Suicide Squad (26 page)

The Joker leaned close to the pilot and gave him his broadest smile.

“Closer,” he said. Both pilots nodded.
Absolutely. Whatever you want. Anything you say.

“So,” the Joker started, “you were saying, Doctor, that it’s all working? You’re not lying to me, are you?”

His heart beating like a trip-hammer, Van Criss looked up.

“No. No. I’d never do that, sir. It works. It really does. Just as you wanted.”

The madman leaned into him and gave him a big, toothy smile. “You definitely are my new best friend.”

Van Criss grinned. Happy. But then, he didn’t know what the Joker had done to his previous best friends.

Flag and Waller stared at the Chinook hovering directly over the Federal building, but not descending to its landing dock. Why wasn’t it landing? Something was wrong.

GQ shouted into his comm. “Savior One Zero. Why are you holding? Savior One Zero, respond, please. What the hell is going on up there, Savior One Zero?”

There was no answer. GQ traded looks with Flag.

“They’re not talking to me.”

Flag turned to the Squad. These were exactly the kind of scum who would throw a curveball like this. He turned back to GQ.

“Our bird’s been hijacked,” he said with certainty. “Light it up.” He thought it could be interesting to see how his killers reacted.

GQ and the SEALs opened fire on the Chinook. It suddenly slipped sideways, circling to reveal the tail ramp. Flag could see a big man inside it, spinning a six-barrelled chain gun. It pumped lead like water in a fire hose.

Flag shouted at his Squad. “Get down. Now.”

They scattered in different directions.

One of the SEALs let out a gasp then fell to the ground. A bullet tunneled through his forehead and exploded out the back. The other SEALs hit the deck, taking cover behind the roof’s parapet.

* * *

Harley hunkered down just a few yards from Deadshot. She saw him staring weirdly at her neck.

“What? I got a hickey or something?”

He looked at the indicator light just under her skin. It was blinking green.

“Your nanite’s disarmed.”

She felt her palm buzz. She unclenched her fingers and looked at the tiny cell phone the Joker had given her. She’d gotten a text.

Now. It’s time.

Finally she saw the Joker step out onto the Chinook’s tail ramp. Her eyes widened with joy and her heart almost burst from her chest.

This is the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for anyone else in the whole history of the world
, she thought with fierce love.
That’s why he’s my one and only Puddin’.

Frost hosed down the roof with his chain gun, scattering SEALs and the Squad team. Next to him the Joker tossed out a rope. It unrolled down to the roof, then dragged toward the edge.

“Harley, it’s up to you now,” he said over the sound of the rotors.

Without hesitation, she ran for the edge of the roof and leapt to catch the rope. As she held on, the chopper nosed down and veered away. Frost kept firing at the rooftop to keep Flag and company pinned down. He only stopped shooting after they cleared the immediate area.

* * *

Deadshot stared at Harley climbing the rope to the copter. Joker impatiently waited for her inside.

“C’mon, babe,” the maniac shouted. “Quit taking your time. We got killing to do.”

“Mr. Lawton,” Waller said. “You kill that woman. Right now.”

Deadshot glared at her. “What’s she done to me?”

“You’re a hitman, right? I got a contract. Kill Harley Quinn. For your freedom and your kid.”

Deadshot nodded. He lifted his carbine and aimed it at Harley, her copter rapidly receding into the distance. He stared at her; she was square in his crosshairs. What Boomer had said. Easy peasy.

“This won’t be easy, lady,” he said to Waller. “They’re already so damn far. And I don’t have time to calibrate wind velocity. Good as I am, I make no promises.”

“I’ll hold you to one anyway. Kill her.”

He didn’t know what to do, and that bothered him. Was he growing a damned conscience? After all this time? He was pretty sure that would be a “no.” He would never allow that to happen. That would be the death of Deadshot.

He tightened his finger on the trigger.

“Now, Lawton. For your daughter.”

He squeezed it.

* * *

Harley had nearly reached the open tail ramp. Her Puddin’ was waiting there for her. He’d risked everything to save her, and she was definitely going to show him how grateful she was.

She heard the bullet explode from Deadshot’s M4A1. A second later it impacted, less than an inch from Harley’s ear. She glanced back at the Federal Building. Deadshot was standing in front of Waller. She was dressing him down.

* * *

“Sorry,” he said. “I missed.”

“Yeah. Like hell.”

“No. It was the wind. There was no way to compensate for it. Not without my equipment, and certainly not while the target was moving in an unsteady chopper. Trust me. I’ve got no love for that nutjob, but you were asking for the impossible. Despite everything, I came damn close.”

Waller stalked off angry as hell. Deadshot stood, watching as Boomer gave him a reassuring pat on the back.

“Good one, mate.”

They looked up and saw Harley pull herself into the Chinook. Its tailgate closed behind her. Deadshot was surrounded by the Squad—they were cheering him for his “accidental miss.”

Waller was livid, but Flag looked at Lawton and smiled.

The head of A.R.G.U.S. reached for her phone and punched in a preset.

“Savior One Zero’s been hijacked,” she shouted. “Shoot it down.” She was determined to get her kill, Deadshot knew.

He decided he didn’t care, and turned back to Boomer, Croc, and Diablo.

“Well, this’s become a brown-eyed mullet,” Boomer complained. “We started with six. Now we’re four.”

“Not sure we needed Quinn,” Lawton said. “Maybe if she was taking her meds, but she’s a loose cannon. And we certainly didn’t need what’s his name?”

Boomer laughed. “Slipshod. Sliprope. Slip something. Who cares? But the real stinker here is we’re bein’ run by a knocker who’d shoot us all herself, if we gave her half a reason.”

“We’re better off alone,” Deadshot agreed. “Just the four of us.”

* * *

Harley was staring at the ocean, looking at it from the Chinook’s tail ramp. The water was beautiful, seductive, overwhelming, and it seemed to be endless.

Two of a kind
, she thought.
The ocean and Harley.

“C’mon. Get inside,” the Joker ordered. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her toward him. “What the hell are you waiting for? We got murdering to do.”

She turned back to her rescuer and gave him the biggest, most sincere smile she had. But he wasn’t smiling back.

“I tell you, the crap I do for you,” he said.

“Puddin’?” Harley stammered, confused. After all, he had just put his life on the line to rescue her. What could she have done wrong? Harley decided maybe they got off to a bad start. She rushed closer to hug him.

He answered by pushing her back.

“We’ll talk about this,” he said sternly. “Later.”

“Okay. Sure.” She nodded her head, still confused, but he was her Puddin’, her Mister J. Whatever her man said worked for her.

Frost broke the tension.

“Boss. We got problems.”

The Blackhawk helicopter had been circling Midway City, spotting enemy combatants as well as the few idiot looters who thought they had the place to themselves. They quickly learned otherwise.

Captain Hawk was the pilot. New orders came over the comm, relayed to the chopper by Amanda Waller. The Joker had stolen a Chinook, and likely murdered its crew. The captain’s orders were to find it, and then blow it the hell out of the sky.

Waller didn’t want prisoners. She wanted body parts.

The captain’s people linked into the Chinook’s GPS signal, then sent Hawk a new course that would enable the Blackhawk to intercept the chopper over the city’s downtown. The Joker wasn’t going to get away.

“First monsters, and now I’m hunting super-villains.” Captain Hawk chuckled. “Never a boring day.”

“We have our target, sir.” Steve Gardner, Hawk’s second in command, pointed to the radar. “Five hundred ninety yards due west. Just behind the Kane Tower complex.” Hawk entered the data into the nav computer, then felt the Blackhawk bank as it adapted to its new orders.

Within minutes they were shooting toward the Chinook at an interception angle. Before the target could respond, they cut it off and shifted into firing position.

The Chinook pulled up and hovered.

Hawk hit the button that launched a hellfire missile.

* * *

The Joker shouted for the pilot to evade, but it was too late. The missile slammed into the front of the Chinook, blowing the pilots out of the cockpit. The impact disabled Dr. Van Criss’s equipment.

Joker grabbed onto a handhold and angrily turned to Harley.

“We gotta get out of here fast,” he shouted.

They rushed toward the tail ramp when the chopper swerved and spun. Harley fell forward, out the open ramp, even as the Joker fell back, into the plunging copter.

* * *

Before she knew what was happening, Harley was hurtling out of the helicopter. The loud sound of the rotors was replaced by the whoosh of empty air. She was plummeting toward the ground, but she also had forward momentum, and it carried her over the roof of a low building.

I’m flying
, she thought.
Gliding.
The city below spiraled crazily, but Harley closed her eyes, spread her arms out like the wings she knew they were, stuck out her tongue, and let the winds and momentum carry her wherever they might.

She came in at a low angle and skidded across a building’s roof rather than pancaking directly into it. Scraping painfully along the rough surface, letting out a couple of unladylike grunts, she finally rolled to a stop. Sure, she might have a broken bone or two, but miraculously she was still breathing.

Best. Landing. Ever!

Lying on the rooftop, bloody and partially broken, she looked up to see the Chinook spiral down, then crash into the Groiler building. It exploded on contact.

“No. Nonono. Puddin’!” she exclaimed. Tears streaked her face. She howled in pain even as the Blackhawk thundered overhead, heading back for the Federal Building.

Flag and the others stood on the Federal Building roof as the Blackhawk arrived and hovered alongside the edge. Captain George Hawk opened the door as Katana and Flag helped Waller board.

“Stand by,” she ordered. “I’ll send another helo for the rest of you.” The Blackhawk lifted, moved off, then screamed to the street in a near freefall, leveling just yards before it would have hit the ground. It slowly regained altitude and fired off amber flares behind it to distract any incoming missiles.

She leaves us behind and takes off all by her lonesome
, Lawton thought.
That’s one paranoid bitch.

* * *

“Okay, let’s go,” Waller said to Hawk. “The fun’s just beginning.”

He laughed. He’d known Waller since the day she started at A.R.G.U.S. She was a self-professed bitch on wheels then, and she hadn’t changed the slightest in all these years. There was little reason to. Despite her style, she was usually right.

Hawk flew the Blackhawk as low as he safely could, maneuvering it between the fallen skyscrapers and damaged buildings that had yet to crumble. He needed to keep them off enemy radar.

* * *

Deadshot watched as the Blackhawk disappeared into the distance.

Why the hell didn’t Waller let any of them join her? They certainly had room for most of the Squad. Then again, Waller only cared about Waller, and he knew that would never change.

Well
, he thought,
she has to live with herself.
In the back of his mind he knew others said the same about him, but he had resolved that problem years ago.

He turned to Flag. “Signed, sealed, and delivered, big guy. Time to pay the bill.”

“You earned it.” Flag sighed in relief. His job had been to use the Squad to rescue Waller, not specifically to fight the EAs. Waller and the Army were better set up to do that.

Deadshot looked to the ground and saw something metal glistening in the light. He picked it up and recognized it. Harley’s cell phone. He slipped it into his pocket. Might as well keep it.

She wouldn’t need it any more.

The Midway City Bank building was completed in 1926 and somehow managed to make it through the 1929 Great Depression, an uneasy economy during the war years, and the bank closures of the early 21st century. It survived the EA’s initial bombardments and as SEALs, Army, and Marines joined and launched their assault against the beasts, it continued to stand as a tall and proud reminder of the way things had been and could be again.

Then hell plummeted from the sky in the guise of a crippled, out of control Chinook helicopter that skidded across rooftops and shredded its way down Ninth Street, only to careen into the bank’s facade, destroying glass, stone, and mortar before its sturdy all-steel vault put an abrupt stop to the aircraft.

The copter was on fire. Nothing inside could have survived.

From across the way, on another rooftop, the Joker watched the flames rising into the sky. He had jumped just in time. If he had waited even another ten seconds, he would now be little more than ash.

He watched as the bank erupted into a blazing inferno. The fire consumed the building, destroying ninety years of solvency. What the Great Depression couldn’t shutter, the Joker did without even trying.

He picked himself up and laughed as the bank burned. It was a glorious sight, knowing that millions of dollars of cold, hard samolians were being reduced to worthless ash.

What’s next
, he wondered, but he already knew the answer.

He had to find Harley.

He’d accepted that one day she’d be the death of him, and perhaps that was why she was so enticing. Every day with her was like running through a shifting mine field. Having to survive kept him stimulated. Knowing one day he’d strangle the very life out of her kept him focused. Life with Harley was always an adventure. A dangerous, corrosive one, but hey, he was the Joker.