Job Arakkis isn't as cheap as your girlfriend (youre_welcome) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-04-17 13:22:00 |
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Entry tags: | lois lane, spider jerusalem |
Who: Max and Job
What: Interviews, with less then stellar results.
When: About 10 minutes after this
Where: Virginia Mason hospital
Warnings: Shooters are creepy and people use predictably foul language.
Max had spent the drive to Job’s apartment alternating between slamming the heel of her palm against the steering wheel and wishing she smoked. She knew Thomas was going to be livid, and she knew Thomas deserved to be livid. She also knew that if they hadn’t tricked him into staying home with Amanda two things would have happened - he would have been killed in Aubade’s lobby, and Amanda would have been left alone with someone who couldn’t protect her.
It didn’t change the fact that she felt like shit, and that she knew that if someone died, Thomas was going to blame them all for it.
There wasn’t much time to focus on that, though, as she pulled in front of Hamartia. The Chief had been calling since the reporter outside Monarch - Mark Johanson - had been declared DOA at Virginia Mason. She knew it was intentional, the Chief assigning her and Job to this particular story, and she knew enough to expect a shit storm when they got to the hospital. She had a bulletproof vest under her shirt, and a spare one was stretched on the truck’s passenger seat when she pulled the truck to a stop.
Job had been studiously ignoring all phone calls all morning since the first few regardless of who they came from, so the news that the Chief was throwing them at this madness had been news to him. Not that he was surprised to hear it; it seemed like the type of sick mindfuck bosses were known for and not-so-secretly got off on. Necessary effects were grabbed and secured before he headed downstairs, clattering and generally making as much noise as physically possible during the trip for no other reason than to get it out of his system before he had to actually feign civility.
He wanted to stay home. Maybe make a trip to whatever liquor store was nearby and start in on polluting his liver to full toxicity while he waited for the whole thing to blow over, but mostly just stay home. Regroup. Figure out where to go from here, what his next move was, determine if there was a way to capture public attention and use all this nervous energy constructively. But no. He had to go out in the middle of the clusterfuck and take apart this story of ‘wrong place wrong time’ because of some imagined camaraderie. Not that he didn’t feel bad about it, it was unfortunate and unnecessary and just another case of mob mentality playing havoc with human decency, but still. He had better things to do than go investigate a story in person that he could probably whip out in an hour from the safety of his shithole of an apartment.
When he got to the truck he gave a half-assed salute before climbing in, removing the vest from the cushion before getting himself settled. “And to think I thought I was done wearing these things. But I guess you’re not really living unless you get shot at once in a while, right?” He flashed a savage grin as he strapped on the vest, a disconcertingly humorless expression despite the jovial tone. If you couldn’t laugh in the face of your potential destruction, what was the point? If he had to do this, he figured he might as well try to enjoy it.
Max appreciated the fake bravado of the salute and the smart-ass comment, and she scoffed. “Let’s just hope they’re stupid enough to aim for our organs,” she said, but she really wasn’t too worried. They’d had people outside the apartment, sure, but no one had tried to hurt them. It was mainly fans, screaming and ardent and looking for pictures of the Bat’s kid. And if Arakkis got gunned down, it would be by a supporter of the Bat, not the opposite. And she was counting on the fact that her presence would ameliorate that.
The police radio in the truck was loud chatter, and it indicated that the Aubade shooter had been taken down and was being bused to Virginia Mason. “Convenient,” she said, the stress of tricking Thomas into not going into Aubade on a death mission showing on her features. “We can kill two birds with one stone.”
“Hooray,” Job returned with fabricated cheer, more intent on the words coming out of the radio and committing them to memory than the woman speaking beside him. New story, new avenues to look into, new things to occupy his mind with rather than the cold hard facts and his place in them. Just as with every other story he’d ever worked on he was determined to focus on it and only it until it was complete, it was just how he worked and honestly he was morbidly glad for the momentary diversion. “Not that you seem overly thrilled about it.”
“They’re going to blame themselves for anyone who’s dead,” she explained, not clarifying the who, not thinking she needed to. “The masks are split between men who think lethal action is acceptable and men who don’t. The one’s who don’t think it’s acceptable are going to feel like all of this shit is their fault,” she explained, adding, “and I don’t think anyone’s taking the shit that’s happened today very well.”
She pulled the truck in front of the ER entrance at Virginia Mason, and she snapped her press pass on her belt loop. She wasn’t going to risk walking in the parking lot, not with how crowded the fucking place was, and she flashed the pass at the cop who came to see why they had parked there. Luckily, it was someone she knew from her interaction with West, and they were being escorted into the hospital within seconds. They bypassed the waiting room, and the cop led them past a wall of screaming locals and paparazzi. The screams, even as they passed, were clear and distinguishable. Yells of Can you introduce me to the Bat, Job??!! and Tell the Bat I love him!!! and You bitch, you stole him from me!!!.
Max didn’t turn, and tried not to listen as the cop handed them the information he had on the dead man: The reporter was a thirty year old employee of the Times named Mark Johanson. He had a girlfriend, a young women in her mid twenties struggling through medical school. Both his parents are still alive, and he has a brother and a sister, both younger than him, one a teenager, one in their early twenties. He was widely considered to be an aggressive reporter with a knack for getting himself into trouble, but a good guy with a passion for fantasy football and noir movies.
The family, the cop explained, was in the room beyond. Max gave Job a look, and she pushed open the door to the sound of anger and crying. “The questions are all yours,” she said.
“My pleasure,” he muttered before stepping inside, taking a deep breath as reassurance.
He hated this part. Asking the hard questions, getting under people’s skin, that part he thrived on, delighted in, even. This kind of human interest digging, especially for answers he was pretty sure he already knew...this part he liked substantially less. He would much rather be talking to the shooter, he didn’t see the point in poking at people’s losses to see what fell out and how much they would bleed. It was everything he hated about modern reporting.
Once in the room he glanced around idly, taking stock of both it and the people inside before dropping into a chair opposite, leaning forward in the universal ‘I’m hanging on your every word’ posture. “Hi. We’re from the Times. I’m Job, this is Max,” he gestured towards her in case that was somehow not obvious, “and first I would just like to say we’re very sorry for your loss. Cold comfort, I know, but it’s true. From what I hear he was a pretty stand-up guy, and good at his job, so. He’ll be missed. I’ll try to make this as painless as possible.” The words felt hollow and empty and completely devoid of any meaningful reassurance, but what were you supposed to say? He didn’t know the guy, and he’d be damned if he was going to promise everything was going to get better when everyone knew it sucked like hell until it eventually didn’t. Better to say things that were at least true and get the whole thing over with. “So, right off the bat, if you’ll excuse the tasteless pun. What side of the fence was he working?”
The teenager, Mark’s brother, got to his feet first, and he threw a very bad, very ineffective punch at Job’s nose before his mother managed to pull him back. The teenage girl began yelling next, screaming about how her brother was just doing what he had done, how he was wanted to tell the truth, how she was proud of him. Max glanced at Job, and then at the grieving family, and they reminded her of people she knew. Of Audrey, of Luke, and she just rested a tentatively awkward hand on Mark’s mother’s shoulder, which resulted in the woman grabbing her into a hug that Max very much wanted to escape from. The woman babbled through her tears, babbled about her son’s support of the Masks, of how he had always wanted to tell people about the good they’d done. She talked for awhile, calling Max by name and inquiring after her family, and Max finally had to break away.
The woman looked at Job, next, and she held her head high and wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “My son,” she said, “was a good reporter,” and then she broke down and slumped into the chair she’d vacated, sobbing.
Max glanced over at Job; maybe it would be better to talk to the shooters.
Job hadn’t moved when the punch was thrown, and not because he’d known it wouldn’t go anywhere. The kid was hurting, he could understand that, and if that’s what his catharsis entailed, who was he to judge? He could understand that too. But it never quite connected, and the mother was there before another one, a better aimed one, could be thrown. He’d find something else later, Job knew, when his movements weren’t so affected by grief. Something more stationary, more rewarding.
He offered the woman a commiserating look, without the reassuring words he was fairly sure she was looking for. There weren’t any. Just the verbal equivalent of a pat on the shoulder, a ‘there, there’, and what had that ever done for anyone? Jack shit. Even ‘I’m sorry’ sounded patronizing to his ears. It just wasn’t enough to encompass all of it adequately. And it certainly didn’t help knowing that he’d had a hand in it.
But hindsight was always 20/20, and it had never done anyone any good looking back aside from to learn from past mistakes to avoid them in the future. Job met Max’s eyes before looking over at the door pointedly. There wasn’t much more they could do here, after all, better to go where the rest of the story was.
Max followed Job to the door, and she glanced at his fave once they were outside and in the hall. She touched where the punch had landed, a quick, military kind of medical assessment, and then she nodded toward the room the cops were guarding. She’d seen the footage, and she knew Orin Monarch had beaten this man near to death, and she knew Job was smart enough to have caught the speed with which Orin was on the other man. She didn’t know who Monarch was, but she was getting closer and closer to being sure he was someone.
Behind them, voices called out more of the same from earlier, screamed requests from girls for Job to introduce them to the Bat, and jealous slurs right after. Max ignored them, flashed her pass at the officer guarding the door, and pressed into the room.
The man on the hospital bed looked terrible, and the man on the bed beside him, the man from Aubade, was covered from head-to-toe in a white sheet.
The two shooters were Marcus and Tom Fitzpatrick, a pair of brothers in their mid twenties. Marcus, the man who shot at Orin Monarch and killed a journalist, was a year older than Tom, who held the guard hostage in the lobby of Aubade. The two men had not lost anyone to the Bat - they both came from a low-income, abusive household, and have been living together since Marcus entered college. Both were obsessed with the Bat, and when the article came out in the paper, they swiftly fed each other into the idea that killing him was the only way to truly immortalize themselves alongside him, always to be said in the same breath as his name, never forgotten. So they split up and went after Orin Monarch and Thomas Brandon, intending to kill both just to make sure they had killed whichever one was the Bat.
Max knew that much from the statement the man in the bed, Marcus, had made upon arrival. She edged close to the bed, enough to capture his attention, and Marcus looked at them both with pleased greedy eyes. “I’ll answer any questions you got,” he said eagerly, even through the missing teeth and split lip.
Job crept in closer, close enough to get a good look at the man but just out of grabbing distance. Based on the information available he doubted Marcus would do anything untoward -he wouldn’t want to risk the potential that it might ruin his chance at fame, after all - but he still didn’t want to be any closer to the sick fuck than he had to be. Whereas he had been calm and quiet and understanding with the family, now that he was once again in his element the teeth came out, lips twisting into a vicious smirk in response to the greedy look. Not, strictly speaking, ‘professional,’ maybe, but he’d found it tended to get results. “Of course you will. Anything to get your fifteen minutes, right? So we’ll start with the easy ones. Why the Bat, and how do you feel knowing you missed your shot not just once but twice?”
Marcus smiled, a slow and spreading smile, one that didn't stop widening when Job finished talking. "I didn't miss," he insisted, voice a dreamy with self-satisfaction. "Tom and I, we did what we set out to do. We put ourselves beside him. People will say our names and his together, and we will be with him even though he is dead." He reached out with his free hand for Job's hand, gently, and asked, with pity in his voice, "Are you jealous?"
Max took a step back, just one, before remembering herself and holding her ground.
The hand was pulled safely out of reach of Marcus’ reaching one, and shoved in a pocket instead, although he made no other move to retreat. “Jealous of you two knuckleheads? Give me a break. Like you’ve done anything to be jealous of. The man you shot? Wasn’t the Bat. Just so we’re clear. He was just a regular guy, doing his job. And your brother? Never even got a chance. They’ll talk about you for another week or so, but after that everything will be back to business as usual and you’ll be forgotten. I’ll make sure of it if I have to. But you never answered my question. Why the Bat? Plenty of other people to pick from. Masks, too.”
Marcus never stopped smiling, and he laid back on the bed. "You're wrong," he said, settling in, comfortable on the hospital sheets as he would be on the padded down of the bed of a king. "We chose him because we loved him. So much power, so much darkness, so much efficacy. We wanted to be with him, and now we are." His wandering, watery blue gaze settled on Max. He looked like a euphoric preacher, someone touched deeply by something grand and unnameable. The reverence with which he spoke of what he'd done was spiritual in its awed respect and joy. "I will miss Tom," he said, quietly. "But I know he did what was right. Even if we didn't succeed, the Bat will never forget us. He will always remember how close we came. We changed his world. We touched him. That's all that matters."
Max wanted to spit on him, the reaction all military and nothing female at all. “You son of a fucking bitch,” she said, stepping forward with an anger she couldn’t control. “You egotistical, selfish, son of a motherfucking bitch.” She reached for a firearm that wasn’t there.
Job shot her a look, the kind that parents tended to give their children when they were about to misbehave. Yes, the bastard was in fact just that, and a twisted son of a bitch, and about a billion other worse things that were frowned upon to mention in polite society, but telling him so, not to mention showing him exactly what either of them thought of him, was about the worst thing they could possibly do. It would only give him power, justify him further. And that was the last thing they needed right now.
"Must be nice to be that delusional, that cuckoo for cocoa puffs, that you actually think killing a hero - I'm sorry, not killing a hero, I should say - is going to immortalize you forever. Especially in his. You know how many creeps like you he deals with every day? You're not special. Neither of you are. But I digress. I'd ask if you had anything to say for yourself about that reporter you killed for your grandiose hallucinations, but I'm sure it would only end in having to pull my friend here off your throat, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that while you would probably get off on it she'd regret it later. So instead I'll just ask, out of curiosity, which of you two MENSA candidates came up with the brilliant idea?"
Marcus glanced at his dead brother’s form once, just once, before looking back at Job and smiling that smile again. “Me, of course,” he said, as if he would take the credit regardless.
Max had registered the look Job gave her, and she spun out of the room and into the hall, her back against the wall beside the door, chest heaving with her desire to break what teeth Marcus had left. She waited for Job to reappear, to come close enough to hear. “He’s going to doubt every good thing he’s done for this city, thanks to that bastard. He’s going to force all of us to live away from him, thanks to that bastard. All the fucking progress- you know, when I met him, he didn’t have anyone. No one. And it’s taken this long to make him understand people care about him, really fucking care. And now he’s going to shove us all away, because some motherfucker like him,” she pointed to the hospital room, “might come by with a gun at any time. In a park, in a store, in a bedroom.” She slammed her fist back against the hallway wall once, and then again.
Job grabbed her wrist without a thought before she could continue, holding it back before she could make the next impact, and made a sound that he supposed was intended to sound reassuring, for all the good it likely did. “Hey, the only good that’s going to do is break your fucking hand, and what the hell’s that gonna prove? You want to pummel something try a bag. Or a face. Just leave the damn wall alone unless you want to pay both the hospital to fix the wall and the doctor to fix you.” There was no need to ask who ‘he’ was, it was obvious enough. If Job were a better man he might have apologized, and some part of him toyed with the idea anyway. But it was too small a token, and it would accomplish nothing. What’s done was done and could not be undone; there was no point in regrets, time only moved forward, never back. The only good regrets did was provide learning experiences, things to avoid in the future. He had a few of those now, and that was that. Instead he pulled out a new cigarette from the crushed package in his jeans and lit up, after a moment offering the package to Max. Politesse, after all, and it was the least he could do considering the hell he’d rained down on her and the rest of them. “As for him...” Job paused to take a few deep drags, trying to figure out what to say exactly. It wasn’t like ‘He’ll get over it’ was either reassuring or entirely accurate.
“There’s psychos everywhere. You honestly can’t expect me to believe this is the first one he’s come across who’s gotten this close.” He snorted. “And besides. You can’t tell me he doesn’t read the papers, keep track of crime statistics. How could he possibly doubt the good he does? That’s complete bullshit.”
Max didn’t smoke, but she took the cigarette, shaking her hand free of his grip easily before reaching for the smoke, staring at him for a few long seconds before doing so. She brought the cigarette to her lips, and she waited for him to light it for her, and she took a deep inhale as she waited for them to get kicked out for smoking. She leaned back against the wall, kicking one heeled foot back against it for good measure, and then she looked over at him. “As the Bat,” she said. “When he was just the Bat, he was someone they couldn’t touch, someone they didn’t think they could touch. Now, they know better. And it won’t take them forever to realize they can go after people he loves. What then? Does he leave us all behind to keep us fucking safe?” It was a selfish question, and she knew it, and she exhaled smoke over both of their heads. “I know this isn’t what you wanted. It isn’t what I fucking wanted when I started writing the same story a year ago, either.”
She pulled out her cell, and she didn’t bother moving out of his earshot as she called to check on Thomas. There was no point; this man was a part of their lives now, whether he wanted to be or not. The conversation was a short one, and she pocketed her phone and tugged out her keys as soon as it was over. “He’s at Aubade, being questioned by the police,” she told him. “I have to go pick up my kid,” she added, stubbing the cigarette out beneath the toe of her shoe and looking up at him. “You’re a better man than I thought you were,” she said honestly. “Find yourself a safe ride home, and don’t even think of fucking going out without that vest on.” She started to move, and then she stopped and looked over her shoulder. “And if anything gets dangerous, you fucking call me,” she said.
Leaning against the wall, arms crossed once she pulled out of his grip, he snorted at her admission, clearly thinking she was overstating - he made a living off making others’ lives difficult, saying he was more decent a guy than she’d anticipated didn’t exactly amount to much and it wouldn’t do much for his career if people started thinking otherwise. But he kept his thoughts on that to himself; there was no reason to press his luck when she evidently didn’t seem to actually hold everything against him. He took a few more drags on the cigarette before sighing heavily out of frustration, the acrid smoke billowing out through his nostrils in roiling clouds in its search for an exit. “Oh, I don’t plan on so much as leaving the apartment to pick up a damn pizza until this clusterfuck blows over, not unless somebody’s got weapons-grade plutonium-level information that’ll tip things the right way. But...yeah, fine. As sceptical as I am of your newfound warm and fuzzies over this thing, duly noted on both counts. Yes, mother, I’ll be careful and I’ll be sure to call if I run into trouble when I’m out past curfew.” While the tone was light and almost mocking, as if he thought she was overreacting, the sentiment was sincere. And he knew perfectly well it wouldn’t hurt knowing he had at least one friendly out there. “I know I don’t need to say this, but you and yours watch your backs too, alright? It’s bad enough I’ve got a few bodies on my not-entirely-absent conscience already, the last thing I want is a few more.” He gave another lazy salute as she left, and made sure to wait a good fifteen minutes or so before heading home himself.