The two box trucks rolled into the abandoned lot under the glare of the four arc lights, tires crunching across broken asphalt and scattered glass.
Slipknot and the Tattooed Man stepped out, shut their doors, and walked over with the measured indifference of professionals who had already been paid a deposit and weren't in the business of showing enthusiasm. Like Deadshot, Cheshire, and Javelin, they'd been contracted through the Ventriloquist — which, as far as any of them were concerned, meant they were working for a mid-tier Gotham crime boss with unusually specific operational requirements. Nobody had suggested anything different.
Slipknot took in the scene. The rope system he'd pre-rigged had performed exactly as designed. Killer Croc was on the ground, bound at every joint, going nowhere. The corner of Slipknot's mouth moved slightly — the professional equivalent of a standing ovation.
The Tattooed Man looked like a sailor who had fallen asleep on a moving tattoo parlor, and he operated accordingly. He walked up to the secured target, looked him over, and said:
"Ha. Our mark is a complete idiot."
A sound came from Killer Croc's direction — a sharp percussive pressure, like a boiler venting — and a column of steam rose from the top of his head into the cold air above.
It took all five of them working together to drag Croc to the backs of the two trucks. During the process the Tattooed Man made two additional comments. After the second one, Croc got his jaw close enough to take a piece out of his forearm, and what followed was loud and undignified and ended with everyone several feet further from the target than they'd started.
Killer Croc had passed through anger approximately twenty minutes ago and was now operating in territory that didn't have a name. Every humiliation of the evening had stacked neatly on top of the last — the bait, the electricity, the nets, the commentary — and the compound result was a state of outrage so total and so pure that it had become almost serene in its intensity.
The words kept coming out of him in waves:
"Unforgivable—"
"UNFORGIVABLE—"
"UN—FOR—GIV—"
Arnold Wesker walked to the back of the first truck.
He opened the doors.
One metric ton of American currency fell out and landed directly on Killer Croc's face.
No preamble. No speech. No conditions stated in advance. Just the rear doors swinging wide and a solid wall of banded hundreds cascading down in a green avalanche, the stack collapsing as it hit the ground and spreading across the asphalt in every direction like someone had upended an enormous filing cabinet full of money.
Killer Croc's voice stopped.
"Pre-payment," Wesker said — or rather, the Batman plush in his hand said it, while Wesker's mouth remained closed. "It's all yours, the moment you agree."
"...Unfor—"
Wesker opened the second truck.
Another ton. It came down harder this time, the banded stacks fanning apart on impact, paper hitting scales and pavement with a sound like very expensive rain.
Croc's face had gone from dark green to a mottled, furious red. His jaw worked. He was attempting to formulate a morally decisive rejection — something that would establish, once and for all, that Waylon Jones was not the kind of being who could be purchased, who bent his knee to wealth, who allowed money to override the fundamental dignity of—
A single bill separated from the pile and settled gently over his left eye.
He stopped.
The word he'd been building toward — unforgivable — made it halfway out and then dissolved.
"...Un..."
"...For..."
"...Forgiven."
The silence that followed had a different quality than the silence before. Killer Croc lay still in his ropes, holding a handful of hundreds in each fist, staring at the money the way a man stares at something he didn't know he'd been waiting for.
He looked up.
"...Boss," he said, with great solemnity.
Deadshot stared at him.
Then Croc appeared to remember something. His expression shifted.
"Ahem." He cleared his throat. "What I mean to say is."
He drew himself up as much as the restraints allowed.
"I have wandered for most of my life. My only regret has been the lack of an employer worthy of my capabilities. If you'll have me, I would be—"
"THERE HAS TO BE TENS OF MILLIONS IN HERE—"
Captain Javelin had located the edge of the money pile, evaluated it for approximately one second, and then thrown himself into the center of it. He was now lying spread-eagle in the bills with the expression of a man undergoing a profound spiritual experience.
"I'm going to die. I'm actually going to die."
"Get out of there," Croc snarled. "That's my money—"
"She belongs to you, sure, but right now I'm the one rolling around in her—"
Waylon Jones — still bound, remember, hands still tied — somehow generated enough core muscle tension to launch himself bodily off the ground and into the money pile directly on top of Captain Javelin.
"Mine. Mine. Mine."
Deadshot watched this.
He stood very still for a long moment, looking at two large men wrestling in a pile of cash in an abandoned Gotham parking lot at two in the morning.
Then he did the math.
Javelin had said tens of millions. Javelin was, charitably, not good at math. Deadshot had spent enough years in this profession to calibrate these things accurately.
Two hundred million, he thought. Minimum. There is a minimum of two hundred million dollars in those two trucks.
He'd had no idea what Slipknot and the Tattooed Man had been transporting. From their expressions — currently cycling through a sequence of emotions that ended somewhere around critically dangerous — they hadn't known either.
For exactly one second, Floyd Lawton's professional ethics had a conversation with the part of his brain that understood compound interest, and the conversation got heated.
Then his daughter's face appeared, and the conversation ended.
Someone who can produce two hundred million dollars in cash, he thought, can also produce two hundred million dollars in bounty. You have a kid, Lawton. You can take the payday or you can take the bullet, but you cannot take both.
Also — practically speaking — the money weighed over two tons. He had no vehicle rated for that. He'd make it approximately three blocks.
He turned his head.
Slipknot and the Tattooed Man were looking at the pile with expressions that had stopped being professional. Their eyes had gone a specific color — the color that eyes go when the math becomes too simple and the moral infrastructure starts showing stress fractures.
Deadshot's hand found his sidearm without announcing its intention.
"Easy." He kept his voice level. "Let's all stay reasonable."
He took a slow step back. Javelin — who was genuinely not perceptive, but was occasionally functional — climbed out of the money pile, read the room, and positioned himself on Deadshot's flank without being asked. Croc was still in the pile, apparently having forgotten about everything else in the universe.
The tension stretched.
Then Cheshire materialized at the group's three o'clock, silent as a change in weather, positioning herself at an angle that covered Slipknot and the Tattooed Man from the side.
Deadshot clocked it instantly.
Pre-arranged. She was already bought.
He felt a sharp, specific irritation — the kind reserved for being outmaneuvered by someone who'd read your psychology more accurately than you'd read theirs. The whole evening had the fingerprints of a person who'd modeled every variable: Croc's greed overriding his pride, Deadshot's pragmatism overriding his impulse, Javelin's irrelevance making him safe, Cheshire's mercenary flexibility making her purchasable, Slipknot and the Tattooed Man's unprofessionalism making them the controllable chaos that justified all the other pieces.
And the person who'd assembled all of this had apparently also modeled the part where Deadshot noticed he'd been outmaneuvered — because there was no move to make. The situation was already resolved. The only thing left was to accept the architecture.
Why, Deadshot thought with deep irritation, does this feel like Batman?
He thought about the Batman plush on Wesker's hand. He thought about the last time he'd been in Gotham, and the three ribs that had taken eleven weeks to heal.
He stopped thinking about Batman immediately.
Whoever this is — not Batman, Batman doesn't do this — they knew I wouldn't fire. They knew Croc would take the money. They knew Cheshire's price. They knew Slipknot and Tattooed Man were the unstable variables and positioned accordingly.
They knew all of it.
He lowered his weapon. The tension in the lot exhaled and dispersed.
He turned toward Arnold Wesker, who was crouching near the truck wheel looking like a man who very much wanted to be somewhere else.
"So." Deadshot's voice was flat and not particularly friendly. "The real employer. Any interest in dropping the act?"
Wesker blinked. Then he reached behind his back and produced five earpieces, each in a small sealed bag, and held them out.
He even had those ready.
Deadshot stared at the earpieces for a long moment.
Then he took one, because there was clearly nothing else to do.