known you would have laughed, you would have found it so delicious…
"I don't want you anywhere near me, Joker," was all she said, her tones cold and bitter. "I just don't like to see shit lying on the sidewalk where anyone could step in it. I saw what you did to the city tonight."
And once I get hold of Batman, you're going to be out of my life so fast…
"There you go again," admonished the Joker, yawning theatrically with one white hand raised to his wide red mouth, "thinking you're clever. But no gold star for you today and someone else gets to take home the class stick insects for the holidays."
Then, as if reading her mind, he added: "And when you speak to your darling letter-jacketed jock, he'll tell you. Batsy knows I'm innocent. I've been with him all night, sweetheart, sorry to have to break it to you. And it was fabulous."
Selina glowered at him. "You're lying."
"Well, all right. Maybe it wasn't fabulous. I was just trying to save Bat-boy's ego from shrivelling up and dying. Poor dear. He does have such a self-esteem problem." He grinned at her shocked expression. "I blame the parents."
"Innocent?" Selina exploded.
"Pure as the driven slush." The Joker held up two fingers mockingly and stuck out his tongue. "Scout's honour."
As the rain finally showed signs of easing outside and the rattling of water on the window became less distinct, Catwoman watched the Joker lean against her apartment wall and cough into a green hankerchief, and wondered why in the name of all that was great and good she half-believed him.
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Review Responses:
Dark-Lady-Devinity: Thankyou! Yeah…I don't think Catwoman's going to top this one for a while in the weird stakes.
LexLuthor13: Ah, The Long Halloween. A bit of a classic in my opinion. I've always liked the duality of Catwoman, the criminal turned heroine. I'm very glad you approve of my depiction.
Cyn Wraith: Oh, he's wily enough to look after himself, I think, at least for a while! Hope you enjoyed the latest chapter.
Robster72: I think you and Batman will both be very glad when things start to get a bit clearer! I'm truly happy you think my style is readable, thankyou.
Spectral Sereda::KJ hugs: You always know just the right things to say to make this amateur feel like she's doing she's created something magical. Thankyou so much…you have no idea how much your feedback means to me.
giveGodtheGlory: I'm glad you liked that bit…it was one of my favourite moments in that chapter too. Poor Selina indeed…she has a hard night's work ahead!
Nightmare1: Thankyou for the compliment on the picture::KJ hugs: I think she may be regretting her choice to take Gotham's finest fruitloop under her wing right about now…
Meow: Catwoman got a brief mention in an earlier chapter as a teaser, but I'm very glad to bring her in now as a major player. She's always been one of my favourites.
Kelly Renee: You're too kind. I'm just happy to share whatever small talent I have with people who appreciate it. And yes, poor J is being pulled around like a chew toy at the moment. Be ready for when he gets sick of it… ;)
Darqx: Hello::KJ grins: Thankyou for such a lovely and generous review, and thankyou for visiting from DA! And yes…it amused me while I was writing to see Joker almost dependant on his enemies and rivals as he dragged about the city. I'm proud to make a story junkie out of you::bows:
Killinjoke: Hello! Your penname indicates you're either very keen on the same graphic novel as I am, or you really like the band… Anyhow. I just want to say, your review made me smile all day. Amazing how one simple line can say so much. :KJ hugs: thankyou. I hope Christmas continues for you here…
Wiley21: Thankyou very much! Characterisation's one of my greatest concerns when I write. I'm very happy you like it and I hope you enjoyed this last chapter.
Loserville: That's a great compliment you've paid me there, thankyou very much! I hope you like the chapters to come just as much.