Boom boom boom boom boom boom.
Frantic, uneven knocking. The particular rhythm of small fists that can't quite reach the door knocker.
Footsteps shuffled across hardwood, slow and slippered. An elderly woman called out questions that received no answer.
She opened the door.
A thin white shape drifted in from the dark, limbless, formless—nothing visible except two small dark eyes peering from the center of a pale sheet. Before she could make a sound, the ghost lunged forward and wrapped both arms around her waist.
"Trick or treat!"
They came from everywhere. Witches in pointed hats, clutching plastic broomsticks. Reapers in black robes dragging foam scythes. Little devils with foam horns and red capes. One kid wearing blue and a red cape over it all.
"Oh, honey." The old woman laughed. "Superman isn't a ghost."
The boy under the sheet looked confused.
Halloween in Gotham—for a few hours each year, the children owned the streets. The adults prowled in elaborate costumes, but the children owned the night, little devils and monsters going door to door demanding their tribute. Candy, or consequences.
The old woman smiled and distributed sweets to the reaching hands. As she turned back toward her door, something on the street caught her eye.
Under the corner streetlight: a man wearing a carved pumpkin on his head, holding a small jack-o'-lantern.
"What an ugly pumpkin," she muttered. "Have we ever had one that hideous before?"
Jude was experiencing mixed feelings about the location.
He'd followed the system's navigation without questioning it, but he hadn't expected the pickup point to be here.
The Diamond District occupied Gotham's southern end—geographically as far from the East End as it was possible to get while remaining in the same city. The name was accurate. This was where Gotham's wealth concentrated, drawing inward, dense and pressurized.
Gotham's crime rate moved in a gradient from north to south. Uptown—the East End, the Narrows, the Bowery—was chaos without pretense. Most of Gotham's murders, robberies, and everything in between originated there, compressed into a few square miles that the city had essentially written off. Move south to Midtown—Otisburg, Burnley—and crime became less constant and more ambitious. Only serious operations bothered working there. The crimes that did occur tended to be spectacular.
Downtown, where the Diamond District gleamed, had the best security presence in the city. If you saw only this part of Gotham, you might believe the rest of the country's optimism about the place. Clean streets. Functioning lights. People in expensive coats who looked at the world with the composure that came from never having to worry about it.
The irony: Carmine Falcone lived here. Sal Maroni too—the second-most powerful crime family in the city, operating out of a mansion two blocks from the best coffee in Gotham. They paid their taxes, threw their parties, attended the right events. The crime rate was low in the Diamond District because the people committing crimes here were never actually charged with them.
Jude surveyed the street through his pumpkin head.
Halloween had taken over. A man in a hockey mask and blood-soaked coveralls moved through the crowd. A woman in a black robe carried a prop knife that was either extremely realistic or, in this city, not a prop. A clown with white face paint held a red balloon and stood slightly too still near a lamppost. Someone had put a paper bag over their head and was wielding a prop chainsaw. Zombies in detailed prosthetic decay. Each costume more elaborate and disturbing than the last.
Jude looked down at the jack-o'-lantern in his hands.
The system job had been simple: carve a pumpkin at work, find a buyer. He'd carved a pumpkin. The resulting thing had eyes like dead fish, rendered in uneven gouges, and a grinning mouth with scratch marks at the corners that looked disturbingly like dried drool. The Red Dragon's kitchen staff had stared at it with expressions ranging from pity to genuine concern.
"There's actually a buyer for this?" He studied it. "In the Diamond District?"
A figure materialized from the crowd.
Black round hat. Loose grey trench coat, shapeless and deliberately so. Rough work gloves on both hands. Face obscured by shadow and costume, unremarkable among the evening's parade of deliberately unremarkable costumes.
The man approached without speaking. Pointed at the pumpkin. Paid cash. Took it. Walked away without making eye contact, without acknowledging Jude's existence as a person rather than a transaction.
"Interesting costume," Jude muttered.
The system flashed TASK COMPLETE. Two jobs remaining. No time to analyze mysterious buyers with unusual taste in seasonal décor—he had a sewer burger to deliver and some kind of warehouse situation to handle before midnight.
So it was that on this particular Halloween, the Diamond District gained a memorable addition to its street entertainment: a man wearing a carved pumpkin on his head, cheap coat, thick gloves, wandering the wealthy avenues with no apparent destination. He looked exactly like the nonsensical killers from slasher films—the ones that didn't run, didn't speak, just moved.
Pedestrians stopped and stared.
What an unusual costume, several of them thought.
The man in the trench coat thought the same thing about the street vendor who had sold him the pumpkin, then put the thought away.
Not the time.
He moved up a long, narrow staircase along the exterior of the villa, treading lightly. Late evening—most of the lights in the building had gone dark. A few scattered bulbs along the second-floor corridor, dim and irregular. Most of the household had gone to sleep.
But from somewhere above: the faint sound of running water.
He moved toward it through the shadows, following the sound the way certain things follow certain other things in dark water.
A hand turned the faucet. The water stopped rising.
In the steam, a man settled deeper into the bath, humming tunelessly, letting the heat take the tension out of him. He preferred dim light these days—had developed an aversion to brightness recently, a preference for shadows. Bright light made him feel visible in ways that had become uncomfortable.
"Idiot Daniel," he muttered, watching the steam curl.
The warmth had a particular quality tonight. It reminded him of the feeling from earlier in the week—sheltered in the back of a moving car, the night coming in through the windows, the specific sensation of being anonymous and untouchable in the dark while the gun in his hand did what it was made for.
He'd been different afterward. He knew that. On ordinary evenings he wanted parties, company, the energy of a room focused on him. But after—after, he wanted exactly this. Stillness. Darkness. Heat.
A line of light split the steam.
The door had opened.
He was still processing this—how—when his pupils contracted against the sudden light, and the answer arrived:
Pop. Pop. Pop.