Arrow

by Marc Guggenheim

  Rene leaned forward. “I think that’s the most open you’ve ever been, the entire time that I’ve known you.”

  “Well,” Oliver said, “I’ve been trying to work on things. Learning why I do things instead of simply doing them. I think it’s realizing I can lose people—people who are close to me—that makes me act the way I do.”

  Rene knew how much strength it took to disclose such hard, heavy feelings, and he was touched. It was hard for him to talk about his own emotions, to share how he felt about things that truly mattered. He couldn’t imagine how much harder it had to be for Oliver, after all that he’d been through.

  That touched him. He had no concept of how to respond to that level of honesty, especially between two people who put up walls, just to hold the world at bay.

  So he went to the joke.

  “Damn, cut it out, Hoss,” he said. “I’m getting misty.”

  Oliver chuckled, releasing the tension between them. Rene leaned back in the chair, and relaxed some. The moment had passed, but not without leaving a mark.

  The door to the office opened and a plain, dark-haired man leaned in.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but do you remember me?”

  Suddenly Oliver’s voice was hollow.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Hallsey?”

  “I’d much rather speak with you alone.” Hallsey’s eyes slid to the left, indicating Rene.

  Tension vibrated off Rene’s shoulders, and his teeth clenched.

  “I can stay.”

  “It’s okay,” Oliver said. “I’ve got this, Mr. Ramirez. If you will leave us to it, I’m sure Mr. Hallsey will only take a moment of my time.”

  Rene walked toward the door, passing close to the newcomer. When they were side by side he spoke, his voice low.

  “I’ll be right outside.” With that he stepped out and shut the door.

  * * *

  “He’s an aggressive one, isn’t he?” Hallsey asked.

  Oliver moved around the desk, closing the distance between him and his visitor, gaining ground, establishing a position of authority in his own office. Hallsey moved forward and dropped himself into the chair Rene had vacated.

  “Mr. Hallsey,” Oliver said, “what can I do for you?”

  “My… work brought me close to here today, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to continue our conversation, from when I was in lockup,” Hallsey explained. “There were things you said, and didn’t say. You kind of stepped around… certain topics. Well, I’m not one to beat around the bush, Mr. Mayor. I will tell you the truth—confirm that I have been taking an active part in cleaning up the streets of Star City.”

  Oliver listened to what Hallsey said, thinking about it for a long moment.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Which part? Clean up the streets, or tell you that your suspicions are true?”

  “Let’s start with the first part.”

  “I’m just doing what needs to be done.” Oliver waited for him to elaborate, but the man remained silent.

  “I’m not sure that we have a shortage of vigilantes in this town,” Oliver said, filling the silence. “We have more than Blüdhaven and Central City combined.”

  “I understand that, Mr. Mayor.” Hallsey leaned forward. “We also seem to have more criminals.” His voice took on the fervor of a preacher. “Every day there are people suffering from the lawlessness that goes on in this city. Crime isn’t being stopped, it’s only being deterred, and often not even that. The police are a joke—the ones who aren’t corrupt are ineffective because they rely too much on vigilantes to do their job and keep people safe. They’ve gone soft.”

  “Mr. Hallsey, I’m not sure if I understand,” Oliver said, keeping his voice even. “You just told me that you are a vigilante, and implied that you feel the ones I’m familiar with—the Green Arrow and others—aren’t going far enough in stopping the criminals.”

  “Not going far enough by far,” Hallsey said, and he smirked at his own play on words.

  “Are you confessing to me that you’ve been killing people?”

  “That would be a ridiculous thing to do, even though you’re not the police.”

  “That is, however, what it sounds like.”

  “For the record, Mr. Mayor, I’m not saying that I’m guilty of anything.”

  “You’re not denying it, either.”

  Hallsey shrugged.

  “Then what did you come here for?” Oliver asked. “To unburden your soul, or recite scripture like last time?”

  Hallsey put his elbows on his knees, leaning forward. “It has been long established that you allow vigilantes to operate in Star City. In fact, you actually endorse them, as you did with the memorial to Laurel Lance. I stood in front of that statue, Mayor Queen, inspired by the speech that you gave that day.”

  “Are you blaming my speech for your actions?”

  “You inspired me, but I am my own man,” Hallsey said, “with my own motivations for what I do.”

  “Again, what do you want?”

  “I seek your endorsement.”

  “No.” There was heat in Oliver’s voice.

  “You misunderstand—not with the city,” Hallsey said. “I prefer to operate in the shadows, like all the other crimefighters you know. Speak to the Green Arrow, tell him I’m going to continue to operate in the city. I’m going to stop criminals from hurting innocent people. This is my city, and nothing is going to stop me.”

  His phone buzzed and he glanced at it, then stood, looking at Oliver.

  “I’d like to stop having to look over my shoulder all the time, just because my fellow vigilantes think I’m not good enough at my job. I don’t care about their opinions, not really. They’re not effective enough at what they do, either. But I cannot abide their interference.”

  “Why would Green Arrow listen?” Oliver asked. “If he’s decided to stop you, he will. There’s no doubt of that.”

  “Call it a hunch,” Hallsey replied. “Just let the Green Arrow know to stay out of my way, or suffer the consequences. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment to keep.” With that he turned on his heels and walked out of the office.

  * * *

  The mercenary in the town car lowered the camera. He began pushing buttons on the back.

  “What are you doing?” his partner asked from behind the wheel.

  “Uploading the pictures to the remote server.”

  “Why?”

  “I think we got enough shots of the building.”

  “Better be sure, ’cause that Faust guy is a weird one.” The driver shivered. “You saw what he did to Rickson.”

  “Rickson was an idiot.”

  “He was a good soldier.”

  “Like the two things are mutually exclusive?”

  The wheel man looked over. “You’re a soldier, too.”

  “But I ain’t an idiot—and we got enough pictures of City Hall. Let’s roll.”

  The wheel man dropped the car into gear and pulled forward, easing onto the road. Glancing in the mirror, he saw a high-performance sports bike pull out at the same time. When it peeled off in another direction, though, he put it out of his mind.

  * * *

  Oliver moved quickly down the hall.

  Rene rounded the corner.

  “Which way did he go?” Oliver didn’t break stride.

  “Toward the main entrance.”

  “Hold the fort here. I’m going after him.”

  “Let me suit up.”

  “I’ve got it.” Oliver broke away, entering the stairwell that provided access to the basement, digging his phone out of his pocket.

  * * *

  “It’s an MGM dash one forty ATAC dash MS.”

  Curtis nodded. “Run the specs.”

  Felicity went through the details, her voice almost staccato. “Surface to surface guided missile—it’s one of ours, range of one hundred-plus miles, and can be fired from a bunch of different kinds of launchers.�
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  “Fuel?”

  “Solid propellant.”

  Curtis nodded.

  “Payload is a unitary blast fragmentation warhead.”

  “Those damn unitarians,” he said. “Guidance system?”

  “GPS and inertial navigational system.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Is it?”

  “We know he’s close.” Curtis nodded, fingers steepled in thought. “Short range on that thing.”

  “Hundred-mile radius really narrows it down.” Sarcasm hung heavy in Felicity’s voice. “We’re just seconds away from catching him.”

  “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

  “Lao Tzu? Really?”

  Curtis looked sheepish. “I was doing some reading on ancient Chinese philosophers. He’s no Gongsun Long or Wang Bi, but it’s hard to avoid him.”

  Felicity gave him a look.

  “It’s been a good distraction since Paul left.”

  Felicity felt a pang of terrible guilt at having inadvertently reminded her friend that his husband had left him. She tried to keep that feeling off her face, and was pretty sure she’d failed.

  “It’s okay,” Curtis said. “No problem at all. Just me and philosophy from Chinese monks who have been dead for thousands of years.” Suddenly the comms buzzed, jolting both of them to attention. It was the signal for an incoming emergency call.

  Felicity hit the button. “Overwatch here, go.”

  Oliver’s voice came over the speakers.

  “Hallsey is here at City Hall, leaving by the main entrance. Track him and tell me where he’s going.”

  * * *

  The bike under him roared as he whipped it out of the parking garage. The wind whipped over his battle suit, snagging in the scoop of his hood, snapping the edges of it.

  “Where am I going?” he growled over the comms.

  “We picked him up outside. He’s on a bike and heading north on the main drag.”

  He twisted the throttle and cut left, separating from the pack of traffic and heading in the direction he’d been given.

  * * *

  “Did that car make the same three turns our guy made?” Curtis pointed at the monitor.

  “It did.” Felicity leaned forward, clicking her mouse to grab a screen shot from a surveillance camera and move it to its own screen.

  “Before our guy made them?”

  Felicity nodded, squinting at the fuzzy picture she’d grabbed, enhancing it. There were people who claimed it couldn’t be done—that it was just a trick made up for television. If only they knew. She read off the license plate under her breath, fingers moving over keys to type it in.

  “What do you have?”

  Felicity read the information on the car, clicking on hyperlinks to learn more. She clicked on the comms.

  “Um, we have a problem,” she announced.

  * * *

  He jerked left, shoving the bike into a cut-through alley by throwing his body weight to one side. His front tire scrubbed the brick wall, but it stayed intact, so he dropped it and kept moving.

  Emerging from the alley, he cut right again.

  “Talk to me, Overwatch.”

  * * *

  “He’s chasing a car,” Felicity said. “The tag is a dead end, probably a cutter.”

  “Cutter?” Curtis asked.

  “Chop shop trick,” she explained. “Take two license plates, cut them both in half with a torch, then weld two unmatched halves together and you have an untraceable plate for your car.”

  “That really works?”

  Felicity nodded.

  “How did you know that?”

  “I don’t just know how to hack computers.”

  Oliver’s voice came through the comms. “Who is he after?”

  “One moment.”

  Both she and Curtis began running through the traffic cam footage of the car Hallsey was tailing, scrolling quickly on their monitors.

  Curtis jumped. “Got it.” He typed quickly, fingers moving like lightning over the keys as he cut the frame of footage he’d found and performed a zoom and scrub on the face of the man in the passenger seat of the car. He assigned the nodal points to the photo and zipped it through the facial recognition software. In a moment it spit back a list of organizations and names.

  “He’s part of a group of paramilitary mercenaries,” Curtis said, “selling their services to the highest bidder.”

  “Why would Hallsey be tracking them, if he’s so on fire to snag drug dealers?”

  Curtis pointed at the screen. He’d found another picture of the man in the car. This time he was wearing a dark blue uniform, with other members of his crew.

  “These are the guys who were with Faust at the Blues Festival.”

  Felicity relayed the news.

  * * *

  Oliver rolled his bike around the corner and into the junkyard. Towers of twisted metal that once were cars and appliances loomed over him, making solid walls thirty feet high along the twisting dirt driveway. Some of them leaned crazily, hanging out overhead, cutting jagged, geometric abstracts from the sky.

  He hoped they were welded together.

  Noise filled the air, machinery working all throughout the property. Over the wall of scrap he could see a magnetic crane swinging overhead. A low, grinding thrum filled the air, and he could feel it on his skin. Shrill screams of metal on metal split the fog of noise in sharp jags.

  Feeling like he’d been wrapped in a cocoon of junkyard, he breathed in the heady mix of fuel and exhaust and rubber and metal baking in the sun. It enveloped him, choking his senses. Even his sight was curtailed by the bends of the dirt road hemmed in with mountains of junked vehicles.

  He rolled forward at a slow pace, sticking to the left curve. Hallsey and Faust’s men were here, nearby, he felt it. Not logic, but intuition shaped by years working against criminals. This place was full of cover and off the law enforcement radar, out in the open but twisty enough to let them feel safe. There were a dozen ways to slip free if things went south, but only a few people would know them.

  A perfect place for a meet.

  Is he chasing them, or working with them?

  A wall of stacked shipping containers crossed the path he was on. He went right, riding along their length. At the end of the row the road turned back on itself. He followed the switchback and found himself in a large opening, boxed in on three sides with more stacked shipping containers. He kept his bike idling and found a niche from which he could observe, unnoticed.

  In the center stood Hallsey, gun drawn and pointed at two men who knelt beside a town car with its doors flung open. The copycat’s sport bike jutted, crumpled into the wheel well on the front passenger side of the car.

  The sounds of the junkyard were louder here. Hallsey yelled something at the men, but he couldn’t make it out—from where he stood, still unnoticed, it was just noise. One of the men yelled something back.

  A large SUV rolled up the road across the opening. It stopped at the edge of the clearing. He was too far away to see inside the tinted glass, but the sight of it made his stomach clench with dread.

  Hallsey began swinging his gun back and forth between the men on the ground to whoever was inside the SUV. The passenger-side window rolled down and a slender arm slid out. Its owner held something in his hand.

  He could see a red button.

  He hit the throttle.

  Hallsey fired a shot at the SUV.

  The town car exploded in a ball of flame and screaming metal shrapnel. A wave of heat and concussion knocked Oliver off the bike, lifting him completely from the seat and tossing him to skid in the dirt. He rolled to a stop, and sharp pain radiated from his shin. Some small piece of metal had cut through his boot and lodged itself in the muscle there.

  Everything was a blur of light and shadows, and the sounds of the junkyard had been replaced by a roaring in his ears that slowly diminished. As his vision began to return, shapes slow
ly resolved and became recognizable. He pushed himself up and began moving. The wound forced him to limp.

  The town car was a hunk of twisted burning slag, just the steel ribs of it showing through the flames and black smoke it spewed into the air. The two mercenaries had been torn apart by the blast. Pieces of them scattered in a half circle in the dirt. For the most part the containers stood intact, though several had holes in them, and here and there a few seemed to teeter precariously.

  The SUV was gone.

  Hallsey lay in a heap, thrown a dozen feet from where he had been standing.

  Oliver limped across, dropping beside him, rolling him over.

  The man’s face was a wreck of torn and shredded flesh. Scorched bone showed along his temple and cheek where the skin had just been scrubbed away. His right eye was gone. The fabric of his mask had melted, fusing with the skin along his scalp.

  Just below his collarbone jutted a thin, spiraled piece of shrapnel. It sank deep, embedding itself in his body cavity. The edges of it were serrated and fluted—they would have destroyed anything they cut through. The ugly wound pumped dark blood from along its edges.

  Green Arrow was holding a dying man.

  Hallsey’s eye rolled wildly as he gasped, trying to breathe around the metal that was killing him.

  “I—I—should…”

  “Don’t talk,” he said. “It will be over soon.”

  Hallsey gripped the strap of his quiver.

  “Shld’ve listnd to—Mayor… Queen.”

  Oliver didn’t say anything. Hallsey had brought this on himself, but he should have stopped him, should have saved him… Green Arrow shuttered the conflicting thoughts away at the back of his mind. They would do no good for anyone.

  So Green Arrow did the only thing that was left to do. He bore witness to the death of a man. Hallsey spoke, his voice too low and garbled to understand. Oliver leaned down, putting his ear close.

  “I—I think Faust—is water…”

  Hallsey’s last breath chased his final word away.

  4

  He sat in a low spot on the couch. It was a nice couch, leather rich and brown, well stuffed, only slightly worn even though it was of a style that had been popular nearly two decades past. The place he sat dipped just slightly, the springs precompressed, the stuffing of the cushion slightly displaced, the wood frame gently curved.