Batman 6 - The Dark Knight Read online

  He started small. The first batch of stuff he cooked up could have been made by any reasonably competent chemist with access to some basic tools, the kind of junk that was sold out of trailers and skid row bars. But neither Crane’s new business associates nor their customers had any complaints. Those associates suggested that he might want to expand his efforts and he told them, yes, he’d be glad to, but he needed a decent place to work. He couldn’t produce quantity, much less quality, working in a toolshed. He told them what he had in mind and they told him it was no problem. Crane provided another shopping list and, three weeks after he had fled from the asylum, Crane moved into a large loft located in an industrial park on Gotham City’s eastern border. Now, he had all that he needed, and it was time to begin his life’s work again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  There were few people around the Major Crimes Unit headquarters tonight. Most of the on-duty crew were at the site of the afternoon’s bank heist, and the rest were scattered throughout the boroughs investigating the odd homicide, a kidnapping or two, a few serious robberies. Only two cops were here, in the main bullpen: a twenty-year vet named Wuertz and relative newcomer Anna Ramirez.

  Detective Ramirez was the duty officer, charged with taking calls and directing them to wherever they should go. She checked herself in a full-length mirror: She nodded, satisfied, and switched on the office television. She turned to the all-news channel and sat down in a chair near a bank of telephones.

  Mike Engel, a local hotshot reporter, was on the screen, giving the mayor hell.

  “Mister Mayor,” Engel was saying, “you were elected on a campaign to clean up the city . . . When are you going to start?”

  The mayor rubbed his lapel between a thumb and forefinger and said, “Well, Mike—”

  Engel ignored him. “Like this so-called Batman—a lot of people say he’s doing some good, that criminals are running scared. But I say he’s not! What kind of hero needs to wear a mask? You don’t let vigilantes run around breaking the law! Where does it end? Yet we hear rumors that instead of trying to arrest him, the cops are using him to do their dirty work.”

  “I’m told our men in the Major Crimes Unit are close to an arrest . . .”

  Ramirez turned her eyes from the television and called to Wuertz, who was squinting at a sheet of yellow paper. “Hey, the mayor says you’re closing in on the Batman.”

  Wuertz looked at her in distaste. “The investigation is ongoing.”

  He crumpled the yellow paper and tossed it at a cork-board on the nearest wall. The corkboard bore a strip of cardboard on which was lettered: BATMAN SUSPECTS. Below it were several pictures: Abraham Lincoln, Elvis, and the Abominable Snowman.

  “Sure it is,” Ramirez said, getting up and crossing to where a coffeepot perched atop a burner. She poured coffee into a plastic cup and went to a flight of stairs that led to the roof.

  She found Lieutenant Gordon standing beside the newly installed searchlight that stabbed a beam of brightness into the sky above them. On misty nights, a bat silhouette on the searchlight’s lens could be projected onto clouds, but, misty or not, the beam was always visible from anywhere in the city.

  Ramirez handed the coffee to Gordon and asked, “Ever intend to see your wife again, Lieutenant?”

  Gordon grunted and sipped the coffee. “How’s your mother?”

  “They checked her back into the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Least there she’s got someone round the clock. Unlike your wife.” Ramirez pointed her chin at the searchlight. “He hasn’t shown?”

  “No. But I like reminding everyone he’s out there.”

  “Why wouldn’t he come? You think he doesn’t know this thing is for him?”

  “Oh, he figured that out in a second. No . . . hopefully, he isn’t here because he’s busy.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Bruce Wayne wasn’t the only person in Greater Gotham dressing up as the Batman that night—wasn’t even one of two or three.

  Brian Douglas still had his gym clothes on and was just about to have a shower and hit the sheets when he got the call from that weird guy, Anton-something, the guy who had organized the . . . Brian wasn’t sure what it was. He thought of it as the “Batman Club.” Two or three guys who stayed in touch and met occasionally for some vigilante action. Lonely guys, and angry guys—angry for good reason: all of them had suffered, in one way or another, from Gotham City’s lawlessness. Douglas himself was an ex-cop who had gotten tired of the corruption and inaction in the police force and had decided to take matters into his own hands. According to this Anton, he had a second cousin who worked in a parking garage near the manufacturing district and he, the second cousin, happened to overhear two guys talking. The one with the thick Russian accent—at least Jimmy’s cousin thought it was Russian and was sure it wasn’t Spanish—told the other about a drug deal that was going down that night, in about an hour, in fact.

  He hung up the phone and hauled his makeshift Batman suit out of the closet and put it on, then figured it wouldn’t be too smart to wear a mask on the streets of Gotham this late at night. The mask with the pointy ears went into a coat pocket, then he reached for his shotgun. Checking it was loaded, he tucked it into his bulky coat and headed outside.

  He got on his motorcycle, a Japanese model twenty-five years out of the showroom, and on the fifth try got the engine to kick over. Somebody from a window yelled at him to shut the damn thing off, but that was Gotham for you, people always complaining about something.

  As he neared the parking garage Anton had told him about on the phone, he could see the two others in Batsuits walking purposefully toward their common destination. He parked his bike on the sidewalk—at this hour, nobody would care—and joined his fellow Batmen.

  The Chechen and his bodyguards got into his black SUV. While one of the men drove through the busy center of the city and into the industrial section, the Chechen and his other employees chatted. Someone mentioned the Batman, and the Chechen snorted.

  “Fairy tales for little girls!”

  Batman gazed through a tinted windshield and waited.

  His Tumbler was parked on the roof across a narrow alleyway from a multifloored parking garage. During daylight hours, it would be jammed with cars and pickup trucks belonging to workers at the nearby storage facilities, but now, after dark, it was empty, as were the streets surrounding it. The Chechen and an unknown supplier of the drugs the Chechen peddled were to meet on the garage roof to do business. The Chechen went to considerable trouble to conceal his itinerary, and for a month he had succeeded. But eventually, patience, persistence, and no small amount of money had given Batman the knowledge he sought. It had taken him here.

  He saw movement on the garage rooftop.

  Two black SUVs were turning off the up ramp. They stopped near the only other vehicle on the floor, a battered white van. Several men, all of them bulky, all of them dressed in ill-fitting suits, emerged from the SUVs. The bulkiest of them looked out over the rooftops and suggested that there might be a night watchman on the premises.

  The Chechen shrugged, and said in Russian, “That’s why we bring the dogs.”

  He opened the back door of the nearest SUV, and three enormous rottweilers sprang out, their claws clicking on the concrete floor. The Chechen knelt, and the dogs licked his face. He spoke again in Russian: “My little princes . . .” He looked up at the others. “The Batman’s invisible to you fools, but my little princes . . . they can find human meat in complete darkness.”

  He left the dogs and went to the second SUV. He opened the back door and dragged out a filthy man wearing rags.

  “No!” he squealed. “No, get ’em off me! Off me!”

  The Chechen dragged his prisoner to the white van. The van’s side door slid open, and two newcomers dressed in coveralls emerged, carrying metal kegs, guns strapped to their backs.

  In heavily accented English, the Chechen said, “Look! Look what your drug
s did to my customers.”

  From inside the van: “Buyer beware.”

  A tall, thin figure wearing a wrinkled blue suit and a burlap mask emerged from the van. “I told your man my compound would take you places. I never said they’d be places you wanted to go . . .”

  “My business is repeat customers,” the Chechen said.

  “If you don’t like what I have to offer, buy from someone else,” the Scarecrow said. “Assuming Batman left anyone else to buy from.”

  Both of the dogs began barking in unison.

  The barking grew louder.

  “Come on out sonofbitch, whoever you are,” the Chechen shouted, gazing around. “My dogs are hungry.”

  Suddenly a rising Batman silhouette appeared from around the corner. There was the roar of a shotgun and a ragged, round hole appeared in the SUV, inches from the Chechen.

  More guns roared.

  “Loose the dogs!” the Chechen screamed.

  When nobody immediately obeyed him, the Chechen knelt by the rottweilers and snapped the leashes free from their collars. The dogs raced into the darkness. From an alcove leading to an elevator, a figure wearing a mask and cape stumbled toward the down ramp. One of the dogs leapt at him and closed its teeth and jaws on the Batman’s neck.

  The Scarecrow climbed into the driver’s seat of the pellet-pocked van and stopped; the barrel of a shotgun was pressing into the back of his head. A mask with pointed ears was visible in the rearview mirror. The Scarecrow groped between the seats and lifted an aerosol can. He fingered a button, and a cloud of spray filled the van. The masked man dropped his shotgun and rolled, screaming, out the door. He lay crying at the Chechen’s feet.

  The Scarecrow stuck his head out, and said to the Chechen, “Not the real Batman.”

  “How you know?”

  “We’re old friends, the Batman and I.”

  “The other one ain’t real either, I bet,” a bodyguard said.

  The Chechen kicked the whimpering man on the floor and was drawing back his foot to kick again when he stopped, startled by a loud crashing sound as four large wheels smashed down onto the concrete in front of him, dust and floor spraying everywhere.

  “That’s more like it!” said the Scarecrow.

  Batman knew he had to be quick and effective and try not to hurt anyone too severely, especially not the fools in the costumes, whoever they were.

  One of those fools stood nearby, lining up his shotgun on a fleeing bodyguard. Batman grabbed the weapon barrel and bent it upward as the faux Batman looked into the face of the red deal. He stumbled backward as Batman opened his hand to reveal a pneumatic mangle hidden in his palm.

  He bore down on a pair of rottweilers mauling another costumed fool. Batman lifted his arm and drew a grappling gun. A monofilament shot out and wrapped around the fake Batman’s ankle, and Batman pulled him away from the dogs.

  Now the animals.

  A rottweiler was already in the air, leaping at Batman’s throat. Batman kicked it in the belly, and the dog fell away, whimpering. The second dog closed its jaws on Batman’s gauntlet, but the Kevlar armor proved impenetrable. Batman swung the animal over his head and it fell to the concrete, whimpering.

  While Batman had been busy with the rottweilers and the imposter Batmen, he saw Scarecrow climb into a van. He jumped aside as the van sped toward him. Then, as it passed, he put his fist through the driver’s window. His armored knuckles grazed the Scarecrow’s mask. Startled, the Scarecrow leaned away, unintentionally twisting the wheel. He righted it just in time to avoid smashing into a retaining wall, and the van skidded onto the exit ramp and began to descend it.

  Batman sprang to the edge of the ramp and waited, staring down at the corkscrew-shaped ramp. If he went after the Scarecrow, the others might have time to run. If he didn’t, the Scarecrow would certainly lose himself in the dark streets. Six of one, half a dozen of the other . . . But the Scarecrow was the known evil. Batman made his decision.

  He jumped.

  A second before he would have struck the ground, his cape expanded into glider wings that slowed his fall. The Scarecrow’s van swerved out of the exit ramp, and Batman landed atop it, crushing the cab. The van swerved and struck a wall.

  Batman pulled a dazed Scarecrow from the cab and slung him over his shoulder.

  A minute later, he dumped the Scarecrow next to the Chechen’s injured accomplices and two of the men wearing faux Batman costumes. The Chechen himself had disappeared.

  “We’re trying to help you,” the impostor blurted.

  “I don’t need help,” Batman said as he bound the Chechen’s crew with plastic ties.

  “Not my diagnosis,” the Scarecrow said.

  Batman stared at the Scarecrow as he fitted plastic ties over his wrists and ankles, then pulled off Crane’s mask. Next he turned to the impostor. “Don’t ever let me find you out here again.”

  “You need us! There’s only one of you. It’s war out here.”

  Batman walked toward his car carrying an armload of confiscated weapons and dropped them in a pile for the police.

  “What gives you the right?” the impostor cried. “What’s the difference between you and me?”

  Batman replied, “I’m not wearing hockey pads.”

  The impostor looked down at his ridiculous outfit as Batman sped from the area.

  At the last minute, Brian Douglas had decided not to join the other two Batmen in the parking garage. After all, he wasn’t one of them, he was just an observer, and if he heard any kind of ruckus inside, maybe then he’d check it out. But otherwise . . . why hang around with a bunch of jerks? So Brian planted himself against a wall and waited. When he heard gunshots, he still waited. Maybe somebody will come this way and I can ask them. There’s no point in getting my ass shot off . . . That would be foolish . . .

  That was why Brian saw Batman capture the Scarecrow, saw a distinctive silhouette swoop down to land atop the van and, without hesitation, without pausing for a second, reach into the damaged vehicle, haul the Scarecrow out, fling the criminal over his shoulder, and stride back into the garage. How long had the whole thing taken? Seconds—

  —and then and there, Brian Douglas had an epiphany. Suddenly, he believed. He had seen something—someone—he had doubted. He was real, and he was magnificent, and Brian needed to know more!

  The Chechen was furious, as angry with himself as with anyone else for allowing himself to become mixed up with such fools as the Scarecrow. Where were mobsters, thugs, greedy killers—the kind of criminal he understood, the kind of criminal he was himself? But he could not linger for revenge now. Everything had gone sour, and there was nothing for a sane man to do but escape. The Chechen had gotten behind the wheel of his SUV and roared away.

  The cops waited until they were back at the station house before cutting the plastic ties from Jonathan Crane’s wrists and confiscating his burlap mask.

  “Well, well,” a cop said, waving the mask. “We got us a celebrity.”

  “I think I liked him better with his face covered,” another cop said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jim Gordon, in his unmarked squad car, heard someone he knew was Batman use police frequencies to call for patrol cars and ambulances. So it’d been right, what he’d told Ramirez—Batman had been busy. Good. But Gordon had other things on his mind, namely the bank heist that had happened earlier that day. He’d hoped to get Batman’s insights into the crime; that’s why he’d wasted an hour standing next to the searchlight. But Batman hadn’t shown, and that shouldn’t get in the way of Gordon doing his job, so it wouldn’t.

  He parked near a row of patrol cars. Ignoring shouts from reporters and gawkers, he entered the bank lobby.

  For a while, he watched the forensics crew do its job. Then he called to a detective named McFarland, and asked, “We get anything from the surveillance cameras?”

  McFarland handed Gordon a sheaf of grainy photographs. “He can’t resist showing us his face.”
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br />   Gordon looked at the pictures: a leering clown with a scarred mouth. Then he raised his eyes and glimpsed movement in the shadows near the tellers’ cage.

  “Be back in a minute,” he told McFarland, and moved away.

  He joined Batman in the darkness. “You made it.”

  Batman nodded and peered at the photos. “Him again. Who are the others?”

  “Another bunch of small timers.”

  Batman said, “Get me some of the money.”

  Gordon went to where some twenty-dollar bills lay scattered on the floor next to Grumpy’s body, scooped up a handful, and brought them to Batman, who scanned them with a gadget he’d taken from his belt. The gadget pinged.

  “Some of the marked bills I gave you,” Batman said.

  “My detectives have been making drug buys with them for weeks,” Gordon said. “This bank was another drop for the mob. That makes five banks—we’ve found the bulk of their dirty cash.”

  “Time to move in.”

  Gordon waved a photo. “What about this Joker guy?”

  “One man or the entire mob? The Joker will have to wait.”

  “We’ll have to hit all the banks simultaneously—SWAT teams, backup . . .” Gordon held up a handful of banknotes. “When the new DA gets wind of this, he’ll want in.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Be hard to keep him out,” Gordon said. “I hear he’s as stubborn as you.”

  That last sentence was spoken to empty air. Gordon shrugged, then went to rejoin his detectives.

  Alfred Pennyworth, whistling an old music hall ditty, moved through the Wayne penthouse, opening blinds, raising shades, stopping occasionally to admire the truly spectacular view from any of the windows. He went into the kitchen, placed a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee on a tray and carried it to the bedroom. He stopped in the open room and frowned at the still-made bed.