DC – I am Batman

The docks at night were a different city.

Gotham's port ran along the east side of the Narrows for two miles, container yards and loading cranes and warehouses that had been built in the forties and repaired by people who didn't care if the repairs matched. The sodium lights turned everything orange and the water was black and flat and smelled like diesel and salt and whatever the Gotham River deposited on its way to the harbor. He'd been mapping the port for three weeks. Shipping lanes, delivery schedules, which warehouses were active and which were fronts, who owned what through which shell company. Julia's intelligence dossier had given him the financial architecture. The docks gave him the physical layout.

He was on the roof of a cold storage facility, prone, in dark clothes and soft-soled shoes. No suit. No cowl. Just training and a pair of compact binoculars and a notepad where he was sketching the loading patterns of Pier 17, which was a Falcone operation running cocaine through frozen fish shipments. The fish came from a processing plant in Blüdhaven that didn't exist on any commercial registry. The cocaine went to a distribution network in the Narrows that Sofia had mapped for him in a birthday card three years ago, the route hidden inside a description of her aunt's orecchiette recipe.

Pier 17 was supposed to be quiet tonight. The schedule said no deliveries until Thursday.

Pier 17 was not quiet.

He heard the first body hit the ground before he saw it. A wet sound, meat and concrete, and then a man was lying at the base of a shipping container with a crossbow bolt through his right shoulder and his gun skidding across the asphalt. A second man came around the corner of the container and a second bolt took him in the thigh and he went down screaming and the screaming stopped when a boot connected with his jaw.

She came out of the dark between two containers. Fast. Low. Her stance was trained, European, and the crossbow in her hands was a compact tactical model that she reloaded while moving. Dark hair, dark clothes, a jacket that looked like leather and moved like armor. She was small enough that the men didn't take her seriously until she'd already put two of them on the ground.

The third man got his gun up. She closed the distance in three steps and broke his wrist with the stock of the crossbow and he dropped and she kicked the gun into the water. The fourth and fifth came together from behind a truck and she put a bolt into the truck's tire six inches from the fourth man's head and while he flinched she hit the fifth one in the throat with her fist and drove her knee into his stomach when he doubled over.

Six armed men. She'd been moving for maybe a minute and a half.

The sixth man ran. She let him get ten feet and then the crossbow came up and the bolt pinned his jacket to a shipping container and he hung there like a coat on a hook. She walked to him. Said something he couldn't hear. The man's face went white in the sodium light. She pulled the bolt out and he dropped and ran and she watched him go.

She stood in the middle of six groaning men and reloaded the crossbow and her breathing wasn't even elevated. The loading crane overhead creaked in the wind. A gull was sitting on a bollard near the water, watching with the disinterested focus of something that had seen worse.

He should not have moved.

He shifted his weight on the roof to get a better angle on her face and his knee scraped the gravel surface and the sound carried in the quiet after the fight and she looked up.

The crossbow aimed at his roof in under a second. She couldn't see him in the dark but she knew where the sound had come from and her aim was steady and she didn't call out a warning. She just aimed.

He stood up. Slowly. Hands visible.

"Walk away." Her voice carried across the pier. Accented. Italian underneath the English, the consonants harder than American mouths made them.

"I'm not with them."

"I don't care who you're not with." The crossbow didn't move. "Walk."

He walked. Down the fire escape on the far side of the building, across the access road, into the dark between warehouses. He didn't look back because looking back was a way of saying I'll be here again and he wasn't sure she'd take that well.

He went home. Sat in the cave. Pulled up the Falcone file and the Maroni file and the list of Sicilian crime families with Gotham connections and found the name he was looking for.

Bertinelli.

Franco Bertinelli. Gotham-born, Sicilian roots. Head of the Bertinelli crime family until an inter-family war in Sicily resulted in the massacre of the entire Bertinelli household. One survivor. Helena, age six, smuggled out by a family friend. Raised in Sicily. Trained. Returned to Gotham at some point in the last few months, based on the fact that organized crime shipments had been getting hit by someone with a crossbow and a grudge.

Helena Bertinelli. The Huntress.

He closed the file and sat with it. She was faster than he'd expected. More precise. The crossbow work was professional and the hand-to-hand was violent and efficient and she'd left six men alive because she'd chosen to, which meant the restraint was a decision, not a limit. She could have killed all of them. She didn't.

He wasn't sure she'd always make that choice.

The Church of the Holy Redeemer was on Russo Street in Little Italy, three blocks from the waterfront. Small, old, brick with a green copper steeple that had gone the color of seawater. The front steps were cracked and someone had put a potted plant next to the door that had died and nobody had removed it. A handwritten sign in the window said CONFESSION SATURDAYS 4-6 PM in English and Italian.

He found her in the third pew from the front.

The church was empty except for her and the candles. Rows of votives along the side altar, most of them lit, the flames making the shadows move on the walls like breathing. The air smelled like wax and old wood and something floral, maybe incense from that morning's mass. A crucifix hung above the main altar and the painted Christ had a chipped nose and the expression of a man who'd been hanging there long enough to stop minding.

She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap and her head bowed and her knuckles were white. Dark hair loose, past her shoulders. Different from last night. Last night she'd been a weapon. Tonight she was a woman in a church with her hands in a knot and her jaw tight and the candlelight turning her skin warm and her eyes dark and her whole body holding something down.

She was beautiful. It settled somewhere behind his ribs and stayed.

He walked up the center aisle. She heard him at the fourth pew. Her head came up and her body shifted and for a half-second her hand went to her hip where a weapon would be if she'd brought one to church.

He sat down in the pew beside her. Left a foot of space. Looked at the altar.

A minute passed. The candles flickered. Somewhere in the building a pipe creaked.

"You're either brave or stupid." Her voice was quiet. Church-quiet.

"I get that a lot."

She didn't turn. Her hands stayed folded. The white knuckles hadn't loosened.

Another minute. He sat and looked at the crucifix and the chipped nose and listened to the candles burn. That was a thing he hadn't known before tonight, that burning candles had a sound. A small continuous hiss, like someone shushing the dark.

"I don't want a friend."

"I'm not offering."

She turned then. He could see her face in the candlelight. Dark eyes, wide, with circles under them that said she hadn't been sleeping. A jaw that clenched when she wasn't talking. Thin scar along her hairline, left side, healed years ago. He knew how she got it. He knew a lot of things about Helena Bertinelli from files and stories, and the woman in the pew with white knuckles and no sleep wasn't any of them.

"Then what are you doing here?"

"Sitting."

Her mouth pulled to one side. It wasn't a smile. It was the place a smile would be if she had one available.

"You were on the roof last night."

"Yes."

"I could have put a bolt through your eye."

"You could have. You aimed for center mass."

The almost-smile faded. She looked at him. Really looked. Assessed him the same way she'd assessed the pier, tracked the sixth man running.

"Who are you?"

"Bruce Wayne."

"Wayne." She said it like she was tasting it. "Falcone's doctor's son."

"Thomas Wayne saved Carmine Falcone's life, yes." In this city, in this neighborhood, everyone knew whose debts ran where. "I'm not here because of the Falcones."

"Then why are you here?"

"I was in the neighborhood," he said.

She stared at him. The candlelight caught her jaw and the scar on her hairline and the set of her mouth.

"You're a terrible liar."

"So I've been told."

A pause. The candles hissed. The pipe creaked again. Somewhere outside, a car passed with its radio playing, a few seconds of bass that came through the walls and faded.

"The men at the pier," she said. "Falcone's."

"I know."

"They're moving product through the docks. Cocaine. The fish shipments."

"I know that too."

Her eyes narrowed. "You know a lot for a billionaire's son."

"I pay attention."

"Paying attention at the Gotham docks at midnight in dark clothes with binoculars. That's not paying attention. That's something else."

He didn't answer. She waited. He let her wait.

"I'm not going to stop," she said. Her voice hardened. The church-quiet was gone. "The people who killed my family have business in this city. I'm going to find every one of them and I'm going to make sure they can't operate. If you're here to talk me out of it, save your breath."

"I'm not here to talk you out of anything."

"Then what."

"I'm sitting in a church."

She exhaled. Half a laugh, mostly air, and it loosened her hands by one degree. The knuckles went from white to pale and the candles kept burning and the chipped Christ watched from the wall.

"You sat on that roof for three hours last night," she said. "I saw you arrive. I waited to see if you'd follow. You didn't."

Three hours. She'd clocked him arriving and let him watch. Which meant she'd known he was there the whole time. The fight hadn't been for his benefit but she'd been aware of him through every second of it and the crossbow at the end was a test. Not who are you but what will you do.

He'd walked. That was the answer she'd needed.

"I'll be here tomorrow night," she said. She stood up. Looked down at him in the pew. In the candlelight with her hair loose and her jaw set and her dark eyes holding his, she looked like she'd been standing for a long time and hadn't decided whether to sit back down. "If you're going to sit, sit."

She walked out. The church door closed behind her and the candles shifted in the draft and the building settled back into silence.

He sat in the pew for another ten minutes. The votives burned. The pipe creaked.

Tomorrow night. She'd be here. She'd told him to come, which meant the crossbow was down, which meant the door was open exactly one inch, and the smart thing was to walk through it at the speed she'd set and not faster.

He'd done this before. Different woman, different damage. Sit. Wait. Don't chase.

He stood up and walked out of the church and the Gotham night was cold and wet and the dead plant was still on the front steps and he drove home thinking about crossbows and candles and a woman who prayed with white knuckles.