Batman 6 - The Dark Knight (25 page)

“Going to join your wife?” a familiar voice asked. The man beside the driver leaned over the seat, aiming a pistol, letting the light from outside the car strike his mutilated face.

“Do you love her?” Dent continued, ignoring Maroni’s gasp.

“Yes.”

“Can you imagine what it would be like to listen to her die?”

“Take it up with the Joker. He killed your woman. Made you like this.”

“The Joker’s just a mad dog. I want whoever let him off his leash. I took care of Wuertz, but who was your other man inside Gordon’s unit? Who picked up Rachel? It must’ve been someone she trusted.”

“If I tell you, will you let me go?”

“It can’t hurt your chances.”

“It was Ramirez.”

Dent took his lucky coin from his pocket and cocked his pistol.

“But you said—” Maroni protested.

“I said it couldn’t hurt your chances.”

Dent flipped the coin, caught it: good side. “Lucky guy”

Dent flipped the coin again: bad side. “But
he’s
not.”

“Who?” Maroni asked, confused.

The limo made its way out of the train yard.

Dent fastened his seat belt and shot the driver.

The limo sped forward and crashed into an abandoned shack, then flipped over, crashed beyond repair.

T
he first ferry was chugging away from its dock and into the bay as the moon became visible through clouds, a fuzzy white disc. As soon as the traffic cops signaled the deckhands to lift the boarding barrier on the second ferry, hundreds of people surged aboard, some burdened with luggage, some wearing fur coats, some dressed as though for a beach outing, despite the chilly air. Within minutes, it, too, pulled out into the choppy water, heading for the western shore, the mainland, safety.

It was about a half mile from the city when, Kirk Packer, the first mate of the vessel carrying the prisoners, went on deck and did something he always liked to do when he was working at night, gaze at the lights of Gotham. From out here, in the semidarkness, Gotham was beautiful. He noticed that the sister vessel, the second ferry, the one full of citizens, was a motionless silhouette, dead in the water.

He went onto the bridge and said to the captain, “They’ve lost their engines . . . the other guys. Get on the radio and tell ’em we’ll come back for ’em once we dump these scumbags.”

Suddenly, there was no green glow on the captain’s face. The lights on the control panel had flickered out.

“Get down to the engine room,” the captain said, but Packer was already descending a ladder. He ran through the passenger lounge, one deck below, skirting around prisoners and corrections officers. He scurried down another ladder and another and wrenched open the hatch leading to the engine room.

He stopped. The emergency lamps were red, shedding a red glow over hundreds of barrels, the kind used to transport diesel fuel, and sitting atop the closest one, was a smallish box wrapped in silver paper and tied with a silver bow.

Packer grabbed the box and ran up three decks. The captain was still at his post, his large hands gripping the wheel. Packer gave him the gift box and reported that he saw no sign of the engine crew, just a lot of oil barrels.

The captain contacted his counterpart on the passenger ferry and outlined the situation.

The other captain’s voice, issuing from the radio, was startlingly loud and clear: “Same thing over here. Enough diesel fuel to blow us sky-high. And a present.”

“Let’s unwrap ’em.”

Through the radio speaker, Packer and the captain heard the crackle of paper even as the captain fumbled off the silvery wrapping on the small box.

“I got a detonator,” the passenger captain said. “Looks homemade.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“This can’t be good.”

Bruce had been doing a random search of the city’s transmissions when he overheard the exchange between the ferry captains. He couldn’t decide if this was a lucky break or if some part of his subconscious
expected
trouble at the ferries, but it made no difference. He alerted Lucius Fox immediately, then changed into his Batman outfit.

In the main lounge of the passenger ferry, a cell phone taped to the overhead, out of anyone’s reach, rang and immediately answered itself.

“Can you hear me?” the Joker asked through the ferry’s speaker. “Tonight, you’re all going to be part of a social experiment.”

The prisoners on the first ferry were listening to the same voice, as was Lucius Fox in the subsubbasement below the Wayne Enterprises building. Fox immediately busied himself at the console, trying to trace the call.

“Through the magic of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate,” the Joker continued, “I’m ready right now to blow you all sky-high. Anyone attempts to get off their boat, you all die. But we’re going to make things a little more interesting than that. Tonight, we’re going to learn a little bit about ourselves. There’s no need for all of you to die. That would be a waste. So I’ve left you a little present. At midnight I blow you all up—both boats, boom, bye-bye. If, however, one of you presses the button, I’ll let that boat live. You choose. So who’s it going to be—Harvey Dent’s most-wanted-scumbag collection . . . or the sweet, innocent civilians? Oh, and you might want to decide quickly, because the people on the other boat might not be so noble.”

Barbara Gordon picked up the phone on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Barbara, it’s Anna Ramirez. Listen carefully, there’s no time. Jim needs you to pack up and get the kids in the car right away.”

“But the patrol car’s outside . . .”

“Barbara, those cops can’t be trusted. Jim needs you away from them as soon as possible. I’ll call them off for ten minutes . . . You’ll have to move fast.”

Ramirez was sitting at her desk in the Major Crimes Unit, hanging up her phone and wincing because Harvey Dent was pressing a gun barrel into her temple.

“She believes you?” Dent asked.

Ramirez nodded.

“She trusts you,” Dent said. “Just like Rachel trusted you.”

“I didn’t know—”

Dent interrupted Ramirez: “—‘what they were gonna do?’ You’re the second cop who said that to me. What, exactly, did you
think
they were going to do?”

“I’m sorry. They got me early on. My mother’s medical bills—”

Dent’s voice was harsh: “Don’t.” He flipped his coin.

Ramirez spoke rapidly: “I took a little from them, once they got you they keep you I’m sorry.”

Dent caught the coin: good side.

“Live to fight another day, Officer,” Dent said, and struck her with the butt of his gun.

Batman sped out into the night astride the two-wheeled pod. There was no traffic problem; the citizens had either fled or were barricaded in their dwellings.

On the freeway leading downtown, Batman spoke to Fox on his mask radio. “Anything?”

Fox did.

Batman called Gordon: “I have the Joker’s location. Prewitt Building. Assemble on the building opposite.”

The passengers were clustered around a National Guard commander, who had one hand on the Joker’s detonator and the other on his holstered weapon. Several passengers, including a mother holding an infant and a brown-suited, gray-haired businessman, took several steps toward him.

“Stay back,” the commander warned, drawing his gun.

“We don’t all have to die,” the mother said. “Why should my baby die? Those men had their chance . . .”

“This is not open to discussion,” the commander said.

“You can bet they’re discussing it on the other boat,” the businessman said. “If they’re even bothering to talk. Let’s put it to a vote.”

The crowd murmured its assent.

The businessman was wrong. On the prisoners’ ferry, nobody was exactly discussing anything, though a lot of the men were muttering threats and curses as they inched forward. A corrections officer fired a shotgun blast just above their heads, then aimed the barrel of the gun directly at them. They stopped, but the muttering grew louder.

The passengers had persuaded the captain that a vote was the best way to settle their differences. Everyone tore scraps from whatever paper was available—newspaper margins, receipts, ticket stubs, old calling cards—and using either their own pens or ones borrowed from whoever was nearest, scribbled either a
yes
or a
no.
Someone provided a hat and as it was passed from person to person, each dropped their vote into it.

Ronald Coburgh stared down at the bit of paper he’d torn from a video rental card. It was blank. He looked first at the prisoner’s ferry, laying maybe a hundred yards off the port bow, then at the glowing face of his watch: 11:50. Ten minutes . . .

Gordon looked at his watch—ten to midnight—then at the cops who were setting up rifle tripods on the balustrade of the building they were occupying, which was directly across from their objective.

Was Batman near? Didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

The voice of a SWAT team leader called his name from his radio and said, “We found our missing school bus. Parking garage basement. Empty.”

What Gordon expected and feared: a hostage situation.

He looked across the street at the Prewitt Building. The building was still under construction, and a lot of the floors were either missing or incomplete. Pipes and wiring were exposed in many areas, making the site a dangerous one. The top third of it was nothing more than steel girders forming a superstructure, gaunt against the sky; the lower section was more or less complete, at least on the outside. There were stacks of building materials littering the street, and several pieces of earthmoving equipment, and a corrugated steel trailer that served as a temporary office. Gordon knew that the job was months behind schedule and that some of the tenants had already occupied the lower, completed floors.

Several men, wearing clown masks and brandishing firearms, were standing in clear view behind one of a long row of floor-to-ceiling windows.

“It’s a shooting gallery,” Gordon said. “Why’d he choose a spot with such big windows.”

“Maybe he likes the view,” Batman said from the shadows.

“You made it,” Gordon said.

Sergeant Mayer, adjusting the scope on his rifle, said: “We have clear shots on five clowns. Snipers take them out, smash the windows, a team rappels in, another team moves in by the stairwells. Two or three casualties max.”

“Let’s do it,” Gordon said.

“It’s not that simple,” Batman said. “With the Joker, it never is.”

“What’s simple,” Gordon snapped, “is that every second we don’t take him, those people on the ferries get closer to blowing each other up!”

“That won’t happen.”

“Then he’ll blow them
all
up. There’s no time. We have to go in
now.
”

“There’s
always
a catch with him.”

“That’s why we can’t wait, why we can’t play his games—”

“I need five minutes alone.” Batman retreated farther into the shadows.

“No,” Gordon shouted. “There’s no time. We have clear shots. Dent’s in here with them. We have to save Dent.
I
have to save Dent.”

Batman leapt from the building and, his cape wide, soared across the street.

Gordon turned to Mayer. “We give him two minutes. Then we breach.”

Batman glided into the Prewitt Building, grabbing one of the clown-masked thugs stationed next to the window. Yanking off the clown mask, he saw that instead of one of the Joker’s thugs, it was Mike Engel. Engels’s hands were duct-taped together, a gun nestled between them. Looking around he saw another man in a clown mask, then realized what was going on. The Joker and his crew had put the innocent civilians in the clown masks . . . and were themselves disguised as the hostages!

A red laser dot suddenly appeared on the man’s clown mask, and Batman realized the SWAT rifleman had the man in his sights. Which meant that as soon as the SWAT team fired and breached the building, dozens of innocent victims would be killed. He had to act quickly.

He tapped his connection to Lucius Fox and asked him to contact Gordon and tell him that the Joker had the hostages dressed up as clown thugs.

On the rooftop across the street, Gordon’s phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID and said, “Barbara, I can’t talk now.”