Theme 95: Veteran
Title: Casting Call
Universe: General
Genre: Drama
Characters: The Redshirts of Gotham city, officers of the GCPD
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,903
Summary: Just how do you recruit volunteers for a big show in Gotham?
***
Casting Call
To Officer Gibbs, barely out of his teens and only a few weeks into active duty with the GCPD, the call had brought an exhilarating rush of apprehension and excitement.
“If it’s a kidnapping then the FBI could be involved, right?” He asked, a touch of nervousness entering his voice as he checked and re-checked the address on the call log. “We could actually end up working as part of a major task force?”
From the driver’s seat his partner grunted with ill-disguised scorn at the mention of the FBI. To a 20-year veteran of the GCPD, the prospect of such inter-agency cooperation was significantly less of a thrill.
“If we did then guess who would be hosting the press conferences and who would be spending eight hours sieving garbage or freezin’ their asses off standing guard outside an apartment block in the Narrows all night?”
Gibbs just gave him a wan smile in return and checked the address again.
“Anyway, kid,” Officer Irvine continued, sweeping the car around a corner and heading deeper into the Narrows district, “I don’t want to piss on your parade but it’s only an initial check of a missing child report and 95% of the time the rug-rat is just really good at playing hide and taking a nap in a closet, maybe they snuck out to see a friend and didn’t tell anyone or Mommy was having one of her Vicodin-induced afternoon naps and junior decides that shoplifting at the mall is more fun than daytime TV.”
This did little to dampen-down the half-terrified, half-thrilled adrenaline rush of a rookie on what looked like it could be his first real call to a proper genuine crime - not just another junkie lifting pork chops from the Pay-N-Save or a drunken brawl at ten in the morning outside a school. It might not be one of the really exciting costumed-lunatic crimes he’d been watching on the news since he was a kid, but it was still hopefully a start of some actual crime fighting.
“Yeah, okay then,” he asked his older partner, “but what about the other 5%? They’re the juicy ones, right?”
“Define juicy. A mix of runaways, disgruntled ex’s who don’t return the kid on the dot after unsupervised contact, a few accidents where the kid turns up at the emergency room but Mom hasn’t been called yet. Maybe one in a hundred times it’s something more sinister.”
Gibbs had his heart set on sinister. He checked the address once more, and as Irvine pulled the cruiser up to the kerb he realised they were there already.
The apartment listed in the call log was two floors above a grimy-looking laundrette; the humid stairwell streaked with mould and vibrating slightly from the industrial driers churning away at street level. Gibbs reluctantly crossed a financially-motivated kidnapping from his mental list of potential crimes - the Narrows had pockets of narcotics or gun-smuggling generated wealth but no-one with any degree of disposable cash would choose to live in a dump like this.
His partner knocked on the door of apartment 7B while Gibbs fumbled for his notebook, determined to take thorough notes of the initial contact with the complainant - potentially victim, witness or even suspect. A dishevelled-looking blonde woman wearing a ratty grey housecoat opened the door until it caught on a security chain.
“Is it Ms McLead?” Irvine asked. “We’re with the GCPD, ma’am, and we received a report of a missing child from this address.”
The door was slammed shut suddenly, causing Gibbs a moment of baffled surprise before a rattle of unfastened security chain allowed it to swing open fully. The tear-stained occupant - seemingly Ms McLead - immediately hustled both the officers inside.
“Thank God - I’ve been callin’ and callin’ and they just said they’d send someone but it’s seemed like hours…” the woman choked out through heavy sobs, closing the door behind them and re-fastening the chain. “My baby’s gone and no-one’s been doing anything, he could be halfway across the country or dead in a gutter…”
Despite the distraction of a sobbing woman pouring her heart out to them, Gibbs saw his partner checking out the surroundings and resolved to do the same - not that there was much to see. To him it looked like a typical cheap rented apartment in one of the less salubrious parts of town - second hand furniture probably picked up from the kerb, a fuzzy rabbit-ear TV tuned to a noisy gameshow, few personal possessions and nothing much that showed a kid lived there.
The woman was clearly distraught, ringing her hands together as she paced across the room and with what looked like half a stick of mascara smeared in teary rivulets down her face.
“He’s only 8 years old,” she sobbed, voice cracking. “I just let him go to the store by himself for the first time…”
“Ms McLead,” Irvine interrupted, beckoning her to sit down on the sorry-looking sofa next to him. “Why don’t you come and sit down for a moment and let’s just start at the beginning. You said your boy was missing - what’s his name?”
“Jimmy,” she said softly, perching on the edge of the cushion and taking a deep, shuddering breath.
“And when did you last see him?” Irvine shot Gibbs a sharp look, reminding him to write everything down as it was said. He perched on a rickety looking chair just across the room and started writing.
“I don’t know - 4 or 5? It might have been later, I was taking a nap. We were out of juice,” she wavered and looked like she was starting to well-up again, “I said he could take $10 from my purse and go to the store two blocks away by himself to pick some up, I never should have let him - I should have been there…”
Gibbs squiggled a question mark next to the nap comment - she might work nights or have insomnia, but his partner’s favourite narcotics nap theory was another likely contender. Irvine had told him several times to always check out the eyes - often an addict could hide the physical signs of their habit under bulky clothes or clamp down on tics and twitches, but the eyes would give them away. Glancing up between notes, Gibbs thought this woman’s eyes mostly gave away an unfortunate mascara obsession. She looked pretty hyper, but if your kid was missing then who wouldn’t be stressed out?
“It’s just after 7pm now, Ms McLead,” his partner continued. “Do you think that Jimmy might have met some friends and gone with them to the park, maybe lost track of time?”
The woman shook her head vehemently. “He’d never do that - he’s missing his Little League practice, and Timmy lives for baseball. He’d never skip a practice unless he was really sick.”
She knelt down next to the sofa briefly and picked up a painted red-and-white striped baseball bat that Gibbs assumed belonged to the missing boy; maybe a souvenir from a minor league team in a hometown. She was stroking it gently and looked to be about to start sobbing again.
“Where is that practice held, ma’am? We can radio in for a car to be sent over and have someone check if he’s there now - in case he ran into someone he knew who gave him a lift or headed there by himself for some reason.”
“It’s down at Robinson Park - the juniors group, they meet twice a week...”
“Excuse me, Ms McLead?” Gibbs interrupted, suddenly struck by something she’d said and flipping back a page in his notes. “Sorry but what was your son’s name again?”
“It’s Jimmy, I said that already,” she replied with a touch of anger in her voice, brushing at her eyes with the back of a hand and smearing more makeup across her face. “Weren’t you listening?”
Irvine was giving him another one of those looks - this one easy to decipher as 'keep up, rookie'.
“I’m sorry,” Gibbs said, turning the page back down with a frown of embarrassed confusion. “It’s just I thought you called him Timmy a moment ago - sorry, please carry on.”
“I apologise for Officer Gibbs, ma’am…” Irvine was saying, but to his surprise the woman gave a hoot of laughter and slapped a hand to her forehead in disbelief.
“Crud buckets! I did, didn’t I? That’s what comes from not rehearsin’ things properly. Oh well, we got half-way and I’m happy just cuttin’ straight to the finish.”
The woman sprung to her feet, suddenly looking distinctly less like a grieving mother and more like a lunatic with a baseball bat. Irvine had taken a step or two back and looked to be reaching for his weapon, but the bat was swinging through the air and there was a dull thunk, Gibbs watching in horror as his partner collapsed bonelessly to the carpet.
“But… wait…” he stuttered, never feeling less like an officer of the law as he found himself standing and backing into a corner of the room.
“Don’t worry kid,” the woman advanced towards him with the bat resting on her shoulder, “this ain’t the bit you need to worry about - the show hasn’t even started yet. It’s just a quick bump to the noggin then nighty night, junior!” she giggled in a strangely sing-song way, grinning now as she swung the bat in a blur that rushed towards his face all too quickly to duck away from.
The thought that dominated his mind before it went black was that he’d expected the sound of a baseball bat hitting your skull to be louder.
*
Harley Quinn shed the drab housecoat - she wasn’t wearing that ratty old thing a second longer than necessary - and wiped some of the excess mascara from her face. She could now pass successfully for any vivacious young woman who might be loitering around the Narrows wearing hotpants and a midriff-baring shirt; questions might be asked but not of the sort that got passed onto more cops if they came sniffing around later.
She tucked her favourite candy-cane-striped baseball bat under one arm and sighed happily at a successful afternoon’s work. As requested: two little piggies ready to be hog-tied and taken back to the warehouse for Mistah J’s latest Bat-brain-baiting plan. Sure the backstory of her little gig could have been worked though better, but she liked to ad-lib now and then (when Mistah J wasn’t around to get mad at her straying from his scripts) and most importantly she still got the goods.
When it came to looking for law enforcement volunteers to shed a few pints of blood and some of the more vital internal organs for one of his schemes, Mistah J loved a baby-faced rookie. But he also had a soft spot for the grizzled only-three-days-away-from-retirement veteran types. He loved to chuckle about the “retirony” as they gasped their last, picturing those stolen peaceful years they’d planned to enjoy with the wife and kids down in the Florida Keys... This time it looked like her numbers had come up and she’d scored a perfect two-for-one deal!
“You boys have bought me some brownie points!” she beamed, blowing their unconscious forms a kiss as she began dragging the smaller one out of the apartment and down towards an inconspicuous waiting laundry van. “Here’s hopin’ Mistah J’s in the mood to say thank you the naughty way…”
Fin
***
End note: Hey hey, I was a little more organised this week and managed to write something in good time! *preens*
Second End note: Harley's spiffy bat is a shout-out to my current time-sucking obsession with Arkham City. It's perfect for smacking Batman or poor sucker cops in the face! (well a big ol' sledgehammer/mallet is cool but it just isn't always practical for a lady to carry about her person, is it...)
Universe: General
Genre: Drama
Characters: The Redshirts of Gotham city, officers of the GCPD
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,903
Summary: Just how do you recruit volunteers for a big show in Gotham?
***
Casting Call
To Officer Gibbs, barely out of his teens and only a few weeks into active duty with the GCPD, the call had brought an exhilarating rush of apprehension and excitement.
“If it’s a kidnapping then the FBI could be involved, right?” He asked, a touch of nervousness entering his voice as he checked and re-checked the address on the call log. “We could actually end up working as part of a major task force?”
From the driver’s seat his partner grunted with ill-disguised scorn at the mention of the FBI. To a 20-year veteran of the GCPD, the prospect of such inter-agency cooperation was significantly less of a thrill.
“If we did then guess who would be hosting the press conferences and who would be spending eight hours sieving garbage or freezin’ their asses off standing guard outside an apartment block in the Narrows all night?”
Gibbs just gave him a wan smile in return and checked the address again.
“Anyway, kid,” Officer Irvine continued, sweeping the car around a corner and heading deeper into the Narrows district, “I don’t want to piss on your parade but it’s only an initial check of a missing child report and 95% of the time the rug-rat is just really good at playing hide and taking a nap in a closet, maybe they snuck out to see a friend and didn’t tell anyone or Mommy was having one of her Vicodin-induced afternoon naps and junior decides that shoplifting at the mall is more fun than daytime TV.”
This did little to dampen-down the half-terrified, half-thrilled adrenaline rush of a rookie on what looked like it could be his first real call to a proper genuine crime - not just another junkie lifting pork chops from the Pay-N-Save or a drunken brawl at ten in the morning outside a school. It might not be one of the really exciting costumed-lunatic crimes he’d been watching on the news since he was a kid, but it was still hopefully a start of some actual crime fighting.
“Yeah, okay then,” he asked his older partner, “but what about the other 5%? They’re the juicy ones, right?”
“Define juicy. A mix of runaways, disgruntled ex’s who don’t return the kid on the dot after unsupervised contact, a few accidents where the kid turns up at the emergency room but Mom hasn’t been called yet. Maybe one in a hundred times it’s something more sinister.”
Gibbs had his heart set on sinister. He checked the address once more, and as Irvine pulled the cruiser up to the kerb he realised they were there already.
The apartment listed in the call log was two floors above a grimy-looking laundrette; the humid stairwell streaked with mould and vibrating slightly from the industrial driers churning away at street level. Gibbs reluctantly crossed a financially-motivated kidnapping from his mental list of potential crimes - the Narrows had pockets of narcotics or gun-smuggling generated wealth but no-one with any degree of disposable cash would choose to live in a dump like this.
His partner knocked on the door of apartment 7B while Gibbs fumbled for his notebook, determined to take thorough notes of the initial contact with the complainant - potentially victim, witness or even suspect. A dishevelled-looking blonde woman wearing a ratty grey housecoat opened the door until it caught on a security chain.
“Is it Ms McLead?” Irvine asked. “We’re with the GCPD, ma’am, and we received a report of a missing child from this address.”
The door was slammed shut suddenly, causing Gibbs a moment of baffled surprise before a rattle of unfastened security chain allowed it to swing open fully. The tear-stained occupant - seemingly Ms McLead - immediately hustled both the officers inside.
“Thank God - I’ve been callin’ and callin’ and they just said they’d send someone but it’s seemed like hours…” the woman choked out through heavy sobs, closing the door behind them and re-fastening the chain. “My baby’s gone and no-one’s been doing anything, he could be halfway across the country or dead in a gutter…”
Despite the distraction of a sobbing woman pouring her heart out to them, Gibbs saw his partner checking out the surroundings and resolved to do the same - not that there was much to see. To him it looked like a typical cheap rented apartment in one of the less salubrious parts of town - second hand furniture probably picked up from the kerb, a fuzzy rabbit-ear TV tuned to a noisy gameshow, few personal possessions and nothing much that showed a kid lived there.
The woman was clearly distraught, ringing her hands together as she paced across the room and with what looked like half a stick of mascara smeared in teary rivulets down her face.
“He’s only 8 years old,” she sobbed, voice cracking. “I just let him go to the store by himself for the first time…”
“Ms McLead,” Irvine interrupted, beckoning her to sit down on the sorry-looking sofa next to him. “Why don’t you come and sit down for a moment and let’s just start at the beginning. You said your boy was missing - what’s his name?”
“Jimmy,” she said softly, perching on the edge of the cushion and taking a deep, shuddering breath.
“And when did you last see him?” Irvine shot Gibbs a sharp look, reminding him to write everything down as it was said. He perched on a rickety looking chair just across the room and started writing.
“I don’t know - 4 or 5? It might have been later, I was taking a nap. We were out of juice,” she wavered and looked like she was starting to well-up again, “I said he could take $10 from my purse and go to the store two blocks away by himself to pick some up, I never should have let him - I should have been there…”
Gibbs squiggled a question mark next to the nap comment - she might work nights or have insomnia, but his partner’s favourite narcotics nap theory was another likely contender. Irvine had told him several times to always check out the eyes - often an addict could hide the physical signs of their habit under bulky clothes or clamp down on tics and twitches, but the eyes would give them away. Glancing up between notes, Gibbs thought this woman’s eyes mostly gave away an unfortunate mascara obsession. She looked pretty hyper, but if your kid was missing then who wouldn’t be stressed out?
“It’s just after 7pm now, Ms McLead,” his partner continued. “Do you think that Jimmy might have met some friends and gone with them to the park, maybe lost track of time?”
The woman shook her head vehemently. “He’d never do that - he’s missing his Little League practice, and Timmy lives for baseball. He’d never skip a practice unless he was really sick.”
She knelt down next to the sofa briefly and picked up a painted red-and-white striped baseball bat that Gibbs assumed belonged to the missing boy; maybe a souvenir from a minor league team in a hometown. She was stroking it gently and looked to be about to start sobbing again.
“Where is that practice held, ma’am? We can radio in for a car to be sent over and have someone check if he’s there now - in case he ran into someone he knew who gave him a lift or headed there by himself for some reason.”
“It’s down at Robinson Park - the juniors group, they meet twice a week...”
“Excuse me, Ms McLead?” Gibbs interrupted, suddenly struck by something she’d said and flipping back a page in his notes. “Sorry but what was your son’s name again?”
“It’s Jimmy, I said that already,” she replied with a touch of anger in her voice, brushing at her eyes with the back of a hand and smearing more makeup across her face. “Weren’t you listening?”
Irvine was giving him another one of those looks - this one easy to decipher as 'keep up, rookie'.
“I’m sorry,” Gibbs said, turning the page back down with a frown of embarrassed confusion. “It’s just I thought you called him Timmy a moment ago - sorry, please carry on.”
“I apologise for Officer Gibbs, ma’am…” Irvine was saying, but to his surprise the woman gave a hoot of laughter and slapped a hand to her forehead in disbelief.
“Crud buckets! I did, didn’t I? That’s what comes from not rehearsin’ things properly. Oh well, we got half-way and I’m happy just cuttin’ straight to the finish.”
The woman sprung to her feet, suddenly looking distinctly less like a grieving mother and more like a lunatic with a baseball bat. Irvine had taken a step or two back and looked to be reaching for his weapon, but the bat was swinging through the air and there was a dull thunk, Gibbs watching in horror as his partner collapsed bonelessly to the carpet.
“But… wait…” he stuttered, never feeling less like an officer of the law as he found himself standing and backing into a corner of the room.
“Don’t worry kid,” the woman advanced towards him with the bat resting on her shoulder, “this ain’t the bit you need to worry about - the show hasn’t even started yet. It’s just a quick bump to the noggin then nighty night, junior!” she giggled in a strangely sing-song way, grinning now as she swung the bat in a blur that rushed towards his face all too quickly to duck away from.
The thought that dominated his mind before it went black was that he’d expected the sound of a baseball bat hitting your skull to be louder.
*
Harley Quinn shed the drab housecoat - she wasn’t wearing that ratty old thing a second longer than necessary - and wiped some of the excess mascara from her face. She could now pass successfully for any vivacious young woman who might be loitering around the Narrows wearing hotpants and a midriff-baring shirt; questions might be asked but not of the sort that got passed onto more cops if they came sniffing around later.
She tucked her favourite candy-cane-striped baseball bat under one arm and sighed happily at a successful afternoon’s work. As requested: two little piggies ready to be hog-tied and taken back to the warehouse for Mistah J’s latest Bat-brain-baiting plan. Sure the backstory of her little gig could have been worked though better, but she liked to ad-lib now and then (when Mistah J wasn’t around to get mad at her straying from his scripts) and most importantly she still got the goods.
When it came to looking for law enforcement volunteers to shed a few pints of blood and some of the more vital internal organs for one of his schemes, Mistah J loved a baby-faced rookie. But he also had a soft spot for the grizzled only-three-days-away-from-retirement veteran types. He loved to chuckle about the “retirony” as they gasped their last, picturing those stolen peaceful years they’d planned to enjoy with the wife and kids down in the Florida Keys... This time it looked like her numbers had come up and she’d scored a perfect two-for-one deal!
“You boys have bought me some brownie points!” she beamed, blowing their unconscious forms a kiss as she began dragging the smaller one out of the apartment and down towards an inconspicuous waiting laundry van. “Here’s hopin’ Mistah J’s in the mood to say thank you the naughty way…”
Fin
***
End note: Hey hey, I was a little more organised this week and managed to write something in good time! *preens*
Second End note: Harley's spiffy bat is a shout-out to my current time-sucking obsession with Arkham City. It's perfect for smacking Batman or poor sucker cops in the face! (well a big ol' sledgehammer/mallet is cool but it just isn't always practical for a lady to carry about her person, is it...)