aFireFist
A Life in DC
Chapter 14 - Part 6
Vieri did not follow her in.
He picked the kitchen up first because leaving it like that felt like leaving a report half-written. He wiped the table. He kicked the wet Spoiler suit farther off the linoleum with the side of his foot so it was in one pile instead of a trail. He threw a towel over the worst of the rug and did not look at it long. The beer he had opened before she showed up was still on the counter, warm now. He poured it out.
In the bathroom Stephanie stood under water that was too hot and let it hit the back of her neck. The tile was old. The soap was a bar, not a bottle. She washed his cum off her tits first, watching the white streak thin and run down over her stomach and into the drain. Then she washed between her legs. She was swollen and sore and still twitching when the cloth passed over her clit. She hissed and did it anyway. The handprints on her ass showed pink under the water. She turned, looked at them over her shoulder in the streaked mirror, and laughed once, quiet, mean at herself.
"Contact," she said to the steam. "Sure."
She shut the water off. Dripped. Found the towel in the hall closet where he had said it would be, because of course it was. She dried off standing in his hallway with her wet hair dripping on his floor and her thick thighs pressed together against the slow leak of what he had left in her. The suit was still a cold, wet heap. She made a face and pulled it on anyway.
It clung worse than the rain had. Purple-and-black sucking to her full D-cup tits, the heavy shape of them obvious, nipples still tight from the heat and from him. The crotch seam sat wrong against her sore cunt. The ass of the suit showed the faint lift of the spanking if you knew how to look. She got the zipper up. She got the boots on. One had ended up under the table. She swore at it, sat on the hall floor to lace it, and stood like the last stretch was still sitting in her hips.
Gloves off the counter. Mask in her hand, not on her face yet.
Vieri was in the kitchen doorway when she came out. Shirt back on. Belt done. He looked like a man who had finished a shift and then another one on his own floor.
"You good to walk?" he asked.
"I've walked on worse." She pulled the mask up onto her head like a cap and left her face bare. Damp blonde hair stuck to her neck. Color still high on her cheeks. "If I limp, I'll call it the crowbar guy."
"There was a crowbar guy."
"There was. He didn't do this to my gait." She glanced at the rug, then away. "Don't wash that tonight. You'll just spread it around."
"I'll deal with it."
"I know you will. You deal with things. That's your whole problem." She stood there a second longer, rain starting again on the back windows, the house small around both of them. "Zodiac paid those men to stay off the main streets. That's not a rumor I made up to get in your door. Babs has the phone dump. If the Queens keep the quiet and she doesn't, you're the piece in the middle whether you like the folder or not."
"I heard you the first time."
"Good. I wasn't sure. You were busy." Her mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "I'm going out the back. If a neighbor sees purple on your porch I'm going to have to invent a story and I'm a bad liar when my legs don't work."
She paused with her hand on the door.
"For what it's worth," she said, looking at the glass instead of him, "I meant the part about pointing them at her. The rest of it was me being an idiot in a suit. Both things can be true."
"Brown."
"Yeah."
"Get back to the Tower before she starts pulling street cams on this block."
"Working on it."
She went out the way she had come in. Wet porch. Trash bag still sitting where he had set it down. Fence. Then the dark between the row houses.
Vieri locked the back door. He stood in the kitchen with his hand on the deadbolt and listened to the rain. Then he took his phone out of the bowl by the keys, saw no messages from Selina, no messages from a number that would be Ivy, and put it down again.
Stephanie made it two streets before she stopped under a broken stoop light and turned her comm back on.
The dead zone closed. Her dot would be back on Barbara's map, a little west of where it should have been, a little late.
She did not explain the ninety seconds. She typed one word to the Clock Tower line instead, thumb wet on the screen.
Contact.
Send.
She put the mask on. The world narrowed to the eyeholes and the rain. She took the roofs this time, not the sidewalks, because a girl in purple on the street in the Heights was a story and a girl in purple on the tar paper was just the job.
She did not see Cass until she was three buildings over.
Cassandra Cain was on the roof across from Vieri's house, the one with the rusted dish and the pigeon coop that had not held pigeons in years. Orphan black against black. Rain running off her like it did not matter. She had been there long enough that the gravel around her boots was a darker circle.
Stephanie landed on the next roof and went still.
Cass signed, small, clear, no wasted motion.
You went in.
Stephanie signed back, after a second.
I said I would call first contact.
You said copy. That is not the same.
Stephanie's mouth tightened behind the mask. The suit pulled across her sore tits when she breathed. She could still feel him when she shifted her weight. She signed anyway.
He knows we were on the dock last night. He knows about Montoya. I told him about the geometry phrase. That is the job part.
Cass watched her. Rain dripped off her chin. She signed:
And the other part.
Stephanie did not answer with her hands. That was an answer.
Cass's mouth twitched, the almost-smile that never stayed. She signed:
Babs saw the dead zone. She is not stupid. Come in. Now.
Stephanie looked back once at the dark house. Kitchen light still on. No silhouette in the window. Then she followed Cass east, two shapes on wet roofs, the Clock Tower a dull spike against the clouds.
Inside, the Tower was warm and too bright after the street. Servers. Old coffee. The faint ozone of equipment that never got turned off. Stephanie pulled the mask off as soon as the upper door shut and the rain stayed outside. Water ran down the front of the suit and between her full D-cup tits. She sat before her legs could make the decision for her. The chair took her weight. She hissed through her teeth and covered it by dragging a glove off.
Barbara did not turn around at first.
She was at the main console, red hair still tied back, dark tactical top stretched across her full breasts, three screens up. One showed the garment dock, uniforms still there, vans being tagged. One showed the phone dump from the cracked screen, the phrase highlighted. One showed the map with Stephanie's dot reappearing two streets west of the Heights grid, then moving, then gone onto roofs the cameras did not love.
Cass signed to Barbara's back.
She is here.
Barbara turned the chair.
Her face was even. The flush on her cheeks was not. She looked at Stephanie sitting wet in the chair, at the way she was sitting, at the damp hair, at the scuff on the glove she had not put back on.
"You're late," Barbara said.
"There was a tail."
"There was not a tail. I ran the block. I ran the two blocks west. I ran the bus camera you used as cover. There was a dead zone and then there was you walking toward a residential grid we already have flagged." She clicked the mouse. The map zoomed. "Oronzo's block. Don't insult me by calling it a coincidence."
Stephanie held her eyes. It cost her. The chair was unkind.
"I made contact," she said. "That's what I said I would do. That's what I texted."
Barbara looked at the message still sitting on the side monitor. One word. No punctuation. No report.
Contact.
"I asked for no one going near him alone," Barbara said. Her voice stayed controlled. There was a tightness under it that had been there last night when Stephanie had described the warehouse and had not gone away since. "I asked for a morning meeting. I asked for the phone dump and the residual and a plan. What I got was you killing your comm for ninety seconds and walking into his house."
Cass signed, not taking sides, just putting the fact on the table.
She told him we watched the warehouse. She told him about Montoya. She told him about the geometry lady on the phone. That part is useful.
"And the other part?" Barbara asked, still looking at Stephanie.
Stephanie's jaw worked. She did not look at Cass. She did not look at the warehouse timestamps still frozen on the far screen.
"The other part is mine," she said. "You can be angry about the dead zone. You can put me on logs. You can make Cass babysit me for a week. I am not sitting here giving you a play-by-play of a conversation that started as the job and got out of my hand."
Barbara's hands tightened on the armrests. The tactical top pulled across her full breasts with the breath she took. She glanced once at the closed audio file from Kane Street — the one that still had Montoya's voice in it — and did not open it.
"Zodiac paid a smash crew to stay off the main streets on the same night the Queens went quiet," Barbara said. "That is the board. He is in the middle of it. I need you sharp, not sitting in my chair like you ran a marathon in that suit. Are you hurt."
"No."
"Are you going to be able to work tomorrow."
Stephanie almost laughed and killed it. "Yes."
"Then you write up the dock. You write up the phrase on the phone. You write that contact was made and that he knows we have him. You do not write the rest. Not on my server. Not tonight." Barbara turned back to the screens. "Cass. You were on the roof across the street."
Cass signed.
Yes.
"Did anyone else approach the house after she left."
No. Light stayed on. He did not come out. I left when she moved.
Barbara nodded once. The flush had not left her face. "We pick it up at 0800. Residual, phone dump, his file, the Queens' two-week clock. Nobody lone-wolfs the Heights again. Clear?"
"Clear," Stephanie said.
Cass signed clear and went to strip the wet suit in the back room like the rain was the only thing she needed to get off her skin.
Stephanie sat a minute longer. The Tower hummed. On the river cam the vans were being hooked. On the map her dot was home. On the side monitor the word Contact sat there looking smaller than it had felt to type.
She got up. The suit pulled at her sore cunt and the marked ass and the heavy tits still sensitive under the wet fabric. She walked to the back and did not look at Barbara's reflection in the dark glass.
Vieri shut the lights off from the back of the house forward.
Kitchen. Hall. Living room last. The towel on the rug was a problem for the morning. The table was clean enough. He stood in the dark with the rain on the windows and the smell of her still in the room — soap now, and under it the sex the shower had not taken out of the air.
His phone buzzed once on the counter.
Not Selina. Not Ivy. Not Sawyer. A number he did not have a name for, which in this city was its own kind of name.
He picked it up.
The message was a photo. No caption. A still from a traffic cam, rain-streaked, his own back porch from an angle that should not have existed. Timestamped twelve minutes ago. Stephanie in the suit, mask off, hand on his door.
Then a second message, text this time, clean and short.
She is not the only one who can watch a house.
No name. No threat with a clock on it. Just the fact of it.
Vieri looked at the dark glass of his own back door. The yard was empty. The fence was still. The trash bag was still sitting in the rain because he had never taken it to the can.
He thumbed the photo dark. He set the phone face down.
Tomorrow there would be a log to finish and a captain who wanted another clean day and a detective who would look at his desk too long and a Batgirl who would have to sit in a chair she could not sit in comfortably. Tomorrow Ivy would feel whatever this was in the roots and Selina would want a sentence and Harley would want a turn. Tomorrow Zodiac would still be in the city, paying men to stay off the main streets and sending pictures of his porch.
Tonight he locked the deadbolt, left the porch light off, and went to bed with the ache in his thighs and the smell of rain in the hall.
The house stayed quiet.
The city did not.
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