Chapter Four

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Gotham City, 1997

"Wow," said Oliver breathlessly. "And to think I was afraid you might feel a little restrained in your mother's house."

Dinah rolled away from him and wiped the sweat out of her eyes. She grinned up at him flirtatiously. "Now, when have you ever known me to be restrained?"

Oliver propped himself on one elbow to look at her. His features were shadowed, backlit by the bedroom window — the only one the apartment possessed — but even in the dark she could make out the wide grin. "That's a trick question, right? But seriously, this once it wouldn't have surprised me, considering how weirded out women get about their mothers."

"Chauvinist."

"Chauvinist, my eye. Hell, even I'm a little turned off the more I think about it. The thought of spilling my se—"

She shushed him quickly by laying two fingers over his mouth. "And a vulgar chauvinist at that," she chided. "Anyway, look at it this way. You know I was mad as hell when we left the hospital. I definitely needed to work off some steam, so maybe you actually owe the lady a debt of gratitude."

He snorted. "You never did tell me what she said to get you that worked up. On your case about me again?"

"Among other things. You, my ex, crimefighting... Not so much an out and out attack, she was just needling me constantly."

"Yeah. The woman's a regular pincushion, all right."

"Mm hmm. I just can't believe some of the things she said to me. But I ought to — same thing she's been doing since I was a little girl. So I can't even excuse it on the grounds that she's sick, even though that's the only thing that kept me from blowing up right back at her like I normally would. And the great irony is, this time we were trying not to fight."

"Ech, parents and children," he said sympathetically. "Sometimes I think they shouldn't be allowed near each other after a certain age."

She gave him a knowing smile. "Dreading your visit to Roy tomorrow?" she suggested sweetly.

"Ohh, yeah. I'm still trying to find an excuse not to go." Oliver sighed. "But it's past time we mended a few fences. 'Course that's what you thought, too."

Dinah adjusted the pillow behind her and leaned against it, head resting on her crossed hands. "My mother is a monster," she said conversationally. "Not that I don't love her — exactly — but we've been at each other's throats my whole life. You and Roy were close as could be till the last couple of years. I've had a lot longer to be a parental disappointment."

Ollie shook his head. "You may have had more time, but seriously...you can't really tell me that dropping out of college to marry some loser really compares to getting kicked out for drug abuse. And you didn't drop out of the hero business to go to work for a gun manufacturer that just makes my job all the more necessary. And then there was the business about him sleeping with a terrorist, for God's sake!"

He was getting himself all worked up, probably more from the strain of the upcoming reunion than anything else. Dinah reached out and stroked his arm lovingly, trying to calm him. There were a lot of things she felt like saying out of fairness to Roy, but now wasn't the time. Gently, she scraped one fingernail up his chest and throat, twined her fingers in the stiff beard and moved closer to him.

"I'm on your side, you know," she reminded him softly. "But I do know that when all's said and done, you still love your son more than anything else in the world."

Feeling more relaxed, he smiled at her and dropped his head to rain a series of kisses along her shoulder. "Almost anything," he corrected.

Dinah surrendered herself to the delicious afterglow. "Mmmmmm..." she said happily, as he nibbled at her neck. Without warning, she abruptly sat up and commanded, "Sshhh!"

"Whaddaya mean, sshhh?" Oliver demanded. "I tell you I love you and you shush me?"

"I thought I heard something," she explained in a whisper. "In the living room."

He rolled his eyes, but when he spoke, the volume of his voice was considerably lower. "Oh, brother. I knew I shouldn't have brought up where we were. Don't tell me after all these years you're going to start acting like one of those neurotic sitcom wives —"

Thud!

Instantly alert, the couple looked at each other. There was definitely something happening in the next room.

Oliver got out of bed and promptly tripped over his hastily discarded clothes. Swearing under his breath, he kicked the garments out of the way and groped against the dresser for the carrying case that contained his cherished longbow.

"Pants!" whispered Dinah frantically, but he paid no attention to her. She herself had already unpacked, and had her robe at hand the instant she slipped out of bed. She looked around the nightstand for a flashlight.

Bow re-strung and arrow nocked, he simply looked at her and nodded. Dinah's hand reached for the doorknob. Stealth was out of the question; they remembered making a joke earlier about the loud creak of the hinges, so the element of surprise was paramount.

The young man in the living room, believing himself alone in the apartment, jumped in fright when the bedroom door opened with a loud shriek of protest. The beam of light caught him right in the eyes, momentarily blinding him as well as illuminating his longish black hair and rather rodent-like features. Instinctively he reached for his gun.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Oliver said firmly.

He moved slightly and the light from the bedroom window behind him allowed the intruder to make out the shape of the bow, and a faint glint of metal from the deadly-looking arrow aimed directly at his throat.

The younger man panicked and fled. He tried to slam the front door behind him, but its latch was broken and the pressure bounced it harmlessly open again. Oblivious to his nudity, the bowman took off in hot pursuit.

A neighbour, returning home from a rather unsuccessful date, found herself shoved rudely against the wall as the burglar rocketed past her to the elevator she'd just exited. He slipped inside just as the doors closed.

Ollie was a split second too late. The doors stubbornly refused to respond to his frantic presses on the signal button, and he heard a mechanical groan as the lift began its descent. With an oath, he slammed his hand against the metal doors and turned to stalk back to the apartment.

Midway, he met the casualty of his pursuit. The woman gaped at him in open-mouthed astonishment, taking in the bow and arrow...and his leanly muscled, utterly naked form. Without a trace of embarrassment, he met her stare with a grin and a saucy wink.

"Evening," he said amiably, and disappeared back inside his mother-in-law's apartment.

Dinah was on the phone with her assistant back in Seattle. "Okay. Yeah, call me as soon as you finish checking the place over, Jenette. Okay, bye. No luck?" she asked Oliver.

"Nah. He got away, and I couldn't follow him like this."

"I told you to at least put some pants on," she reminded him caustically. She was still a little sore about the "neurotic sitcom wife" crack.

He had no answer for that. He couldn't very well argue that the guy might have gotten away if he'd taken time to dress, since that was exactly what happened.

Brushing past her, he asked, "Have you called the cops?"

"Not yet. I'm just about to."

"Much good it'll do," he said from the bedroom.

She picked up the phone again. "Well, do me a favour and get dressed before they get here. The last thing we need is for you to be arrested for indecent exposure."

->>> ————————>

A uniformed officer went through the formality of dusting the apartment and corridor for fingerprints, although the complainants were warned it was all but useless if the burglar had been wearing driving gloves as they'd claimed.

The plainclothes officer, who gave her name as Detective Montoya, was a rather acerbic Hispanic woman in her early thirties. She interviewed the couple and filled out a standard B&E report without noticeable interest. After all, to the best of their knowledge nothing had been taken.

"You're free to come down to the station and look at mug shots if you'd like," she was telling them as the phone rang.

"Excuse me," Dinah said. "Hello? Yes, Jenette. Absolutely nothing? You're sure? Yes, that's wonderful...thank you very much for checking it out for us. Right. See you in a week or two. Bye.

"My assistant," she informed Montoya. "I wanted to make sure everything was okay at our place back in Seattle."

The detective's interest was piqued. "Really," she said, looking at the pair with interest, her pen paused above the notebook she'd been about to close. "Do you have any particular reason to assume you were the intended victims? Especially since, as you claim, you had no intention of staying in the apartment until you actually arrived here tonight."

It was unusual, in Renee Montoya's experience, for two witnesses to give such closely matching descriptions of a perpetrator, especially one viewed in the beam of a flashlight for only a few seconds. Usually, when such a thing happened, it turned out to be the outcome of discussing the matter beforehand, augmenting one another's memories and almost invariably building up a false recollection of events and features. Or...they'd both had considerable training and experience in the matter.

They looked at one another. "No particular reason, no," Oliver answered with a bland smile. "But we don't have any reason to ignore any possibility, either."

"My father was a private investigator," explained Dinah. "He always said to leave no stone unturned; I must have picked up the habit, Detective Montoya. Therefore, I'm not going to eliminate a connection to ourselves, or a grudge against my mother, or even some tie-in to one of Dad's old cases."

"Stranger things have happened," agreed Oliver.

The policewoman put her notebook away and rose to go. "That's true, Mr. Queen. However," she reminded him, "random break-ins do occur all the time. Even in Gotham City. As I said, you're welcome to come down to the precinct tomorrow to check out mugshots. Other than that, I'm afraid it's a waste of time."

And with that, she exited the apartment close on the heels of the uniformed officer.

"She's probably right, you know," Oliver told his girlfriend.

"I know."

———————— -

Looking through the oversized books of GCPD mugshots was a time-consuming process, and the longer it continued the more the faces tended to blend together.

Dinah, looking away to rest her eyes and refresh her mind, found herself distracted more than once by her surroundings. The squad room probably wouldn't have changed much since her grandfather's time. Her mom, she knew, had practically grown up in this building. What had the cops Richard Drake worked with been like?

A light tap on her knee ended her reveries. Oliver gestured toward the page now open on the table. Almost immediately, her eyes found the same picture that had caught his attention.

"Y'know, I could swear I've seen this guy before somewhere," mused Ollie as the officer on duty pulled up the information on the computer.

"In Seattle?"

"No, I don't...I don't know. Just somewhere."

Officer Glickman swiveled his chair around to face them, studying the printout in his hands. "Okay, your boy is called Johnny G. Last initial G., even though his last name really is Gee... G-E-E," he over-explained. "Plain old-fashioned B&E isn't really his style; he's a mob wannabe. Got a couple of outstanding warrants here already, nothing too major. Nonpayment of child support, stuff like that. We'll add this to the list and see if we can bring him in."

"One of these days," agreed Dinah in saccharine tones. "When the backlog of real crime isn't quite so high, right?"

Glickman sighed. It was the same routine he went through several times a day with victims of petty crime. "We find him, Miss Lance, we got a lot of reasons to bring him in. That's the best we can do. Flipside, you folks live on the opposite coast, and your mom can't ID him, right?"

The couple simply frowned at one another.

Aside from one grumbled monologue from Oliver regarding the iniquity and general incompetence of the boys in blue worldwide, the couple avoided the disheartening subject once they were alone. After all, they couldn't say they hadn't been warned: in a city like Gotham — or Seattle, for that matter — petty crimes like housebreaking simply weren't considered worth wasting manpower on. Hell, they couldn't even say they entirely disagreed. Not entirely.

The July morning already held promise of sizzling heat, so they chose a cafe with tables outside for their late breakfast.

Dinah studied a train timetable as she sipped her coffee. "There's a train at 11:30 you could probably make, if you want to hang around New York for awhile until Roy gets off work."

"You that anxious to get rid of me?" her boyfriend smiled.

She lowered the schedule card and winked at him. "You ought to know better than that. However, since I'll be busy myself all day, between visiting Mom and looking in on her shop, I just thought you might get a little bored. There's another train at 3:15, though, if you don't want to rush. Taking a cab you'd probably get to Roy's apartment just about the time he gets home."

He leaned back and stretched. "Oh, I don't know. I'm sure there's something I could do around Gotham City to keep myself...entertained...for a few hours."

Dinah accepted a coffee refill from the passing waitress, and studied him suspiciously. "You're planning on going out looking for trouble, aren't you, Queen?"

Oliver gave her a look of exaggerated innocence. "Why, I never go out looking for trouble — you know that. It just seems to find me all on its lonesome."

"Which of course is why you brought the costume along," she replied in a low voice. "So you can help it find you a little more easily."

"You know me too well," he grinned, and took another bite of his breakfast.

"You're not using this as an excuse to avoid talking to Roy, are you?"

"Who, me?" he asked, feigning surprise. Then his expression grew serious again and he told her, "No, I'm going to see him, probably today. But I wouldn't mind having a little look into this matter first, since the police obviously aren't going to. Just put it down to my generally suspicious nature."

What she put it down to was his reluctance to leave her before he'd made sure she was safe, but he didn't say it. Probably in fact wouldn't have said it. Retired or not, the erstwhile Black Canary was a lot more capable of defending herself than most people could ever dream of being, and he had good reason to know it.

An ambulance screamed to a halt across the street from the café, and Dinah said lightly, "I hope it wasn't the food."

Oliver chuckled and went on eating. As he watched the white-uniformed attendants unload the gurney and roll it into the bank he had a sudden flash of memory. The forkful of eggs stopped halfway to his mouth.

"What is it?" Dinah asked him.

He frowned at her. "I think I may just cancel on the kid after all," he announced. "I just now remembered where it was I saw that guy before. Dinah...yesterday he was dressed up as an orderly outside your mom's hospital room."