Killer Moth and Tiger Moth in:  It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time!

Part Two

Dru woke with a start, reflexively searching the now half-empty bed for his ex-wife.  Finding nothing, he fully eased into consciousness as he pulled back the comforter and sheets, now messily piled atop him, and took stock of the situation.  At least I kept my boxers on, he thought to himself as he unceremoniously dumped the tangled bed fittings onto the floor and pulled himself to a sitting position.  He had just begun to wonder if he'd find Tiger making an equal mess of his kitchen when she sauntered out of the bathroom in nothing more than a towel wrapped around her hair as she brushed her teeth.

"Finally," she muttered through a mouth full of toothpaste, "I'm not your mom, Dru, I shouldn't have to wake you up when we've got shit to do and on a time limit."

Dru reached over and grabbed his phone, not quite 7am and two unanswered messages that he made a note to look at some point later in the day.  "I think we'll do just fine," he said with no small amount of irritation in his voice as he stood up, "is that my toothbrush?"

She looked down at the brush sticking halfway out her mouth and shrugged.  "Afraid of getting cooties?"  She turned and spat into the sink, wiping her mouth on the handtowel hanging from the wall.  "You're not going to get snippy at me for cleaning up while I'm here, are you?  It's going to take me 45 minutes to get back to my RV and I wanted a head start on the day."  She unwrapped the towel around her head and threw it at Dru as she walked out of the room.  "I'm going to see if I can't scrounge up some breakfast," she called out as she descended the stairs, "try not to take too long getting ready."

Dru looked at himself in the mirror and sighed heavily.  "Just one more night and the job is done," he admonished himself, "just one more night."  But still something unsettled him deeply, and it wasn't just the dry mouth and headache from not having drunk anything but red wine since yesterday afternoon.  He thought about last night and just how much he wanted to give in to her advances, and no matter how he tried to pin the blame on the booze he couldn't escape the reality that a part of him was willing to take her back - even if for just one night.  Glancing back at the mirror, he realized that he couldn't really stomach looking at himself right now and turned away, tossing his toothbrush into the garbage can as he left the bathroom and headed downstairs as well.

He found her sitting in the kitchen, face buried in her phone, feet propped up on the table, having found the bagels in the fridge.  He let out a noise of irritation that went ignored by her, and she completely failed to note his presence as he made himself some oatmeal.  After a few minutes he set his breakfast down on the kitchen island and stared at her as he ate.  "So," he started, "are we going to ignore last night?"

She glanced up from her phone only to immediately return to it.  "What's there to talk about, Dru?  I tried to be nice, you rejected it, now we're having breakfast."

"You call putting my hand down your panties after I told you no 'being nice?'" he added finger quotes for emphasis.

She rolled her eyes and tossed the phone on the table.  "I slipped one of your fingers under my panties to help move things along.  I don't know why you're whining, it's not like you were the one who got liquored up."

Dru slammed his spoon down on the counter and ran his hand down his mouth as he composed his thoughts.  "No one forced you get drunk and spend the night here, Ti."

"And no one forced you to fuck me either, Dru, and you didn't.  But here you are being a little bitch about it.  God.  You know, I figured anyone who kept their house looking like this had to be one uptight son of bitch in need of getting laid and I was right."

"I don't need your help to get my dick wet."

Tiger stood up and marched over to the island, squaring up across from Dru and staring him right in the eyes.  "You used to be fun.  I'm getting dressed and heading out, I'll message you with the rendezvous location and time for tonight, and for the love of God, get over yourself."

He watched her silently as she left and stomped back up the stairs.  "I used to be an idiot," he muttered quietly to himself, but the moment for a comeback had long passed.  Instead he just looked down at his oatmeal, letting spoonfuls of it fall and spatter back into the bowl.  He wasn't hungry anymore.

													*****************************

Dru stood in the dark and compulsively checked the time again, having lost count after the twelfth or thirteenth time.  Tiger had said 1:30am but Dru went ahead and showed up a half hour early, and it was already 1:49am.  He suppressed the urge to pace around; the meeting place was a dilapidated repair shop on a 3 block section scheduled for redevelopment but even so he didn't need to do anything to draw attention to himself - a somewhat laughable concept for a man currently wearing a purple, green, and gold bug suit and standing next to an equally garish muscle car.  So instead he simply rocked back and forth, and checked the time once more.

Suddenly he heard the door creak.  Dropping down he unholstered his cocoon gun and readied himself.  A bum?  Some kids exploring?  Silently he drew the gun and flicked the safety off, carefully peaking around the wall to see what awaited him.  It was Tiger Moth, backlit in stark contrast by the streetlights outside.  Reholstering his gun, he silently flicked a switch on his belt and one on the underside of his helmet.  The first lit the eye lenses of his helmet and backlit his chest emblem a bright green which caused Tiger to jump as they glowed in the darkness, the second contorted his voice to a screeching electronic staccato as he admonished, "You're late."

She shrugged like nothing was wrong, "Best laid plans."  She casually walked over to him, the heels of her thigh-high boots clacking against the concrete floor, "You know how it goes."

"Let's get moving."

"Radio silence until I can bring the truck around."

Leaving the abandoned building, they split up.  Tiger heading out to the truck to await Dru's signal while Dru fired up his flight rig and aimed a grappling gun at the overhead freeway.  With a pneumatic "PSSH" followed by the KA-CHINK of the line securing itself, Dru reeled in the line and took to the air, his wings allowing him to silently fly over the roadways and streetlights unseen and land next to a nondescript junction box situated 20 feet up a security wall.  Prying the box open he quickly isolated the data cables and slipped a small cuff around it that he twisted until it cut into the wires and fed their information into a small handheld.  Within a minute he had located all of the cameras in the area of his operation and with a few taps on the heldheld had replaced the signal with a 3 second loop of a deserted dock.  Off-site security was blind.  Time for the hard part.

Standing tall atop the wall, he leapt, his flight rig keeping him aloft at a steady 20 feet.  Not high enough to keep security on the ground from noticing him, but high enough for him to cover the ground between the perimeter wall and the security house in seconds.  He scrambled across the roof as silent as he could, and leaned down over the edge to peer inside.  Two guards sat at the control desk, placidly gazing at a bank of monitors, and he noted two more patrolling the grounds.  Retracting his wings he tumbled off the roof and onto the ground, diving low as soon as his feet touched pavement.  Pressing himself against the wall, he carefully pushed the door ajar as he readied a device from his utility belt.  Activating the infrasonic emitter, he silently rolled it through the doorway and across the carpeted floor.  Within seconds both guards were feeling it, and soon both were so disoriented they could barely function, much less stand.  Protected by his helmet, Dru casually walked through the door, flicking off the lights to make sure they couldn't give good testimony, and left them zip-tied face down on the floor with ease.

Making his way out of the office, he stuck to the shadows, sprinting from container to container as he kept any eye out for the other two guards.  Carefully he zigzagged his way towards the moored container ship and began to feel a bit like a goon considering all Tiger was doing was sitting in the cab of a truck waiting for him to do all the hard work.  60/40 split his ass, her role was worth 20% at most.  Lost in thought he almost failed to notice the golf cart as he turned a corner.  Quickly turning back, he carefully peeked out only to see the cart stopping as one of the guards got out to have a closer look at what just moved.  Swearing to himself, Dru climbed the double stack of containers and silently prayed.  The guard stopped right below him and swung his flashlight around, looking for whatever he glimpsed a second earlier.  As he walked past, Dru dropped and had the guard in a chokehold before he could even react.  After a few seconds he was on the ground and Dru was down two more zip-ties.  The guard in the golf cart didn't even have a chance, the taser had him on the ground in a half-second, and he soon joined his partner trussed on the ground.

At last Dru reached the crane, and with the pull of the trigger on his grappling gun he was hoisted to his goals.  As he slipped into the operator cab, he radioed Tiger.  "I'm in place.  One guard at the gate, I trust you can handle him."

"Piece of cake, just be ready as soon as I pull up.  And don't fuck it up."

Dru nervously thumbed the controls as he waited for Tiger to show up.  This was the make or break part of the heist.  The dock wasn't scheduled to begin unloading again until 5am, and it would be highly unlikely for nobody to notice the crane operating.  As long as they were fast enough, they could be on the highway before anyone showed up to see what was going on.  And if they were lucky enough for no one to notice or care about the crane, it could be until shift change that anyone would notice the tied up guards.  Still, he found his eyes compulsively scanning the streets for red and blue lights.

"I'm in position.  Get that thing moving!"

Snapped out of his thoughts Dru quickly fired up the crane and maneuvered it into position.  Two down, twelve across as Tiger had specified, spreader lowered and locked, and the container climbed towards the sky.  He had to work delicately but quickly, and despite his practice he didn't have much practical experience in what he was doing.  Still he managed to get the container lined up with the waiting flatbed and quickly lowered it, feathering the landing as to not risk damaging the container, then quickly released it.  Kicking open the door of the cab, he leapt over the railing, waiting until the last moment to activate his wings and cushion his fall.  Tiger ran up to him as he set down and clapped him on the back, a big smile plastered on her face.  "We ready?" he asked as he looked over the container resting a little haphazardly on the bed of the trailer.

"One last thing," she said as she put her hands on her belt and suddenly Dru couldn't tell his right from his left and the pavement and sky swirled as he collapsed to the ground in a fit of vertigo.  He tried to grab at Tiger Moth but she easily stepped aside and flicked another control on her belt.  Suddenly her costume and cape were awash in flickering lights that left Dru feeling every single migraine he ever experienced at once.  The best he could do was roll himself face first to the ground to try and avoid the disorienting effects of her costume, but his attempts were met with a kick to the side that rolled him over onto his back.  Peering down on him was a flashing fractal engine in the shape of his ex-wife, every one of her movements shattering her form a thousand times a second into recursive images that expanded their width, depth, and breadth to cover all of reality as they shrunk down to nothing at the same time.  He tried to strike at her, but everything he saw wasn't there and each flailing arm movement sent his sense of balance spiraling in a new direction.

"I really can't thank you enough for doing this for me, Dru," came her voice from seemingly all directions, distorted by her suit's sonic emitters into seething whispers leaking out from the shifting distortion in perceived reality standing above him.

"You..." he tried to sound defiant, but the best he could managed was to hold off on vomiting in his helmet, "...cunt."

In response he got another swift kick to the guts before she knelt down, "You always did have a little sexist streak in you.  I don't know why I put up with it for so long."  Reaching down, she unstrapped his helmet as he weakly tried to fend her off.  He had wondered why his helmet's filters hadn't protected him, but now he realized they had simply been overwhelmed.  He could hear and feel the blood coursing through his body, it hurt to breathe, and the distorted image of Tiger Moth was replaced by a howling wrongness upon the face of the world vaguely identifiable as a woman in a cape.  He felt like he was having a seizure, a stroke, a thousand other things he couldn't name at the moment.  She laughed at him, her suit warping it into warbling, vibrato thunder.  "But that's okay, you get to make it up to me by taking the heat for this.  Don't worry, I'll take good care of Kitten for you.  I think I might even buy your house once it goes into foreclosure; it might make a good starter home while I work my way up to something a bit more...high class."  Dru could only lay there on the asphalt as Tiger pulled one of her pistols from its holster, but instead of putting one into his head she spun the gun around and pistol-whipped him until he went limp before standing up, climbing into the truck cab, and driving away.

														**************************

The sun was already bright and hot over the horizon as Tiger Moth brought the truck to a stop as she turned off the highway.  She yawned long and loud, her eyelids drooping and heavy as she was capping off 24 hours awake with a 4 hour drive.  She banged on the door to the toilet in the sleeper compartment.  "Would it have killed you to have something to keep me awake?  Caffeine, amphetamines, anything?" she yelled at the rig's owner, who banged and yelled back as best he could while tied up and gagged.  With the light turning green, she headed down the road and turned into the truck stop where she had arranged the transfer, heading towards the back lot where she had stashed a car for a quick getaway once the money had changed hands.

Looking over the lot, she spied her contacts just as they were described.  Black SUV, business suits, sunglasses, two of them, and a leather briefcase.  Quickly she parked, hopping out of the cab with almost childlike glee at the windfall awaiting her, and rushed over to the waiting SUV.  An older, black woman stepped out to face her while her partner, a musclebound man with neck tats creeping past his collar stood tensely on the other side of the automobile.

"Tiger Moth," the woman said, more a statement than anything.

"Who else," Tiger responded, still in costume from the heist, "and you are."

"Unimportant," the woman said dispassionately as she motioned for her partner to inspect the truck.

"If you hear any banging noises don't mind, that's just Gary," she said as he passed her.  Turning back to the woman she smiled sardonically, "I'm just borrowing the truck from him."

A few seconds passed before the man came trotting back, giving his partner the thumbs up, "Container numbers match."

A big grin broke out across Tiger's face as the woman handed her the briefcase.  Opening it up she took as second to marvel at the stacks of hundred dollar bills that filled it before snapping it back shut.  "A pleasure doing business with you.  Feel free to give me a call whenever you need a supervillain."

"Sure thing, Barbie," the woman said with a smirk.

And just as Tiger Moth turned around to leave, the rear doors of two nearby semi-trailers flew open and a dozen men with rifles and body armor stormed out as six police cruisers pulled up from all sides.  Taken aback with surprise, she turned to the people beside her only for both of them to be pointing guns at her.  The woman moved her blazer to the side, revealing a badge clipped to her belt that made Tiger's heart stop beating for a second.

"Tiger Moth, you're under arrest.  Put your hands up and don't move a muscle."

													**************************

Tiger Moth trudged through the hallways of Blackgate's Women's Correctional Facility, flanked by a guard that guided her to the visitation room.  As she approached the booth she nearly turned right around to head back to her cell once she saw who was waiting for her but forced herself to sit across from the overpoweringly smug countenance of her ex-husband.  With a smile beaming from ear to ear, he picked up the phone and motioned for her to do the same.  Against her better judgement she picked up the phone and uttered a single word.  "How?"

Dru held up his hand to say wait, and pressed a ring he was wearing against the phone which caused an ear-splitting tone followed by a crackling hiss that eventually faded.  "Sorry, never know who is listening in on these things and this little gizmo hidden in the ring makes sure no one is listening in on us.  But enough about that, I'm sure you have plenty of questions."

Tiger stared at him blankly, her anger rising, and repeated, "How?"

"I'm better than you, isn't that obvious?"

"You snitched on me to avoid jail, didn't you?  Don't for a second think that I'm going to let you get away with that."

"Hardly, I was never arrested and it was a completely anonymous but surprisingly thorough and detailed tipoff that led to your arrest.  Next time you want to leave a fall guy, actually make sure he's unconscious and not pretending.  I was out of there before the cops ever showed."

"Wipe that stupid smile off your face, I'm still taking you down with me."

"And how would you do that?  There is no evidence I was ever there.  I spoofed the cameras, I took down the guards without them seeing me, I even intentionally avoided using my cocoon gun.  But what I did use was infrasonics, just like you do, and the only decent witness is the guard at the gate, who quite clearly was attacked by a woman matching your description and costume driving the stolen truck she was using at the time of her arrest.  That's on top of my alibi.  At the time the theft happened my FitBit will clearly show that I took a quick nighttime jog around my neighborhood, which was followed up by a little online shopping from my home computer, and probably some porn too.  Because unlike some people I can actually cultivate friendships with others, or the very least a mutual sense of trust who will do those things for me.  So according to all available evidence, you did everything by yourself."

She glared at him, trying to summon up enough vitriol that she could kill him with her hate, only to come to a slow realization, "Wait, why would you hide your involvement unles-"

"Unless I knew you were going to pull something?  You tipped me off.  Saturday night you said you were at your mom's house, a two hour drive when traffic is good, but on Sunday morning you said you were less than an hour from where you were staying.  So I give your mother a call, and lo and behold it turns out she hasn't heard a single word from you in two months.  I try all your usual haunts and no one has seen hide nor hair of you, almost as if you didn't want anyone to know you were in Gotham at all.  Because a fall guy doesn't work unless you have an alibi to back it up.  It took a little digging to find your buyer, but Calculator did most of the heavy lifting.  One call to the owner of a chain of strip clubs outside of Pittsburgh listing off the particulars of drug deal scheduled for the morning and he was out, then one call to the cops and they were in, and here we are."

She sat there chewing on his words for what seemed like hours, staring into the condescending face behind the thick pane of safety glass and wishing more than anything she could punch right through it.  "I guess congratulations are in order for you turning that around on me."

"I also owe you a thanks."

"Why?"

Dru leaned forward and his smug sense of self-satisfaction became nigh intolerable.  "You were right, Dent did give me a pretty decent finders fee for revealing a smuggling operation right under his nose.  And a nice bonus for handing him 100,000 hits of fentanyl.  Oh, and you're welcome for not spending the rest of your life in federal prison.  I mean, you're still on the hook for hijacking the 18 wheeler, imprisoning its owner, attacking the dock guards, and stealing what turned out to be a shipping container full of cheap toys, but don't sweat the small stuff.  I, on the other hand, just shaved a year or so off my mortgage with enough left over to take a month off.  And that was with the coinflip coming up scarred."

Her face contorted and her lips trembled as her she struggled to retain her composure against her rising anger.  The knuckles on her hand that gripped the phone where white, and her jaw clenched and ground her teeth hard.  Her skin flushed redder than the roots of her dye job as her breath grew increasingly harsh and fast.  "Now, now," he said in the most condescendingly paternal tone he could muster, "it wasn't a bad plan.  Just one that worked out better for me than you.  Kind of like our divorce."  And with that the dam broke; Tiger slammed the phone against the glass divider, screaming loudly enough that everyone on both sides of the glass could hear her.  She didn't stop screaming as three guards grabbed her and dragged her back to her cell, and was still audible well after the door closed behind them.  Dru hung up the phone in state of pure bliss, and he met the stare every guard, inmate, and visitor with a smile and nod as he strolled past.  By the time he reached the parking lot he was practically skipping.

His euphoria managed to last all the way to his street, coming to a complete crash when he saw a familiar motorcycle and rider waiting at the curb in front of his house.  By the time he pulled into the driveway every muscle in his body was tense and he was grimacing.  He looked down at his phone, nine unread messages; I probably could have have avoided this he thought to himself as he worked up the courage to exit the SUV.  No sooner did his feet hit concrete did he wince as a melodic and cheery voice greet him with a "Hey, you!"

"Heeeeyyyyyyy, Barbara," he said awkwardly as he turned to face the athletic redhead standing behind him with her arms clasped behind her back, a predatory and terrifying smile on her face.  "What, uh, whatcha doin?"

"Sooooo, lets flash back a couple days ago.  I'm at work and I get these text messages from this guy that I'm...I have a certain fondness for.  They're playful and flirty and a little direct - not that I don't enjoy that occasionally - and then suddenly he stops responding.  So I send him a message or two seeing if everything is okay, no answer, then a few more, no answer."

"Come on now, it's n-"

"Quiet.  So as this is happening the Northside Gotham Docks get robbed.  Couple of guards banged up, shipping container stolen, kind of a surprising heist all things considered.  A couple hours later one Tiger Moth is arrested in Pennsylvania with stolen flatbed and the missing container on account of an exceptionally precise and exhaustive anonymous tip to the cops.  And that piques my curiosity.  What are the odds there are two supercriminals patterned after moths of all things that operate in Gotham?  So I do a little digging into Tiger Moth; in addition to discovering that her real name is actually Tiger and that for God knows what reason she had her last name legally changed to Moth a couple years back, I found out that until about nine years ago she was Tiger Walker, as she was married to one Drury Walker, aka Killer Moth."

"What does that have to with the theft on the docks?  I was at home that night-"

"Going for a jog around your neighborhood according to your fitness tracker, followed by ordering a pasta machine according to your ISP logs.  And then you watched Ghetto Shemales 9.  Not that I'm one to judge, I can see the appeal."

"Yeah, uh..." he mentally resolved to have a long and unpleasant chat with Firefly over the new addition to his internet browsing history, "you figured it all out.  Way to go, B, tell your boss he's got a week to hand over the world's greatest detective trophy."

"Is that all you have to say for yourself?" she asked leaning forward a bit to get right in his face.

He glanced around and shrugged, "Maybe I should have let you know something last minute came up instead of leaving you hanging."

"That's it?"

He thought for a moment, and realized just how tired he was of this little game, of complicated.  "Are you jealous, or just feeling insecure?"

Babs stepped back, a little shocked at the question, and more than a little flustered.  "Is that what kind of girl you think I am?"

Dru shrugged again, raising his hands for emphasis.  "You never bother me about capers that have gone down, you never bother me about other villains unless you're feeling gossipy, and you certainly never had any issue with things going hot and cold between us as they always do.  But the one time my ex is in the picture you drive all the way to the suburbs to give me an earful and demand something from me that you don't even know what it is."

Babs stared at him quietly, not quite sure how to respond to him calling her out like that.  She tried to speak but only got out a few half-hearted stammers before Dru raised his hands, "you know what?  Forget I said anything."

He turned his back to her and Babs couldn't think of anything to do but shuffle her feet and stare at the ground.  As he got back into his car to put it in the garage she stepped forward and blurted out, "I just didn't like being dropped like that."

Dru stopped and nodded in recognition.  He wasn't doing complicated right now, but he wasn't doing apologies either.  "You know," he said slowly for emphasis, "we could just pick up that text conversation right were we left off.  I don't have to pick up Kitten until Saturday, you're already here..."

Smirking, Babs leaned against the open door, "you never told me what I'd be getting out of this little domestic rendezvous."

"Well..." he started as he pulled her close, "you're clearly angry and frustrated, and need to take it out on a certain someone."  He grabbed her jacket and pulled her into a kiss.  "I've done some very bad things the past few days, Babs, and I think you know what you need to do."

She giggled and kissed him back, pulling him into the garage, throwing him up against the wall and hitting the button to close the door behind them as she unzipped her jacket.  "It's Miss Gordon when I'm mad at you."