The paralysis faded as quickly as it came.
Selina withdrew the needle. Will sat on the alley ground with one hand on his neck and waited for his legs to work.
He heard Oswald's footsteps first — fast and uneven — and then Oswald himself appeared in the alley entrance with a chunk of brick in one fist.
"Step away from him. Both of you."
"Relax." Strange held up the syringe case, tilting it slightly so the liquid inside caught the light. "I have no hostile intentions. I only needed to borrow a small amount of your friend's blood."
He handed the case to Selina. She handed it back. Strange examined it with the satisfaction of someone completing a checklist item, turned, and walked away into the dark. Behind him, somewhere in the alley's deeper shadow, the weight of augmented-men footsteps moved and then faded.
Oswald was still holding the brick. He looked like he wanted to use it.
Will grabbed his arm.
"Let it go. We have the money."
He held out the checks.
Oswald looked at them. The brick dropped.
Selina's eyes had been moving between Will and the space where Strange had disappeared. She looked back at Will now.
"I'm sorry. I should have told you. I was worried you'd refuse—"
"I wouldn't have refused." He thought about it. "I might have, actually. But it's fine."
He meant it. She'd come back twice — once from the sewer, once tonight. The checks were in his hand. Strange had taken blood, not a life, and the reasoning was clear enough: Strange had been looking for the body Will inhabited. A blood sample was biological data, not a killing blow. Whatever he needed it for could be dealt with later.
The immediate problem was Maroni's deadline, and that was now solved.
Will said so.
Oswald said no.
He had a plan.
Will watched the idea take shape on Oswald's face — watched the eyes go wide and slightly outward, the jaw set, the particular quality of attention that appeared when someone had been waiting a long time for an opportunity and finally saw it arriving.
"The Joker incident split them," Oswald said. "Falcone has been looking for an excuse to remove Maroni for two years. We give him the excuse. We tell him Maroni stole the money, that this was Maroni's scheme from the start — using Strange, using the casino, all of it designed to embarrass Falcone and undermine the arrangement between them."
"And you think he'll believe that."
"I think he'll want to believe it. There's a difference, and in this city the difference matters more than the truth."
Will turned to Selina.
She looked at the situation from her own angle: Falcone was the target. Anything that destabilized the Roman Empire's upper command was, from her perspective, worth attempting. She wasn't the one who'd have to sit across from the old man and sell the lie.
"It's a viable approach," she said.
Will recognized immediately that this was the wrong answer to have given Oswald at this particular moment, and that he had made a mistake by asking.
"You see?" Oswald was already moving. "She agrees. Come on."
"We should think about—"
"We can think in the car. We're already past midnight. Maroni could have people here any minute — in fact, we should let his people find us first, let them rough us up a bit so we look the part when we arrive at Falcone's—"
"We are absolutely not doing that part."
"Fine, fine. Car first."
They found a muscle car parked on a side street. Oswald had the panel off and the ignition crossed before Will finished telling himself this wasn't his problem. He turned to face the building across the street and focused on a window.
He'd promised Gordon nothing illegal. That had been approximately two hours ago.
He didn't watch.
Two men in the doorway across the street who had been slumped against the wall like drunks were not asleep.
Will saw it at the moment they moved — the specific way their posture changed, too coordinated, too immediate, both hands going to the same place.
"Down — drive—"
The windshield became something else entirely.
Glass went everywhere. Will had his head below the dashboard before the second burst came through, and Oswald had the engine running in the same instant by some process that Will could only describe as professional, and then they were moving.
The car came off the curb sideways, tires catching and then catching harder, and they were in the street and accelerating.
The mirrors showed motorcycles. More than Will wanted to count. He counted anyway: twelve, thirteen, more joining at the first intersection.
For two people who failed to deliver. Will shook glass out of his collar. This is what they send.
A motorcycle pulled level on the left. The rider had an Uzi braced on the mirror bracket, aimed at Oswald's head.
Will kicked. His foot connected with the weapon through the open window frame and the burst went into the windshield above them, stitching holes through the glass and into the storefront awning on the right side of the street.
The rider recovered, flipped something from his wrist — a blade, short, angled for a thrust — and drove it toward Will's thigh.
Oswald's hand came across Will's body and grabbed the wrist. One sharp pull and the rider left the motorcycle, hit the car's door sill, and then the road.
The car went over something.
"Can you drive?" Oswald was already climbing between the seats.
"I've played Need for Speed—"
"Take the wheel."
Will grabbed it. Oswald was in the back seat with the submachine gun the fallen rider had left behind, and then everything got louder.
The gun made the kind of sound that rearranges the geometry of a situation. Will kept his eyes forward and his hands on the wheel and registered, in peripheral vision, motorcycles going sideways and dark. Oswald was methodical about it in a way that Will found slightly alarming — not frantic, not desperate, just working through the problem from the back of a stolen car at eighty miles an hour.
By the time they hit the bridge there were four motorcycles left.
The bridge had a curve.
Will had, in theory, handled curves in racing games many times.
Downshift. Brake. Counter-steer. Let the rear come around.
He executed all four steps with reasonable confidence.
The rear came around more than intended.
Two wheels lifted.
"What are you doing—"
"It's a drift, it's fine—"
"Why are you—"
"In films chase scenes always—"
The railing arrived.
The river arrived shortly after.
The motorcycles stopped on the bridge. Their riders fired into the water until the bubbles stopped.
Will and Oswald were holding onto a bridge pylon, six feet underwater, listening to the shots impact the surface above them. The cold was considerable. The current was doing things to Will's injured ribs that he didn't appreciate.
When the motorcycles left, they surfaced.
They lay on the riverbank in the weeds for a while, breathing.
"The checks?" Oswald managed.
Will reached into his jacket. The checks were in an interior pocket. Wet but intact.
"Still here."
Oswald closed his eyes.
They walked to Falcone's club. It took forty minutes. They arrived looking like exactly what they were: two men who had been through a great deal of water recently and were not improved by it.
Falcone's remaining establishment was what happened when a man who had once controlled half a city's criminal economy decided to keep only the part that required no explanation. A good room. Good wine. The kind of lighting that made everything look like a negotiation.
Falcone himself was at a corner table, eating. White hair. A linen napkin tucked into his collar. He was working through what appeared to be a steak with the patience of a man who had nowhere to be.
He didn't look up when they were brought in. He didn't look up when they sat down. He cut another piece of meat, chewed it slowly, and let the silence do the work it had always done for him.
Will felt it — the specific weight of being looked at without being looked at. The sense of being measured without being engaged with. He'd felt something like it in the presence of certain executives in a previous life, but this was older and more thorough.
He already knows, Will thought. Everything. He knows what the money is and where it's been and who we are. He's watching us decide what to say.
"Maroni asked us to return this to you," Will said.
Oswald's head turned sharply.
Falcone's fork paused.
"The funds that went missing from his casino," Will continued. "There was a misunderstanding. He wanted to correct it."
From the corner of his eye, he could see Oswald processing this — the script had just been completely rewritten, and not in a direction Oswald had authorized. Will could feel the frustration vibrating off him.
Falcone took another bite. Chewed. Set the fork down.
He looked at Will for the first time. It lasted approximately three seconds and felt much longer.
Then he looked at Oswald.
Oswald, who had been suppressing his objections for ten seconds, made a calculation and abandoned the suppression.
"That's not what happened at all," Oswald said, and his hands were already moving. "Maroni stole this money himself — he planned the whole thing, he used Hugo Strange, it was all designed to—"
He stopped.
Falcone had reached into his jacket.
The revolver that came out was old and well-kept, a service-caliber wheel gun with the specific patina of something that had been used before and maintained carefully between uses. Falcone held it with the ease of someone who had been handling firearms since before Oswald was born.
He opened the cylinder. He loaded three rounds, deliberately and without haste. He closed the cylinder and spun it once.
He set it at his end of the table and slid it slowly across the surface until it came to rest equidistant between them.
"I'm not interested in which version is true," Falcone said. His voice was conversational and very quiet. "I prefer to hear from people who are still alive."
He picked up his fork.
"Gentlemen."