Her Name is Molly (Or was it Lucy?)

[Jason Todd]

To the east of the Rogers Yacht Basin in Uptown Gotham City lied the barge docks. There, where the water rippled and the rigging creaked and every little noise carried along the inlet, it was never really quiet. Strange and unsettling sounds drifted occasionally from the north- from the long abandoned ruin that was Amusement Mile. The barge docks were gargantuan, cavernous buildings designed to hold long, wide, shallow ships which were mainly used to traverse rivers and other shallow waters.

It was on one of these buildings that a stranger sat. A long rifle lay languorously on the rooftop next to the figure who was backlit by the moon. He waited. His featureless face scanned the entrances to the Yacht Basin, watching with silent determination. The air was still and the moon hung high over Gotham City, casting great shadows even in the darkness of the evening. Behind the scarlet mask existed one Jason Todd. Even under his coat and his armor, Jason's skin pulled into tight lumps of gooseflesh in the cold. A girl went missing there on the water two days ago. She wasn't the first.

It was not uncommon to hear pounding music amid the waterfront cacophony. These pulsing rhythms were the result of warehouse raves; scenes of debauchery and drug use and just the right place to find all kinds of nasty people. It was also the perfect locale to find labs producing a veritable flood of illegal chemicals. The crew for which the Hood scanned in the cold night were suppliers of MDMA, known commonly as Ecstasy or Molly. By itself MDMA's neurotoxicity is still hotly debated among the scientific community; the consensus is often that MDMA is quite safe in a controlled environment. Unfortunately for Jack Kingsbury's prospective customers, the pills he was pushing were not wholly MDMA. Mr. Kingsbury was cutting his product. A common enough practice, except the depraved bastard was cutting his with rat poison. He intended to haul ass out of the city as soon as he turned his tidy, bloodstained profit.

A group of young men and a very intoxicated young woman came stumbling out from behind a pallet of boxes. Jason hefted the long rifle from the rough rooftop in his right hand and cozied the stock into the comfortable resting place of his right shoulder. Jason swung the SR25's ten pounds in a loose arc to the left and eased it down via the two legs of its bipod onto the lip of the rooftop. Fitting closely to his face, Jason's helmet did not interfere too badly with his ability to view through the optic attached to the rail of his rifle. He watched as the gathering took up relaxed positions next to the pallet. He watched as the young man who was clearly the leader leaned back against the boxes. Jason's body did the work for him. He watched as the reticle raised about two and a half mils up, felt a rush of cold air into his lungs, felt it slowly trickle out through his teeth. The optic made a little spastic bounce with each beat of his heart. His finger gently caressed the trigger between the sixteenth and seventeenth beat. The muted crash of the 147 grain slug of metal breaking the sound barrier and the rush of gases tumbling around in the suppressor slapped against Jason's mask.

The innards of the leader's left knee suddenly became outards, well before the sound of the projectile reached his ears. His screams carried across the water in a chilling rebuttal to Jason's opening statement.

The moonlight turned a slice of the crimson helmet almost silver. The edges of the light, soft against the matte paintjob, seemed almost devoured among the rest of Jason's attire. This made his head appear to be floating eerily in the shadow of the barge dock. His boots made a noise that was a combination of a tink and a clang as he climbed quickly down the ladder, the rifle rhythmically thumping his back with each step. Streaks of orange colored the grips of his fingers from the unpainted ladder that had been slowly oxidizing for nine or ten years.

It wasn't a long jaunt around the harbor. Jason wasn't even winded when he reached the leader's bleeding form. The boy, for that's what he was really, just a boy, on the other hand was breathing like a dog on a hot day. A dark slick pool lingered under him, inviting the light in for a nice cup of tea and then locking it away in the basement to be never seen again.

"The shit you've been selling in there is poison," growled the hood, squatting on his haunches over the boy, "Who gave it to you?"

In response to this the boy let out a long, low moan and slid promptly out of consciousness. Jason's cry of exasperation started soft and deep in his chest but became harsh and loud and skated some distance over the water before sinking into the song of the harbor. He extricated a knife from one of his myriad pockets and cut a strip of cloth from the boy's shirt. Fashioning this cloth into a tourniquet was a simple affair. The 911 operator was peaky and intractably worried, but assured Jason that an ambulance would be there soon.

Music shuddered through the warehouses, hanging poised in the air like a feral animal waiting to pounce on something unsuspecting. The crowd in line awaiting the bouncer's approval was a young and colorful group, buzzing and bouncing to the music even outside the venue. Jason's unhurried steps thudded noiselessly with every pounding beat. The bouncer, a smallish if burly and menacing man cried out as Jason through a practiced low roundhouse. The man's knee cracking could be heard, sickeningly, over both the pounding rhythm and his shrill cry of pain which was cut short by Jason whirling and bringing his boot up in one savage motion to connect with the man's jaw.