A Second Chance

Part 65 - Reunion(s)

I opened my eyes to a low ceiling and fluorescent lighting.

"You're awake!"

Charlotte was right beside me, sitting on the floor with her knees pulled up and a look on her face that was equal parts worried and relieved. There was a red mark on her forearm from where she'd gone down.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'm good," I said, sitting up slowly and taking stock of the room. Concrete walls, no windows, one door, two guys standing near it with their arms crossed.

"Good to hear."

The voice came from the far side of the room, and I knew it before I finished turning toward it.

Ripper.

I kept my expression neutral through what took considerable effort. So that's where he'd ended up after disappearing from the other realm. Deathstroke had clearly found him and pointed him somewhere useful, and apparently that somewhere was here. The one thing I needed to figure out fast was whether he knew who I actually was, because if Nadakhan had ever described me to him in any useful detail, this conversation was going to go sideways before it started.

He walked toward us slowly, hands clasped behind his back, with the specific unhurried confidence of someone who was very comfortable being the most dangerous person in a room.

"So," he said, stopping a few feet away and looking down at me. "You were looming over our operation. You knocked out Renner and nearly got him arrested." He tilted his head slightly. "That's not ideal, now is it?"

"Probably not for you," I said, keeping my voice relaxed.

"Who are you? And who's the hottie?"

"Private investigator," I said. "The name's Gordon. Your company's been putting out some strange signals and I got curious. Shady activity tends to do that to me."

Ripper studied me for a moment, then smiled in a way that didn't reach his eyes. "Gordon. I think you're a reasonable man. I genuinely do. So as one reasonable man to another, I'm asking you nicely to walk away from whatever you think you've found and leave our company alone. We're operating legally and we don't appreciate the implication that we aren't."

"I'll consider it," I said. "What are those markings though? The geometric symbols. What do they mean?"

"Internal communication system," he said simply. "Our staff use them to leave notes for each other. Standard operational shorthand, nothing more."

"Standard operational shorthand that requires fake police officers to protect it?"

"It's just complicated,"

"Yeah but-" Charlotte started, then stopped, then started again like she was trying to get a running start on the sentence. "Sorry, but why are those exact same markings in my school's basement? Because that's, that's not a coincidence, that's genuinely not a coincidence, and four students went down there and didn't come back and one of them is my friend and nobody's telling me anything and I really need to know where Oliver is,"

"I have no idea, and I don't care," Ripper replied. "Who the hell are you anyway? You know what, why don't we send you to those students. I can find out about them right now,"

"Hey, this is between us!" I interjected. "Keep her out of this and send her back!"

"Fair enough," Ripper replied.

"Wait, no!" Charlotte interjected. "We can't just leave it like that! Jay, Oliver's still missing and this guy clearly knows something, we can't just-"

"Fine, if we release this 'Oliver' and his friends, will you leave and promise not to tell anyone about this,"