Batman (24 page)

Batman notified Gordon that Pierre Ouellette was still alive, and that Deadshot was waiting for a ride to Blackgate.

He was furious with himself for losing control. His nose ached fiercely, and while the bleeding had stopped, he wouldn’t be able to set the break until he’d returned to the cave.

On his way back to the Batmobile, he pinged Oracle.

“Are there any other names on the list? Any other numbers that had multiple contacts with Conundrum?”

“No,”
she said.
“I’ve found them all, and they’re all accounted for. But I’ve lost contact with Robin. For a while I was able to find a pretty strong signal from his comm, but it cut out about twenty minutes ago. Also, here’s another thing you should know. The timer app just deleted itself.”

There were two possible reasons. Either Ouellette had been the last name on the list, in which case the app’s reason for existence had disappeared… or the Riddler had built a fail-safe into it, and deleted the app when Batman interrupted the latest hit.

He was inclined to believe the first possibility, and Oracle agreed.

“If there were more targets out there, the Riddler would have some kind of backup plan for dealing with the disruption,”
she said.
“Like the guardian robot he sent to interrupt Harley Quinn.”

“If that’s what really happened,” Batman said. “For all we know, the two of them staged that little drama.”

“Yet the scene with Deadshot wasn’t staged,”
Oracle said.
“He was going to kill Ouellette.”

Batman felt an almost audible
click
in his brain.

“He
thought
he was, yes. But what if the Riddler wanted me to stop him? That gets Deadshot out of the Riddler’s way, cleaning up another loose end.”
But why would Riddler leave Ouellette alive
, he wondered. “Pierre Ouellette possesses information the Riddler wants me to have.”

“My dad is getting to the safe house now, with an ambulance,”
Oracle said.
“Better catch them before the EMTs drug up Ouellette, and he forgets whatever it is you need to know.”

* * *

Batman got there, but barely.

“Hold on,” he said to an EMT who was loading Ouellette into the back of the ambulance. “Have you given him any painkillers?”

“No, they haven’t,” Ouellette groused. “And I wish to hell they would.”

“Good,” Batman said. He climbed into the back of the ambulance and gave the EMT a look.

“I’m going to need a minute here.”

Without a word the EMT stepped back, and Batman shut the ambulance door.

“What’s—what’s going on?” Ouellette asked, his eyes wide and bloodshot. “I have a hole in my foot. I need to go to the hospital.”

“Most people who cross paths with Deadshot get holes in worse places,” Batman said. “But we can make this quick, as long as you give me some information. What did you do for the Riddler?”

“Uh-uh. No way,” Ouellette said. “I already got shot once. What do you think he’ll do if he finds out I talked to you?”

“He’s going to assume that anyhow—if he has people watching, he knows I’m here,” Batman said. “On the other hand, if you help me, I’ll be able to find him. Then he won’t be your problem anymore.”

“If you find him, sure.” Ouellette was panicking. “But you didn’t find him in time to keep me from getting shot, did you?”

“I found you in time to prevent your being killed,” Batman pointed out. “Face it, he’s already decided you need to die. You think he’s going to change his mind now? Your only chance is to tell me what you know.”

Ouellette looked up from the gurney, terrified and confused. Despite the man’s connection to the Riddler, Batman felt sorry for him, but he couldn’t let Ouellette see that. He couldn’t leave the ambulance without some answers.

“He, um… he had a big lab down in Wonder City,” Ouellette said. “I didn’t even know Wonder City was real, but he came and picked me up and took me down there. He had me work on this old robotic suit, rewire it so he could run it remotely.”

“One of the mechanical guardians?”

“Yeah, I think that’s what he called them. There were posters down there with pictures of them. Old stuff. I was surprised any of it still worked, but he—the Riddler—said he was getting some of them running again. He said it was for a show, like there was going to be a carnival down there or something. But he made me swear to keep it a secret.

“When he did that, he was scary—there was something in his eyes.” Ouellette began to breathe heavily. “Look, Batman, I didn’t know—”

“Spare me,” Batman said. “You didn’t care, is what you mean. As long as the check cleared.” He opened the ambulance door. “People have already died because of what you did. More still might die. Think about that while you’re whining about your foot.”

Climbing out of the ambulance, he said to the EMT, “He’s all yours.”

The medical technician looked past him, as if he wanted to make sure Batman hadn’t done something awful in there. Seeing only a morose and suffering Pierre Ouellette, he climbed in, closed the doors, and the ambulance drove away.

Commissioner Gordon was waiting.

“What was that all about?”

“I figured something out, Commissioner,” Batman said. “But I’m not entirely sure what.”

“If I wanted puzzles, I’d go get a newspaper,” Gordon said.

“We’ve got puzzles whether we want them or not, Jim, but a little piece of one of them just fell into place. Ouellette helped the Riddler rewire and possibly program some of the old mechanical guardians, down in Wonder City,” Batman said.

“Why? To build some kind of robot army? That’s not the Riddler’s style.”

“Agreed,” Batman said. “That’s why I said I’m not sure.”

Moving out of earshot, he called Oracle to find out whether she had managed to locate Robin. She hadn’t.

Two police orderlies brought Deadshot out of the building, strapped down on a gurney. They had stripped off his wrist guns but left the monocle. As they passed, he turned his head toward Batman.

“Twice you’ve made me miss,” he said. “Won’t happen again.”

It occurred to Batman that maybe he should have let Deadshot eliminate Jack Ryder. This would have accomplished two things—both of them positive. One, Deadshot wouldn’t have a grudge and might have been happier to stay in Blackgate. Two, Jack Ryder wouldn’t be polluting the airwaves of Gotham City with his toxic egomania.

Suddenly he felt something shift in his head, an almost physical sensation, and he realized he had been thinking like one of his foes—one of the people he had dedicated his life to stopping. He wasn’t the kind of man who played enemies against each other, or who sacrificed lives to achieve goals. He
couldn’t
be that. He stood for something more. But the train of thought had come so easily to him, had been so seductive… almost as if there was another consciousness in his head.

With a stirring of deep unease, Batman articulated the thought.

That was how the Joker would think.

Was that what it was like to internalize an enemy so deeply that when that enemy was gone, you kept him alive? Batman knew he didn’t have the leisure to chase the Joker’s ghost around the inside of his own head. He had to stay focused—but time and again, he had felt the Joker’s presence. A psychiatrist might call it post-traumatic stress, but if that was the case, he’d had post-traumatic stress since he was a child.

His entire life he had been driven by the presence of the dead.

But right now Batman didn’t have the time for psychiatry. Deadshot was still looking at him as the orderlies wheeled him to an armored ambulance for transport to Blackgate’s secure hospital.

“Whatcha thinking about?” Deadshot said, taunting him again.

Out of the corner of his eye, Batman saw Gordon watching them. He waited until the prison ambulance was gone, then came over.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“Deadshot had an insight,” Batman said.

“That’s all you’re going to give me?” Gordon looked irritated. “I get a lecture about trust, I give you the address of this place… and you tell me ‘Deadshot had an insight.’”

“I’m still figuring it out, Commissioner,” Batman said.

“Well, figure fast,” Gordon said. “I’m all out of ideas.”

I’m missing something
, Batman thought. Deadshot was right. The Riddler had walked him through the Joker’s Greatest Hits… but what was the big finale? There were no puzzles left, no way for him to get in touch with Robin, or find another of the Riddler’s associates.

Everything had gone quiet.

That, in Batman’s experience, meant that everything was about to get very loud.

Duane Trask, Gotham Globe Radio

Robin was walking beneath the surface of the water, aided by the current. The underground river wound a sinuous course beneath the oldest parts of Gotham City. The mechanical guardian was airtight, and moved as easily underwater as it had in the open air—more easily, in fact, since the buoyancy gave the suit less of its own weight to carry.

As he walked, Robin saw bits of the city’s history stuck in the silt on the floor of the tunnel. Old tools, pieces of machinery, and more recent additions like plastic bags and Styrofoam cups. He walked the way he imagined an astronaut on the moon might, bounding along with his arms out both for balance and to push off from the curving walls so he stayed in the center of the flow.