Three hours later, Keevra was sobbing on the phone to her friend, Garrett Soles.
Garrett Soles and Keevra had met while in Gotham's juvenile detention center six years ago. Garrett had been sent there because he committed arson. He had burned down a comic store with his gang. But he had taken the fall for the crime when he was seventeen years old. He was the only one of his gang to take the fall of their crime.
Keevra had been sent there because she had a mental breakdown that had caused her to attack her classmate with her fists at Gotham Academy. Keevra had been expelled and then she had been sent to juvi, where she had met Garrett after he had defended her against a gang.
"And then what happened?" Garrett asked calmly.
Keevra could sense that he was forcing himself to keep his emotions in check. So that he could keep Keevra from having another mental breakdown, like the one she had six years ago. She had had her first mental breakdown when her eight year old brother, Seth had died in a car accident. Keevra could imagine Garrett in his apartment, laying spread out on his bedroom floor, holding his cell phone to his ear with his right hand, his fingers on his left hand unknowingly running through his thick beard.
Images flashed through Keevra's mind, her memories. Memories of herself shouting threats against the Joker. Threats of "You are going to pay for this!" and "I'll hunt you down if its the last thing I do!" to the open air as he and his cronies walked away from the masacre they had constructed. The image of herself of picking up Charlotte's limp corpse off of the street and carrying her in her arms and walking down the street, her mind whirling with numbness, until the Gotham City Police arrived along with peramedics slammed into her mind's eye.
"Keevra-?"
Garrett's voice brought her out of her memory.
"Then I- I handed. . . "Keevra choked, it felt like her throat was collapsing in on itself. "- Charlotte over."
Keevra wiped her red-hot face with her T-shirt sleeve.
"I'm so sorry, Keevra," Garrett said sincerly. "Is there anything I can do?"
"No," Keevra exhaled as she leaned against the back of her futon in her living room. The coolness of the futon felt good on her body. "He-killed-her-in-cold-blood." Keevra said in one compressed word. "I'm-going-to-make-him-pay."
"What?" Garrett's tone sounded confused.
"The Joker."
"Keevra, what did you say?"
"You heard me."
"I didn't."
"I'm going to kill the Joker."
Before she heard Garrett's reply she clicked the END button her cell phone, hanging up on him. Seconds later, her cell phone vibrated against her right palm. She didn't have to look on the photo I.D. to know it was Garrett calling her back. Keevra didn't feel like she needed to talk to Garrett any longer. She had made up her mind, she wasn't about to let Garrett Soles talk her out of this. Garrett kept trying to call her back. She got annoyed by his persistance, so she chucked her cell phone on the side table next to her futon.
Killing the Joker was something she had to do. For Gotham City. For Charlotte. For herself. Killing the Joker would give her the kind of her closure she deserved. She had to do this. It was for the greater good.
Keevra grabbed her diary that was on the side table. Whenever she was about to do something important she wrote it down. No matter what it was. If it was important it went into the diary. She didn't write much for she knew she had to get to Arkham City before it got too dark outside. Right now it was five in the afternoon. She needed to get going soon.
She placed her diary next to her cell phone (which was still vibrating).
"Dammit Garrett, give it up," Keeva snapped at her cell phone.
She got off of the futon and onto her hands and knees. Reaching underneath the futon she grabbed an old shoebox. She lifted the shoebox and pulled out its content. It was her hand pistol she had bought when she had moved out of her parent's house when she was seventeen. Now, three years later she would be firing it at the monster that had killed her longest friend. Charlotte Carlyle and Keevra Avryn had met in the second grade, they had grown up together and now. . .
She held the pistol in her hands, feeling the weight and the coolness of it on her fingers.
"Justice is about to be served," Keevra muttered to herself as she slipped a round of bullets into the pistol. "Real justice."
She took two extra rounds of bullets and placed them inside her jacket she was wearing. Her black leather jacket had pockets stitched into it.
When she was finished getting her pistol ready for it's first shooting, Keevra walked out of her apartment, closed the door. Outside she walked down to her apartment complex's parking area. She got into her rusty, old Lexus and drove away towards Arkham City.
"If Batman isn't going to take out the Joker himself, I will do it for him", Keevra Avryn thought.