Batman 6 - The Dark Knight (19 page)

Suddenly, her eyes opened and she swung her legs over the side of the bed, stood, hurried to a small desk in the corner. She switched on a light, sat, and found a pen and a sheaf of notepaper in a drawer.

Dear Bruce,

She began writing, quickly, not rereading, not pausing, her need to get everything on paper too urgent.

Rachel was exhausted and worried. She rejoined Alfred in the living area and had a sandwich of salmon and French bread and some kind of fantastic coffee, then sat with Alfred at the kitchen counter, nibbling and sipping and watching a press conference on television. The camera zoomed in on Harvey Dent, standing on the steps of City Hall, surrounded by reporters, who were thrusting microphones at him.

“. . . but that’s not why we’re demanding he turn himself in,” Dent was saying. “We’re doing it because we’re scared. We’ve been happy to let Batman clean up our streets for us until now—”

“Things are worse than ever,” someone yelled from the crowd.

“Yes, they are. But the night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn
is
coming. One day, Batman will have to answer for the laws he’s broken—but to
us,
not to this madman.”

A uniformed police sergeant yelled, “No more dead cops.” Several of his fellow officers echoed him.

Another group, citizens this time, began to chant, “Where
is
the Batman?”

The chanting stopped. Bruce Wayne, standing at the rear of the crowd, began inching forward.

Dent shrugged. “So be it.” He turned to the knot of police standing on the steps behind him. “Take the Batman into custody.”

Bruce continued to move determinedly forward.

“
I
am the Batman,” Harvey Dent proclaimed.

Rachel watched Dent being handcuffed on television.

She turned to Alfred. “Why is he letting Harvey do this?”

“I don’t know. He went down to the press conference and—”

“Just stood by!”

“Perhaps both Bruce and Mr. Dent believe that Batman stands for something more important than a terrorist’s whims, Miss Dawes, even if everyone hates him for it. That’s the sacrifice he’s making—not to be a hero. To be something more.”

“Well, you’re right about one thing—letting Harvey take the fall is not heroic.” Rachel handed an envelope to Alfred. “You know Bruce best, Alfred . . . give it to him when the time is right.”

“How will I know?”

“It’s not sealed.”

Rachel kissed Alfred’s cheek. “Good-bye, Alfred.”

“Good-bye, Rachel.”

The Major Crimes Unit was unusually busy that night. Cops who were off duty hung around because . . . well, it had been a hell of a day and maybe something else might happen, and even if nothing did, there were worse ways to kill a night than drinking coffee and talking.

A number of cops she’d worked with called greetings to Rachel as she passed through the bullpen and descended the steel steps to the lockup.

Harvey Dent, in a small cell, seemed to be waiting for her. He smiled at her through the bars, and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t have time to talk this through with you.”

“I know what you’re doing, Harvey.”

“They’re transferring me to central holding. This is the Joker’s chance. When he attacks, the Batman will take him down.”

“No! This is too dangerous . . . Don’t offer yourself as bait!”

A uniformed guard, flanked by two others, told Dent it was time to go and unlocked the cell door. The guards handcuffed Dent and locked shackles around his ankles, then marched him outside. Nobody seemed to care that Rachel was following. Hampered by the shackles, Dent was taking half steps and Rachel had no trouble keeping pace with him.

“He’s using you as bait,” she said. “But he doesn’t know if he can get the Joker. He’s failed so far.”

“How do you know what the Batman’s thinking?” Dent asked.

“I just do, okay, Harvey? This isn’t just about you. What about all the people counting on you to turn this city around? Tell everyone the truth—”

Awkwardly, because of the handcuffs, Dent removed his lucky coin from a hip pocket. “Heads I go through with it.”

“Harvey, this is your
life.
You don’t leave something like this to chance . . .”

Dent tossed the coin to her. Rachel caught it and looked: Heads.

“I’m not leaving anything to chance,” Dent said.

Rachel turned the coin over. The reverse side was heads, too.

The guards loaded Dent into the back of a transport van and closed the doors behind him.

“You make your own luck,” Rachel murmured.

During his wild years, roaming the globe, often in the company of thieves and killers, Bruce had often done things he considered shameful. But none of those ugly deeds approached what he was doing now, using a good man as a pawn in a game that might end in death.

If all went well—if all went
half-
well—the Joker would attack Dent and Batman would attack the Joker and by tomorrow this whole thing would be finished and everyone could get on with their lives.

Bruce didn’t expect to avoid punishment entirely; he
had
played fast and loose with the city’s laws, and in the process endangered innocent lives. But he could hope that a judge or jury would see that he had acted in the best interests of his fellow citizens and the city he loved, and be lenient. A big fine, a few months in a minimum-security facility, maybe just community service. Community service—that would be ironic; he planned to devote the rest of his life to serving the community and would welcome an early start as part of the price he had to pay.

First, however, was the Joker. That lunatic had become his priority, more important to him than the mob, the corruption, any of it. The Joker had killed Loeb. The Joker had tried to kill Harvey Dent and was going to try for Rachel next. The Joker
had
to be stopped. By any means necessary . . .

I
t was something rarely seen on city streets, a convoy, with two patrol cars leading the armored van, followed by two SWAT vans, all speeding down a freeway, past roadblocks that denied traffic access from side streets and on-ramps. Suddenly, a truck lumbered to a stop at an intersection where a police officer was holding up traffic.

The cop ran from his post at one of the barricades and approached the cab. “You wait like everyone else,” he told the driver, then died from a shotgun blast.

A second truck pulled off the exit ramp and stopped in the middle of the avenue, a bright red fire department hook-and-ladder. A minute later, it burst into flame, completely blocking both sides of the freeway and isolating the middle and rear of the convoy.

In the cab of the armored car, the driver and his companion were listening to words crackling from the radio: “All units be advised. Obstruction ahead. All units will exit down to lower Fifth.”

“Lower Fifth?” the SWAT officer riding shotgun muttered. “We’ll be like ducks in a barrel down there.”

The convoy left the freeway by the nearest ramp and rolled through the underground highway. A garbage truck casually swiped the rear vehicles of the convoy off the road, and from there chaos erupted.

“Get us out of here,” the SWAT officer said as the garbage truck filled the rearview mirror. “We’ve got company back there!”

Both men were knocked for a loop as the garbage truck rammed the car’s rear bumper, smashing it forward.

At the head of the convoy, a second truck smashed into the SWAT van, smashing it through the concrete barrier on the side of the road and into the river. The truck then pulled alongside the armored car. The driver could see that the
LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE
logo on the side had a crude “S” painted next to it so that it now read
SLAUGHTER
, along with “HA HA HA” repeated all along the side.

A second later the side door slid open to reveal the Joker brandishing a machine gun. The armored car locked its brakes, but the garbage truck attached to it from behind kept pushing it forward. The Joker fired the gun with abandon, bullets riddling the side of the armored car.

Inside the van, the guards flinched at the bullet fire and lifted their guns as Harvey Dent sat calmly in the midst of the pandemonium.

The Joker dropped the machine gun and picked up an RPG, but stopped before firing at the driver of the armored car. Instead, he stared behind him as the Batmobile raced toward the garbage truck attached to the armored car.

Seconds later, it plowed into the garbage truck, throwing it up into the concrete ceiling. The Batmobile continued forward on its own momentum as the garbage truck came apart behind it, then whipped around and headed back to the armored car.

Inside the Batmobile, Batman shook his head and heard the vehicle’s computer speaking to him:
Damage catastrophic. Initiate eject and self-destruct.

Batman adjusted his position in the seat and hit a button. Armed guards grabbed at Batman’s forearms as explosive bolts fired all around the pod.

The Joker and his driver looked back at the Batmobile, a huge grin on his face.

“Is that
him
?” the driver gasped.

“Anyone
could be driving that thing,” the Joker said. “Stay on Dent.”

The Joker lined up his RPG and aimed at the armored car. He fired as the armored car began braking. The RPG slammed into the squad car in front of the armored car, and the squad car exploded. The armored van kept on going, and the Batmobile sped up to join the pursuit.

As the Joker turned the RPG toward the armored car and fired, the Batmobile crashed down in the open space between them and took the hit. The rocket struck the Batmobile’s rear and exploded. Fire bathed the street and the Batmobile crashed through a retaining wall and landed in an access road alongside the underground highway. For a moment, the air seemed to be filled with spinning shards of dark metal as the Tumbler disintegrated. One of these shards smashed through the driver’s side window of the Joker’s truck and buried itself in the driver’s head, killing him.

Inside the Batmobile, Batman wrestled with the pod controls as the car somersaulted across the street. It came to rest against one of the pillars supporting the overpass, a tangled heap of smoking metal, its rear wheels scattered across the roadway.

The Joker jumped down from the truck and looked back at the burning wreckage of the Batmobile. Giggling, he yanked the dead driver from behind the wheel of the cab and took his place. With a quick shift of gears, he pulled back onto the roadway in pursuit of the armored car.

Inside the Batmobile, the computer spoke a final time:
good-bye.

Panels blew out from the front of the Batmobile and, a few seconds later, Batman was hoisted up and out over the front wheel, then the pod pushed the other wheel in front to form what appeared to be a motorcycle. He shot forward from the wreckage just as what was left of the Batmobile detonated and erupted into a massive fireball.

Now a block away, Batman glanced back at the conflagration, confident that any clue to his identity and any technology that might be useful to the Joker or anyone else would be destroyed.

He drove through the access corridor of the highway. He sped past cars at a stoplight, then, realizing his progress was blocked by a line of parked cars. He began firing the pod guns at them, destroying the vehicles one by one.