Batman 6 - The Dark Knight Page 16

The Joker danced around to the rear of the pile and emerged from the other side holding a gasoline can. “I’m a man of simple tastes. I like gunpowder. Dynamite.” He splashed liquid from the can onto the money. “Gasoline.”

  The Chechen bolted forward and stopped when the Joker jammed a pistol into his cheek.

  “You know what they have in common?” the Joker continued. “They’re cheap.”

  “You said you were a man of your word.”

  The Joker plucked the cigar from between the Chechen’s lips. “I am.”

  He tossed the smoldering cigar onto the money pile.

  The Chechen stared in horror as the money flared into flame.

  “I’m only burning my half,” the Joker said. “Of course, your half will burn with it. Nothing to be done, I’m afraid.”

  The Chechen watched the fire.

  “All you care about is the money,” the Joker said. “This city deserves a better class of criminal, and I’m going to give it to them. This is my town now. Tell your men they work for me.”

  “They won’t work for a freak.”

  The Joker removed a knife from a sheath under his jacket and tossed it to one of his men. “Cut him up and offer him to his little princes. Let’s show him just how loyal a hungry dog is.”

  Two other men grabbed the Chechen.

  The fire had burned down, almost to where Lau was lying.

  “It’s not about the money,” the Joker said. “It’s about sending a message.”

  Lau screamed as the Joker took a cell phone from his pocket.

  At that moment, a lot of Gotham residents were watching television—not so much the usual afternoon talk show/cartoon rerun fare, but the all-news channel, where Mike Engel was interviewing Coleman Reese. Even less media-savvy Gothamites could tell that Engel was milking the story for all it was worth, delaying Reese’s big revelation by taking calls.

  “. . . how much they gonna pay you to say who the Batman really is,” an irate viewer was asking Reese.

  “That’s simply not why I’m doing this,” Reese said, looking straight into the camera.

  “Caller, you’re on the air,” Engel said to nobody visible.

  The caller, a man with a deep voice: “Harvey Dent didn’t want us to give in to this maniac. You think you know better than him?”

  “Guy’s got a point,” Engel said, as earnest as a school debater’s referee. “Dent didn’t want Batman to give himself up. Is this the right thing to do?”

  Just as earnestly, Reese said, “If Dent could talk now, he might feel differently.”

  “And we wish him a speedy recovery,” Engel said, now a model of sincerity. “God knows we need him now. Let’s take another call.”

  The disembodied voice, a falsetto, seemed to be that of an old lady. “Mr. Reese, what’s more valuable, one life or a hundred?”

  “I guess it would depend on the life,” Reese replied, a small smile on his lips.

  “Okay, let’s say it’s your life. Is it worth more than the lives of several hundred others?”

  “Of course not,” Reese said, now apparently indignant.

  “I’m glad you feel that way. Because I’ve put a bomb in one of the city’s hospitals. It’s going off in sixty minutes unless someone kills you.”

  “Who is this?” Engel demanded.

  “Just a concerned citizen”—the falsetto vanished, the voice dropped an octave—“and regular guy. I had a vision. Of a world without Batman. The mob ground out a little profit and the police tried to shut them down, one block at a time . . . and it was so . . . boring. I’ve had a change of heart. I don’t want Mr. Reese spoiling everything, but why should I have all the fun? Let’s give someone else a chance . . .”

  Reese rose from his chair. Engel put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down.

  “If Coleman Reese isn’t dead in sixty minutes, then I blow up a hospital. Of course, you could always kill yourself, Mr. Reese. But that would be a noble thing to do. And you’re a lawyer.”

  There was a loud click and the hum of a dial tone.

  The cops at the Major Crimes Unit had been taking turns watching television, just in case the Joker chose to make another announcement, and they weren’t disappointed. Detective Murphy was on monitor duty, snacking from a bag of corn chips, when the pseudo old lady began her rant. He realized immediately what was happening and yelled to the rest of the squad, including Gordon and a dozen uniforms, to join him. Gordon quickly addressed the patrolmen.

  “Call in every officer—tell ’em to head to the nearest hospital and start evac and search. Call the transit authority, the school board, prisons. Get every available bus to a hospital. Murphy, you’re in charge of that. The priority is Gotham General—wheel everybody out of that place right now. My hunch is, that’s where the bomb is.”

  “Why?” a sergeant asked.

  “That’s where Harvey Dent is.”

  The uniforms hurried away, and Gordon turned to his detectives.

  “You guys come with me.”

  “Where we going?” one of them asked.

  “To get Reese.”

  As Alfred switched off the television, Bruce Wayne was already moving toward the elevator. Alfred caught up with him seconds later.

  “Get to the comm gear,” Bruce said. “I need you plugged in, checking Gordon’s men and their families.”

  “Looking for?”

  “Hospital admissions.”

  “Will you be taking the Bat-Pod, sir?”

  Gordon and his men burst into the television station, running through the reception area and onto the broadcast studio without asking permission or even flashing their badges. They found Reese slumped in a chair just beyond the glare of the lights and grabbed him.

  Mike Engel bolted from his on-camera desk, and asked Gordon, “Do you really think someone would try to . . .”

  Gordon ignored him and hustled Reese into the lobby. Through the glass doors, Gordon saw an old man raise a big revolver and begin pulling the trigger. The door shattered as Gordon flung Reese to the carpet.

  Gordon did not fire back. He pulled Reese back into the studio and told Murphy to get the cars to the rear of the building.

  Gordon and his men surrounded Reese during the dozen steps they took from the back door of the studio to a waiting police van.

  “They’re trying to kill me,” Reese gasped.

  Gordon pushed Reese into the back of the van. “Maybe the Batman’ll save you.”

  Bruce was certain that he knew what Gordon would do, and he was right: get Reese to safety and everyone out of the hospitals. Nothing he could do about the hospital inmates, though their well-being should obviously have the highest priority; his appearance might only confuse an already chaotic situation. But Reese . . . maybe he could help there.

  He guided the Lamborghini off the freeway and toward the television station. When he saw the mob in the street, he thought that Gordon would probably leave by the alley, and when he saw the police van pulling away from behind the station, he knew he’d made a good guess. He began to follow.

  Detectives Jeremy Polk and Willy Davis were on the four-to-midnight shift outside Harvey Dent’s room at Gotham General when the word came to get everyone out, and that meant Harvey Dent as well, ASAP. Polk and Davis checked the room, then Polk left Davis standing by Dent’s bed while he went to the street outside to see what he could scare up in the way of transportation. He found a school bus at the emergency-room entrance, its engine idling; orderlies, doctors, and nurses were helping men and women dressed in white hospital gowns and robes to board it.

  Polk saw the driver standing near the open front door.

  “I got a priority passenger,” Polk said.

  “We’ll make a spot for ’im,” the driver said.

  Polk keyed his radio: “Davis, I got space, bring him out.”

  No answer.

  “Davis?”

  Polk ran back into the hospital and up the fire stairs to Dent’s room. There
was no sign of Davis. A red-haired nurse stood over Dent’s bed with her back to Polk.

  “Ma’am, we’re going to have to move him now,” Polk said, and got no answer. “Ma’am?”

  The nurse turned and fired a silenced pistol. Polk died as he fell to the floor.

  Then the nurse pulled off her cap, and said to Dent, “It’s me, your old pal the Joker. Surprised? I don’t want there to be any hard feelings between us, Harvey. When you and Rachel were being abducted, I was sitting in Gordon’s cage. I didn’t rig those charges.”

  “Your men,” Dent croaked. “Your plan.”

  “Do I really look like a man with a plan, Harvey? I don’t have a plan. The mob has plans, the cops have plans. You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. I just do things. I’m a wrench in the gears. I hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone’s. Maroni has plans. Gordon has plans. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer. I show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. So when I say that what happened to you and your girlfriend was nothing personal, you know I’m telling the truth.”

  The Joker gave Dent his pistol and stood still as Dent aimed it. The Joker leaned forward, pressing his head against the gun barrel. “It’s the schemer who put you where you are. You were a schemer. You had plans. Look where it got you. I just did what I did best—I took your plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I’ve done to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics. Because it’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, everybody loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It’s fair.”

  Dent was holding his lucky coin. He had found it on his bedside table after he had spoken to Gordon in the hospital. He was not sure how it had gotten there, as the last he remembered, he had given the coin to Rachel. It was burned and dirty on one side due to the fire. Just like he was now . . . He looked down at it: good side.

  “You live,” he said.

  He turned the coin over: bad side.

  “You die.”

  The Joker looked first at the coin, then, admiringly, at Dent. “Now you’re talking!”

  Dent flipped the coin, caught it, then looked at it.

  Gordon sat with Reese and a cop named Berg in the back of the van. He still didn’t know where he wanted to take the lawyer, but he knew plenty of places he didn’t want Reese to be, and for now, his agenda was to get away from all of them.

  He looked at his companion. “I don’t think we’ve officially met. Berg, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir, Commissioner Gordon,” Berg said, looking at his watch.

  “Something’s eating at you, son. Maybe I’d better have your weapon.”

  “My wife’s in the hospital, Commissioner. She’s very sick. I don’t want her to be in any more danger—”

  Berg stopped midsentence and took out his gun, but he didn’t give it to Gordon. Instead, he aimed it at Gordon’s head. “He said he’d kill my wife. I’m sorry, sir.”

  Bruce, a half block behind the van, saw it stop at a red light. The light changed, the van inched into the intersection. A battered green pickup truck shot from out of a side street, aimed toward the police van. Bruce gripped the wheel of the Lamborghini and floored the gas pedal, twisted the steering wheel, jumped the curb, and sped down the sidewalk.

  The pickup was only feet from the van, about to hit it broadside.

  The Lamborghini slid between the pickup and the van, and the pickup smashed into it.

  Inside the van, the jolt knocked Berg against the wall. Gordon’s own gun was already out and slamming the side of Berg’s head before the younger man could recover.

  Gordon handcuffed the unconscious Berg, told Reese to stay put, and climbed onto the street. He went to the fancy sports car, wrenched open the door, and reached inside to help the driver.

  Then he saw who the man was, and whispered, “Bruce Wayne?”

  Bruce got out of the Lamborghini, now a mass of twisted metal, and swayed. Gordon put a hand on his arm to steady him and guided him to the curb. Bruce sat, put his head in his hands for a moment, then looked up at Gordon.

  “You okay, Mr. Wayne?”

  “Call me Bruce. I think so.”

  “That was a brave thing you did.”

  “Trying to catch the light?”

  “You weren’t protecting the van?”

  “Why? Who’s in it?”

  “You don’t watch a whole lot of news, do you, Mr. Wayne?”

  Bruce shrugged. “It can get a little depressing. Do you think I should go to a hospital?”

  “Not today.”

  The Joker sauntered through the deserted hospital, his right thumb on the button of a detonator. He pressed it and, as he continued walking, explosions burst from the doors behind him. He went through an exit, and windows blew out, sending showers of glass into the rays of the dying sun.

  The evacuees, those who could walk, sought cover behind the bus or simply by flattening themselves onto the asphalt.

  The Joker walked into the emergency-room area and onto the school bus as Gotham General imploded and collapsed, filling the air with dust and smoke and debris.

  Gordon heard the sounds, a series of loud bangs followed by a prolonged rumble, and saw, over the tops of buildings, dust and smoke rising into the twilight.

  “Gotta be Gotham General,” he said, keying his radio.

  A cop named Grogan responded. Gordon asked him if Dent had been evacuated, and Grogan replied that he thought so, but wasn’t sure.

  Everyone in the area was staring at what had been Gotham General just two minutes earlier and was now a huge heap of twisted steel and shattered masonry from which dust and smoke still rose. No one paid any particular attention to the school bus that left the space that had been a parking zone for the emergency room and, bumping over stuff that littered the pavement, turned onto the nearest street.

  By six, every television and radio venue in the city had preempted regular programming and was covering the Gotham General situation. But the reporters had no new information, so they continually repeated video of the hospital collapsing taken by a passerby with a phone camera, interviewed each other, interviewed eyewitnesses, who all said the same thing: it had been blown up.

  But the journalists soldiered on, and people continued to wonder and worry and talk. Some thought that this latest hassle, coming so soon after the Narrows drama the other year, was the universe telling them that anywhere would be better than Gotham City, maybe including the Black Hole of Calcutta. One small but noisy group thought that the Joker was part of a government plot designed to distract the citizenry from their loss of independence—a couple of radio-talk-show hosts rode that theory to exhaustion. The Gotham Times began to print a lot of angry letters, mostly expressing chagrin at the cops’ inability to do their job, which was to serve and protect—especially protect. Most people, though, did what Gothamites almost always do: complain, hope that the evil, whatever it was, stayed clear of their neighborhood, and took out the garbage and grumbled to their mates and . . . lived their lives. But there were a lot of small changes in their routines. More parents drove their kids to school and soccer practice and the skating rink, and forbade them to hang out at the malls. Business was sharply down at downtown restaurants and theaters. Gasoline sales were also suffering because people weren’t going anywhere they didn’t absolutely have to be. The only thing that was improving were the ratings for the nightly newscasts. The good citizens of Gotham City were watching a lot of news.

  They were watching in Lou’s Bar, a drinking establishment on the fring
e of the blue-collar neighborhood where Detective Michael Wuertz lived alone in a three-room flat. Lou’s was not a classy joint. It was dingy and stale-smelling, with bad lighting and worse plumbing, where a despairing and lonely man could go to extinguish large chunks of time. After dinner was usually the big time of day for Lou’s, when it became a haven for guys who couldn’t stand the thought of either another evening of TV or another argument with their wives. Now, at six fifteen, only Wuertz and the bartender were in Lou’s, and only the bartender was watching the news broadcast on a television set on metal brackets above the back bar.

  “Sweet Jesus, d’you see this, Mike?” he asked Wuertz. “They blew up a hospital. Shouldn’t you be out there, y’know, doing something?”

  “It’s my day off,” Wuertz mumbled into his drink.

  The bartender locked the cash register and came around the bar. “I gotta take a leak. Keep an eye on things, will ya?”

  Wuertz shrugged an answer. The bartender went through a door. Almost immediately, the door reopened.

  “What?” Wuertz grumbled. “You need me to shake it for y—”

  Someone jammed a gun barrel into Wuertz’s cheek. He looked sideways, without turning his head, and recognized the gunman standing in deep shadow, with only the right side of his face visible.

  “Hello,” Harvey Dent said. “I see you still come to the same old place.”

  “Dent! I thought you was . . . dead.”

  Dent leaned into the light, displaying the mutilated left side of his face. “Half.”

  Dent picked up Wuertz’s drink, took a sip, asked, “Who picked up Rachel, Wuertz?”

  “It must’ve been Maroni’s men.”

  Dent slammed the glass onto the bar. “You, of all people, are gonna protect the other traitor in Gordon’s unit?”

  “I don’t know who it is. He’d never tell me.”

  Neither man spoke for a full minute. Finally, Wuertz said, “I swear to God I didn’t know what they were gonna do to you.”

  Dent took his lucky coin from his pocked. “Funny, I don’t know what’s gonna happen to you, either.”