Friday, October 3rd, 2008, 21:47
New Jersey
Gotham City
East End
The closet smelled like his mother's perfume and his father's cigarettes, a mixture that usually meant safety. Tonight it meant terror.
Twelve-year-old Malik Anderson pressed his back against the wooden slats, his knees drawn up to his chest as voices carried through the thin apartment walls. His parents were talking to someone. Multiple someones. The conversation had started civil enough, but now his father's voice carried that edge it got when he was scared but trying not to show it.
"Look, I already told you, I don't know nothing about any shipment."
Marcus Anderson had always been a small man, but his voice could fill a room when he wanted it to. Tonight it sounded hollow, like he was trying to convince himself as much as the strangers in their living room.
"Come on, Marcus." The voice that responded was smooth, patient. Dangerous in the way that quiet dogs were more frightening than barking ones. "We both know you fence for half the crews in the East End. Penguin's missing a very specific package, and your name came up in conversation."
Malik's hands found the photo in his shirt pocket, the one of him and his parents at the pier last summer. His fingers traced the edges, worn soft from nervous handling. His mother had been laughing in that picture, caught mid-spin as his father dipped her like they were dancing. She'd worn the yellow dress that made her look like sunlight.
"I move watches, jewelry, the occasional electronics," his father said. "Nothing big enough to get Cobblepot's attention."
"Betty, sweetheart." The smooth voice shifted, and Malik heard his mother's sharp intake of breath. "You're awful quiet tonight."
Joan Anderson had been many things before she became a mother. An acrobat with Haly's Circus, a woman who could walk a tightrope blindfolded and land a triple somersault without breaking a sweat. She'd given that up when she met Marcus, traded the spotlight for a cramped apartment in Gotham's most forgotten neighborhood. But her voice still carried that performer's projection when she spoke.
"I don't know what you want us to say. Marcus doesn't deal with Penguin's people."
"See, that's interesting." A chair creaked, someone settling in for a longer conversation. "Because we found your husband's tools at the warehouse where the shipment went missing. Those custom picks he's so proud of. Got his initials right there on the handles."
Malik's breath caught. The lock picks. His father had been teaching him to use them, said every man needed a skill that could get him out of trouble. They'd spent hours practicing on old locks Marcus brought home, Malik's small fingers growing steady and sure under his father's guidance.
"Those were stolen last month," Marcus said quickly. "I reported it to the cops."
"Funny thing about Gotham cops." The voice carried amusement now, but the kind that made Malik's skin crawl. "They don't always file reports when they should. Especially when the reporting party has a record."
The apartment fell silent except for the distant hum of traffic and the old building settling around them. Malik counted his heartbeats, each one loud enough that he was sure the strangers would hear it through the walls.
"What do you want?" Joan's voice was smaller now.
"The shipment. Or the money from selling it. We're not picky."
"We don't have either." Marcus's words came out sharp and fast. "You got the wrong people."
"I really hoped you wouldn't say that."
The sound that followed would haunt Malik for the rest of his life. Not the gunshots, though those came. The sound that broke something inside him was his mother screaming his father's name, the raw terror in her voice as everything she loved disappeared in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Two shots. Close together. Professional.
Then silence.
Malik bit down on his fist to keep from making noise, tears streaming down his face as he listened to strangers move through his home. Drawers opening and closing. Furniture being moved. They were searching for something, taking their time now that the talking was done.
"Check the kid's room," someone said. A different voice, rougher than the smooth one.
Footsteps in the hallway. Getting closer.
Malik's hand found the second thing in his pocket, the small set of picks his father had given him for his birthday. "Every lock is just a puzzle, son," Marcus had said. "You just got to find the right way to solve it."
The footsteps stopped outside his bedroom door.
Malik closed his eyes and pictured the fire escape outside his window, the one his mother had made him practice climbing down during their "emergency drills." She'd always been paranoid about having an escape route, a leftover from her circus days when one mistake could mean death.
The bedroom door opened with a soft click.
"Nothing here," the rough voice called. "Just kid stuff."
"Boss wants us to be thorough."
"Kid's probably at school or something. Place has been empty all day by the look of it."
Malik held his breath as the footsteps moved away, back toward the living room where his parents lay bleeding on the carpet they'd saved three months to buy. His mother had been so proud of that carpet, how it made the place look "almost civilized."
Minutes passed. Hours. Time moved strangely when your world ended.
Eventually, the strangers left, taking whatever they'd come for and leaving behind a silence that felt different from any quiet Malik had ever known. This was the silence of absence, of spaces where voices should be but never would be again.
He waited until the building settled into its late-night rhythms before emerging from the closet. The apartment looked wrong in the lamplight, furniture moved, drawers hanging open like wounded mouths. He forced himself not to look toward the living room, where dark stains on the new carpet caught the light.
His backpack was where he'd left it by the door, homework half-finished inside. He dumped the books and filled it with clothes, the photo, his father's picks, and the small amount of cash his mother kept in the coffee tin marked "grocery money."
The fire escape outside his window protested under his weight, metal groaning against brick as he made his way down three stories to the alley below. The rain had started while he hid, a steady drizzle that turned October cold into something that bit through his jacket and settled in his bones.
He walked through streets that looked familiar but felt foreign, past buildings where people lived normal lives behind lit windows. Families having dinner. Kids watching television. Parents who would be there when their children woke up tomorrow.
The alley where he finally stopped was narrow and forgotten, squeezed between a defunct electronics store and a pawn shop that had been closed for years. A fire had gutted the electronics place months ago, leaving a shell that provided shelter from the worst of the rain.
Malik curled up against the least damaged wall, his backpack clutched against his chest like armor. The concrete was cold and rough, nothing like his bed with its hand-me-down blankets and the stuffed bear his mother had sewn from circus tent scraps.
He pulled out the photo with shaking hands, water damage already starting to curl the edges. His parents smiled back at him from better days, frozen in a moment when the worst thing in the world was having to get up early for school.
The rain washed everything clean that night. The blood on the apartment carpet. The tears on a twelve-year-old boy's face. The last traces of the family that had existed in a cramped East End apartment, where a former acrobat and a small-time fence had tried to build something good in a city that ate good things for breakfast.
When morning came, Malik Anderson would begin learning the first of many hard lessons about survival in Gotham City. But that night, he was just a kid with a photo and his father's tools, sleeping in an alley while rain drummed against broken windows and washed away everything he'd ever known.
The city moved around him, indifferent to another orphan in its streets. Gotham had made thousands of them over the years. Most disappeared into the system or the shadows, forgotten statistics in a city that specialized in making people vanish.
But this one would be different.
This one would remember.