A/N As an apology for getting the last chapter out a day late, and in honor of Italy's World Cup victory this afternoon (more about that at the end of this chapter), Chapter 30 is up a day early! Let's blow the top off of four hundred reviews this time!
Thank you to my beta, IcyWaters, who works hard to bring you an error-free reading experience.
Disclaimer If I had to pick my three favorite movie stars at this moment, they would be Christian Bale, Colin Firth, and Denzel Washington. I don't own any of them, but the sun still came up this morning.
Acknowledgment To my courageous aunt, for taking us to the early morning day-after-Thanksgiving sales.
Chapter 30
I'm the boss, you're an idiot. You're the boss, I'm an idiot.
- Russian Army Saying
Alfred listened quietly while Bruce calmly explained everything that had happened after he had returned to the caverns.
"And where is Miss Somerville now?"
"Sedated in one of the guest rooms on the third floor."
"Voluntarily?"
"Yes."
Alfred examined his employer carefully. Bruce sat behind his desk in the study, arms folded on the desktop, his expression calm and, despite the fact that he hadn't slept in almost twenty-four hours, alert. "You seem to be taking this rather well."
"You know, Alfred, in a way it's almost a relief. Ever since Somerville arrived I've felt like I've been in some sort of paralysis, teetering on the edge of disaster and unable to do anything about it. Now disaster has happened, and I can start doing something."
"I see, sir," Alfred said doubtfully.
"I want you to go to Washington. Use your connections in the old boys club to check on Somerville's story."
"I can do that over the phone, there's no need for me to actually go."
Bruce shook his head. "No, it's too easy for them to put you off. What we're asking for is pretty classified, and it calls for face to face schmoozing. I've already got a jet waiting for you. You'll be back by dinnertime."
"And who will look after Master Dick?"
"I will. With Somerville temporarily out of the picture, we can go back to our regular routine."
"Don't forget to feed him lunch. The takeout numbers are all by the kitchen phone."
"I can cook, Alfred."
"Of course, sir. Are you quite sure you'll be all right?"
Bruce raised his right hand. "I solemnly swear not to burn down the Manor while you are gone."
"I fail to find that amusing."
"Seriously, we'll be fine. You'll only be gone for the day, and Somerville is out of it. What could happen?"
The butler looked dour but nodded in acquiescence. "As you wish."
Once Alfred was safely on his way, Bruce glanced at his watch and saw with some amazement that it was nearly 8 a.m. I guess I won't bother with the sleep thing. He went upstairs to his ward's room. Dick was restless but still sleeping. Bruce mercilessly pulled off the covers and picked the boy up by his ankles. "Rise and shine, sleepyhead!"
"Huh?" Dick blinked in sleepy confusion. "Bruce?"
"Yep."
"Why are you holding me upside down?"
"Because it's time to get up." Bruce dropped Dick back onto the bed. "Get dressed and be in the gym in five minutes."
"I thought we weren't practicing while Somerville was here?"
"She's sleeping in. Hurry up."
Working out had seemed like a good idea, until Bruce let his ward land a kick on his stomach. "Ooh," he grunted, faltering.
"Are you ok?" Dick asked anxiously.
"I think so," Bruce gasped, pulling up his shirt. The skin on his stomach was a single, enormous black bruise, thanks to the two bullets that had slammed against his armor last night. "Didn't realize that was so bad."
Dick stared in fascination. "What happened?"
"Ah…I ran into something. Listen, don't tell Alfred about this, ok? He'll just worry."
Dick shrugged. "Ok. Are we done?"
"Yeah, I think it's breakfast time."
"Alfred's usually telling us to take a shower by now."
"Alfred's not here. He had to fly to Washington on some business, but he'll be back tonight."
"Oh." Dick frowned. "Who's going to make us breakfast?"
"What, you think I can't open a box of cereal?"
The boy rolled his eyes. "Anyone can do that. Do you know how to make pancakes?"
Bruce shrugged. "Sure." How hard can it be?
When Dick entered the kitchen, pink and shining from his shower, Bruce was digging through the cupboards. "Do you know where Alfred keeps the pancake mix?"
"He doesn't use a mix. He puts in flour and milk and stuff."
"He would," Bruce muttered. "Ok, how about a cookbook?"
After he found the book and looked up the recipe, it took him twenty minutes to find the measuring cups and the baking powder and the right frying pan. "Are you sure you just don't want some Captain Crunch?" Bruce asked, looking dubiously from the lumpy bowl of batter to the hissing oil in the pan.
"No thank you," Dick said politely.
"Here goes." He spooned batter into the pan and watched as bubbles broke out across the white liquid. "Is it supposed to do that?" Before he could double check with the book, the phone rang. It was Fox.
"Mr. Wayne? I have some news about that matter we were discussing the other day."
Bruce set his spatula down. "I'm listening."
"One of our employees was murdered last night. A Simon Golding. Guess which department he worked in."
Bruce's eyebrows slowly rose. "Accounting?"
"You got it. We've only begun analyzing his files, but from the looks of things, Mr. Golding was Earle's right hand man when it came to fooling with numbers."
"Hey, Bruce?" Dick asked.
Bruce gestured for his ward to keep quiet. "Do you know where the money was coming from?"
"Not yet."
"Bruce!" Dick said urgently.
"I…" The shrill squeal of the smoke detector invaded the kitchen, and Bruce whirled to see smoke billowing out of the frying pan. Dropping the phone, he grabbed the pan handle and threw the whole thing into the sink.
"Mr. Wayne?" Fox was asking anxiously when he picked the phone back up.
"Sorry about that," Bruce shouted over the alarm, "I…Hold on, I've got a call on line two…This is Bruce Wayne."
"Mr. Wayne, this is the Gotham City fire department. Our system shows that you have a smoke detector going off?"
Bruce grabbed the cookbook and started waving the smoke away from the detector. "Oh yeah, there's no problem. We just burned some pancakes. There's no fire." Dick pulled a placemat off the table and climbed up on a chair to help fan away the smoke. The alarm stopped screaming.
"Are you quite sure?" the woman from the fire department demanded.
"Yeah, yeah. The alarm just shut off."
"We could send someone out to check…"
"Really, it's fine!" Bruce snapped. "Thanks for checking up on us." He switched back to line one. "Fox, I'm coming in." He glanced at the still smoking mess in the sink. "And could you order breakfast? With pancakes."
- - - - - -
Jim Gordon was just finishing his own pancakes when the doorbell rang. He was officially taking a day off: His beeper and phone were both shut off, he had warned the people at the precinct not to contact him even if the city was burning down, and he had promised both Barbaras that he was going to take them to Gladelands Holly Days sale.
His wife went to answer the door, and a moment later the sounds of an argument drifted down the hall to the kitchen. Gordon stuck his plate in the sink and went to see what the problem was. Barbara was standing squarely in the doorway, staring defiantly up at one his officers.
"I'm very sorry, sergeant, but James isn't working today. You'll have to find someone else to deal with your problem."
Sergeant Fiskers saw Gordon enter the hallway, and relief broke over his face. "Hello, Lieutenant, I'm real sorry to bother you, but Audrey Williams called in saying she had some information about her father's murder, and she won't talk to anyone but you."
Why today? Gordon thought, even though he knew that today was really no different from any other day. Barbara had turned around and was scowling at him now.
"Jim, you promised!"
"I know, honey, but…it's a murder investigation."
"Isn't it always?" she muttered, and stormed past him. A moment later the bedroom door slammed.
"I'll get my coat," Gordon sighed, then remembered that it was in the bedroom. "Never mind, let's go."
The Williams' mansion was lavishly decorated with evergreen branches and twinkling lights, but the dead silence inside the building didn't match the appearance of Christmas cheer. A uniformed maid silently led Gordon and Fiskers to a small sitting room, where both Audrey and her mother were waiting. Both women were clad in fashionable black, and both looked pale and had dark rings beneath their eyes.
"Lieutenant Gordon, thank you so much for coming," Audrey said, standing and looking questioningly at the two men.
"This is Sergeant Fiskers. He's very trustworthy."
Mrs. Williams remained silent, her back ramrod straight and her lips pressed into a thin, tight line. Gordon got the impression that calling him hadn't been her idea.
"Look, before we tell you what we found, there's one condition." Audrey clasped her hands nervously and stole a glance at her mother. Mrs. Williams remained immobile, staring frostily at some point over Gordon's right shoulder. "We want this kept out of the papers. My father is dead and…there's no need to slander his name."
"We'll do our best, Miss Williams, but I can't promise anything. These things usually get out, sooner or later."
She looked again at her mother. "I know. I guess we can't ask any more than that." She took a deep breath and said, "If you'll come with me, then, I have something to show you." Audrey led the way down the hall and up a flight of stairs to a room that was clearly a man's study. "This is…was…my father's office. My mother…I…we found this."
Your mother knew about it and you pried it out of her, Gordon mentally translated. Audrey knelt in a corner of the room and pushed on the paneling. A small section of wood slid away to reveal a small safe with a keypad entry. She punched in a series of numbers and the door to the safe opened. Inside sat a short stack of computer disks. Audrey handed them to Gordon and said, "My…we think there may have been another set of these, in another safe, but they're not there anymore."
Gordon handed the disks to Fiskers, who had large coat pockets, and asked, "What's your security like here?"
"We have a good alarm system."
Obviously not good enough. "I'm going to put a police watch on your house, Miss Williams. If the people who killed your father suspect that you're trying to help us, they may try to come after you."
"And do you think your pathetic little gesture will stop them?" a shrill voice demanded behind him.
Gordon spun, surprised. He hadn't heard Mrs. Williams enter the room. "I wish I could do more, ma'am, but…"
She ignored him. "I told you," she hissed at her daughter, "that calling the police was stupid. They'll find out, and they'll kill us both!" Her voice rose to a hysterical shriek. "Do you want me dead, as well as your father?"
Audrey, if possible, was even paler than before, but she stared defiantly back at her mother. "I want the men who did this to daddy punished!"
Mrs. Williams's hysteria abruptly disappeared. "Silly girl," she crooned, shaking her head back and forth. "Silly, silly girl."
Gordon began to suspect that the shock of Charles Williams's death had been more than his wife's mind could handle. "I understand that this has all been very upsetting," he said soothingly, placing a gentle hand under her arm and guiding her toward a deep leather sofa. "Why don't you lie down for a little, until you feel better?"
"Yes, perhaps I'd better." She allowed him to lead her to the couch, but she refused to lie down. She perched on the very edge of the cushions, her hands relentlessly pleating the fabric of her skirt. "I mustn't go to sleep," she told Gordon seriously. "Someone has to keep watch."
He pulled Audrey aside and asked, "Can you get her a doctor?"
"Yes, I'll call. She's been like this ever since I got her to tell me where the disks were."
"Listen, I want you and your mother to check into a hotel for a little while, ok? Go somewhere where they won't know you, and use an assumed name. Call me before you go and we'll have it checked out for security."
"You think that mother is right? That these people will try to kill us?"
"I don't know," Gordon said honestly, "but better safe than sorry."
When he and Fiskers left, the sergeant offered, "I can take the disks down to the station and start looking at them, if you wanted to, uh, finish your day off."
"Yeah, I guess I'd better," Gordon agreed, a bit reluctantly. He was intensely interested in the content of the disks, but maybe showing up at the Holly Days sale would cool the hot water he was currently in.
But when he arrived at Gladelands, he wondered how he could have believed he would be able to find his wife and daughter in this mess. A massive crowd, predominantly female, coursed through the aisles of the enormous store, like a raging river gone amok. Gray haired ladies used the sharp corners of their shopping baskets to forge a ruthless path, and here and there, helpless sales associates hung onto displays like drowning men clinging to life preservers. Gordon narrowly avoided being run down by a mother who apparently felt no compunction over using her two-year-old as a battering ram, and fell against an information counter.
"You ok?" a sympathetic clerk asked from behind the security of his tall counter.
"Yeah." Gordon straightened. "I'm supposed to be meeting my wife. Is there any chance you could page her?"
The man shrugged. "Sure, what's her name?"
"Barbara Gordon."
The helpful clerk picked up the intercom receiver. "Attention all customers. Would Barbara Gordon please come to the main information desk."
Five minutes later, there was disturbance in the current of shoppers, and Gordon's white-faced wife hurtled toward the desk, a terrified Babs in tow. She skidded to a stop in front of Gordon and stared at him in disbelief. "You're here!"
"Yeah, it didn't take too long, so I thought…"
"You're not hurt?" Barbara demanded.
"No," he replied, confused.
"I," said Barbara furiously, "dropped a whole basket full of jeans that were seventy-five percent off because I thought you'd been shot! Don't you ever, EVER do that again!" And then she slapped him.
"You show him, girlfriend!" a voice shouted from the crowd that had suddenly gathered around them.
Gordon winced. Happy Holly Days.
To Be Continued…
A/N Yes, it's true! Italy is the football champion of the world! Of course, the really important thing about this is that France lost. FRANCE LOST! Not that they didn't deserve it after that truly vicious foul they pulled in overtime. It warms my little heart to think of the tears my French friends will be shedding tonight… And can I just say that Italian goalie Buffon is THE MAN. Totally terrific save in the second half.
As most of you will have noticed, I PM'd the responses to reviews for the last chapter. This happened mainly because I got confused about which set of reviews I was supposed to be catching up on, but I guess the important thing is that you have all been properly responded to, on time for once!
Feel free to mention your top three favorite movie actors (or actresses) in your review. I'm curious to see who (aside from the exquisite Christian) will pop up.