Chapter Text
August 8th. 4:17PM. Crime Alley.
Hazard pay, as a concept, is nice. Most people in unstable financial situations would jump at a chance of getting money after going through dangerous shit.
Unfortunately, few businesses based in Crime Central, New Jersey, offer hazard pay. Unless you count Wayne Enterprises, but since it operates enough companies to call itself an enterprise paying employees extra for any threat of being threatened.
To hazard (ha) a guess, it’s probably because most business owners believe that living here is, in its entirety, a hazard. If you don’t count Gotham’s Rogues Gallery, there’s still pollution and a damp, socioeconomically unstable environment perfect for a Venn diagram of grunge bands and suicide risks.
It doesn’t really help that most businesses deal in cash, despite credit that being in circulation for long enough for an entire subset of fraud is dedicated to it. What makes it so much worse is that carrying cash is a very fast way to get robbed.
Hazard pay is only one of several reasons why Danny is in a neighborhood that’s quickly devolving into an active war zone. He’s been electing to ignore all names of said neighborhood as he sweats bullets into mountains of trash bags and broken glass. He’s banking on at least finding something.
Maybe he’ll come across a few twenties, and he’ll be able to buy cleaning supplies on his way back to Tricorner.
Most times when Danny doesn’t seem busy, many recently departed will come and ask him for favors. It starts as a tug in his chest, and then his feet start moving, taking him through paths he hasn’t traveled before. His feet take him places, some familiar and some foreign, and then he’ll stop in front of where he has to be.
Sometimes things ghosts want, especially shades, are intuitive, like cleaning off graves at cemeteries, taking a beloved cat to a nearby vet, fishing lost mementos out of dumpsters and sewers. Small things that mean so much more than people know. Shades are simple creatures who just want to be remembered by someone, and really that isn’t a big thing to want at all.
He can understand that kind of appeal most days.
Full ghosts aren’t much different, only they don’t fade away after he’s completed tasks they gave him. Afterwards, they go back and haunt people they were close to in life. They tend to stick to their people most times.
That makes it a rare occasion when they seek out someone like Danny to help sort out their postmortem problems. There are still some who do ask for help, though.
Take Ms. DeMarco. Forty-five, mother of Tanya, 20, and Jacob, 14. Former resident of somewhere south of Robbinsville, before a rather unfortunate spat with her ex-husband.
Because no disagreement between divorcees ever ends well, Ms. DeMarco was shot three times between her thyroid cartilage and her epiglottis, and disposed of in some dumpster seventeen blocks from her apartment. This same dumpster that Danny is digging through with more misery than Boxy after Amity Park’s branch of Lowe’s shut down.
Apparently Tanya DeMarco needs it to fill out a mountain of forms in order to gain custody of her younger brother, and needs her mother’s birth certificate, but she hasn’t been able to find it anywhere in their apartment.
Ms. DeMarco knew exactly where it was, though. Her wallet had ended up falling out of her pocket as her ex-husband tossed her into this dumpster. She had been following him postmortem, apparently. Danny can appreciate a person with foresight.
Usually, Danny has better things to do on Tuesdays. He spends his Tuesdays in Gotham City Public Library with JJ, stuffed in a corner where both of them can read and Danny can study for his classes. Tuesday is when he doesn’t have extracurriculars, or a shift at work, or Ghost Shit™.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t have to deal with Ghost Shit™ on Tuesdays not because no shades ask him for favors, but because he spends Tuesdays politely ignoring summons of local shades.
Ms. DeMarco had made her problem sound time sensitive, though.
So, here he was.
Fishing through trash bags, rotting food, old cigarettes, and bullet casings. Looking for a small red wallet in a sea of mold and waterlogged garbage was proving difficult. More difficult than Danny had originally guessed, at least, which wasn’t saying a lot.
He could win an Olympic medal in a contest of underestimating his problems.
By now he’s stopped breathing in his best attempt at keeping odors of soft, disintegrating meat out of his lungs. Sounds of gunshots and distant booms of explosives have long since faded past Danny’s peripheral.
Seventeen minutes and forty-eight seconds is how long it takes for cold and wet fingers to grasp old pleather in a tub of rusted steel.
Ms. DeMarco’s wallet.
Thank fuck. Praise be, Ms. DeMarco, to you and your firm belief in capitalism.
He opens it gently, fingers running over wear and tear with reverence he usually reserves for books on infinite universes.
Enclosed within weathered nylon is a birth certificate for one Melissa Abernathy DeMarco. Stuffed in other pockets are a handful of ones and twenties, with miscellaneous coupons in every other fold.
Danny checks his watch.
Ten til five.
If he runs to Tanya DeMarco’s apartment, phases her mother’s wallet through her kitchen window, and then tears ass to Diamond District, he can make it to GCPL’s main branch a few hours before it closes.
Usually he has more time there.
JJ won’t be happy.
What else is new, though?
7:13 PM. Gotham City Public Library, Diamond District
“Excuse me, Miss Gordon?”
Barbara is currently glaring at her phone. Usually she doesn’t have it out while she’s working, but Tim was having a hard time coming up with a plausible reason why he couldn’t patrol today, and had been texting Steph about it, and Steph had asked her for help.
Most times, Red Robin is capable of conjuring up a plethora of reasonable explanations for his often unusual behavior. Him not being able to make up some bullshit excuse so he can do whatever he’s going to do in lieu of patrol is honestly alarming. Steph isn’t being particularly forthcoming on whatever Tim’s up to, either.
If Barbara’s being entirely honest with herself, she’s been a bit concerned about Tim.
These past years, he’s made it a habit of trying to fix problems before they become problems. If she was going to bet money on it, she’d probably say that Tim was busy with his own solo investigations.
Why he couldn’t just up and say that was a mystery. Maybe it had something to do with whatever he thought was going on with bodies going missing in Burnley crime scenes, and he just didn’t want to bother B without concrete evidence.
Or maybe he was going skateboarding. He definitely wasn’t going skateboarding, though. He didn’t go skateboarding anymore unless he was using skateboarding as a cover for something that wasn’t skateboarding.
She kind of hoped he was going skateboarding. That kid needed to learn how to take time for himself once in a while. She could probably bribe Dick into dragging him out somewhere.
She probably didn’t even need to resort to bribery.
“Miss Gordon?”
Barbara pauses. Blinks.
She turns a wheel of her chair to face her last remaining intern. Maizy, as her colorful new nametag reads, stands a solid six foot something tall. Through some miracle of posture, however, she makes herself look quite small regardless.
Maizy’s face is framed by a mess of rust-brown hair, and her expression is full of anxiety.
Her expression has been full of anxiety recently.
That’s not exactly unexpected, considering that this poor girl was kidnapped by Two-Face in June along with all her other interns.
“What can I help you with, Maizy?” Babs tries to keep her tone light. Worrying about Tim when she can’t do anything directly about it has long proven counterproductive.
“What do I… um.” Maizy’s voice is almost a whisper. She throws a brief glance behind her. “Are there rules about having more than one library card?”
Barbara’s eyebrows furrow. “Huh.” That… shouldn’t be happening.
“Because there’s someone back there..He’s standing in front of Checkout with… I think it was six? Six cards. And he’s trying to check out… trying to check out fifteen different books. On different cards. What do we–what do I do?”
This particular dilemma is a rare occurrence.
One of Barbara Gordon’s many accomplishments, when she finally became a full-time Gotham Librarian, was her creation of a suggestion box. It sits a bit left of their hoard of book stamps, just out of direct sight.
Not a lot of people have even seen it, but it does get some regular foot traffic.
One specific suggestion had shown up a few months after Babs had placed it in its current home. It was a great idea, if she was being honest with herself.
Most of it was a complaint about how many library cards this anonymous person had lost (Which was nine in total. All nine either been destroyed in Rogue attacks, dropped in a sewer, or misplaced within a six month period. It was honestly pretty impressive, when you consider there’s a two week remediation process of getting a new library card) but its last two lines, seemingly as a joke, suggested that cards should be made like dog tags instead of out of their usual ‘flimsy’ plastic.
GCPL’s managing board had thought it was a genius idea that would save a lot of money.
Now, a person’s library card has their name and ID number embossed into stainless steel. No one has had to get a replacement card in six and a half years.
Barbara has been keeping track.
It also unintentionally solved one problem of people stealing library cards to check out more books, usually with intent to set them on fire. That problem was almost entirely concentrated on authors who were controversial and/or war criminals.
This is all a long-winded way of saying it is very unlikely that a person has more than one library card that is actually their own. Given, she could always have Maizy check ends of their ID numbers. Those last two digits were for an account owner’s birth year, in case anyone was trying to commit fraud.
It wasn’t a particularly common occurrence at a library, but this is Gotham.
She starts to say something about that when she pauses. Leaning back in her chair, she can get a pretty good view of who’s standing at Checkout.
It looks like he’s sitting down, because all she can see is a red hoodie with a mop of black hair sticking out. There’s something familiar about his streak of–
Ah. Jason. That explains it.
Sighing, she turns back to Maizy and says, “I know him. He’s probably running errands for kids in his neighborhood again. He does that a lot, most of the time for kids who don’t really go far from their usual haunts.”
“Oh!” Maizy’s worried lips break into an unsteady but sincere smile. “…that’s so sweet.”
Barbara remembers her first time being driven out of city limits. She was five, and her father was on some errand. That’s when she discovered this point on Highway 47 where pollution and storm clouds that cling to this city like a disease start to dissipate. As you drive further from city limits, bright rays of sunlight start to peek through permanent gloom.
Maizy’s smile is kind of like that.
“I’ll go help him with that. Thank you, Miss Gordon!” She turns and starts back towards reception.
”Oh, and Maizy?”
Maizy pauses and looks back. “Yes, Miss Gordon?”
“Tell him Barbie says hi.”
“Okay. I will.”