Kane’s Pier
Columbus Holiday
2 a.m.

Robin emerged from the shadows down by the docks. Special Agent Hernandez was waiting for him.

“Don’t you have a curfew or something?”

“You called, agent. I answered.”

“Yeah I called, but I didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”

“That device I gave you is a pager, not an appointment calendar.”

“Yeah I see that.” Hernandez frowned and reached into his trench coat. Robin stiffened imperceptibly but relaxed again when the agent pulled out a file folder. “Listen, kid, I really hate to involve you in this, but my department’s at our wits’ end with this one and, quite frankly, it’s too important to not ask for your help now that I’ve got it.”

“What have you got?” Robin asked, all business.

Hernandez hesitated, remembering again that this young hero might not even be old enough to vote yet. “I need to ask you something, kid, and I want you to tell me straight. Did Batman let you work on all the cases that crossed his desk?”

Robin’s eye mask narrowed. “Even the ones that involve children?” he ventured a guess.

Hernandez sighed again. “I don’t know whether or not to feel grateful or depressed,” he confessed as he handed the file over.

Robin opened the file and perused its contents. His lips pursed into a thin line and he gritted his teeth, but other than that he showed no outward signs of emotion. Once again Hernandez didn’t know how to react to this. There were some seasoned agents in the bureau that wouldn’t have been able to maintain such clinical detachment as they read through the information contained in that file.

Slowly Robin’s eyes began to narrow.

“You’ve got something?” Hernandez asked hopefully.

“Perhaps,” Robin answered guardedly. “I’ll be in touch.”

“I hope so,” Hernandez replied honestly. Then he promptly turned around and walked back the way he came, leaving Robin free to conduct his disappearing act. Robin briefly wondered if this was a show of trust or one of authority before he took the invitation to meld back into the shadows and disappear.

Mal Duncan was on his way to the train station from Gabriel’s Horn after another closing shift. He’d barely made it three blocks when suddenly he heard a scuffling sound off to his left. Curious, he turned to investigate. He slipped his brass knuckles over his fingers as he cautiously made his way down the darkened alley.

“Hello?” he called out. A bold move, if not a bright one.

Robin briefly pondered that there was something to be said for that as he launched himself from the shadows. Before Duncan knew what hit him he was pinned to the ground with both hands wrenched behind his back. Robin held him by the wrists and stepped painfully over his spine in just the right spot to make him rethink any plans of moving his legs.

“What the hell!” Duncan called out. He didn’t get a good look at his attacker and so had no clue who held him down. “Take the wallet,” he called out. “Leather’s worth more th’n what’s inside anyway.”

“I don’t want your money,” Robin spat at him. Duncan didn’t immediately place the voice: it was quite a bit lower and colder than the last time he met the Boy Wonder. This voice would have sent shivers up his spine if it wasn’t otherwise occupied.

“Then what do you want? Man, I ain’t got nuthin!”

“Oh I think you do,” said Robin, digging his heel in a little deeper for good measure. His voice dripped jagged ice. “I think you’ve got information.”

“What? Hey, who the hell are you, man?”

This time it was his shoulders that wrenched painfully. Duncan winced and gave an abbreviated cry.

“I ask the questions,” Robin reminded him, and finally something in the voice clicked for Duncan.

“Robin?” he asked, half incredulous, half fearful. “What the hell do you want from me? I ain’t no gangbanger or drug dealer or nuthin,’ you know that!”

“Well someone’s been dealing out of your club, Mal,” Robin informed him. His voice hadn’t changed but he did loosen up on Duncan’s spine just a bit.

“Man that’s crazy!” Duncan protested. “When I was a bouncer I had to check everyone for stuff at the door—it’s the rules and they ain’t changed! Ain’t no one can smuggle drugs in without the bouncers knowin’ it!”

“So you say,” Robin conceded sardonically. “But fourteen overdose victims say differently.”

“Hey, there ain’t been an OD at my club in over two years!”

Suddenly Duncan found himself flipped around, half sitting propped up against the side of a building. Robin used one hand to secure both of Duncan’s writs above his head while his other hand had a fistful of Duncan’s shirt to pull his face to within inches of his own.

“Nine kids,” he spat through grit teeth. “Ages fifteen to seventeen. And five adults, ages eighteen to twenty-two. The coroner’s report wasn’t pretty—especially the victims’ photographs post-mortem—and you know what they had in common? Fresh hand stamps from areanightclubs, Mal, and two of them yours.”

Duncan’s mind was reeling. He blinked rapidly, shaking his head. “M-mine?”

“Someone’s been making the rounds at the clubs, Mal, including yours. They’ve been in town since late August and are slick enough to attract the attention of the right tax bracket. That shouldn’t leave too many possibilities, Mal. I want a name!”

“Man, I never saw no one!”

“Wrong answer!” Somehow Robin managed to flip Duncan back around. He was on his stomach again, Robin’s boot in his spine and shoulders wrenched at painful angles. He grunted and winced in protest.

“Look I don’t pay close attention to the crowd no more! I’m in the office a good part a the night!”

“Where there’s closed-circuit television feeds streaming from all angles of the club,” Robin hissed, almost taunting.

“Hey you think I got time to stare at the TV all night?” Duncan barked his question through the pain his body was resonating. “I guess they don’t teach management in vigilante school.”

“I want those tapes,” Robin demanded.

“Sure,” Duncan agreed sardonically. “Just give me your mailing address.”

His arms were wrenched painfully again.

“I have yours,” Robin assured him coolly. “I’ll be in touch.”

Suddenly the pressure lifted. Duncan quickly rolled his shoulders and got his hands back underneath him again. However, when he pushed himself up he found himself alone in the alley.

The three crime fighters-in-training had entered their secret hideout at the appointed time, but instead of finding a relaxed Robin in full teaching mode, they found someone quite different standing at the head of their table, waiting for them. The cool, fluorescently lit room seemed colder, the shadows more pronounced in his presence, as if he were somehow responsible for the darkness. Quite a feat for smallish young man in a traffic light-patterned costume, but the juxtaposition only added to the jarring surrealism.

“Something tells me we’re not gonna get around to those trust falls,” Beast Boy, née Garfield Logan, offered up to the oppressive silence as he and his fellow newbies hesitantly marched forward. His comment was greeted by silence, and he simpered slightly, toying with his collar, shallowly breathing the stale are.

With unsure steps, one by one the Titans found their places at the table under Robin’s stone-faced gaze, his eyes sweeping about, Starlite lenses masking their movements, until they all were seated. When they got there, they saw in front of Robin on the table three unsealed manila envelopes and what appeared to be two long, rolled posters on plain paper. Maps perhaps? They couldn’t be sure.

“Okay Titans, listen up. Our benefactor at the FBI has dropped this one in our laps, and we have to make good on it.” Robin paused long enough to slide an envelope across the table to each of his teammates. “This case might hit close to home,” he continued, warning them. “There’s a new designer drug on the market, and Nassau County is the proving ground.”

“Drug dealing?” Beast Boy asked with a scrunched up face. “In yuppiesville?”

Cyborg scoffed. “I know we don’t actually remember the eighties, but trust me, the rich like their drugs too. They just don’t usually buy ‘em on street corners in bad neighborhoods.”

Robin nodded. “Take a look at those files—what do you see?”

Silence as Cyborg and Beast Boy joined Raven in directing their full attention to what was in front of them. Robin had cleansed the file some when he copied it, of course. The crime scene photographs were removed and the autopsy photographs were limited to just the victim’s faces and blown up shots of the relevant hands for the ones that had nightclub stamps. He preferred to ease his new teammates into the more grizzly part of crime fighting, especially since the paid professionals had gathered sufficient evidence already—even if they didn’t know quite what to do with it.

“They all overdosed,” Raven eventually announced.

Robin grit his teeth at the statement of the blatantly obvious.

“Wait a sec,” Cyborg interjected. “One guy was found dead at work, and another girl keeled over during gym class. You gotta have brass ones if you’re getting high in places like that.”

“Or pills,” Beast Boy added quietly.

Raven fixed him with a scrutinizing gaze.

“You know, something small and portable? Maybe looks like aspirin that you can choke ‘em back without anyone being the wiser?”

Cyborg frowned. “Maybe so, but still, getting high in school? That’s not something I’d expect coming from a… honor roll student who volunteers at an animal shelter,” he finished, reading from the file.

“Aren’t we supposed to expect the unexpected,” Raven asked him.

“Well, yeah, but then there was the guy at work—junior forklift operator. That’s not a job you ever wanna tackle stoned—don’t they drug-test you before you can get those types of jobs anyway?” Cyborg looked imploringly at Robin.

Robin nodded. “They do.”

“See!”

“The young man was in and out of juvenile court,” Raven pointed out. “Most of his cases were drug-related.”

“But he’d only had the job a few months,” Cyborg argued. “How’d he get it—faked his drug test?”

“He wouldn’t be the first,” Raven reminded him.

Cyborg grumbled.

Robin stood patiently.

“Even if he did fake the test,” Beast Boy spoke up at last, “and was dumb enough to use at work, there were only… two, with history of drug use and the other was the… NYU student who got busted for pot last year and was kicked off campus,” Beast Boy informed them as he read from the file. “What’s up with the others? Is the bad guy trying to pop their drug cherries or something?”

“Hey just cuz the others have never been caught, that doesn’t mean they haven’t experimented or anything.”

Beast Boy frowned at Cyborg. “Cynic.”

“What?” Cyborg shrugged. “Statistics have shown that at least seventy percent of high schoolers have tried pot at least once.”

“Should we care whether or not the victims may or may not have smoked marijuana?” Raven asked. “It hardly seems relevant in their deaths.”

Mentally Robin sighed. In a passing thought he made a note to teach them how to better interpret a toxicology screen. He’d thought with Victor Stone’s background—but then, why would he have delved into something so specific? Not everybody had taken basic chemistry at age eleven, he reminded himself. Even Roy Harper had been thirteen.

“I’m just trying to find a way to connect the victims,” Cyborg pointed out, as the conversation continued on around Robin’s musings.

“With what?” Beast Boy asked. “Eight girls, six guys; five in high school, seven in college, and two in vocational jobs. They weren’t even all white, what with that Vietnamese girl and that Indian guy.”

“Bangladeshi,” Raven corrected.

“Gesundheit.”

“Nnnnggh...”

Robin’s frown deepened slightly. The goal of tonight was to get them started with detective work, but he couldn’t let them talk in circles forever. This wasn’t a debate club. He’d give them another hour or so, and if they hadn’t figured it out by then he’d fill in the rest of the puzzle for them. He needed to discuss strategy for this case at some point tonight, too.

“If we don’t connect the victims somehow,” Cyborg continued, “we’ll never figure out where they’re getting the drugs.”

“But they’ve got, like, nothing in common!” Beast Boy groused. “They don’t even live in the same area.”

“Maybe there is no connection,” Raven voiced.

“What do you mean?” Cyborg asked her.

“Maybe the victims aren’t taking the drugs by choice. Perhaps they’re being poisoned.”

Beast Boy made a face. “You’ve got serious issues, you know that?”

“I’m just saying it’s possible.”

“Yeah, well, even if you’re right,” Cyborg hedged, “they’d still need something in common. How else would the bad guy find them?”

“Okay dudes… and dudette, brainstorming time!” Beast Boy announced. Then he stood from his chair and breezed passed Robin on his way to the whiteboard.

The Boy Wonder swiveled his stance and now stood leaning back up against the table, facing Beast Boy. He crossed his arms and observed the green changeling with interest.

“Okay we know a lot about what they don’t have in common,” he said as he began writing. In sloppy yet still legible script the words gender, race, age, and hometown were scrawled and then X-ed out. “What else?”

“Let’s stop looking at the victims for a moment,” Cyborg offered, his nose buried in some printout. “What about this drug they’re taking?”

“Robin said it was ‘designer,’” Raven reminded them.

“That means it was made in a lab,” Beast Boy concluded. Then he frowned. “Drug labs are risky businesses—seems like one’s always accidentally blowing up in Gotham.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the el-cheapo versions that blow up,” Cyborg informed him. “I’ll bet the ones, say, backed by some of your well-funded nut-jobs, were state of the art.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call nerve gas and weaponized hallucinogens ‘designer drugs,’ dude,” Beast Boy pointed out somberly.

Robin tensed briefly as he reflected on how little he really knew of this situation. Just because he’d figured out the street-level in the totem pole, that didn’t mean he had the first clue where the source is. Sometimes you had to start at the bottom and work your way up.

“The drug seems to… stimulate the various pleasure centers of the brain,” Raven answered the almost-forgotten question, her eyes still scanning the papers in front of her.

“Well that narrows it down!” Beast Boy grumbled. “That could mean anything from heroin to ecstasy!”

Cyborg suddenly snapped his fingers. “Ecstasy! Guys, check it out!” He swiftly and sloppily shuffled through the papers and photographs in his file until he found what he was looking for—five close-ups of five different hands, each with a stamp in varying degrees of smudginess. Beast Boy walked back to the table and stood over Cyborg’s shoulder as he laid them out, and Robin turned back around.

“What are they?” Raven asked, having found her own copies and laid them out similarly before her.

“Hand stamps,” Cyborg informed her. “The kind you get at clubs.”

“Dude! People do drugs in clubs!”

“Two different clubs…” Raven mused, noting how two of the five were red and the other three were black.

“Ah, I think that’s three different clubs,” Cyborg corrected as he scanned the images with a magnifying eye. “One of those black ones is circular.”

Raven squinted at the photograph. Sure enough there were two obviously square designs, but the last, overly smudged one, was definitely circular.

“So whose hands are those?” Beast Boy asked.

“Four women and one man, ages eighteen to twenty,” Raven supplied.

“That makes sense,” Cyborg concluded. “A lot of places mark the under-aged so they can’t buy alcohol.”

“But what of the minors?” Raven asked.

“Hell-oh!” Beast Boy emphatically droned. “Ever heard of a fake ID?”

“Yeah,” Cyborg agreed. “They would have claimed to be old enough to drink, so no hand-stampyness for them.”

Beast Boy grinned and streaked back to the whiteboard. He wrote clubbing in large, bold letters. “Well dudes, do we take it to the professor?”

Three sets of eyes immediately fixated on Robin, who had once again tracked Beast Boy’s movements and was now standing at an angle, hip resting against the table and arms casually folded. He had been doing his best to bite back a grin—wanting to refrain from dropping visual hints so as to force them to think it through on their own. However, when Beast Boy asked for his opinion, he didn’t stop himself smiling at the impressionable green changeling.

“That’s the best working theory I have,” he admitted, rather proud of his team for coming to the right conclusions this quickly. Of course, he’d rather streamlined the evidence for them, but that didn’t detract from their achievement in his eyes. After all, this was their first exercise with detective-work.

Cyborg sat back in his chair with a shameless grin and Beast Boy went so far as to whoop for joy. Even Raven looked pleased, Robin noted, as he unfurled the first of the two rollups.

“This is an off-center map of the county,” he explained. “I’ve marked the locations of the victims’ houses in red, and the three nightclubs—Soto, The Taproom, and Gabriel’s Horn, in black.”

“Isn’t Gabriel’s Horn Mal’s club?” Beast Boy asked. He shared a glance with Cyborg.

“Each victim lived within fifteen miles of one of those clubs,” Robin continued as though he hadn’t been interrupted.

“What are the blue hash marks?” Raven asked.

“Bus stops,” Robin supplied. “All but two of the victims lived within four blocks of one.”

“Did the ones who don’t have cars?” Beast Boy asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Cyborg. “They could have carpooled with someone or taken a cab.”

Robin nodded. “The bus system makes it impossible to tell which unstamped victims went to which clubs, but if we assume that most chose the club closest to home, then we can deduce that the first three deaths came out of the Soto club, the next two came from The Taproom, the next four came from Gabriel’s Horn, and then they cycled back to Soto for the next four. The most recent victim has a hand stamp from the Taproom.”

“That accounts for the five weeks since the first deaths,” Cyborg observed. Then he frowned. “Those creeps would have been at The Taproom all weekend.”

“That means more people are going to be turning up dead this week,” Beast Boy concluded morosely. Then he looked at Robin. “What do we do?”

“We don’t know if the dealers are still operating out of The Taproom, but if they stick to their pattern we do know that they’ll be selling out of Gabriel’s Horn next weekend.”

“Dude! We gotta tell Mal!”

“Mr. Duncan has already been made aware of the situation,” Robin informed them. “He’ll be providing us with the security feeds from his nightclub. Hopefully something has been caught on tape.”

“Do you have any idea how many hours of feed that means?” Cyborg gawked. “Even if we just focus on that particular weekend, the club’s gotta have at least two cameras going…”

“Four cameras,” Robin corrected. “And we’re focusing on the week leading up to that weekend, Monday through Sunday.”

Victor palmed a hand across his face. “This is gonna take days.”

“Dude, can we make popcorn?”

Robin smirked ever so slightly. He remembered when such details seemed daunting to him, too.

“Tomorrow’s meeting starts at eight. Bring your own food.”

“Uh, how many nights is this gonna take?” Beast Boy asked.

“Why? Do you have something more important to do?” Robin challenged with a Bat-like glare.

Beast Boy simpered. “Just homework,” he confessed.

“You’re done by noon on Tuesday,” Robin reminded him, “and only have two subjects on Wednesday. Nine hours should be sufficient to complete the work for two courses.”

“Says you. I have a biology lab report due Wednesday—do you have any idea how long those take?”

“I’ll help you with that little buddy,” Cyborg offered congenially. “We can do them together.”

Thanks Vi—er, Cyborg.” Beast Boy caught himself at the last moment.

“I don’t suppose I have to remind you,” Raven said to Robin once Beast Boy’s dilemma was solved. “My class doesn’t end until nine tomorrow.”

“You’re watching a three hour documentary on the early middle ages,” Robin informed her. “You can rent it from the school library and watch the last hour before class next week.”

“How would you know that?” Raven asked him, only the barest hints of accusation in her voice. “The syllabus—which I didn’t show you—wasn’t that specific.”

“Dude, he’s Robin,” said Beast Boy, as though that explained everything—which it rather did.

The vigilante in question allowed himself a small smirk.

“So, is the meeting adjured?” Cyborg asked.

Robin nodded. “Go home, get plenty of rest, and make sure you stay on top of your school assignments. Tomorrow’s going to be a long night, and unless we’re incredibly lucky, the next few nights will be, too.”

“I thought guys like you didn’t believe in luck,” Beast Boy pointed out.

“Stay in this business long enough you learn to believe in just about everything,” Robin informed him, but he seemed to scowl when he said it.

Cyborg shook his head. “Heh, Robin the Boy Mulder.”

Beast Boy laughed but Robin’s scowl deepened. Raven blinked, not getting the reference.

“Get going,” Robin directed, his voice a growl. “I’ll see you all tomorrow night.”

“Heh, later dude.”

“Yeah, see ya!”

And the three new Titans left the lair, allowing the trapdoor to slam shut behind them.

When they were gone, Robin allowed himself a heavy sigh. Tonight had gone surprisingly well. The three of them were able to talk it out in relatively short order. They stayed on task, and worked well in group discussion. More importantly, they all took the case seriously, which had been a problem with his last team. Sometimes it seemed as though the previous incarnation of Titans was more interested in hanging with friends and being out from under their mentors’ shadows rather than with establishing any credibility as a viable crime-fighting team. Of course, the Boy Wonder wasn’t entirely innocent of that, either. Sometimes their meetings consisted entirely of a game of catch-up with each other’s lives, usually while they answered the fan mail.

Dick Grayson shuddered when he remembered the fan mail. Superman would deliver it to their hideout at the start of every meeting on behalf of the Daily Planet, the Titans official mailing address. Clark Kent was always harassed by Perry White for the influx of mail taking up one of the basement storage closets, as it had been the mild-mannered reporter’s idea in the first place to enable troubled youths to get in touch with their heroes, but the Metropolitan newspaper had won numerous awards and honors from humanitarian organizations because of it so that kept the hem-hawing to a minimum.

Bushels and bushels of letters would arrive every week, and for every legitimate plea for help or advice there were at least five product endorsement requests and ten gushing love letters. Superman did his super-powered best to remove all the ones with suggestive photographs, but sometimes he missed a few—which Roy had scrap-booked over Donna’s staunch disapproval.

On a normal day, Wally answered all the fan mail that wasn’t addressed to a specific Titan, since he could write at speeds that sometimes caused the paper to catch fire if he wasn’t careful. Donna wrote a thoughtful letter to every girl with a self-esteem problem (which were most of them, unfortunately) and answered all the appropriate pleas for a charitable public appearance. Roy played fast and loose with the charity fund (comprised of donations from the Queen Trust, the Wayne Foundation, and a number of other organizations looking for a few tax breaks or good PR) to pay for things like medical treatment for the uninsured and new facilities and equipment for Boys and Girls Clubs. Garth, the least publicized member of the group, answered the few letters addressed to him and helped Wally with the bulk mail. Sometimes he shared the public appearance bill with Donna, but only for coastal cities. And Dick Grayson? He typed the replies to his own fan mail and signed the letters with his off hand as it wouldn’t do to have samples of his handwriting floating about, and he decided which pleas for help warranted their actual involvement.

A few pizzas, a vending machine’s worth of soda, someone’s CD playing in the portable stereo, and five friends gathered around a round table, reading letters from their adoring fans and making fun of each other for their contents; just a bunch of kids in their clubhouse, though occasionally something serious happened. Some of those letters had begged help with drug or gang problems, which had led the Titans into fifteen different cities around this country and three in Canada on what Roy had dubbed their ‘weekend warrior’ missions, and only once had it led to something serious enough for none of them to object when the Justice League stepped in. At the time, they’d been very proud of their accomplishments as a team, and Robin has many cherished memories from that period in his life.

But that was then. This is now, with a new team, a new city, and an older and (more cynical if not) wiser Robin, and their first real case was bound to turn up more corpses before it was solved. He could only hope that the impending victims wouldn’t be kids his teammates recognized; they didn’t deserve such a personal introduction to crime-fighting.

No one did.

Robin sighed again, the hiss of breath echoing loudly in the stillness of the empty room. He wasn’t going to solve this case through reminiscing, nor would it help his teammates to adjust to their new lives if he was too focused on that newness. They sought him out because they wanted to be heroes and he had the will and means to make it happen if they had the resolve to see it through. Of these things he has no doubt, but assurances won’t help them the first time they find themselves faced with solving a crime close to their hearts, and the longer he can delay that the better off they’ll be. Its better that they’re in this game because of a desire to do good things—to be heroes, different from him and better because he’s here—as Batman is here, not to do good but to prevent bad; a dark defender, not a hero at all.

He also wasn’t going to solve this case by dwelling in morbidity, he realized with mirthless laugh. He checked the time—just after ten. That would put his impending visit of Gabriel’s Horn around eleven, a bit early for his tastes. Thankfully though Dick remembered to grab his sociology textbook before leaving tonight; he could park the Red Bird in some secluded spot and study for tomorrow’s test for a few hours before putting in his appearance.

Robin stashed the Red Bird near the mouth of the alley that ran behind the club. He fired his grapnel and took to the roofs until he stood atop the nightclub. Even up here he could hear snippets of the manic techno beat that raged inside. As this was a weeknight, the club would be closing at two and so Robin had at least forty minutes to kill before he could talk to Duncan. He spent that time first surveying the layout of the roof and the view from all angles. Gabriel’s Horn was in a tightly packed section of town, bordered on one side by a pizza place that kept hours in tune with the nightclub, and a Chinese takeout restaurant on the other that closed at midnight; these three venues took up the entire block. There was a 7/11 across the street, a bank, a Laundromat, a delicatessen, and a pub that catered to an older crowd than the club that also closed at two. Across the alley behind the club were an antique store, a jewelry store, the post office, and a Burger King that closed at eleven-thirty.

Robin frowned. He didn’t like the close proximity of stores catering to the late-night crowd. The increased civilian population exponentially increased the risks, and unlike Gotham this town wasn’t used to sudden eruptions of violence. He didn’t realize how much he (and Batman) took Gotham’s duck-and-cover nature for granted until he was faced with the possibility of throngs of innocents who didn’t have such programming. Anything done would have to wait until after midnight—twelve-thirty at the earliest, to ensure that everything that would be locked up was locked up, and that even the last night-janitor had gone home.

The frown deepened when Robin realized that if he’d come early he could have seen when the Chinese place finished closing. He foresaw stakeouts in his very near future, except there was one slight problem with that. How could he do that and watch the surveillance videos with his team? Robin hung his head slightly, the frown turning into a positive scowl. Garth and Donna had been good at stake-outs, he remembered; patient and quiet. Wally and Roy were, to put it mildly, prone to distraction more often than not, but they would have done well if left to watch the videos together. Robin could have assigned himself to either pair without fear for the other.

Of course, falling to fond reminiscing wasn’t going to solve this case any faster than dwelling on morbid thoughts, Robin chastised himself again with a shake of the head. He still had a half and hour to eat up before he could meet Duncan so he whipped out his grapnel. Better to familiarize himself more fully with this section of town—place visual cues alongside bland map coordinates and see what the streets, alleyways, and rooftops would do for him.

When he made his way back to the nightclub at a quarter passed two, Robin had conducted an extensive reconnaissance of the surrounding neighborhood. The surrounding blocks contained a few restaurants that would be closed well before midnight, a grocery store that may or may not have overnight deliveries (he’d have to check that out), and one other bar. The rest were various commercial buildings—stores and offices that kept normal business hours. After that the buildings petered out into the residential neighborhoods. All of the alleyways were clear, too, and every fire escape was secure and in working order. Decay hadn’t come to Farmingdale yet, despite an increase in crime. How long, Robin wondered, before chain-link fences were erected or dumpsters left in strategic locations? How long before high windows were barred and fire escapes deliberately sabotaged? Not long, if his hunch was correct in that this narcotics ring traced back to organized crime. Not long at all, if there was no one to stop it.

Robin set his jaw with an audible (and Bat-like) grunt. Where were these thoughts coming from anyway? He wasn’t prone to a wandering mind—at least, not behind the mask; not for a long, long time.

No matter though. It was well passed closing, time to talk to Duncan.

Robin perched on the edge of the roof overlooking the front entrance. The kitchen exit opened to the rear alley, but no one would take that route unless they favored walking in the dark (which he cynically doubted, especially since there were no cars parked that way), and the side fire exit was alarmed. That left the front door, and sure enough Robin saw the employees begin to trickle out, starting around two-thirty. Bouncers, bartenders, cooks, wait-staff... everyone except for Duncan, it seemed, had exited by three—time for Robin to make his appearance.

As the building had no windows or skylights to speak of, he chose the kitchen entrance. Duncan hadn’t yet activated the alarm, but the security cameras were still rolling and Robin made sure to keep his face turned away from the one at the door. The lock was picked in seconds, and Robin’s night-vision compensated instantly for the increased darkness, washing his view of the kitchen in a sickly shade of green. He silently shut and relocked the door and then made his way past freezers and fryers to the entrance to the dance hall.

Actually, Robin found himself standing behind the bar and he took a moment to chide himself for his naiveté. Of course food orders would be placed at the bar, or else dropped off there by wait-staff, but under-aged Dick Grayson had never ventured into establishments like this (except in Star City, but then Roy hadn’t brought him there for the food), and Robin’s only time in similar places was spent bashing heads. Still a lot to learn, the detective’s apprentice reminded himself with a grim smile as he took stock of his location. There was no exit from behind the bar and so he vaulted over it, deftly avoiding the beer taps and the overhead rack of hanging glasses.

Now in the dancehall proper, Robin cast his green-hued gaze about the vast, empty warehouse that housed it. The dance floor was huge and took up the center of the space. The back wall was lined with arcade games; the bar stopped halfway up the left wall and had booths finishing the distance, with two parallel columns of tables forming a rectangular dining area. The control booth for the sound equipment and the general and stage lighting sat in the back right corner, and the raised platform that served as a stage abutted the right wall just ahead of it. The entire area was roped off right now, as there hadn’t been a live band tonight. Ahead of that, lining the rest of the wall towards the front, were three more columns of booths and tables.

Robin resisted the urge to whistle as he took in the impressive immensity of the club. Instead he made his way forward. The staircase to the second level sat to the right of the main entrance, and Duncan’s office had to be upstairs.

As Robin ascended he realized that he should have done a more thorough background check on this place. The blueprints wouldn’t have been hard to access through his uplink to the Bat computer, but it was either that or finish up his latest psychology essay. How he was going to balance being a fulltime student and a fulltime vigilante with a team to manage was currently beyond him, but he wasn’t fool enough to not realize that failing as Dick Grayson wasn’t nearly as dangerous as failing as Robin. Reminding himself that he shouldn’t take risks like this in the future (especially the night after lecturing his team about the dangers of flying blind), he idly wondered how Bruce managed to run Wayne Enterprises while devoting most of his life to protecting Gotham and helping the Justice League. Alfred, Robin concluded with an amused headshake. Alfred and Lucius Fox.

The club’s second floor held pool tables with a small bar along one wall and dartboards along the rest, except for the back left corner and its door labeled ‘private.’ Robin’s expression hardened instantaneously and automatically as he crossed the distance to that door with sure but silent strides. When he reached the threshold his inner Bat decided against knocking, but he wasn’t so pretentious that he would try to open the door silently. Instead he grabbed the doorknob, and with an almost cocky air of nonchalance, turned it and allowed the door to swing open in front of him.

To Duncan’s credit he heard either the soft click of the door release or the faint groan of the hinges because he nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of an intruder. “Man, how the hell did you get in here?” he groused, his tone conveying aggravation but his body language betrayed him.

“I told you I’d be in touch,” Robin replied, ignoring the question. “I want those tapes.”

Confusion flashed through Duncan’s expression only briefly before he remembered. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered on the tails of a long-suffering sigh. Then he made his way out from behind his desk and walked over to the bookshelf on the opposite wall. The top three rows were full of VHS tapes.

“What dates?” Duncan asked when he reached the bookshelf.

“September fifth through the twelfth,” Robin supplied.

Duncan glanced askance at him. “You want eight days worth of film from four cameras? You got pockets in that getup big enough for thirty-two tapes?”

Robin’s response was to reach into a back pocket of his utility belt and retrieve what appeared to be a small pouch. Then suddenly he snapped his wrist and the pouch unfolded like a parachute, revealing itself to be a sizeable canvas bag. It was normally used for collecting large pieces of evidence (such as clothing), but it would suffice well enough here and he tossed it to Duncan, who shook his head in apathetic amusement as he caught it.

“Here ya go,” he said, sighing slightly as he gathered up a stack of tapes and allowed them to tumble in to the bag. He held the bag securely as their weight further stretched the canvas to its true size, and then he placed it on the ground. Three more stacks followed and the bag was mostly full. Then he pulled the drawstring closed.

“Just outta curiosity, are you really gonna watch ‘em all? That’s gotta be what—over two hundred hours?”

“The tapes,” Robin directed, once again ignoring Duncan’s question.

Duncan sighed yet again as he stooped to pick up the bag, which was actually fairly heavy. He swung it over to Robin with a suppressed grunt, but the Boy Wonder caught it easily around its bulky center.

“Am I ever gonna get those back?”

“If you want them, unless they’re needed as evidence.”

Robin shifted the bag so that he was carrying it under one arm and then turned to go. The tapes and the overall setup of the nightclub precluded him from making the typical Bat-style exit so he didn’t bother to try slipping away unnoticed.

“Hey, Robin?”

Not that Duncan would have let him anyway. Robin paused in the doorway, tensing slightly but not turning back around.

“If some sicko really is dealing outta my club… I hope you catch ‘im.”

With his face safely hidden, Robin allowed some of the ice to melt from his expression. He repressed a sigh, and a trained eye might have seen some of the tension deflate from his body.

“So do I,” he replied, his voice a bit softer than it had been. Then before any type of awkwardness could descend into the silence Robin exited the office, pulling the door shut behind him with his free hand.

Two hundred and twenty-eight hours worth of video footage, Robin mused dejectedly as he made his way out of Gabriel’s Horn and back to his car. Fortunately he only had to pay serious attention to one of the cameras (the one above the bar), which cut the total down to fifty-seven hours. If this had occurred in Gotham, the main computer in the cave would have been rigged to play four tapes at once, and the Dynamic Duo would have their answer in less than fifteen hours.

Robin scowled.

This wasn’t Gotham.

This was Long Island, and he didn’t have the Batman’s resources. He didn’t even have the Titans’ resources. What he did have was three sets of untrained eyes, one TV-VCR, and fifty-seven hours of video footage to pour through—in between class time and homework.

The scowl melted into resignation as he shifted the Red Bird into gear and sped away, bound for the Lair. Given the drive time, he could get a four-hour head start on those tapes before class with Dr. Beach at nine. Finally he sighed.

“Sleep’s overrated anyway.”