I've been a police officer in this city for a long time.
Long enough to think I've seen most of what Gotham has to offer. Long enough to stop being surprised by the things it sends my way. And yet here I am, standing behind a window at Blackgate's medical bay at six in the morning, looking at a young man who shouldn't be alive, holding a file that tells me essentially nothing.
He's unconscious. Bandaged from the shoulder down on his left side, more wrapping across the ribs, his jaw a deep purple that's going to look worse before it looks better. The medic who treated him said he'd lost significant blood before we found him. Said the forearm laceration alone should have been enough to put him down. Said the rib situation was a small miracle of geometry — one of them had cracked clean rather than splintering, which apparently made the difference between a punctured lung and a painful recovery.
The medic had used the word miracle twice.
I've been on the job too long to believe in miracles, but I was standing at that dock scene at two in the morning and I understand the sentiment.
— ✦ —
The file is thin.
No priors. No juvenile record. No DMV record, no tax filings, nothing connecting to a social security number in our system. He had ID on him — a Gotham driver's license, good quality, that came back to a name that doesn't connect to anything else in any database we run. Whether that's our system failing or someone making deliberate choices, I haven't decided yet.
He looks young. Twenty-five, maybe twenty-six. Dark hair, lean build, a face that's hard to read even unconscious.
The scene at the docks was something else entirely.
Thirty-six bodies. That was the final count. Thirty-six, in and around a loading bay in the warehouse district, with a scatter pattern that suggested the fight had moved through three distinct areas before ending at the water's edge. The bodies were dressed identically — dark tactical clothing, white masks, the kind of gear that didn't come from any supplier we could identify. The weapons were short blades, some modified, consistent across all thirty-six.
Then there was him. Found on the dock planking outside the loading bay doors, soaking wet, unconscious, a gun still in his right hand. The gun matched the rounds we pulled from seven of the bodies inside.
Seven. And the other twenty-nine he'd apparently handled without it.
I've been doing this job since before some of my officers were born. I've seen organized crime hits, gang warfare, the aftermath of whatever the costumed community leaves behind when a night goes sideways. I've stood in rooms that should have been impossible and called them Tuesday.
That loading bay was something different.
One man. Thirty-six bodies. And from the physical evidence — the spread of impact marks, the blood trails, the positioning of the fallen — he hadn't set up a defensive position or ambushed them. He'd fought them in the open. Moving through them, using the space, adapting. The forensics team kept looking at each other while they worked. I knew the look. It was the look of people whose professional framework for understanding violence was being asked to accommodate something outside it.
I made sure he went to Blackgate.
Not Arkham. We've had enough of that particular revolving door. Whatever this young man is, he's not a psychopath in a costume. He's something more straightforward and considerably more dangerous, and Blackgate has better physical security than people give it credit for, and I wanted him somewhere I could keep track of him.
I looked at him through the window for another minute.
It's a genuine miracle he's alive.
I gestured to the officer on guard that I was done, and left.
— ✦ —
The drive back to the station was quiet.
Gotham at that hour has a specific quality that I've never quite gotten used to even after all these years — not peaceful, exactly, but resting. Gathering itself. The city that never fully stops at least slows down between four and seven, the worst of the night finished and the day not yet started, and I drove through it with the window cracked and the file on the passenger seat and my head running through what I knew and what I didn't.
What I knew: a young man with no record had been found unconscious at a scene involving thirty-six bodies. His gear was professional. His injuries were consistent with extended, sustained combat. He was alive when he shouldn't have been.
What I didn't know: who he was, who sent the thirty-six, why he'd been targeted, and whether the one that got away — we'd found boot prints at the dock's edge, someone who'd gone into the water and the water hadn't given back — was a problem we were going to hear about again.
I parked. Walked up to my office. Switched on the light.
Turned around.
He was there. Of course he was.
Batman. Standing by the window the way he always stood by the window, like the window was his and I was the guest. I've worked with him for long enough that the entrance doesn't startle me anymore. Doesn't mean I've gotten used to it, exactly. More that I've made a professional accommodation.
"Apparently there's no record of him in the system," I said, setting the file on my desk. "He's a ghost."
Batman looked at the file for a moment. Then at me.
"His data was hidden," he said.
I waited. When Batman says something like that, there's usually more.
"Maxwell Connor," he continued. "Orphan. Grew up in the East End. Started as a courier — moving product for mid-tier organizations, the kind of work that doesn't get noticed because it's not meant to. Over the past year he shifted. Contracts. Eliminations." A pause. "He goes by John Wick."
I turned that over. A code name. Someone who'd chosen a code name had thought about what they were doing, which put them in a different category from someone who stumbled into it.
"A formidable one," I said. That felt like an understatement given the loading bay, but it was the word I had.
"He has a connection to Amanda Waller," Batman said.
That landed differently.
Waller. Task Force X. I'd had dealings with that office exactly twice in my career and both times I'd come away with the strong impression that it was the kind of federal apparatus that was better left unexamined unless you were prepared for what the examination produced. The fact that a twenty-five-year-old with no record and a code name was connected to it was a data point I was going to need time to file correctly.
"And the bodies?" I said. "We can't identify them. The gear, the masks, nothing comes back to anything."
Batman was quiet for a moment. I've learned what that particular silence means. It means he knows something and is deciding how much of it to hand over.
"The Court of Owls," he said.
I stared at him.
The Court of Owls.
Every kid who grows up in Gotham hears the rhyme. Old Gotham folklore, the kind of thing grandmothers use to keep children from wandering into certain parts of the city after dark. A secret society of masked elites controlling the city from the shadows for centuries. The kind of story that sounds reasonable in a place like Gotham and that every serious investigator eventually concludes is exactly that — a story.
I'd concluded that myself. Twice.
"The Court," I said slowly, "is a myth."
Batman looked at me.
I stood there and processed what that look meant and what it implied about the number of times I'd been wrong about things I was certain about.
"He offended them?" I asked. It came out sounding more uncertain than I intended.
"Monitor him," Batman said.
That was it. Not an explanation, not a context, not the part where he tells me what I'm supposed to do with the information that the fairy tale my grandmother told me about Gotham's shadow rulers is apparently a going concern that sent thirty-six operatives after one man. Just: monitor him.
I opened my mouth to ask the obvious follow-up question.
He was gone.
Of course he was.
I stood in my office for a moment, looking at the window he'd been standing at, the city visible through it in the early grey of a Gotham morning that had no idea what kind of night had just preceded it.
The Court of Owls was real.
I'd spent thirty years in this city and the Court of Owls was real, and a twenty-five-year-old hitman with no record had apparently walked into one of their operations a year ago and been on their list ever since, and last night they'd sent forty-odd assassins to make a point and he'd put thirty-six of them on the floor of a loading bay before going into the water with what was presumably their primary operative.
And survived.
And now he was in the Blackgate medical bay wrapped in bandages, and my instruction from the one source I trusted in this city more than anyone in my own department was to monitor him.
Not arrest him. Not charge him. Monitor.
I sat down.
I took off my glasses and set them on the desk and pressed my fingers against the bridge of my nose and held them there for a moment.
Thirty years.
The file was still on my desk. Maxwell Connor. John Wick. Orphan from the East End, courier turned hitman, Waller connection, League of Shadows training if Batman's assessment of the fight with Jason was accurate — and Batman's assessments were accurate, that was the one reliable constant of the past thirty years — and now a surviving encounter with the Court of Owls that shouldn't have been survivable.
I looked at the file.
I looked at the window.
I thought about thirty years of this city and the things it had asked of me and the things I'd seen and the things I'd made my peace with because making peace was the only option that left you functional.
"If I'd known," I said to the empty office, to the file, to nobody in particular, "it was going to be like this. I wouldn't have become a cop."
I put my glasses back on.
H
I picked up the phone and called the officer on duty at Blackgate.
"The patient in the medical bay," I said. "He doesn't leave without my direct authorization. Nobody talks to him without my direct authorization. Nobody transfers him without my direct authorization."
I listened to the acknowledgment.
"Good," I said, and hung up.
Outside my window, Gotham was starting its day. The early traffic, the first shift of the legitimate economy, the city assembling itself from the dark into something that resembled normalcy in the light.
Maxwell Connor was in a Blackgate bed, unconscious, being kept alive by medicine and what two separate people had now called a miracle.
The Court of Owls was real.
I poured coffee, because there was nothing else useful to do at six-fifteen in the morning with information like this, and sat at my desk and waited for the city to show me what came next.
It always did.