Closer Than Your Shadow

I'm In The Mood For Love

Dick's POV

December 11th 11:41 p.m.
Gotham
Ace Chemicals

Gizelle Rayford, formerly Careres. 34 years old, immigrated with her parents to Gotham from Argentina. Her dad worked at Ace Chemicals until its shutdown in 2004, then he drank himself to death, leaving Gizelle and her mom on their own. After draining her husband's life insurance for her daughter's tuition, Ms. Careres had to rely on bank loans. When Gizelle got into a drunk driving accident and ruined the nerves in her right hand, she left school and her mom eventually passed too. The debt fell to Gizelle.

Since then, she'd been married to Arthur Rayford for 5 long years. Those years were filled with several trips to multiple emergency rooms. 2 broken noses, multiple busted lips, and a few cracked ribs. Most of them blamed on the same things, either falling down the stairs or getting mugged. He took her in just to use her as his own personal punching bag.

I knew he was scum, a vile piece of shit. That's automatically what someone becomes when they sell drugs to kids but reading Gizelle's medical record made me fucking sick.

Was she being forced to do this?

I wasn't sure, but I'd figure it out soon enough.

The wind slammed into me as I weaved in and out of traffic. I was running from Sasha and what she said.

I don't know why I was taking the bike to the abandoned factory though. A part of me just wanted to go home to Claire, but I needed a second before we attempted to talk about something that'd lead to an argument.

Because I knew what I did pissed her off.

The factory should've been the one place to avoid, but I scaled the barely white walls one more time to avoid her a little longer.

I had no doubt I'd find something out of the ordinary considering this is where the business happened. The first place I looked was in the room I got shot in.

The second I stepped past the plastic yellowed flaps, my body tensed up. The things Dom said. How he made me feel just as powerless as when I was 13, holding onto a swinging bar alone in front of a hundred people. It made me want to blow up, find whoever I could and let it out. To do what I should've done to him. It should've been me. That blood should've been mine to spill to put this shit behind me, but I had all but forced Claire to do it herself. And she wouldn't ever forgive herself. I knew her well enough to know that.

The blood was cleaned from the floor, no stains indicating anything happened. But the thing that'd been in the back of my head for the past 3 days was the bullet.

I'd sent the casing to Bruce, and he told me in the next hour that a local anesthetic was coating it, just like Claire guessed. A trace of benzodiazepine, a sedative, was also found.

My eyes flicked to each potential hiding place in the storage room. Dom ran up here for a reason, to find his special bullets that most likely had been manufactured by Gizelle. I just needed to find them myself. It took me 15 minutes to comb through the room. Eventually I found a scratched-up cardboard box nestled behind an empty vat along the wall. A few pistols sat beside it on the floor wrapped up in a white sheet. Each with their serial numbers scraped off. 30 gold bullets in each of their clips. Normal 9mm casings, but they smelled weird. As if they'd been cleaned and wiped down with alcohol. I grabbed a few and dropped them into a small bag and put it away in my belt.

I found myself in the room with the acid vats. The yellow liquid was the same as last time. The smell and thickness in the air was still draining.

Bruce once told me that this is where the Joker had come to make himself the psychopath he was now. And the only thing I could think of was both of our crime fighting started with acid obsessed freaks.