Batman 6 - The Dark Knight Page 12

  “Get downstairs,” Gordon told the cops. “Secure the area and somebody get a medical examiner down here.”

  The cops left, and someone spoke from behind the shower curtain. “Check the names.”

  Gordon bent over and peered at the drivers licenses. “Patrick Harvey. Richard Dent.”

  “Harvey Dent,” Ramirez said.

  Batman stepped from behind the curtain. “I need ten minutes with the scene before your men contaminate it.”

  “Us contaminate it?” Ramirez asked angrily. “It’s because of you that these guys are dead in the first place.”

  “Ramirez,” Gordon warned.

  Batman moved past the bodies to a small pock in the wall. He removed a knife with a needle blade from his belt and began digging. He twisted the knife and caught a bullet fragment in his palm.

  “That’s brick,” Gordon said. “You’re gonna try and take ballistics off a shattered bullet?”

  “No,” Batman said. “Fingerprints.”

  “He’s not serious,” Ramirez muttered.

  “Whatever you’re gonna do,” Gordon said, “do it fast. He has another target.”

  Gordon pointed to a Gotham Times obituary dated with tomorrow’s date folded underneath Dent’s arm. It read: “Mayor Anthony Garcia was shot and killed today by the criminal mastermind known as the Joker. Surgeons at Gotham General confirmed that Mayor Garcia had succumbed to massive internal bleeding caused by rounds from a high-powered rifle. The mayor was forty years old.” Garcia’s photo had a red Xo Xo written next to it, and in the same red, all over the obituary, was scrawled: HA HA HA.

  Lucius Fox had heard the news about the early-morning murders on his car radio as he was driving in to work and knew he probably wouldn’t be seeing his boss that day, which was okay; the day looked to be extremely routine except for a ten o’clock appointment with the lawyer, Coleman Reese.

  Reese was right on time and looked a bit excited.

  “What can I do for you?” Fox asked him.

  “You asked me to do the diligence on the L.S.I. Holdings deal again. I found some irregularities.”

  “Well, their CEO is in police custody.”

  “Not with their numbers. With yours. A whole division of Wayne Enterprises disappeared overnight. So I went down to the archives and started pulling old files.” Reese removed a blueprint from his attaché case, unfolded it, and pushed it across the desk to Fox. “My kids love the Batman. I thought he was pretty cool, too. Out there, kicking some ass.”

  Fox looked briefly at the blueprint. Across the top at one corner was scrawled: the Tumbler.

  “Changes things when you know it’s just a rich kid trying to play dress-up,” Reese continued. Reese pointed to Fox’s initials in the approval box. “Your project. Don’t tell me you don’t recognize your baby pancaking cop cars on the evening news. Now you’re getting sloppy. Applied Sciences was a small, dead department—who’d notice? But now you’ve got the entire R&D department burning cash, claiming its related to cell phones for the Army. What are you building him now, a rocket ship? I want ten million a year, for the rest of my life.”

  Fox folded the blueprint and contemplated Reese. “Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands. And now your plan is to blackmail this person?”

  Reese stared at Fox, who was smiling lazily.

  “Good luck,” Fox drawled.

  Coleman Reese left Fox angry and insulted. Blackmail? No. Blackmailers were criminals, and Coleman was no criminal. He was a lawyer, one who had not been given his due. He had been cheated. His talents were neither recognized nor rewarded. He had been recruited from the graduating class of Gotham University’s law school with promises of quick promotion and financial largesse. Five years had passed—five whole years!—and where was he? Stuck in a Wayne Enterprises law library doing due diligence. Oh, the money was all right, he guessed; the starting salary had been pretty good, the cost-of-living raises had come promptly, and once he had even been given a bonus that financed a nice vacation in the south of France. But a man of his abilities should not be stuck doing chores in libraries. He should be in a courtroom, where his eloquence and, yes, his personal charm and charisma would not only be winning cases, but would be putting the best possible face on Wayne Enterprises.

  He was not done with Lucius Fox or, for that matter, with Bruce Wayne.

  Bruce and Alfred were busy testing firearms. Earlier, Bruce had fired a rifle in his underground chamber while Alfred stood on the ground above. As they had suspected, the sound of the shot was not audible outside the bunker. Now, Alfred was handing Bruce a bullet inscribed with a grid. Bruce slid it into an ammunition clip and the clip into a computer-controlled Gatling gun. He and Alfred put on ear protectors, and Bruce thumbed a button. The gun hummed and began dollying sideways and spinning and blasting slugs into a series of identical brick wall samples. When the gun stopped firing, Bruce went to the bricks, carrying the slug he had found at the Orchard Street murders. He held the slug up to each of the newly made holes in the walls, then selected two of the bricks and took them to an x-ray scanner. He toggled a switch and high-resolution, three-dimensional images of the bullet fragments lit up the screen.

  An hour later, Bruce was standing next to Lucius Fox at the Applied Sciences Division of Wayne Enterprises. They were standing in front of another screen, and Fox was saying, “Here’s your original scan and”—he pushed a button and a second image appeared on the screen—“here it is reverse-engineered.”

  Fox pushed another button, and the images began moving, seeming to assemble themselves into whole bullets. Finally, the movement stopped; one of the images bore an array of swirling lines.

  “And here,” Bruce said, “is a thumb print.”

  “I’ll make you a copy,” Fox said. “Mr. Wayne, did you assign R&D?”

  “Yes, government telecommunications project.”

  “I wasn’t aware we had any new government contracts. Can you—”

  “Lucius, I’m playing this one pretty close to the vest.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Fox removed a copy of the thumbprint taken from the shattered bullet and handed it to Bruce. “Now, what about the matter of Mr. Reese I told you about when I called?”

  Alfred was waiting for his boss in the bunker, killing time by watching a cooking show on television. Alfred greeted him and watched as Bruce fed the thumbprint into a slot on one of the computers.

  Alfred sat in front of a keyboard and, looking over his shoulder, said, “I’ll run it through all the databases.”

  “Cross-reference the addresses. Look for Parkside and around there.”

  While Alfred busied himself, Bruce went into the shadows and returned wheeling a motorcycle, an MV Augusta Brutale, which he pushed onto the elevator.

  “Got one,” Alfred said. “Melvin White, aggravated assault, moved to Arkham Asylum twice. He’s at 1502 Randolph, just off State Apartment.”

  “Overlooking the funeral procession,” Bruce said, climbing onto the motorcycle. “Not good.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It was the day of Commissioner Loeb’s funeral. Not everyone had liked the commissioner, and he had certainly had his share of political enemies, but he was a Gothamite, his death had been unjust and untimely, and respect was his due. Just after sunrise, people began gathering along the curbs or staking out space in windows above the streets, some with folding chairs, some with picnic coolers full of snacks, many wearing black armbands. It seemed like everyone had their hands folded, their eyes staring at the ground.

  Except, maybe, the police.

  The event had been happening for about an hour. The marchers had traveled less than a mile. For some, this was their moment, their chance to show the world that they were good citizens, decent folk who honored the dead. The police presence was very visible. There was th
e GCPD marching band, of course, and hundreds of uniforms on the sidewalks and standing in the gutters and directing traffic at intersections. There were an equal number of nonuniformed officers pretending to watch the funeral and really watching everything else. And high above, on the rooftops, tight-lipped men in fatigues peered through the scopes of sniper rifles.

  Gordon, standing on a corner, keyed his radio, and growled, “How’s it look on top?”

  One of the snipers, a twenty-year veteran, Sergeant Raphael Mayer, keyed his own radio, and replied: “We’re tight. But frankly . . . there’s a lot of windows.”

  Gordon looked up at the sun glaring off thousands of glass panes. Yeah, a lot of windows, all right.

  Negotiating the streets of Gotham would have been impossible in a car, jammed as they were with mourners. But driving his motorcycle, Bruce could weave and turn and, quite quickly, get to where he was going. And if anyone recognized him? If he had been Batman, everyone would have noticed, followed him, tried to stop him. But Bruce Wayne? Hey, it’s just billionare Bruce up to one of his usual tricks.

  He braked in an alleyway between two medium-sized apartment buildings a dozen yards from a parade barrier. He dismounted, grabbed the lowest rung of a fire escape ladder, pulled himself upward. He continued on to the fifth landing. It took him only moments to open a window and begin stalking down a dimly lit corridor. He counted doors until he reached one marked: 1502.

  He pressed his ear against the wood paneling and heard a voice—muffled and booming at once. The mayor’s voice. His honor must be making his standard fallen comrades speech in the street directly outside the building:

  . . . and as we recognize the sacrifice of this brave servant, we must remember that vigilance is the price of . . .

  The same old speech, the collection of clichés the guy mouthed every time a cop or a fireman or a politician died. But if Bruce were right about what was inside apartment 1502, it would be the mayor’s last speech. Unless he acted.

  He emptied his mind of expectation and speculation, because as Rā’s had taught him, he had to put himself fully in the present moment when going into combat. He kicked in the door and dived and rolled and—

  A sniper scope on a tripod at the window. On the floor, eight men, arms and legs and mouths wrapped in tape. Bruce went to the nearest one and pulled the tape from his lips.

  Gasping, the man said, “They took our guns . . . our uniforms . . .”

  Guns and . . . uniforms?

  Bruce sprang to the window and looked through the scope to see:

  The mayor. His honor guard, eight uniformed men who were raising their rifles, aiming at the mayor. Through the round lens, Bruce could see a face he thought he recognized, the hollowed eyes and gruesome scars . . .

  Gordon saw the scarred face, too, and for a few seconds tried to place the man’s face. Then he realized that the man’s rifle was out of sync. Seconds later he jumped as the rifles fired. Slugs slammed into his back as Gordon lurched into the mayor, and the two men tumbled to the pavement.

  On the rooftop across the street, Sergeant Raphael Mayer heard shots and saw through his scope sunlight glancing off a similar scope in a fifth-floor window. He squeezed the trigger of his weapon.

  The street was pandemonium: shouts, screams, the merrymakers now a mindless mob, desperately afraid, running mindlessly, seeking any kind of safety. Two of the patrolmen had the presence of mind to shoot at the murderous honor guard. One of the shots found a target, the leg of an honor guardsmen, who groaned, dropped his rifle, and folded to the ground.

  Sergeant Mayer’s slugs shattered the upper pane of the window and, as Bruce rolled away, splintered the window frame. He scanned the room to be certain that the bound men—the real honor guard—were out of the line of fire, then sprinted into the corridor.

  Harvey Dent had been with Rachel Dawes at the podium, standing behind Mayor Garcia along with a dozen other dignitaries, when the gunfire began. He pushed Rachel down and told her to stay put, then jumped from the platform and ran forward. The crowd, still mostly confused and in panic, made progress difficult: he was elbowed and jostled, and twice he fell. It took him several minutes to reach the area where the violence had occurred. He saw an ambulance parked in an alleyway between two buildings. He trotted to the ambulance and slipped through the open doors. Inside, the phony guardsman who had been shot was sitting on the edge of a gurney. A paramedic winding a bandage around his leg and two uniformed cops stood nearby, their heads bowed under the low roof.

  Dent crouched by the guardsman. “Tell me what you know about the Joker.”

  The man smirked. Then Dent noticed the name tag on his uniform: Officer Rachel Dawes.

  Dent glanced past the guardsman and saw through a small window that the driver’s seat was empty, and the keys were in the ignition. He told the cops to be sure the area was secure, and after they’d gone, he circled to the front of the ambulance, got in, and drove away.

  Clara Street, near the city limits, was a crowded block in a poor state, with run-down buildings, broken sidewalks, and very little green where the neighborhood’s children could play. The Gordon house was a modest building in the middle of the block. Barbara Gordon stood speechless on the run-down front porch as Officer Gerard Stephens tried to console her.

  “I’m sorry, Barbara,” Stephens said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

  Barbara brushed it off and stepped past Stephens. She looked out in the dark and shouted, “Are you there? Are you? You brought this on us. You did! You brought this . . .” Her voice caught, she sobbed, and collapsed into Stephens’s arms.

  Batman was nearby. He hung his head.

  It was dark in Gotham City by eight, and the streets were emptier than usual. All civic events and most theater and musical performances had been canceled following the afternoon’s shooting. The movie houses and multiplexes and nightclubs were still open, and a few citizens were inside them, determined to be amused no matter how far into despair everyone else had fallen.

  At police headquarters, all of the Gotham City Major Crimes Unit stood next to the searchlight, its beam vanishing into a cloudless sky.

  “Let’s switch it off,” Officer Stephens said. “He ain’t coming. He doesn’t want to talk to us. God help whomever he does want to talk to.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Salvatore Maroni fancied himself an old-time kind of guy—an old-fashioned crime boss, a mobster with class. He liked flash: flashy clothes, flashy cars, flashy woman, and flashy clubs. Tonight, he was in one of his favorite haunts, a nightclub near the waterfront, a joint he considered a lot classier than the dumps the Chechen owned. He was sitting in a booth next to his newest flashy woman and his bodyguards, listening to music with a beat a man could feel in the pit of his stomach, watching dancers whom he saw in half-second intervals because, just now, the entire place was lit by strobes.

  “Can’t we go someplace quieter?” the flashy woman shouted. “We can’t hear each other talk.”

  “I don’t wanna hear you talk,” Maroni shouted back.

  He leaned back to watch the dancers on the floor below, visible in half-second bursts of brightness filled with human motion.

  Two men with assault rifles were on the catwalk above the dance floor and across from Maroni’s table, gazing down at the moving bodies, charged with watching for trouble. They didn’t see a skylight open behind them, nor the figure that seemed to congeal from the night. The bigger of the two felt a breeze on the back of his neck and was turning when a fist caught him beneath the chin. His partner caught a glimpse of him falling in a burst of light and was raising his weapon when something struck him behind the ear. His gun slipped from his hand and fell onto the catwalk. One of Maroni’s bodyguards reacted immediately, jerking a pistol from beneath his jacket and running onto the catwalk.

  A burst of light: a silhouette dropping from the catwalk.

  Darkness.

  Light: A caped figure standing in front of the bodyguard.
<
br />   Darkness.

  Light: the bodyguard collapsing.

  Darkness.

  Light: Maroni half-out of his seat, gun in hand, eyes wide.

  Darkness.

  Light: Batman was crouching on the table, his hands on Maroni, his teeth clenched, and his mask a devil’s face.

  Darkness.

  For Rachel Dawes, the day had been hellish, and now the evening was becoming the same. She hated funerals, hated displaying herself, and had agreed to take part only to please Harvey Dent. Then the gunfire, the panic, the stampede . . . She had gotten herself out of the thick of it, had learned from a cop with a radio what had happened, had walked downtown to her office at the courthouse, where she might be of some use to somebody. The situation was chaotic there, too, but she had managed to organize the deployment of the junior prosecutors and was beginning to deal with the interns when her cell phone rang.

  “Harvey, where are you?” she asked, her voice rising above the din around her.

  “Where are you?”

  “Where you should be, at Major Crimes, trying to sort through—”

  “Rachel, listen to me. You’re not safe there.”

  “This is Gordon’s unit, Harvey.”

  “Gordon’s dead, Rachel.”

  “They didn’t tell me that. He vouched for the honor guard . . .”

  “He’s gone. And the Joker’s named you next.”

  Rachel gazed around the room, at the people she knew and the people she didn’t. There were a lot of the latter.