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[h3]Dutch Hill[/h3]


Tim Drake got out of his car and surveyed the area. It was a fairly quiet, working class neighborhood. The further east Dutch Hill ran the suburbs yards faded into row houses and inner city Gotham, but this neighborhood was about four blocks away from the change. Tim saw yards well kept, dogs in some of them, and houses that were maintained with pride by their owners but in desperate need of remodel. Gentrification was only a matter of time, but for now it stood as a bastion of blue collar Gotham that was rapidly becoming a distant memory.

He was looking for the 1200 block of Williamson Road, a little side street that ran parallel to the main avenue of Kemper Street. Two weeks ago GCPD made a routine traffic stop on Antonio Boggs and found a substantial amount of cocaine on his person, enough to arrest Boggs for felony possession with intent to distribute. Boggs retained the services of Pennyworth & Fox for his criminal defense, and Al threw him the case. An easy enough task for an investigator still wet behind the ears. 

Tim checked the PDF of the arrest report on his phone as he walked down the sidewalk towards Williamson. Sergeant Mike Malone of the Western District initiated the stop, made the arrest, and later wrote out the report Tim was reading. From soup to nuts, Sergeant Malone was the lynchpin of the entire case.

The map on the incident report showed Tim where the stop had occurred, just quiet of the part of the street. He looked around for any cameras on light poles or in backyards. The advent of the wireless doorbell cameras made the job a lot easier some times, some times. You still had to deal with getting the footage from greedy homeowners looking for a cut. It seemed that headache would be avoided this time.

According to the report, Malone observed Boggs’ car doing a rolling stop at a four-way intersection on Williamson. That gave Malone the probable cause he needed to initiate a traffic stop and find the drugs. Tim took pictures of the street with his phone. There was a four-way stop about 200 yards from where the traffic stop occurred, but he couldn’t see a good vantage point to where Malone had been sitting. He walked up the street towards the stop. No good spots to park for a cop cruiser, but he did see a convenience store on Kemper that might have a view. He took more shots of the intersection before trudging over to the convenience store.

“Good morning, my friend,” the man behind the counter said as Tim entered.

The place seemed to be empty. This time of the morning most working people’s days were well underway. There would be a lunchtime rush and then another at five, but for the most part Tim imagined the place just had customers dribbling in one at a time. 

“Morning,” Time said. He reached into his pocket and quickly flashed his credentials. “My name is Tim Drake and I’m an investigator.”

He always found the key was to carry yourself with the air of a cop, but never outright say you were. His ID card did in fact identify him as a state license private investigator, and he hoped his use of the word in an introduction wouldn’t lead to follow up questions.

“Who is the owner here?” he asked.

“It’s me,” said the man.

Tim should have guessed. He was a middle aged Asian man wearing a white button up with top button undone, dark dress pants, and a nice gold watch on his wrist. He didn’t exactly look like he was working for minimum wage.

“I have a few questions for you.”

Tim got out a leather bound notebook and a pen. The good thing about most immigrant business owners was that they were the law and order types, especially in borderline neighborhoods like this one. After asking his name and other biographical details he got to the heart of the matter.

“You ever have a cop frequent this place?”

“Yes,” he said with a smile. “Sergeant Mike. He’s here almost practically every day, he’s one of the good ones. Doesn’t ask for free stuff, always pays full price, and always likes to talk.”

“He ever sit out in the parking lot?”

“All the time,” the owner nodded. “And I love it. Bunch of punk kids live around here, they see Sergeant Mike and they know not to fuck with me.”

Tim kept his head down as he wrote in his notebook. “He ever pull anybody over while sitting in your lot?”

“A couple of time. The people around here, they speed up and down this street. No sense of safety.”

Tim nodded and kept scribbling.

“When was the last time he did that?”

“A couple of weeks ago,” said the man. “Why?”

“Just curious,” Tim said as he looked up. “Thank you for your time.”

“Who did you say you were with?” the man asked with a furrowed brow. “You police?”

“Thank you for your time,” Tim said as he walked out the store. 

From the front of the store, Williamson could be seen, but the four-way stop was a little further up the road. Boggs may have done a rolling stop, but from his vantage point Malone couldn’t have seen it. What he would have seen was a blacked out car with music blasting out of it and he made an assumption, invented probable cause. Profiling, in other words.

Tim took a few more pictures of the street from the front of the store and headed back to his car. It wasn’t much, but in the hands of Big Al Pennyworth it would be enough. They’d go to trial, subpoena the convenience store owner, and destroy Malone’s credibility on the stand. All it took for a Gotham City jury to hear was that a GCPD officer [i]may [/i]have lied in the course of the investigation. Al would play it up from there. If Sergeant Malone had lied about the probable cause, maybe he was lying about the drugs he found on Boggs? Enough doubt to get Boggs out of jail and back on the street.

Because the fact of the matter was Boggs was a drug dealer, the cocaine Malone found on him was in fact meant to be sold. But Boggs was a Wayne Family dealer, and as such he was under the legal protection of Pennyworth & Fox. Tim knew firsthand that the Waynes always stood by their people. He and his dad were proof.

He was on the way back to his car when his phone buzzed. Not the actual phone he used for personal or work related things, but the second phone only a select few people had the number to.

[i][b]BW[/b]
Meet me at the tower tonight.[/i]

He slipped the phone back into his pocket and got into his car. The big man was calling. They probably hadn’t seen each other face to face in a a lone time, but that’s how it worked. That’s how [i]he[/i] worked. If it required face to face then it was a big deal. Tim texted Karmen and let her know they’d have to reschedule for another night, she could always pick up another shift at the Peppermint Rhino. 

Back when Tim was a kid and his old man was out on the street hustling for nickels and dimes, he had always had a dream that he wanted to be a somebody. The night his old man stood tall for the Waynes, Bruce had promised Tim the chance to be that somebody. Jack Drake had sacrificed his life, but it wasn’t in vain. And now here was Tim, a nice well paying job doing something he loved and the freedom to be his own man and the chance to sleep with beautiful women. 

“Living the dream,” he said softly to himself. “I made it, pop.”


[hr]



Barbara Gordon opened her eyes. The sound of her phone vibrating on the nightstand was nearby. She sat up and groaned. The clock on the nightstand said it was almost 11 in the morning, the sunlight peaking through the curtains doubled down on the time. She leaned over and squinted at the screen of her phone.


[b]INCOMING CALL:
BULLOCK[/b]


The hell was Bullock calling for? He knew she worked third shift last night. She had just gotten to sleep a few hours ago. Barbara fumbled for her glasses and put them on. She heard a groan over her shoulder and looked back.

“Tell them to call back,” Dick Grayson mumbled. 

She scowled back at him before slipping out under the covers and grabbing her phone.

“I didn’t wake you did I, sweetheart?” came Bullock’s gruff voice. 

“Yeah, you did in fact.”

“Too bad. I’m on my way to your place. Think we may have a break on the Crutchfield Street killings.”

Barbara cursed under her breath and looked back at the bed. Dick was half asleep, the sheet covering his naked body. The last thing she needed was for Bullock to find him here like this.

“How far away are you?” she asked. “I need to get ready.”

She heard a knock on the front door.

“That answer your question? I been trying to call you for an hour now.”

“I’ll be right there.”

She hung up and started to shake the bed.

“Dick,” she hissed. “Wake up, my partner is outside.”

It surprised Barbara how quickly he moved at that point. He seemed to spring out of the bed and start dressing himself. Within seconds he had his jeans and t-shirt on.

“Do you think he knows?” he asked.

“Bullock is a great detective when he’s on the job, but outside work? He’s a mess, no way. This is something else”

There was another thump at the door.

“C’mon, Babs, I don’t care if you’re in your pj’s.”

Barbara turned towards the door.

“Give me a minute, Harvey!”

When she turned back, Dick was gone. The window to her fire escape was open and she heard the sound of rattling metal. Good, she thought, the last thing Harvey needed to find was Bruce Wayne’s adopted son warming her bed.


[hr]


“This was worth waking me up for?” Barbara asked as she looked at the grainy security footage. Bullock was sitting on her couch, drinking a cup of coffee while Barbara watched the footage from Bullock’s phone, her robe covering her pajamas. 

“Keep watching,” Bullock grunted.

On the phone events from four months prior played out like it had a thousand times before. But, she noticed, this was a new angle. 

Crutchfield Street in the Bowery had a reputation. It was firmly in the red light district and known for its wide variety of carnal pleasure for sale. Usually the red light district was violence free. They knew it drew the attention of the cops, and cops were bad for business. But that truce had been broken during the height of the summer. A pimp and his two goons had been killed approaching the brothel they ran. All three men had been stabbed to death with surgical precision. Barbara and Bullock inherited the case from the uniforms of the southeastern district. They’d identified the three men as Eastern European, members of the Chechen’s crime organization.

After that, the trail went cold. No eyewitnesses were willing to speak to cops, and the few surveillance cameras they found showed footage that was grainy and out of focus. But now? The footage Barbara watched was pretty clear and pretty close. She could clearly make out the name of the brothel where the men had been killed out front: Alexi’s Tea Room.
“How did you get this?” she asked Harvey.

“It took a little convincing and a little bribing,” he said. “But the whorehouse across the street from our scene did in fact have a security camera, despite what they told us. It was hidden in the tits of that naked statue out front.” 

He cleared his throat and looked away from Barbara.

“Don’t… ask more about what I had to do to get it, just watch.”

She smirked and turned back to the footage. It showed a black sedan pull up to the Tea Room. Three serious slavic looking men in suits climbed out the car. The two larger ones flanked a smaller man with a shaved head and a neck full of gold chains. 

Before the could head inside, a figure landed on the roof of the car and struck out quickly. They jumped down with the car blocking them off from the camera. Movement from the other side of the car was fast and furious, the figure knocking all three men to the ground before they could defend themselves. Barbara saw blood running on the pavement under the car and pooling on the street. 

Her eyes widened as the figure jumped back on top of the car. She tapped her finger on the screen to freeze the footage. Crouched on the top of the car, frozen mid-jump, was a man dressed in black body armor. In both hands were some sort of club with what looked to be a razor’s edge. A mask hid his face and on his chest was a bird. The footage was black and white, but she knew the bird would be red.

“Deathwing,” she said softly.

“If that’s what that jerkoff’s name is,” said Bullock. “He’s one of the Bat’s goons, that’s all I know. This was a Wayne hit, Babs.”

She cursed softly and looked towards her bed. The window to the fire escape was still cracked open. If she didn’t know any better, she could have sworn she saw the fire escape sway with movement again.