Batman 6 - The Dark Knight (16 page)

“Stay hidden,” he told Rachel, and left the kitchen.

In the corridor outside, he met one of the Joker’s thugs, who pointed a shotgun at him. Bruce wrested the weapon away from the gunman and flipped it around and hit the man with it. He fieldstripped it as he moved away, scattering the pieces.

Rachel waited only a few seconds before disobeying Bruce’s order. She was not the kind of woman to remain in hiding when she might be able to
do
something. She hurried into the living room and stopped, staring at the Joker, who was sauntering among the guests.

“I have just one question,” the Joker said. “Where is Harvey Dent? No answer. All righty, I’ll settle for his loved ones. Any lovey-wuveys on the scene?” He looked directly at Rachel. “Hello, beautiful. You must be Harvey’s squeeze, no?” He pulled a knife from under his jacket and tiptoed to Rachel’s side. She stood rigid, eyes straight ahead, ignoring him. He ran his knife across her cheek. “And you
are
beautiful. You look nervous. It’s the scars, isn’t it? Wanna know how I got them? I had a wife, beautiful like you. Who tells me I worry too much. Who says I need to smile more. Who gambles. And gets in
deep
with the sharks. One day they carve her face, and we’ve got no money for surgeries. She can’t take it. I just want to see her smile again. I just want her to know that I don’t care about the scars. So I put a razor in my mouth and do this to myself . . . And you know what? She can’t stand the sight of me. She leaves. See, now I see the funny side. Now I’m
always
smiling.”

Muted sounds were coming from his throat, and his face was contorted, but the scars made it impossible to know whether he was laughing or crying.

Bruce made his way into the master bedroom, but stopped short when he saw a couple hastily dressing themselves after enjoying each other on his bed. The couple looked embarrassed, but the man summoned enough courage to ask Bruce what was going on in the living room.

Bruce ignored him and instead walked into a closet and pulled at a false wall. As he stepped into the safe room, the female half of the couple moved swiftly toward him.

“Thank God, you’ve got a panic room!”

Her only reply from Bruce was the safe-room door slamming shut in her face and sealing.

Back in the living room, the Joker raised the knife from Rachel’s cheek. She slugged him.

“A little fight in you,” the Joker said, beaming. “I like that.”

“Then you’re going to love me,” Batman said from behind him.

The Joker whirled and ran into Batman’s fist. The knife fell to the floor, and Batman kicked it away, then spun to face two of the Joker’s thugs. He pivoted on his left leg and kicked them both with his right in one continuous, sweeping motion.

The Joker tapped one ankle with the toe of the opposite foot and a blade sprung from the front of his shoe. His leg levered upward, stiffly, and the blade slid between the plates of Batman’s body armor. Ignoring the wound, Batman lifted the Joker overhead and flung him across the room. There were two of the Joker’s crew left standing, and both were rushing at him. He waited until they were barely a foot away before grabbing their heads and banging them together.

“Looky looky looky,” the Joker sang. He had another knife pressed to Rachel’s neck and held a shotgun in his other hand.

“Let her go,” Batman said.

“Sure. Just take off your mask and show us all who you are . . .”

Rachel shook her head:
No!

The Joker aimed the shotgun and blasted away the nearest windowpane. He dragged Rachel to the windowsill and nudged her over. Only the Joker’s arm around her neck kept her from falling.

“Let her go,” Batman repeated.

The Joker cackled. “Very poor choice of words.”

He flung wide his arm and Rachel fell.

Batman straight-armed the Joker aside and dived out the window after Rachel.

She had hit a sloped glass roof belonging to the apartment below and was sliding toward the edge, her fingers unable to get purchase on the glass. Batman dove right behind her and fired his grapple, snagging Rachel’s ankle as they pitched over the edge and began hurtling toward the dark street. Batman tried to get his cape stiffened so that they could glide to the street below, but only half of the cape responded. Batman grimaced and wrapped his arms around Rachel and twisted in midair so he would land first and his armor would cushion them both. They landed hard atop a taxi, rolled to the pavement, and continued rolling until they reached the sidewalk, where Batman got unsteadily to his feet, helping Rachel up as well. She was out-of breath and very pale, but she gave him a smile of thanks.

Batman and Rachel stood almost completely hidden under a shop awning and watched a black SUV speed away.
Almost certainly the Joker’s getaway car . . .

“Are you all right?” Batman whispered.

Rachel said, “Let’s not do that again, all right? What about Harvey—”

“He’s safe.”

“Thank you.”

In the backseat of the SUV, the Joker was alternately gasping for breath and laughing. He touched a streamlet of blood running down his makeup-smeared chin with a forefinger, licked it, and said, “Yummy! Did you
see
that? Did you love it a great big bunch? I tossed the lovely bird into the wind and out Bats went. I wonder . . . would the Bats take a header for everyone? Or is that pretty little birdie someone
special
? Either way, we know one thing for sure now . . . Batman will always try to save the innocent. And that will be his
downfall
!”

“What about Dent?” the driver asked.

“Oh, I’m a man of my word,” the Joker said, smiling.

Alfred inspected Bruce’s body and found it intact. A back muscle was pulled, Bruce’s left wrist sprained, but by and large he had survived the plunge from the penthouse to the street unscathed.

“Tell me,” Alfred said. “When you dived out that window, did you have a plan?”

“If I’d stopped to plan, both Rachel and I would be dead. I didn’t have time to do anything but
act,
and hope my reactions would be the right ones. I had to trust to the moment. It’s something Rā’s al Ghūl taught me.”

“Just how trustworthy
is
the moment?”

Bruce laughed. “Not very. A random negative factor—a gust of wind, say—and you’d be planning my funeral.”

“You seem to feel that this sort of thing might get you killed.”

“This sort of thing
will
get me killed, sooner or later, if things keep going the way they are . . .”

I
t was midafternoon at Gordon’s office, where nobody was happy. Gordon was behind his desk talking to a stout man with bushy gray sideburns named Gerard Stephens.

“Jim, it’s over!” Stephens insisted.

Gordon shook his head wearily. “As long as they don’t get to Lau, we’ve cut off their funds.”

“But the prosecution’s over! No one’s standing up in front of a judge while judges and police commissioners are getting blown away.”

“What about Dent?”

“If he’s got any sense, Dent’s halfway to Mexico by now.”

The door behind Stephens slammed open, and Harvey Dent strode in.

“So where do you keep your trash?” he demanded.

Ten minutes later, Dent and two uniformed officers entered a cell deep in Gotham Central Jail, where Lau sat on the edge of a cot.

Dent tossed a bulletproof vest at Lau. “You’re due in court. I need you alive long enough to get you on record.”

“No way,” Lau said, laying the vest aside. “You can’t protect me. You can’t even protect yourselves.”

Dent picked up the vest and threw it at Lau. “Refuse to cooperate on the stand, and you won’t be coming back here. You’ll go to county. How long do you
calculate
you’ll last in
there
?”

Bruce Wayne sat in his underground lair staring at the bank of television screens. He was aware of two sets of memories, one superimposed on the other: saving a good woman, a brave and valuable woman, and years earlier using similar skills to save a man who wished to exterminate 90 percent of the world’s population. What nagged at him was that he felt the same satisfaction at both rescues—saving Rachel and saving Rā’s. Was there really no difference?

He heard the elevator groan to a halt behind him, and a few moments later, Alfred joined him. Bruce switched on the video equipment, and together they watched the Joker footage. Occasionally, Bruce would magnify, make louder, mute, or remove color from elements of the images, but he could get no further information from them.

He turned to Alfred. “Targeting me—Batman—won’t get their money back. I knew the mob wouldn’t go down without a fight, but this is different. They’ve crossed a line.”

“You crossed it first, Master Bruce. You’ve hammered them, squeezed them to the point of desperation. And now, in their desperation, they’ve turned to a man they don’t fully understand.”

“Criminals aren’t complicated, Alfred. We just have to figure out what he’s after.”

“Respectfully, Master Bruce . . . perhaps this is a man you don’t understand either.”

Bruce rose and went to the nearest closet.

“Allow me to bore you with a story,” Alfred said. “I was in Burma. A long time ago. My friends and I were working for the local government officials. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders, bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. We were asked to take care of the problem, so we started looking for the stones. But after six months, we couldn’t find anyone who had traded with the outlaw.”

“What were you missing?”

“One day I found a child playing with a ruby as big as a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing the stones away.”

“So why was he stealing them?”

“Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money . . . they can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Bruce nodded and reached into a cabinet to get one of his Batman suits.

“Where to tonight, Master Bruce? The opera? An ice-cream social, perhaps?”

Bruce was snapping armor into place. “I think I’ll sniff around the city . . . or maybe the
top
of the city.”

Ten minutes later, Batman stood atop a skyscraper, listening.

At this early hour of the morning, the neighborhood around Eighth and Orchard, in what had once been the city’s retail center, was all but deserted. James Gordon had no trouble racing his unmarked sedan down the narrow streets, leading three patrol cars whose sirens were howling. Gordon braked to a screeching halt at the intersection and before his engine had stopped growling, he and Ramirez were racing into a tenement building, weapons out, followed by six uniformed cops. Gordon kicked open the door to apartment four. He holstered his gun. He was in a cramped kitchen with a bathtub partly covered by a shower curtain against one bare brick wall. In the center of the room, two dead men sat at a table covered with oilcloth. Each was holding five cards, all jokers, and each was disfigured by crude leers carved into their faces. Both had driver’s licenses pinned to their shirts.

“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.”