Disclaimers: See the first part.

Summary: What do you get when you mix a gunman, a cop, and a taxi? Chaos, that's what. (and some light swearing, but it's only two words. You'll see why at the end of the chapter...) ;)

To Char, for actually understanding what I was trying to do and figuring out how to help me do it.

CALL OF DUTY

High Noon

Part Three
Showdown

All it took was two steps to create problems, and three steps for the chaos to start.

The first one was what finally brought me to his attention – Diablo was known for brawns, not brains – and sent his head twisting towards me, no doubt as he saw the movement in his peripheral vision. His eyes went wide as he saw the uniform under my Gotham Knights jacket. In those eyes I saw the fear I've seen in hundreds of criminals eyes over the years: fear of me and the justice I represented, the accountability for their actions that was finally catching up with them. I also saw in those coal-brown eyes the fire of his madness, the fire that had taken away his sanity until this psychotic episode would end...the same fire that constantly burns in the Joker's yellow eyes.

The second step I made saw him pick up the Bristol from where it had been lying between his stomach and the steering wheel and swing it towards me. As he did, I was already reaching out with my hands, originally aiming for the doorframe but now I was diverting one hand for the gun. Diablo just managed to get the gun steady between us – an unusually fast draw, especially for a thug – when I was finally close enough to brush my outstretched fingers of my left hand against the cool, metal barrel of the Bristol.

The third and final step brought me up close by the taxi and right up into his face even as I was grabbing the metal barrel of the Bristol. I yanked back and up, hard with all my strength, even before my fingers had fully closed around the Bristol's barrel. I'd only be satisfied about the situation when I had the gun far away from his twitchy, psychotic fingers – and that was a moment that would never come fast enough for me.

But I realised almost immediately that my angle was slightly wrong, that I'd miscalculated someplace where I really shouldn't have. His finger slipped on the trigger, pulling it. I immediately felt the blaze of pain along the top of my left shoulder, like the sting of a small swarm of bees all descending on the one spot in my flesh, even as I heard the bullet whistle past my head. I dismissed the pain and the wetness I could feel spreading over my shoulder, pushing all that and the deafness from being far too close to discharging gun as far away as I could. Worry about it later, Grayson. Stop him!

Somehow I'd kept my fingers on the barrel the entire time, and while it was hot under my flesh it was nowhere near enough to make me let go. I yanked again, harder than before as my desperation lent me the strength I'd lacked last time. It would be enough. It had to be.

It was. The sudden hard motion, combined with the Bristol's powerful recoil, pulled his finger away from the trigger and loosened his grip. I pulled the gun back towards me again, intending to take it completely away from him while my other hand finally managed to grab a firm hold on the doorframe of the taxi.

Just as well I did, too. Diablo fell back as he lost the gun, back inside the taxi and partially onto the park-brake. His weight dislodged whatever had caused it to stick, and all of a sudden it was down and releasing its hold on the car. The taxi immediately surged forwards, catching both of us unawares and sending us both off-balance.

I stumbled, badly, not having expected the abrupt change in the car's momentum and thus loosing my footing. My feet were suddenly no more use to me than two big blocks of cement that only get in the way and I was quickly heading my way to the ground. The only good thing about the whole deal was that I managed to keep my grip on the Bristol the entire way down, not that this was going to help me much on my trip to the pavement. It was only my years of acrobatic training that helped me turn the stumble and fall into something else that let me spring back up the moment my hands grazed the pavement. Once again I launched myself to my feet and back into motion, the only difference from before being the Bristol now securely grasped in my grazed, complaining hands.

I mentally cursed as soon as I was up, realizing right away what my stumble had cost me, not just in time but in space. I was now a couple of metres behind the taxi, and that was a gap that would only widen if something didn't happen quickly to stop it. I ran on anyway in the hope that I'd be provided with that something. It was a desperate move, my last card in play. My top speed at full-tilt running was around 23 kph – and the fastest man on record was only a few digits above that – but not even that would help me if Diablo put his foot to the floor...which was, of course, the only logical thing to do.

For that moment, I'd lost. He'd get away and I had no means to get him back. Although one option was shooting his tires, I had no intention of doing it. There's no way I'd be responsible for an accident if that caused the car to veer out of control – which it would. Diablo wasn't exactly known for his driving skills either.

He had won his freedom, even if it was accidentally, and I'd lost my chance to take him down. He was going to get away, to roar off into the proverbial sunset, and I'd never hear the end of it from my friends and family. For that moment, our duel, our battle of wits and skills, was over with me and my pride the only sore losers. The only consolation to be found, if there was one, was that Diablo was now without the Bristol. They way my luck was going though, I kinda doubted he'd have left any serial numbers on it for me to trace later.

Fortunately, I found my ray of hope barely a moment later. I found my 'something to happen' that I needed to turn it all around.

Instead of speeding up and getting away like self-preservation instincts and all the common sense in the world would've demanded, Diablo did the opposite. He's slowing down! But why—The door! He was leaning over to close the door! It was no doubt to stop me getting in the car again, but he didn't realise that in doing so he lessened the pressure on the accelerator. The idiot.

I immediately put on another dose of speed, upgrading my running to the loping, effortless running I'd used barely minutes earlier but that felt more like a couple of months. I'd just managed to reach the boot of the taxi as Diablo grabbed hold of the inner door-handle and started to pull it shut. Thinking quickly, knowing my angle of approach put me in his mirrors' blind spot, I forced myself to wait until I was at the rear passenger door and the driver's door was almost shut before I acted.

At the top of my run, my hand with the Bristol in it shot out and pushed the gun into the small gap that remained as Diablo tried to slam the door, preventing it from shutting fully and keeping my access to him open. His grip on the handle slipped a bit in his shock at my sudden reappearance, and that was all the encouragement I needed to let the half-a-million-dollar gun become a glorified-lever in my hands to force the door.

It opened. Slowly. Millimetres. Centimetres. I kept forcing it open, my instincts telling me only that I needed more, more space and more time. Inches. Half a foot. Enough. Now!

I moved in, taking a running leap and shoving my body inside the small gap I'd created. My feet found the bottom of the doorway first, the standard-issue shoes slipping a moment before I managed to find some grip, and then one hand followed onto the chassis. The other hand with Bristol followed immediately after, and by now I had absolutely no qualms about shoving the damn thing into Diablo's neck.

"Move over!" It was a command, an order.

One that Diablo ignored...by swinging the wheel to the right. Hard.

I could only hang on as most of my body swung out in the opposite direction, tightening my grip even as I felt my fingers sliding as the force of the turn pulled at my grip. All I could do was ride it out, grimly waiting for the inevitable correction in my inertia and hoping it came before I couldn't hold on any longer. The correction came, as it always would, but this time Diablo swung the wheel with it, throwing my centre of balance back towards the taxi. I felt the door slam into my back and hit the shoulder with the bullet graze but ignored both hits, concentrating on reinforcing my grip on the car and putting the Bristol back into his thick, muscular neck while the rest of my body played Catch-Up.

"Move it, you imbecile!" I was beyond orders, beyond politeness, beyond such niceties. This time the voice held more than a hint of the Bat. "Now."

He made no reply – in fact, I realised suddenly that I hadn't heard a clear word off him yet – and even his features made none of the appropriate responses. There was no growing fear or desperation like you'd expect, just a manic glint in his eyes and growing smug smirk, like he knew everything I didn't. The response that did come, however, was one unexpected but not exactly unsurprising.

Again, he abruptly swung the wheel to the left, swerving the car even harder than before, but I was already moving with it, already prepared for anything and everything. His lack of response in the usual ways had alerted me that this was not your usual cowardly crim. This crazy idiot was firmly residing in the Land of the Psychotic, and none of the normal rules were going to apply to him and his way of thinking.

And that of course meant that my own responses were going have to be a lot more creative than I'd originally thought.

Instead of riding the turn like last time and almost losing my grip, I leaned into the curve, pressing my body into the taxi as the forces in the turn tried to tug me out. It was an odd bit of logic – or illogical logic – that I'd gained from my youth: lean against the forces, not with them, and you won't lose ground. After all, when you're stuck in the backseat of a VW Beetle between two super-powered girls on one of the Titan's more unusual road trips, especially when Roy was driving down a mountain road, you quickly learnt how not to lean over your backseat companions in a turn. It was either that or lose certain vital body parts when you accidentally leant on the completely wrong area on a female's body.

The intervening years hadn't dulled the tactic that once again worked for me. Not only did I keep my place, but this time I managed to keep the Bristol pressed into his without one bit of relaxation in pressure throughout the entire turn. "Guess what, Dabie?" I taunted softly, venomously. "Time's up."

And finally, I got a response. His faced paled until he looked like his face was covered in ashen dust as his eyes widened – either in surprise or fear, I wasn't certain, but I knew it was the first clear reaction I'd received yet beyond the erratic course he's chosen. Either way, Diablo was probably realising about now that the hitchhiker he'd picked up wasn't the usual Blüdhaven cop variety, that I was actually anything but normal. I smirked, glad to see that I was finally intimidating the thug...and then took another look at his eyes.

Whoa. Deer in the headlights. He wasn't staring at me in a mixture of fear and surprise, and it wasn't me that made him freeze behind the wheel and look like a rabbit trapped in a car's headlights. He was looking at something ahead of us...something the car was heading towards...something we were probably going to hit.

Taking a risk that this wasn't some skilled deception on his part to catch me unawares, I allowed myself to look at what had him so entranced, using only one eye just in case. What I saw, what we heading towards at a fast rate of knots, made my other eye and the rest of my head turn quickly towards the front to see the item just over eighty metres away and closing in fast.

Oh boy.

At some point in Blüdhaven's history, its citizens had once been served by trams, cable-cars if you will. The trams were now long gone, having made way for the pollution-heavy vehicles of today...but the tramstops remained, abandoned reminders of what had once been. Just recently, the Blüdhaven City Council had decided to replace the old, rotted timber posts that designated a tramstop with a more modern and distinctive item. Being Blüdhaven of course, only a few tramstops had had the modifications made to them before the project organisers ran out of money and motivation. Damn. Out of all the luck... And out of all Blüdhaven's many tramstops, we had to be heading towards one of the five that had been modified.

We were now officially in serious trouble.

Had it just been one of the old posts that had rotted to the core after being battered by almost a century of Blüdhaven's pollution, we would have been fine. Old Willy Jacknife's taxi would certainly have been worse for wear, but it was definitely a survivable crash as long as we kept on our present course...for Diablo. Not me. I would've hit the post. While I could probably survive that if it was a post and I had my padded Nightwing suit on, my odds weren't so great with the newer tramstop and me in police uniform. The new version was a hardier variety, a curving modern structure made of metal that was specifically designed to withstand a car impacting with it. A human body at this speed would be nothing in comparison.

I glanced at the speedometer and swore softly: 48 km/h (or almost 30 mph) to cover about eighty metres. Do the math, and I had about six seconds to react before we hit, and I already knew that there'd be no way to fully avoid an accident in that time. I'd have to reach over and grab the wheel, somehow forcing it to move even though Diablo's frozen hands held it in a white-knuckled grip – no doubt breaking his fingers in the process. Besides, swerving the wheel might only save the front and not the back from hitting the stupid thing.

On the other hand, if I did nothing, if we stayed as we were, at this speed the car would ride up the curved base and definitely flip. Personally, I had no desire to be outside a car doing the somersaults, let alone getting myself creamed in the process of hitting the stupid tramstop in the first place. And if anyone was going to be doing any saving, it was going to have to be me. Diablo was still frozen and his brain was definitely taking a holiday. Shock, no doubt.

All these thoughts, and more, passed through my head in under point-five of a second...which meant I had about five-point-five seconds left to save us.

Shit.

TBC...