Chapter 3: Pier Eight
You write back to Dez at 4:12 in the morning, sitting cross-legged on the Red Hood's couch in his T-shirt, which hangs to your thighs and smells like gun oil and cheap soap.
Got away. Hood's dead. I need to get off the street. Meet me at the Pier Eight office at six. Come alone. Don't tell anyone.
Jason reads it over your shoulder. He's pulling his armor back on, one strap at a time, wincing when the plate settles over the stitches you put in him. "Hood's dead," he repeats. "Wow. Cold."
"You want me to bring you back to life? I hear you've got experience."
He snorts. It turns into a laugh halfway through, the real one, unguarded and a little hoarse, and he presses his knuckles to his side because laughing hurts. You watch him do it and feel something in your chest come loose that you'll have to deal with later.
The phone buzzes in your hand.
Thank God. I'll be there. Alone.
"He's lying," Jason says.
"I know." You turn the phone face-down on your knee. "I've known Dez for five years. He's never once said 'Thank God' in his life. He doesn't believe in God. He believes in percentages."
"So he's bringing friends."
"He's bringing Black Mask's friends." You stand up. Your arm throbs under its bandage. "Which means at six o'clock, all of Roman Sionis's bad decisions are going to be standing on my pier at the same time. Along with however much of his poison is sitting in my warehouse waiting to ship."
Jason is quiet, watching you. Then he picks up the red helmet from the workbench and turns it over in his hands.
"You understand," he says, "that if we do this, it's not your way or my way. It's ours. I go where you tell me on your docks, you let me do what I do."
"Within limits."
"Within limits." He looks at you. "Name 'em."
"Nobody dies on my pier who doesn't draw first," you say. "And Dez is mine."
He holds your eyes for a long moment. Then he nods, once, and puts the helmet on, and the face that kissed you an hour ago disappears behind smooth red nothing.
"Get dressed, Harbormaster," says the Red Hood. "We've got a date."
The Pier Eight office sits at the top of a corrugated steel warehouse at the end of the waterfront, three flights up a metal staircase, with windows on all four sides. You bought it for the windows. From the office you can see the whole harbor: every crane, every container stack, the dark line of the Sprang River feeding into the bay, and on the far shore the lights of Bristol coming on and going off as Gotham's rich people wake up in their real houses.
At 5:58 a black SUV rolls down the pier with its headlights off. Then another. Then a third.
You're behind your desk with the lamp on so he'll see you from below. You've changed into dry clothes from the closet you keep here, black slacks and a black sweater, and the coat over your chair is a spare. Under the desk, in your lap, is the revolver your mother left you, the one you've fired exactly twice.
Jason is somewhere in the dark. You don't know where. That's the point.
The SUVs park in a loose ring at the foot of the stairs. Men get out. Eight, ten, a dozen. They're wearing the cheap black masks Sionis likes his people in, the ones that look like they were bought in bulk. From the middle SUV, last, steps a man in a white suit with a polished black skull where his face should be.
He came himself. Roman Sionis came to see you die in person. You're almost flattered.
The metal stairs ring. One set of footsteps. Dez comes through the door with his hands open and his face arranged into worry, and he looks so exactly like he's looked every morning for five years that for a second, against all sense, you want it to be true.
"Boss," he says. "Thank God. Are you hurt? What happened to Hood?"
"Hello, Dez."
"We need to go. Sionis's people are crawling all over the waterfront, I've got a car..."
"I saw your car. I saw all three of them." You tip your head toward the window. "And I see Roman standing on my pier in a white suit, which I'd say is a choice, before Memorial Day."
Dez stops.
You watch it happen. The worry slides off his face like oil off water, and what's underneath is calm and tired and almost bored, and that's the worst part. He doesn't even look ashamed.
"Five years," you say. "Why?"
"Because you're small." He says it simply, the way he'd read you a shipping manifest. "You could own this whole city. You know where every dollar in Gotham goes. And what do you do? Card rooms. Cigarettes. Rules. No poison, no people. Sionis offered me the waterfront. All of it. No rules."
"And all you had to do was put me in the right chair."
"I told him to wait till Hood left. I didn't want you to suffer." He shrugs. "Your boyfriend jumped too fast."
"He's not my boyfriend," you say. "Yet."
Then you bring the revolver up from under the desk, and Dez's hand goes inside his jacket, and every light on Pier Eight goes out at once.
It takes about ninety seconds.
You'll remember it in pieces. Dez freezing in the dark with his gun half out. The sound from below, a sharp crack and then a man screaming, then two, then the flat, fast double-tap of someone who has done this many, many times. Muzzle flashes on the pier like a string of firecrackers. A red helmet appearing on top of a shipping container in the glare of someone's headlights and then vanishing.
Dez lunges for the door. You're faster. You come around the desk and bring the butt of your mother's revolver down on the back of his gun hand, on the desk, hard, and you hear the bones go, and he screams.
"I've broken men's hands for less," you remind him.
Down on the pier, the shooting stops. There's a long silence. Then the sound of boots on the stairs, slow and heavy, and the door swings open and the Red Hood steps through it, dragging Roman Sionis by the back of his white suit collar. The black skull mask is cracked down the middle. One of Sionis's shoes is missing.
"Delivery," says Jason.
"Is anyone dead?"
"Nobody who didn't draw first." He throws Sionis down beside Dez, who's curled over his ruined hand on the floor. "And nobody at all, actually, but don't tell anyone. Bad for the brand." He turns the helmet toward you. "Warehouse B is full of his poison. Couple hundred kilos."
"I want it gone."
"Already on it. There's a lot of gasoline on this pier. You might want to call your insurance guy."
"I don't have an insurance guy. I have Oswald."
You look down at Dez. He looks up at you, gray-faced, sweating, and for the first time in five years he looks afraid of you.
"Here's what's going to happen," you tell him. "You're going to sit on the floor of my office with your friend Roman until the GCPD gets here. Jim Gordon's people, not the ones you paid off. You're going to have a confession in your pocket and the books for every shipment you ran through my pier in your other pocket. And when you get out, Dez, if you ever get out, I want you to remember that I let you live because I'm small."
Behind the helmet, Jason makes a sound that might be a laugh.
At seven the sun comes up over the harbor, and Warehouse B is still burning.
You watch it from the office with the lights off. The fire's mostly down to a red glow now, rolling black smoke out across the water toward Bristol. Sirens are coming, a long way off, taking their time. Gordon's people zip-tied Dez and Sionis together and drove away with them twenty minutes ago, and the detective in charge looked at the burning warehouse, then at you, and then wisely said nothing.
Jason is sitting on your desk. He's taken the helmet off. It's on the blotter beside him with a fresh scrape down one side. He's got soot on his face and his hair's wrecked and the white streak is gray with ash.
"So," he says. "The docks."
"The docks."
"I came here to take them off you."
"I recall."
"You still want me to get out of Oswald's lounge and go back to my little Alley?"
You turn from the window. "Is that what you want?"
He looks at you for a long moment. Then he holds out his hand, scarred and bruised and black with soot. "I don't want your territory," he says. "I want in. Your docks, my Alley. Same rules. No poison, no people. You keep the books. I keep the peace."
"Partners."
"Partners." His mouth tilts. "Unless you've got a better word for it."
You walk over and stand between his knees, the way you did last night with a needle in your hand. You take his face in your hands instead.
"I've got a few," you say, and kiss him.
It's slower this time. There's no blood and no gunfire, just the early light coming gold through every window and the smell of smoke and the warmth of him. He kisses you like he's got all the time in the world, his hands coming up under your sweater, palms flat and warm against your back, and you feel him smile against your mouth when you shiver.
"Office," he murmurs. "Windows on four sides."
"It's seven in the morning. Nobody's looking."
"Batman's always looking."
"Then he can learn something," you say, and pull his armor open strap by strap.
He lifts you onto the desk. The helmet goes rolling. Your ledger hits the floor. He undresses you like he's unwrapping something he was told he couldn't have, kissing each new inch of skin, your collarbone, the bandage on your arm, your stomach, the inside of your knee. When you reach for his belt he catches your hand and kisses your palm, and says, "Tell me what you want," and this time it isn't a question about permission. It's a promise.
"You," you say. "Just you. Now."
He gives you exactly that. He comes into you slowly, standing between your knees with the desk at the right height and the whole burning harbor at his back, and you hold onto his shoulders and watch his face change. It isn't the Red Hood's face. It isn't the man who walked into the Iceberg Lounge like the floor owed him money. It's younger and more open than that, wrecked and grateful and astonished, like he can't quite believe he's allowed. You wrap your legs around him and pull him closer, deeper, and he drops his forehead to yours and says your name, and you've never heard anyone say it like that.
You move together, slow and then not slow, the desk creaking, the morning light sliding across his shoulders. He holds you like you're something worth guarding. When you come apart it's with your face pressed into his neck and his arms locked around you, and he follows with a groan that shakes through both of you. For a long time afterward neither of you moves. You just breathe, sweaty and sooty and tangled together on top of your ruined paperwork, while the sun comes all the way up.
"Partners," you say into his shoulder, eventually.
"Mm."
"I'm keeping the corner office."
"You can have the corner office." He kisses your temple. "I'm keeping the lounge tab."
You laugh and lift your head, and that's when you see it over his shoulder, through the east window: on top of the tallest crane on the waterfront, black against the pink sky, a silhouette with a cape stirring in the wind off the bay. Pointed ears. Perfectly still. Looking right at you.
"Jason," you say. "Your dad's here."
Jason Todd doesn't turn around. He just raises one hand over his shoulder, middle finger extended, toward the crane, and keeps his other arm around you.
"Not my dad," he says. "And he can wait."
On the crane, after a long moment, the silhouette turns and is gone. You look back down at the man on your desk, soot on his face and your lipstick on his jaw, grinning up at you like the whole city is his.
Let him think so. You keep the books.