To Play the Fool
Chapter Thirty-Four
"Hey, Tex!" The guard knocked on her cell door to wake her up. "Bail's been posted.
Jackie didn't move from her rather uncomfortable bed. "That's hilarious, Leroy. What idiot has $5 million lying around?"
"That would be me," said Bruce Wayne.
She shot up out of bed, her tangled red hair flying around her face. Her eyes had dark circles and her body looked frail under her orange jumpsuit. "Mr. Wayne. What are you doing here?"
"Bailing you out. What does it look like?"
"Why?" she asked critically.
"Does it matter?" he chuckled.
"Yes. If you're bailing me out as a favor to Jenny, then you don't really understand the scope of my situation. If you're doing it just because you can, go away."
Bruce turned to the guard. "Could you give us a few minutes?"
"You've got five," he replied. Then the old guard with nicotine stains on his clubbed fingers left the two alone. As Jackie was being kept in solitary confinement with no other prisoners around in her section, they were more alone than they should have been.
"Do you remember the first time we met?" Bruce asked once he was in the clear. "It was on my front lawn when you were saving Audrey Garrison. Before that, I had always pictured you as some kind of action hero, beating up the bad guys and jumping off of burning buildings and stuff. That night was the first time I realized you weren't doing any of this for fun, and you weren't just an insane Batman obsessed fan."
"That last part's still up for debate," she muttered, leaning against the bars.
"The point is, you care about the people of Gotham, and I don't think you belong in jail for that."
Jackie wrapped her fingers around the bars of her cell door and pulled herself closer. "That's nice of you to say, but you forget that I'm dangerous too."
"Compared to the Batman, you're a saint."
"I've been working with him. We're practically partners."
"I don't care about dangerous, Jackie. You saved Commissioner Gordon's life. You have no idea how much that means to me, do you." She shook her head. "I met him when I was eight, right after my parents were murdered in front of me. Officer Gordon was the only one who really cared about what I was going through. Gotham needs people like you to keep kids from going home at night without their parents." He finished his sentence in a whisper.
Jackie suddenly couldn't meet his gaze. "You're bailing me out so I can keep being Tex."
"Is it selfish of me to ask you to?"
"A little. But I'll do it. Leroy!" she shouted obnoxiously down the hall. The guard's bald head poked in through the door at the end. "Hi. I'm ready to go."
Leroy approached her cell with the keys. "Thought your lawyer said not to accept any bail."
She stepped out of the cell once it was unlocked. "He did. I'm ignoring him."
Bruce waited by the door to the parking lot as Jackie got dressed and collected her personal effects. Ten minutes later, she was escorted out wearing a plain white t-shirt and jeans provided by the jail, her own black boots, and her red and black jacket. Just before she was allowed to leave, a tracking device for home arrests was attached to her left ankle. She was a surprisingly good sport about the whole thing Once it was working, she threw on the jacket and joined Bruce. "Is that part of the Tex suit?" he asked, a bit surprised.
"Yes it is," she replied with a grin.
"They let you keep it?"
"My lawyer is very persuasive," was her cryptic answer.
Curiosity, once unleashed, is hard to stop. "How does your helmet thing fit inside?" He pushed open the door and held it open for Jackie.
"Magic technology. I have no idea. I'm just glad it does." She stopped in her tracks when she noticed which car they were approaching. "Is that … the Lamborghini Aventador?" A smile spread across her face.
"Would you like a ride home?"
"Only if you're offering. And can we stop at the Criterion? I kind of hid the other half of my armor there."
"Sure. I own that one, right?" She rolled her eyes at him as the two of them slid into the car. He started up the car which had a beautifully quiet engine, and pulled out of the parking lot at a speed that would make Batman jealous. "How have you been doing?" he asked, trying to alleviate the silence. "Jenny didn't seem surprised that you didn't call."
"I didn't get to call home."
"Doesn't everybody get one phone call?"
"It's a privilege, not a right. They thought I would call Batman and warn him to stay away. Not that he wouldn't have seen the news. Jail was boring. If I wasn't sleeping, I was being questioned. If I wasn't being questioned, I was talking to my legal counsel."
"If you need a good lawyer, I would be willing to hire one."
"Oh, he's not court appointed. He's an old friend of mine, and so far he's gotten about twelve of my charges dropped."
"Dare I ask how many there are?"
She shrugged. "149, last I counted. I have a feeling most of them are bogus to keep me in custody."
"That doesn't seem legal or ethical," he frowned.
"It's not about me, Mr. Wayne. It's Batman. It's always about Batman."
He clenched his jaw momentarily while Jackie was lost in thought, looking out the window. He could tell there was a lot she was hiding, possibly for his benefit. There was also a level of anger she was hiding behind a layer of apathy. While she didn't want anyone to worry about her, she was clearly hurt. Jackie absentmindedly rubbed her sternum, where a massive bruise had more than likely formed, and winced in pain. If it hurt so much, why did she touch it? To remember that she was hurt, or to check if she was still injured?
"So," she said, coming back from her thoughts. "You're dating my sister."
He nodded once. "That I am."
"You must be smarter than you look. She can't stand stupid people. Not that you look dumb or anything," she hastily corrected.
"She seems to think so."
"Good. She tends to get frustrated with people when they don't understand concepts as quickly as she does, and she'll take little jabs at their intelligence. She's getting better at not doing that, but if she starts it up again, just tell her to knock it off. It's almost impossible to hurt her feelings."
"I will keep that in mind."
"I also feel that I should warn you that if you break her heart, I will break your face."
"You don't solve all your problems with violence, do you?"
"A surprisingly large number of them, actually. Kind of why I became Tex."
That kept the two of them quiet for the rest of the drive to the restaurant. Jackie had him pull into the back lot where the employees parked and shipments came in. Bruce parked across two parking stalls, then they got out of the car. Jackie gave the car a caressing pat before they went inside.
The kitchen suddenly went silent when the door closed, and all the cooks and waiters stopped to look at her. She gave them a quick wave. "Hi guys."
A rotund man nearly six feet tall and dressed in a white chef's coat pushed his way through the crowd. "What are you doing here, Jackie?" he demanded. "You were fired three days ago."
"I'm sorry Mr. Parker," she replied quietly. "My phone was taken away from me. I never got my messages."
"Hang on a second," Bruce interrupted. "There's no need to fire her –"
Jackie put up a hand to stop him. "Mr. Wayne, don't. It's fine. I'll just get my things and go." One of the bus boys was ordered to escort her to the locker room. It only took her a few minutes to collect her meager belongings. In the interim, Bruce shared a scowling match with the head chef. Despite not being the owner, the chef acted like the restaurant belonged to him and Jackie had disgraced it. Bruce could practically smell the contempt emanating from him. Jackie reappeared with a backpack thrown over her shoulders and her lips in a thin line. "I guess this is it, then," she said, addressing her former coworkers. "It was lovely working with you all. I'm going to miss you." She waited for a reaction from someone, anyone, but everyone remained frozen in states of nervousness, anger, and fear. "Okay. Goodbye." Then she awkwardly turned and left. Bruce followed her after shooting one last stink-eye at Mr. Parker.
Jackie was walking much slower back to the Lamborghini. "Are you alright?" Bruce asked.
She nodded, but kept her head down. "Just a job." Her voice was tight with emotion.
He decided not to press the matter. "Home, then?"
She nodded and rubbed away a few leaked tears from her face. "Yeah. Home."
They drove in silence for a long time. Even the thrill of riding in a Lamborghini wasn't enough to stir Jackie from her despondency. After a few minutes of driving on the freeway, Jackie finally broke down in a series of silent, but body wracking sobs. Bruce had a feeling it had less to do with the humiliation of being fired from a job she loved, but with the fact that none of her coworkers, who she probably thought of as friends, would look her in the eye. Apart from Jenny and Imogen, they were the only people she really talked to. What she told Batman wasn't wrong; she has no friends.
"I'm really sorry, Jackie," Bruce told her when she started to calm down. "I can help you find a new job."
She shook her head. No one would hire her at this point, anyway.
When he dropped her off at Jenny's place, she had dried her tears, put some color back into her cheeks, and had a small smile back. They parted ways with the unspoken agreement to never mention what just happened.
Tex returned to the streets that night. Batman was surprised at how fast she had come back. He spied her standing vigil atop the Prewitt building. He watched her from the roof of the Triad Tower as she scanned the rooftops with a pair of binoculars. Then she put a finger to her left ear as if she was listening to an earpiece, and he frowned.
"She's a fake." Tex's voice broke the silence, distorted by a radio speaker. The voice had come from his left by his feet. Batman poked around the roof for a bit before picking up a small black walkie-talkie from a planter. "On Justice Hall, right behind you, there's another one."
He turned around and found a second Jackie lookalike sitting on the edge of the dome. "Yours?" he radioed back.
"Gordon's. He could only afford the two. I think they're British assassins or something."
He couldn't restrain a chuckle. "He has to at least try to catch me. Where are you?" She didn't answer. "These radios have about a five hundred foot range. I can find you." He started searching the rooftops and nearby windows for the real Tex with a pair of high powered binoculars.
"You shouldn't try. They put an ankle monitor on me."
"My priority is Gordon. I need to know who tried to kill him. What do you know?"
"The sniper goes by Deadshot. He's a mercenary with an obscenely high price and one rule: If you pay him, he will deliver. I've seen his work before; he doesn't miss."
"Except for the Commissioner."
Batman finally caught sight of Tex. She was pacing nervously back and forth in a darkened apartment on the fifteenth floor of a building almost a block away. "You're not listening. He doesn't miss. I've seen him shoot the stem off an apple sitting on a man's head a thousand feet away on the top floor of a building while Deadshot was in the London Eye. And that was on a bet. He hit me directly in the heart. That's one of the only ways I can be killed."
"How does he know that?"
It took her a moment to answer. "It's complicated. So if he was aiming at the Commissioner and he decided to shoot me instead, what does that tell you?"
"That shooting you served the same purpose as shooting Gordon. If he was trying to kill Gordon, he would have. He had two more shots to finish the job, but Gordon wasn't touched. He's trying to draw me out."
"You need to be careful."
"When am I not?"
She looked out the window, but down at the ground instead of towards him. Something she saw disturbed her enough that she abandoned the radio on the windowsill and ran out of the apartment. That was the end of that conversation. On the ground, he noticed a nondescript car had just pulled into the street next to the apartment building, and two people had just gotten out. Judging by their walk and the bulges in their clothes where their guns were holstered, these were undercover cops.
Nothing more could be done in this location. He fired a grappling cable at a building in a direction away from Tex's impostors and took off. Jackie's deliberate distance had sent him a clear message: it's dangerous to work together; go away.
Batman found the sniper's nest across the street from the courthouse. The police had already combed through it carefully, leaving their tape up when they were done. The room had been abandoned long before the sniper ever arrived. It was cleared of any and all accoutrements, and a healthy coating of dust had settled on everything. In the corner was a pile of candy and granola bar wrappers, signs of someone staying in one place for hours on end without leaving. He approached the window from the side and pulled aside the curtains just a bit. The window was still propped open, letting a breeze flow through the ratted cloth. On the street, he saw a small red flag attached to a speed limit sign that acted as a wind gauge. Pulling out a small magnifying lens, he studied the windowsill. There were two grooves in the dust where a sniper rifle's tripod would have been set up. From here, the shooter would have had a distinctly clear line of sight onto the press conference.
From the little he had learned from Jackie, this site felt wrong. Any half-decently trained rifleman would have been able to make the shot. Anyone with a grudge and a reason to shoot a DA, really. On second examination, Batman found the grooves had been scratched into the wood itself. More importantly, there was a thin layer of dust in the exposed wood, too much for a sniper to have set up three days ago. This was the wrong nest.
He left the building and took the spot where Gordon had been standing when Tex took the bullet for him. With his binoculars, he scanned the rooftops for a possible sniper nest. Problem was, the Howell building was taller than the ones behind it for half a mile or so. The only structure high enough to accommodate Deadshot's line of fire was the train lines. The bridge wasn't designed for anyone to be able to climb it without being run off by the train.
The 11:20 train raced across the gap between the buildings, and Batman caught a flash of steel in one of the windows. That would do it for Deadshot. Batman flew into the recesses of the courthouse's ceiling via a grappling cable just as a bullet tore through the fabric next to his shoulder. If he hadn't moved as quickly as he did, he would have a gaping hole in that joint. He took refuge behind the pillars and waited for the lightrail to pass.
The train's next stop would be about a minute and a half away, which gave him a short time to get out of the vicinity. He jumped back down to the street, surprising a couple passing by, found his Batpod hiding the shadows at the side of the building, and took off in the opposite direction of the train. It was bad enough to have the cops renew their interest in tracking him down. Now he had to deal with a supremely competent assassin as well.
"Robbery in progress at Kane Chemicals," Batman caught a woman saying over the police scanner. "All officers in the area, respond. Suspects are considered armed and dangerous. Be aware, Tex is involved."
Kane Chemicals. He was not unfamiliar with the company, his mother having been an heiress to their fortune. If the police were following Tex, she would be putting herself in an unfamiliar fight. Batman turned the Batpod towards the chemical plant.
Three blocks before reaching the building, Batman was forced to take to the air. The police presence was starting to get too thick. Gliding through the forest of buildings was complicated by the fact that the police had brought in a helicopter, but for now, they didn't seem to be after him. Even so, he kept to the shadows and approached the building from the back, landing on an upper level of windows looking down into the plant.
Tex had gotten there several minutes ago and had managed to put herself in the thick of the fight. At least seven masked men were attempting to remove some barrels of chemicals from the plant, but Tex had put her foot down and argued otherwise. Taking down a few armed men should have been easy enough, but after watching her dance around the men, he noticed something was different. Tex's moves were less efficient, and more like something straight from a Jackie Chan movie. She was ducking and weaving around their guns and knives, delivering some sweeping kicks that did little to inconvenience them, missed when she punched their faces, and demonstrating some beautiful albeit unnecessary acrobatics.
Their arena was surrounded by flammable and explosive material, including the specific chemicals they were trying to cart out. Any one bullet would have put them in danger of being burned alive. Already, there was one tank that was slowly leaking, leaving a puddle of some unknown substance all over the ground. One man fired at the ground near Tex, and she stopped the bullet with a bit of a pirouette. The bullet was a tracer, designed for night shooting and allowing the firer to see where the bullets were going. They were little more than small incendiary rounds, but that was all that was needed to set the entire complex alight. At the moment, her priority was keeping the flying bullets from killing them all while occupying the thieves long enough for the police to break in and stop them.
From outside the fight, a woman with long, dark red hair approached the fight with a small crossbow in hand. She was wearing the same green trench coat as she was on the night at the docks. Poison Ivy. Then the Leaves of Three were looking for replacements for the shipment that had been confiscated. Batman jimmied open the lock on the window and leaped into the arena, landing in front of the venomous woman.
For the first time, he was able to get a very clear look at Poison Ivy. She had blood red lips that were set in a determined line and passionate green eyes. To her, this robbery wasn't for fun or sport, but was a job and one she was enthusiastic about. It took a moment, but he recognized her as Pamela Isley, the CEO of Environmental Energy Solutions. This confirmed every suspicion the EPA had about her involvement with terrorist organizations. "Batman," she said with an amused air. "Didn't you learn your lesson from last time?"
Behind him, he heard Tex break a gun and knock someone out. "Curare," he replied. "Poisonous, but treatable."
Her smile faltered, but remained true. "I have plenty more poisons to pick from."
She started to make a circle around him, and he mirrored the motion. "I'm sure you do, Pamela Isley."
For a few moments, she didn't know how to respond. "Well. Aren't you the world's greatest detective."
"Not quite."
"Are you going to beat me up like some sort of thug, now?" Her lower lip drooped in an exaggerated pout. "You wouldn't hit a girl, would you?"
"Would you two quit flirting?" Tex snapped. She stopped with the fancy moves and finally started disabling the men. Out of the corner of his eye, Batman saw that four of the seven men were now in a moaning pile on the ground.
Batman pulled out a length of thin cord about five yards long, with a small weighted knife on the end. He swung it in a couple quick circles, let it fly and caught Poison Ivy's crossbow hand. With a sharp tug, he pulled her well off balance. She stumbled forward, he stepped on the cord to bring her center of gravity down, and then he kicked her in the stomach hard enough for her to have a hard time getting back up. With a booted foot, he knocked Poison Ivy's crossbow far across the floor, then caught one of her men unaware with a backhanded punch when he tried to attack him from behind.
"What were they stealing?" Batman asked Tex as she finished off the last of the men.
"I have no idea, but the skull and crossbones on the sides of the barrels tell me I don't want to know." Tex threw a thief over her shoulder in time to see Poison Ivy say something into her wrist. "Uh oh."
"Just shoot him!" she ordered.
Tex lunged at Batman in time for a bullet to fly by their heads and hit the ground. Her shoulder hit him directly in the ribs, and they landed on the floor more or less intact. While they were scrambling to pick themselves up, the door to the plant was forced open by none other than the SWAT team. To make matters worse, the bullet that struck the ground had been able to light a spark. Batman threw a small device at the quickly growing flames. It landed near the pile of men and exploded in a mass of white fire-suppressing foam. Then he grabbed Tex by the waist and got them out through the windows in the ceiling. Glass shattered as the pulled themselves out of the burning building, either because the police were now firing at them or they had an admirer with a sniper rifle keeping the competition at bay.
Tex slid down the roof while Batman took refuge behind a chimney. "I see Deadshot."
"Where is he?" He peeked around the edge of the chimney only to have a fraction of the stonework get blown away, taking a bit off the bridge of his mask's nose.
"Three buildings directly north of us. He's on top of a flagpole."
"Are you up to making a distraction?"
"He can shoot through smoke," she argued.
"That's not what I was thinking." He looked up to the helicopter that was scanning the Kane Chemicals rooftop.
She followed his gaze and looked between Deadshot and the giant flying mechanical deathtrap. "You come up with the worst plans. Ever. Alright, three batarangs and that fancy rope thing." He handed them over without a word.
Then she swung the rope at the helicopter like a grappling hook, and aimed it at the bar running underneath its body. When it caught hold, she took a running start off the roof and swung across the street. The pilots noticed the weight change and turned their attention to find out who was hijacking their helicopter. A batarang hit their windshield, and they found Tex who was winding up the cord. Once she had collected it, she held up her other two batarangs so the police inside could clearly see what they were. She pointed at them, then at Deadshot. The figure was far enough away that his details couldn't be seen, but he was wearing something like a long coat that looked a bit like a cape. The pilot locked onto him with a searchlight and the helicopter headed off after him. The assassin immediately leaped down and started running across the rooftops in an impressive bit of parkour.
Tex turned to Batman and gave him a thumbs-up. "Good girl," he muttered before taking off with his own grappling cable.