Fic: SV/Batverse: Could End Up A Story (2/7)
Title: Could End Up A Story 2/7
Author: fryadvocate
Disclaimer: I own neither any of the characters in SV nor in the DC 'verse.
Summary: Chloe meets Gotham by accident, on her way from one story to the next.
Our Lady of Endless Sorrows was a first-generation Gotham building, one of the few historical buildings left. Chloe read the plaque as she waited.
Behind her, someone coughed. "It was one of the only buildings that survived the earthquake nearly intact. One of the north walls fell, but all of the original stones were still there, so we rebuilt." The nun smiled, a warm thing, free of worry. Her auburn hair was pulled back into a loose bun, making her look more like kindergarten teacher and less like a servant of God. "I'm Sister Magdalene." She extended her hand, short nails, no manicure, but when Chloe shook it, the skin was soft from lotion. Unscented.
"Chloe Sullivan, the Daily Planet."
Following the sister, Chloe asked, "So, how did you find the money to rebuild?"
"Ah, well, Rome gave us a little money directly and the people of Gotham have always been generous to us," Sister Magdalene smiled, and nodded Chloe out to the garden smoothly.
"I guess that some members of the community have been very generous." The path was stone, the same color as the building, deep grays fading into the green grass, a circle of roses around the stone fountain.
"Ah, yes. Well, some of those souls who were dedicated to rebuilding Gotham were more charitable than others." Sister Magdalene said, straightening her habit before sitting.
Chloe couldn't count the number of times she was going to hell for grilling a nun. In her defense, it wasn't her first nun, or even the first time she'd asked uncomfortable questions of a holy person. In for an ear of corn, in for a field. "Did Bruce Wayne give a large donation?"
"The Waynes have a history of giving support to our order." Sister Magedalene smiled, but it was light, the smile of someone above the pettiness of day-to-day living.
"I couldn't find any history of Bruce giving to you. At least not until recently," Chloe smiled, baby steps, let them revise and revise and revise their lies, like slicing off clothing until all that was left was the truth, naked and flawed. Chloe had stopped believing the truth was beautiful a long time ago.
"Bruce gives extensively in the East End. We haven't needed his support until recently." Another sister walked by them, smiling and nodding at Sister Magdalene.
Chloe tilted her head, quirking an eyebrow. "It looks like all of the rebuilding has been done for a while."
"That doesn't take away from the financial burden," Sister Magdalene said. "And until now Bruce didn't realize what kind of a strain we were under."
"What strain?" Chloe watched the way that Sister Magdalene didn't seem to lose her cool, got colder and more distant. Finding the pressure point was an art form that Chloe had mastered years ago with Kwan, her lab rat.
"The rebuilding and the recovery clinic. They didn't have these problems ten years ago," Sister Magdalene said.
"Why not?" Chloe prodded, a quick question that seemed to irritate Sister Magdalene more than anything she'd said so far. The peace was falling away from Sister Magdalene quickly, little lines of tension around her mouth and eyes.
"Well, really, who wants to look after Gotham street whores and addicts? Why should it be their problem?" The questions burst forth with such bitterness that Sister Magdalene bowed her head, tried to recover. They had the tone of someone who'd fought too long and won a Phyrric victory to get what she wanted, someone who was worn out with it.
"The earthquake cut funding to the clinic?" Soft question, light touch of sympathy.
"All of it. And no one knew." Magdalene looked over Chloe's shoulder, towards the sun, a trick to hide the lines of a tight angry mouth and squinted eyes as the light's fault; Chloe used to look out at the Kansas skyline and think, someday it won't matter.
She was too young to be the mother superior, and maybe if the questions had been softballs all the way through, she would have handled them gracefully. But, just looking at her, Chloe knew why she was the face of the convent. Usually nuns were nothing to write home about, but Sister Magdalene was beautiful, even without makeup she was gorgeous.
The coldness was something she must have tended, though, something she had nurtured as peace of spirit to cover hurts. Underneath, Chloe saw the anger, the passion. It was familiar.
Everything bitter was familiar to Chloe now.
"Well, someone must have told Bruce," Chloe said.
"I'm sure someone did. I just can't tell you who," Sister Magdalene stood and Chloe did too, automatically. A bell began tolling and Sister Magdalene said, "Well, I'm sorry, that's the bell for lunch."
"You know, ten years ago, he donated money, too," Chloe said.
Sister Magdalene was frozen, smile completely gone. "That was before I came to the convent," she said, slowly. "I really wouldn't know about it."
"Nice roses," Chloe commented. It was cheating, she knew, didn't care.
"It's rare. Called, 'Gotham Hope'." Sister Magdalene seemed slow to recover her equilibrium, words forced out in half-phrases. "We received some cuttings from the original plants a few years ago." She fingered one of them on the way out.
"They looked better at Wayne manor," Chloe commented, grinning even as Sister Magdalene ushered her outside, a sharp look instead of a goodbye.
After the door was bolted behind her, Chloe grinned. Perry was going to kill her. Clark would probably kill her. But, really, when there were two crazy, omnipotent billionaires out there, what was a girl to do?
*****
If the money that was being funneled into the church was really going to a clinic, then someone who had connections had to be running the clinic. And if Gotham's East End was anything like Metropolis's slums, there would be someone out there who got a little extra for making sure that no one broke in, stole supplies, or generally made life hellish for nuns.
Chloe took her humor where she could make it.
Gotham city records were surprisingly thorough on East End charities. Chloe found that out at the same time that she found out that the night clerk was nineteen, on his way to MetU, and willing to be bribed with coffee and a smile.
"Thanks so much," Chloe said, walking him back to the door of the records room. Clark could shut it; she could do subtle. "I'll put them back right where they were."
Four hours later and there still wasn't any obvious connection between the charities and Wayne, or even the charities themselves. There were subtle little hints that there should be, the way that certain ones failed and others took off immediately. And then she found it.
Doctor Leslie Thompkins threaded her way through the East End clinics and social service work like a ghost, let her name be put everywhere it would be useful, it looked like. Going back, it dated to when she must have been in medical school, no medical title, just her name.
There wasn't any Internet in Slam's apartment, Chloe knew because she'd checked multiple times. Which meant an Internet café to look up Thompkins professional record. At least there would be coffee there and not the filtered cow dung that Slam pretended was coffee before he left for work every morning.
Putting the copies of the important papers in her bag, she hefted up the first box, pushed it back onto the metal shelf. The second box was lighter and she glanced up to the sunroof window when she thought she saw movement. Nothing was there and she shrugged it off as Clark buzzing by to make sure she wasn't getting herself into trouble. Not that he'd really be able to stop her if she was.
But it made him feel better if he could cross his arms and glare at her while she did it, it made him feel like he was doing something useful. Most of the time, it felt reassuring to have him at her back, even when he was being geeky Clark instead of Superman.
She pushed the last box onto the shelf and glanced up again, stopping and staring when she realized that the movement was there and it wasn't Clark's garish primary color fetish costume flying by so quickly he hoped she'd miss him.
Someone was on the roof, wearing a dark gray or black, something she wasn't supposed to be able to see. She wouldn't have seen it at all if she wasn't used to Clark's habit of stalking her from above.
"Superman?" she called out, feeling ridiculous. Easiest lesson she'd ever learned, though. Superman wasn't Clark and the only people she'd hurt by using Clark's name would be Martha, Clark, and herself. She was tired of leaving herself open to being hurt by Clark, at least this way she was guarding herself against the physical harm of kidnapping, which Clark could rescue her from. The emotional problems were history, blacked out pages of ouch and thank God that's over.
Superman's face didn't appear in the window though, and there wasn't any movement, a careful lack of movement. It wasn't a cat, then, or something that could be explained away easily. The problem with being in today's world, Chloe thought, was that the ghosts under the bed tended to be supervillains who didn't hide under the bed, but in warehouses or evil lairs.
Everyone had a hard time dispelling fears of supervillains in the dark shadows when it was a coin toss as to whether that noise was something your head made up or something that was going to hold a gun to your temple and demand you drop the article on illegal crocodile importing.
Not that that had ever happened to Chloe. Well, no more than once with the crocodile thing.
The desk kid said there was an internet café a few blocks down the street. "There isn't going to be any parking," he said. "You'll probably have to leave your car here."
The walk was quick and the daylight hadn't faded all the way yet, even as streetlamps flipped on, white, yellow, and broken bulbs patching together a path of light for her to follow.
Gotham sidewalks were filthy, dirt and gum pounded in to create a molted spectrum of eww and more eww. The cracks of the sidewalk made her step over them carefully, forget breaking her mother's back, she was afraid of breaking her own.
The café reminded her of the Talon immediately, but only in the way that the smell of café coffee and the high whine of an espresso machine would always remind her of the golden years in high school. Well the golden year, when she and Lana had been friends, and Clark had looked over at her one day and really seen her.
She waited for the day that her whole life wouldn't be consumed by Smallville.
After a search that took her further than she had expected, it turned out that Leslie Thompkins wasn't new to Bruce Wayne. They went back almost as far as her work in charity. The picture of Bruce holding her hand, walking away from his parent's bodies was more heartbreaking than cliched. The Wayne heir had the carriage of John Kennedy Jr. even then, but it was the heartbreak in his eyes, the way that he clung to Leslie Thompkins's hand that reminded Chloe of the idolized Lana Lang picture.
Chloe kept her jaw set, because sure he'd once been that kid who looked half-broken being led away from his parent's bodies, but now he was someone else. No one was the same person they were at eight.
After that, it looked like Leslie had worked uptown at a practice that made more money than Chloe even wished she had. A few years in, though, she quit. Started working at an East End practice, her current address was mapquested to a street with more break-ins than anywhere else in the city. Chloe looked at the helpfully colored crime map and back at the address.
She'd pulled out her notepad, the habit of keeping hard copies of everything too ingrained after the fourth time her computer files had been 'corrupted.' Jotted down, in quick half-longhand, "Dr. Leslie Thompkins -- left good practice to take money from those feeling charitable? Address in East End. Deep in crime area. Boss?"
According to her records, Doctor Thompkins did "pro bono" work, a veiled hint that for every paying customer there were two or three hookers and drug addicts she rescued.
The hooker-druggie connection, though, would be easy to check into, hookers were nothing if not eager when there was money on the table. In Metropolis, Chloe would have known where to look for the most desperate girls, the ones that were so hungry, such emotional vacuums that even fearing their pimps was worth it because it meant that they felt something.
They were always willing to tell her whatever she wanted, as long as she listened to them. Chloe was still surprised at the amount of intimate information that basic questions could get her, surprised that people wanted someone to listen to them so much that they let her strip them of their stories, of their words and publish them in a newspaper.
Still, she had no idea where to start, which would mean that she would have to ask someone, probably Slam, to help her find a prostitute. Wouldn't that be a fun conversation.
Packing up, she tossed her empty cup into the trash and headed out. When she heard someone following her, she wasn't surprised. She was pissed because she should have known it sooner, but all surprise had gotten her in the past was a bloody nose and Lois scooping her story.
Chloe knew the sound of her own pace intimately, the sound of her rubber soled, oh-so-comfortable, worn in, work shoes was ingrained because whenever she was on a job she had to be aware of someone else's paces. She reached into her jacket pocket and fingered her mace spray.
She could see the parking lot, and knew that she didn't have much time -- the other person was still walking casually, but close. Her thought as she turned around and pressed down on the spray was that Batman better not have issues with her screaming for Superman in his city, and for that matter, Clark better not have his headphones on or he was never getting nookie again, ever.
She sprayed and it took a second for her to realize that it wasn't doing anything, no expected pained scream, no keeling over. The guy was a pro, wearing a mask and goggles, so she was caught off guard when he lunged at her, cutting off her knee jerk scream, "SUPER-"
Her face was against the brick wall, hot and the nerves were screaming where her arm was twisted back painfully. "Be quiet," the guy said into her ear. "Now, I'm going to tie up your hands and we're going to take a ride back to Met-"
The hand on her arm jerked back, still holding her elbow, but she twisted out and kicked him hard in the groin, expecting to see Superman holding him, all red and blue and hero. It was not Superman, though, holding the guy a few inches above the ground, it was Slam Bradley, bare forearm wrapped tight around the guy's neck, locking one of the guy's arms above his head.
Slam's gray hair glinted white under the streetlight, and he said, "Chloe, get in the car."
His Chevrolet was idling, parked half of the curb and Chloe crossed her arms, said, "Why?"
"You like questioning people. We're going to question him." Slam pushed the guy forward, until he was up against the wall, trying to buck Slam off even as Slam yanked both arms back and handcuffed him. The guy still fought, using his leg to try to kick at Slam's ankle, and Slam gripped the guy's hair, pulled his head back from the wall only to smash his face back into it.
Chloe held open the backseat door, noting that the doors from the backseat out didn't have handles, watched Slam strap the guy in efficiently. Even with the smear of blood on his white shirt, Slam still looked the same: worn out, worn down by life and his crappy job.
"Perry had you watching me?" Chloe had her arms crossed, angry.
Shrugging, Slam reached into his pocket to pull out a crushed pack of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth lit it and offered it to her silently. She took it, watched him light another.
"How long have you been tailing me?" She didn't smoke, but it felt good to have something in her hands.
"You haven't been alone since you got here." Slam opened the passenger door. "Get in, Sullivan. I'll take you to see the good doctor."
Chloe sunk down into the seat, buckling herself in automatically. She glanced over and tugged on her door handle, opened and shut it quickly checking as Slam backed the car out and began driving. The first time that she'd been to see a criminal mastermind, she was nervous. As the years had worn on, she'd become blase about the idea of them, because in the end it was just one more person who wielded power. Anyway, she knew that if Slam Bradley trusted Doctor Thompkins, the woman couldn't be that bad.
Chloe trusted Perry and if Perry trusted Slam, she would, too.
"You like Doctor Thompkins?" Chloe asked.
Flicking what was left of his cigarette out the window, Slam nodded. "She's a good person. We don't get a lot of her kind in the East End."
"You want me to interview her because she's nice?" Chloe couldn't help the disbelief.
Slam laughed. "No, I want you to believe she's nice. Also, you need some patching up." He reached over to touch her cheek and pulled back his finger to reveal blood.
Chloe sighed: Clark would kill her.
*****
On to Part 3
Author: fryadvocate
Disclaimer: I own neither any of the characters in SV nor in the DC 'verse.
Summary: Chloe meets Gotham by accident, on her way from one story to the next.
Our Lady of Endless Sorrows was a first-generation Gotham building, one of the few historical buildings left. Chloe read the plaque as she waited.
Behind her, someone coughed. "It was one of the only buildings that survived the earthquake nearly intact. One of the north walls fell, but all of the original stones were still there, so we rebuilt." The nun smiled, a warm thing, free of worry. Her auburn hair was pulled back into a loose bun, making her look more like kindergarten teacher and less like a servant of God. "I'm Sister Magdalene." She extended her hand, short nails, no manicure, but when Chloe shook it, the skin was soft from lotion. Unscented.
"Chloe Sullivan, the Daily Planet."
Following the sister, Chloe asked, "So, how did you find the money to rebuild?"
"Ah, well, Rome gave us a little money directly and the people of Gotham have always been generous to us," Sister Magdalene smiled, and nodded Chloe out to the garden smoothly.
"I guess that some members of the community have been very generous." The path was stone, the same color as the building, deep grays fading into the green grass, a circle of roses around the stone fountain.
"Ah, yes. Well, some of those souls who were dedicated to rebuilding Gotham were more charitable than others." Sister Magdalene said, straightening her habit before sitting.
Chloe couldn't count the number of times she was going to hell for grilling a nun. In her defense, it wasn't her first nun, or even the first time she'd asked uncomfortable questions of a holy person. In for an ear of corn, in for a field. "Did Bruce Wayne give a large donation?"
"The Waynes have a history of giving support to our order." Sister Magedalene smiled, but it was light, the smile of someone above the pettiness of day-to-day living.
"I couldn't find any history of Bruce giving to you. At least not until recently," Chloe smiled, baby steps, let them revise and revise and revise their lies, like slicing off clothing until all that was left was the truth, naked and flawed. Chloe had stopped believing the truth was beautiful a long time ago.
"Bruce gives extensively in the East End. We haven't needed his support until recently." Another sister walked by them, smiling and nodding at Sister Magdalene.
Chloe tilted her head, quirking an eyebrow. "It looks like all of the rebuilding has been done for a while."
"That doesn't take away from the financial burden," Sister Magdalene said. "And until now Bruce didn't realize what kind of a strain we were under."
"What strain?" Chloe watched the way that Sister Magdalene didn't seem to lose her cool, got colder and more distant. Finding the pressure point was an art form that Chloe had mastered years ago with Kwan, her lab rat.
"The rebuilding and the recovery clinic. They didn't have these problems ten years ago," Sister Magdalene said.
"Why not?" Chloe prodded, a quick question that seemed to irritate Sister Magdalene more than anything she'd said so far. The peace was falling away from Sister Magdalene quickly, little lines of tension around her mouth and eyes.
"Well, really, who wants to look after Gotham street whores and addicts? Why should it be their problem?" The questions burst forth with such bitterness that Sister Magdalene bowed her head, tried to recover. They had the tone of someone who'd fought too long and won a Phyrric victory to get what she wanted, someone who was worn out with it.
"The earthquake cut funding to the clinic?" Soft question, light touch of sympathy.
"All of it. And no one knew." Magdalene looked over Chloe's shoulder, towards the sun, a trick to hide the lines of a tight angry mouth and squinted eyes as the light's fault; Chloe used to look out at the Kansas skyline and think, someday it won't matter.
She was too young to be the mother superior, and maybe if the questions had been softballs all the way through, she would have handled them gracefully. But, just looking at her, Chloe knew why she was the face of the convent. Usually nuns were nothing to write home about, but Sister Magdalene was beautiful, even without makeup she was gorgeous.
The coldness was something she must have tended, though, something she had nurtured as peace of spirit to cover hurts. Underneath, Chloe saw the anger, the passion. It was familiar.
Everything bitter was familiar to Chloe now.
"Well, someone must have told Bruce," Chloe said.
"I'm sure someone did. I just can't tell you who," Sister Magdalene stood and Chloe did too, automatically. A bell began tolling and Sister Magdalene said, "Well, I'm sorry, that's the bell for lunch."
"You know, ten years ago, he donated money, too," Chloe said.
Sister Magdalene was frozen, smile completely gone. "That was before I came to the convent," she said, slowly. "I really wouldn't know about it."
"Nice roses," Chloe commented. It was cheating, she knew, didn't care.
"It's rare. Called, 'Gotham Hope'." Sister Magdalene seemed slow to recover her equilibrium, words forced out in half-phrases. "We received some cuttings from the original plants a few years ago." She fingered one of them on the way out.
"They looked better at Wayne manor," Chloe commented, grinning even as Sister Magdalene ushered her outside, a sharp look instead of a goodbye.
After the door was bolted behind her, Chloe grinned. Perry was going to kill her. Clark would probably kill her. But, really, when there were two crazy, omnipotent billionaires out there, what was a girl to do?
*****
If the money that was being funneled into the church was really going to a clinic, then someone who had connections had to be running the clinic. And if Gotham's East End was anything like Metropolis's slums, there would be someone out there who got a little extra for making sure that no one broke in, stole supplies, or generally made life hellish for nuns.
Chloe took her humor where she could make it.
Gotham city records were surprisingly thorough on East End charities. Chloe found that out at the same time that she found out that the night clerk was nineteen, on his way to MetU, and willing to be bribed with coffee and a smile.
"Thanks so much," Chloe said, walking him back to the door of the records room. Clark could shut it; she could do subtle. "I'll put them back right where they were."
Four hours later and there still wasn't any obvious connection between the charities and Wayne, or even the charities themselves. There were subtle little hints that there should be, the way that certain ones failed and others took off immediately. And then she found it.
Doctor Leslie Thompkins threaded her way through the East End clinics and social service work like a ghost, let her name be put everywhere it would be useful, it looked like. Going back, it dated to when she must have been in medical school, no medical title, just her name.
There wasn't any Internet in Slam's apartment, Chloe knew because she'd checked multiple times. Which meant an Internet café to look up Thompkins professional record. At least there would be coffee there and not the filtered cow dung that Slam pretended was coffee before he left for work every morning.
Putting the copies of the important papers in her bag, she hefted up the first box, pushed it back onto the metal shelf. The second box was lighter and she glanced up to the sunroof window when she thought she saw movement. Nothing was there and she shrugged it off as Clark buzzing by to make sure she wasn't getting herself into trouble. Not that he'd really be able to stop her if she was.
But it made him feel better if he could cross his arms and glare at her while she did it, it made him feel like he was doing something useful. Most of the time, it felt reassuring to have him at her back, even when he was being geeky Clark instead of Superman.
She pushed the last box onto the shelf and glanced up again, stopping and staring when she realized that the movement was there and it wasn't Clark's garish primary color fetish costume flying by so quickly he hoped she'd miss him.
Someone was on the roof, wearing a dark gray or black, something she wasn't supposed to be able to see. She wouldn't have seen it at all if she wasn't used to Clark's habit of stalking her from above.
"Superman?" she called out, feeling ridiculous. Easiest lesson she'd ever learned, though. Superman wasn't Clark and the only people she'd hurt by using Clark's name would be Martha, Clark, and herself. She was tired of leaving herself open to being hurt by Clark, at least this way she was guarding herself against the physical harm of kidnapping, which Clark could rescue her from. The emotional problems were history, blacked out pages of ouch and thank God that's over.
Superman's face didn't appear in the window though, and there wasn't any movement, a careful lack of movement. It wasn't a cat, then, or something that could be explained away easily. The problem with being in today's world, Chloe thought, was that the ghosts under the bed tended to be supervillains who didn't hide under the bed, but in warehouses or evil lairs.
Everyone had a hard time dispelling fears of supervillains in the dark shadows when it was a coin toss as to whether that noise was something your head made up or something that was going to hold a gun to your temple and demand you drop the article on illegal crocodile importing.
Not that that had ever happened to Chloe. Well, no more than once with the crocodile thing.
The desk kid said there was an internet café a few blocks down the street. "There isn't going to be any parking," he said. "You'll probably have to leave your car here."
The walk was quick and the daylight hadn't faded all the way yet, even as streetlamps flipped on, white, yellow, and broken bulbs patching together a path of light for her to follow.
Gotham sidewalks were filthy, dirt and gum pounded in to create a molted spectrum of eww and more eww. The cracks of the sidewalk made her step over them carefully, forget breaking her mother's back, she was afraid of breaking her own.
The café reminded her of the Talon immediately, but only in the way that the smell of café coffee and the high whine of an espresso machine would always remind her of the golden years in high school. Well the golden year, when she and Lana had been friends, and Clark had looked over at her one day and really seen her.
She waited for the day that her whole life wouldn't be consumed by Smallville.
After a search that took her further than she had expected, it turned out that Leslie Thompkins wasn't new to Bruce Wayne. They went back almost as far as her work in charity. The picture of Bruce holding her hand, walking away from his parent's bodies was more heartbreaking than cliched. The Wayne heir had the carriage of John Kennedy Jr. even then, but it was the heartbreak in his eyes, the way that he clung to Leslie Thompkins's hand that reminded Chloe of the idolized Lana Lang picture.
Chloe kept her jaw set, because sure he'd once been that kid who looked half-broken being led away from his parent's bodies, but now he was someone else. No one was the same person they were at eight.
After that, it looked like Leslie had worked uptown at a practice that made more money than Chloe even wished she had. A few years in, though, she quit. Started working at an East End practice, her current address was mapquested to a street with more break-ins than anywhere else in the city. Chloe looked at the helpfully colored crime map and back at the address.
She'd pulled out her notepad, the habit of keeping hard copies of everything too ingrained after the fourth time her computer files had been 'corrupted.' Jotted down, in quick half-longhand, "Dr. Leslie Thompkins -- left good practice to take money from those feeling charitable? Address in East End. Deep in crime area. Boss?"
According to her records, Doctor Thompkins did "pro bono" work, a veiled hint that for every paying customer there were two or three hookers and drug addicts she rescued.
The hooker-druggie connection, though, would be easy to check into, hookers were nothing if not eager when there was money on the table. In Metropolis, Chloe would have known where to look for the most desperate girls, the ones that were so hungry, such emotional vacuums that even fearing their pimps was worth it because it meant that they felt something.
They were always willing to tell her whatever she wanted, as long as she listened to them. Chloe was still surprised at the amount of intimate information that basic questions could get her, surprised that people wanted someone to listen to them so much that they let her strip them of their stories, of their words and publish them in a newspaper.
Still, she had no idea where to start, which would mean that she would have to ask someone, probably Slam, to help her find a prostitute. Wouldn't that be a fun conversation.
Packing up, she tossed her empty cup into the trash and headed out. When she heard someone following her, she wasn't surprised. She was pissed because she should have known it sooner, but all surprise had gotten her in the past was a bloody nose and Lois scooping her story.
Chloe knew the sound of her own pace intimately, the sound of her rubber soled, oh-so-comfortable, worn in, work shoes was ingrained because whenever she was on a job she had to be aware of someone else's paces. She reached into her jacket pocket and fingered her mace spray.
She could see the parking lot, and knew that she didn't have much time -- the other person was still walking casually, but close. Her thought as she turned around and pressed down on the spray was that Batman better not have issues with her screaming for Superman in his city, and for that matter, Clark better not have his headphones on or he was never getting nookie again, ever.
She sprayed and it took a second for her to realize that it wasn't doing anything, no expected pained scream, no keeling over. The guy was a pro, wearing a mask and goggles, so she was caught off guard when he lunged at her, cutting off her knee jerk scream, "SUPER-"
Her face was against the brick wall, hot and the nerves were screaming where her arm was twisted back painfully. "Be quiet," the guy said into her ear. "Now, I'm going to tie up your hands and we're going to take a ride back to Met-"
The hand on her arm jerked back, still holding her elbow, but she twisted out and kicked him hard in the groin, expecting to see Superman holding him, all red and blue and hero. It was not Superman, though, holding the guy a few inches above the ground, it was Slam Bradley, bare forearm wrapped tight around the guy's neck, locking one of the guy's arms above his head.
Slam's gray hair glinted white under the streetlight, and he said, "Chloe, get in the car."
His Chevrolet was idling, parked half of the curb and Chloe crossed her arms, said, "Why?"
"You like questioning people. We're going to question him." Slam pushed the guy forward, until he was up against the wall, trying to buck Slam off even as Slam yanked both arms back and handcuffed him. The guy still fought, using his leg to try to kick at Slam's ankle, and Slam gripped the guy's hair, pulled his head back from the wall only to smash his face back into it.
Chloe held open the backseat door, noting that the doors from the backseat out didn't have handles, watched Slam strap the guy in efficiently. Even with the smear of blood on his white shirt, Slam still looked the same: worn out, worn down by life and his crappy job.
"Perry had you watching me?" Chloe had her arms crossed, angry.
Shrugging, Slam reached into his pocket to pull out a crushed pack of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth lit it and offered it to her silently. She took it, watched him light another.
"How long have you been tailing me?" She didn't smoke, but it felt good to have something in her hands.
"You haven't been alone since you got here." Slam opened the passenger door. "Get in, Sullivan. I'll take you to see the good doctor."
Chloe sunk down into the seat, buckling herself in automatically. She glanced over and tugged on her door handle, opened and shut it quickly checking as Slam backed the car out and began driving. The first time that she'd been to see a criminal mastermind, she was nervous. As the years had worn on, she'd become blase about the idea of them, because in the end it was just one more person who wielded power. Anyway, she knew that if Slam Bradley trusted Doctor Thompkins, the woman couldn't be that bad.
Chloe trusted Perry and if Perry trusted Slam, she would, too.
"You like Doctor Thompkins?" Chloe asked.
Flicking what was left of his cigarette out the window, Slam nodded. "She's a good person. We don't get a lot of her kind in the East End."
"You want me to interview her because she's nice?" Chloe couldn't help the disbelief.
Slam laughed. "No, I want you to believe she's nice. Also, you need some patching up." He reached over to touch her cheek and pulled back his finger to reveal blood.
Chloe sighed: Clark would kill her.
*****
On to Part 3