Nine PM. Shift ended at ten.
At the current rate of events, the shift ending was going to become a theoretical concept.
Santos had flipped a table and was crouched behind it, firing at the restaurant's front entrance with the practiced rhythm of someone who had done this before and intended to do it again. Bridget was on his left, equally transformed from polished server to something considerably less polished. Her gun was out, her face had shed whatever expression she used for taking drink orders, and she looked genuinely furious.
"YOU THINK YOU CAN SHOOT UP THE RED DRAGON?!" Santos bellowed over the gunfire. "YOU ARE DEAD!"
The men at the entrance—about a dozen of them, which was excessive for a Tuesday—returned fire without apparent concern. One of them, wearing a top hat and formal tailcoat in a way that suggested this was not a costume but a genuine lifestyle choice, shouted across the chaos:
"Cobblepot sends his regards! This is what happens when you compete with the Iceberg!"
More gunfire. Shattering glass. The wet neon smear of the street through the front windows, beautiful in the specific way Gotham things were sometimes beautiful—when you ignored the screaming.
Jude was in the corner with his back against the wall, watching bullets chew at the tabletop in front of him. One round hit the edge and thunked solidly instead of punching through. He looked at the divot.
Underneath the splintered wood veneer: steel. Dense, matte, scratched from prior use.
Oh, he thought. That's why these things weigh so much.
He found a candy cigarette in his jacket pocket and put it between his teeth.
Not one quiet day since he'd arrived. The robbery. The bus shootout. The bus crash before the shootout. The wheelchair theft. The car that had nine people die in it, which had somehow been one of his better afternoons.
And now this.
He knew who was behind it, roughly. Oswald Cobblepot—the Penguin—was one of Gotham's more durable crime lords, which was saying something in a city that cycled through them the way other cities cycled through weather.
Born Cobblepot, one of Gotham's old money families, then watched the money evaporate and the family fall apart. Father dead. Mother unstable. The name worth considerably less than it used to be.
He'd rebuilt—through education, through ruthlessness, through a particular kind of strategic patience—into something that ran the Iceberg on the surface and a substantial criminal operation underneath. The top hat was affectation. The empire was real.
Normally, Cobblepot didn't move directly against the Falcones. The power balance wasn't in his favor and he knew it.
But Batman had been hitting the Falcone family hard for months. Wayne Enterprises had started absorbing their legitimate fronts one by one, which meant the Falcones were squeezing every operation beneath them for revenue. Cobblepot had been getting squeezed.
The man in the top hat at the entrance was the result of that calculation.
Workers never have much choice about the company's problems, Jude thought.
"Jude!" The supervisor's voice from the next table over. "Stop hiding back there! SHOOT SOMETHING!"
"I can't!"
The supervisor froze mid-reload. Stared at him.
"What."
"I said I can't shoot!"
"This is Gotham!" The supervisor's voice had acquired a new register. "What do you mean you can't shoot?"
"Can't there be a few people in this city who don't know how? The Waynes never carried guns!"
"Look how that worked out for them!" The supervisor turned back, chambered the round, fired twice. "Safety off! Point at the entrance! Pull the trigger! It's not complicated!"
Jude found the Beretta. Located what he believed to be the safety. Clicked it. Pointed the gun generally toward the far end of the room.
Lowered it.
"I might hit something in the restaurant."
"THAT'S WHAT THE INSURANCE IS FOR!" The supervisor was developing the focused, glassy expression of a man whose blood pressure has become a medical event. "WE HAVE BULLETPROOF FURNITURE! JUST SHOOT!"
"Alright! You said!"
Jude raised the gun. The cluster of men at the entrance was approximately in the direction he was pointing. He lined up what he thought was the sight. Pulled the trigger.
The chandelier came down.
The full fixture—several thousand dollars of crystal, brass fittings, and wiring—detonated from its mounting point and hit the floor in a cascading avalanche of glass and light. The dining room went from dim to near-dark in the space of a second. Fragments scattered across four tables.
The supervisor's voice reached a pitch Jude had only encountered once before, from a cartoon his younger cousin used to watch obsessively.
The memory surfaced. Completely inappropriate timing. Also unavoidable: a tiny animated character, enormous emotion, several octaves above normal human range—
"DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT CHANDELIER COST?!"
"I was aiming at the entrance!"
"HOW?!" The supervisor was staring at him. The stare had moved past anger into something more like genuine philosophical confusion. "HOW DO YOU AIM AT THE ENTRANCE AND HIT THE CEILING?!"
"I pulled up a little—"
"A LITTLE?!"
Near the front of the restaurant, Cobblepot's men had stopped firing.
In the sudden relative quiet, one of them squinted through the drifting plaster dust toward the Red Dragon's side of the room.
"Did someone hit their boss?"
"I think so." The man in the top hat lowered his gun, reassessing. "Should we keep going or…"