DC Comics novels--Batman

by Christa Faust

  “Watch out, man. Steps.”

  “Sure. Sure thing.” The red-hooded comic had his hands out to balance himself. “Y’know… this feels kinda weird. Like a dream. I keep remembering Jeannie…”

  They cut through the fencing and made their way into a huge open area—a labyrinth of concrete walkways between pools of stagnating liquids from which vapors rose. There were towering steel vats, rows of pipes and gauges, and steel catwalks. Just as it had been in the day, security was concentrated at the entrances. The plant’s owners were cheap-shit, so there weren’t any patrols until after darkness fell. Or so the comedian had informed the two.

  “Okay, we go through here,” he said, leading the way unsteadily. “Past the filter tanks and then Monarch Playing Cards is just beyond a partition.” Though he heard the throb of machinery and churn of pumps, it was after hours, so there weren’t any personnel. “Y’know, this place… it looks even worse in red. It looks like—”

  “Hey, you! Freeze!”

  The shout seemed to come from above.

  “C’mon, c’mon, get ’em up!”

  Twisting to the right, he had to shift his entire upper body to see the uniformed security guard on the catwalk. The man had his legs spread wide, his feet planted, and a pistol leveled at them.

  “You asshole!” the skinny thief screeched. “You said there was no security!”

  “They… they must have altered things since I left…”

  “Altered things? I’m gonna alter your stupid horse face, man.” The thug pulled out a pistol and opened fire upward. The sound was deafening.

  “That noise!” He desperately wanted to cover his ears, but could only grip the curved surface of the red hood. “It’s so loud in here!”

  Someone shoved him. It was the guy with the bowler.

  “For God’s sake, run!” he shouted. “This is all screwed up!” As they took off between the open-air vats, they heard the guard again.

  “Murph, get some men over to the rear bays. We got the Red Hood mob in here.”

  Oh, shit, he’s calling for backup, the comic thought frantically. Then it sunk in. Red Hood mob. Oh crap! He means me!

  “Oh, Jesus!” Joe hollered, wheezing with the effort. “Which way is it? How do we get out?” With no place else to go, they ran past parallel rows of tall domed holding tanks. Chemicals could be heard sloshing through a convolution of pipes. The rain continued to fall.

  “I… I don’t know! This mask… can’t see where I’m going.”

  “I’m gonna kill you, you useless son of a bitch,” his skinny cohort gritted. “When we get outta here, I’m gonna—”

  Thunder overwhelmed his every sense.

  Just in front of him, the two criminals burst out from the narrow rows of pipes, then twisted grotesquely as bullets ripped into them. Through the red filter of the hood, the blood looked black as it spurted wherever the bullets penetrated. A thick mist sprayed everywhere. He couldn’t tell if it came from the pipes or the bodies, but it seeped into the cloth of his suit, made him itch, and he felt as if his skin was bubbling from underneath. He stumbled against a fifty-gallon barrel stenciled with the black ace of spades.

  The skinny one got off a last shot, but a bullet went straight through his skull, knocking off his hat.

  The two crumpled to the concrete.

  But pudgy Joe wasn’t dead. “Aw hell… aw hell…” he said, groaning in pain. “You guys… you guys don’t want me.” His voice rose. “You want him. He’s the ringleader. He’s the Red Hood!”

  “What?” the comic said, and then he realized he was covered in something sticky. “What is it? What is it?” He lifted his hands. “It’s all over me…”

  Above them, someone shouted, “Watch out! He’s pulling a gun!” A shot rang out, just missing him. Another hit the pudgy guy in the chest, and blood spurted out of his back.

  “Oh no,” the hooded man screeched. “No no no no…” Desperate to get away, he scrambled up a metal ladder.

  * * *

  “Up on the catwalk!” A guard sighted down his barrel. “I’ve got his ass good and dead.”

  “No more shooting.”

  The sibilant voice came from behind the security personnel. As one they turned—and gaped.

  “The human bat,” one of them gasped.

  “I’m here now,” the Bat Man said. “I’ll take care of it my way.” The ears on his mask were as long as his head, and his black cape draped over his shoulders like wings. His spiked gloves made it look as if he had claws for hands.

  From a standing position, he effortlessly leapt over the men, balanced for an instant on the rail of the catwalk, then ran along it like a tightrope walker. Leaping into the air he did a perfect somersault over vats of chemicals, moving gracefully and fluidly, his cape flapping behind him as if it had a life of its own.

  * * *

  Hearing the sound of close pursuit, the helmeted man looked back over his shoulder, then stopped. He held his hands out to ward off the newcomer.

  “So, Red Hood, we meet again,” the Bat Man said. His cape settled around him like a shroud, and his eyes were slits in the mask. Through the hood, everything was blood red. Perhaps it was the chemicals, absorbed through his skin, affecting the hooded comedian’s perceptions. What he faced was a stygian beast, come to drag him down to the pits. To pay for the sin of failing his wife and unborn child.

  “No, no no no,” he cried out. “This isn’t happening. Oh dear God, what have you sent to punish me?” If his pursuer heard, he gave no indication. “Don’t come closer! Don’t come any closer, or I’ll…”

  The bat figure reached out with a claw.

  “… I’ll jump!”

  Spinning, he went up and over the rail, plunging down into the sickly green pool of unknown chemicals. The current moved quickly here, and for a moment he considered letting it envelop him as his clothes became saturated, dragging him along. The burning intensified, then eased as a carousel of colors and shapes swam before his eyes.

  Reflex took over and he swam upward, gasping inside the hood as he broke the surface of the toxic brew. The stream had carried him outside, not far from the plant, to a drainage channel like the one in which he had seen his reflection. He coughed violently and vomited inside the helmet. With frantic strokes he moved to the crumbling moss-covered cement edge of the canal.

  Suddenly the burning was back.

  “I’m stinging,” he cried out, the sound echoing in the hood. “Itching, my face, my hands… Something in the water? Oh, Jesus, it burns…” He clutched at the damned thing covering his head. “Get this stupid hood off. Get it off so I can…”

  Finally he wrenched it off and peered down into a puddle of rainwater.

  “…see.”

  What looked back was unrecognizable.

  He dropped to his knees and covered his face in his hands. When he looked again, though, nothing had changed. His eyes were pools of darkness in an impossibly white face. And his hair…

  I need to get out of here.

  Lurching to his feet, he stumbled away from the Ace Chemical Processing plant, leaving the hood behind. His mind whirled, the burning abated, and one syllable escaped his lips.

  “Ha.”

  Suddenly it was clear.

  “Ha ha ha.”

  It was all a joke.

  Once he started laughing, it became impossible to stop, to hold it in. He had found what he had always sought… laughter.

  Unrestrained, inescapable laughter!

  The joke was on him, for now—but soon he’d be the one dispensing the laughs.

  His jokes would be killer.

  15

  Dr. Leland was silent for a moment, waiting to see if the Joker would continue. This was by far the longest and most elaborate story he had told her about the events that had led to his current condition. It was the most emotionally raw, and believable, but that didn’t make it true. Next week, he might have a completely different version.

  Yet someho
w she had touched a nerve.

  Leland liked to think that she had a finely tuned bullshit detector. It went with the job and—much to the dismay of the men she dated—tended to spill over into her private life, as well. Something about the Joker, however, messed with her ability on the deepest level, like a magnet throwing off a compass needle.

  She’d dealt with more than her share of compulsive liars, narcissists, and psychotics so alienated from reality that they were unable to distinguish truth from fiction. But the Joker was different.

  Her testimony in court had led to the judgment that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, and he had been remanded to her care at Arkham. Yet, in her darkest, most sleepless hours she wondered if maybe he wasn’t insane after all. Not in the clinical sense, at least. Perhaps it was all just an elaborate act. A complex joke with an unfathomable punchline they might never see coming. If it ever came at all.

  The Joker sprawled on the couch with his head tipped back and a hand over his eyes. He seemed physically spent, though she didn’t know if it was from his emotional trip down memory lane, or his dalliance with her intern. Finally he broke the silence.

  “I’d like to go back to my cell now,” he said without uncovering his eyes.

  “Very well.” Dr. Leland pushed the security button and stood up. “We made some very good progress today,” she said, extending a hand.

  He stood up, as well, eyeing her hand warily before finally committing to shake it.

  “Me, too, Doc,” he said with a wink as the orderlies entered the room and flanked him, each grasping an elbow. “I feel on the verge of a real breakthrough!” He giggled softly to himself as the orderlies led him away. Dr. Leland clicked her pen and wrote on her notepad.

  Security risk remains extremely high. Transfer to outpatient treatment NOT RECOMMENDED.

  As if they’d ever consider it.

  She circled the last two words several times and then flipped the cover over, closing the pad.

  16

  The hulking GCPD prowl car drove slowly along the darkened street. The officer on the passenger side had his searchlight on, moving a lever on the inside of the car to aim the beam left to right, up to down. The beam probed the stone and glass exteriors of various buildings, then the car stopped at a specific structure.

  Where the windows used to be, barren cavities stared out. The light shone inside the ground floor of what had been the old Meskin Oil and Gas company headquarters. The beam moved around, revealing stained cardboard boxes, shopping carts filled with stuffed black plastic shopping bags, and homeless people sleeping under ratty blankets.

  The light remained stationary for a moment, the sound of the big car’s engine idling, drifting upward toward chipped and weathered gargoyle outcroppings. Then the cop extinguished the light, and the car continued on, turning at the far corner. The engine’s growl faded into the distance.

  Inside the ruin several floors had been gutted—walls knocked down and new aluminum skeletons erected, supporting wiring and conduits. A half-dozen real estate developers had tried to make a go of it, converting the building to apartments or condos with retail shops on the ground floor. Eventually they gave up.

  A few of the homeless and assorted street people had made their way to the second floor, and a smattering to the third. Above that there were only pigeons, ambitious rats, and the evidence that a roving graffiti artist had found a virgin wall to tag could be found in the gloomy hallways and rooms.

  That’s why when the three burly men undid a sealed side door on the ground floor and used their flashlights, they weren’t too concerned that their shoes echoed on the metal stairs as they ascended to those darkened upper reaches of the abandoned building.

  Each carried a nylon equipment bag, and all three could be said to be “men of a certain age.” They all had criminal records, having been henchmen of some third-tier masked villain.

  They weren’t dressed in the ridiculous ways they once had been outfitted, mimicking the attire their bosses had worn. They wore khaki chinos and windbreakers or leather coats.

  Having served their prison sentences, they found the pickings slim. This led them to My Alibi, a watering hole along the Gotham docks in the East End where those of the henchman profession could buy beers, talk smack about the old days, and not have to worry about the law or Batman rousting them.

  * * *

  “How was anyone supposed to take serious a dude named Mr. Camera?” one of the men said, waving his glass around. “Let alone running around with a helmet shaped like some kind of big-ass Nikon? Sure, he was able to hypnotize people with that thing, but still.” Harry Simms had once been the quirky villain Mr. Camera.

  He paused and took a swallow of cheap bourbon, setting the glass down heavily and causing the ice cubes to rattle. “But hey, I signed on.” Idly he scratched at an earlobe that was no longer there. He’d lost it in a shootout with a rival gang, over a bunch of raw cut diamonds.

  “I hear you,” his companion said. They sat among others of their ilk. He too downed some of his drink, a domestic beer in a bottle, and used the back of a hand to wipe his gray mustache. “Now when I did my last bid at Blackgate, there was a guy who worked the antique cons. He said that Simms had a kick-ass camera collection. That being his thing and all.”

  “Yeah, supposedly he had stuff like the camera that belonged to some Nazi officer who took the last photo of Adolf Hitler, and one that belonged to Ray Charles, and—”

  “Ray Charles is blind,” his drinking buddy pointed out.

  “Yeah, whatever,” the guy with the missing lobe said. “Maybe he’s got people to tell him what’s in front of him so, you know.” He scratched again. “The point is, the cameras are supposed to be worth a lot of money—money that could get a guy started in a… lucrative pharmaceuticals business, for example.”

  His companion mused on this. “What happened to them?”

  “Who the hell knows.”

  “I heard he sold it when he was trying to raise money for his lawyers,” a guy said from a couple of stools over. He had a serious gut, and held up a beer that showed where it came from. They shot him a dirty look, but he kept going. “Some private collector who paid him handsomely—real handsomely. Only Simms got the bright idea to try and pull one last job before his trial. The Huntress put him and his partner away.”

  The two stared at the third man.

  “I used to run with Julian Day, the Calendar Man,” he explained. “He was the partner. Got shot by the cops and lived. Simms got away, but Day made a deal and ratted him out.

  “Thing is,” he added, “Simms was supposed to have left that nest egg hidden away somewhere.”

  That got their attention.

  * * *

  One thing led to another, and the three began making inquiries. Each on his own might have been able to run the information down, but facing the prospect of a major payday, none of them was about to let the others strike out on their own.

  They found out Simms had a sister who was middle management at Meskin Oil and Gas. At one point, when the gas company had pretty much moved to an upgraded headquarters, she was one of the few who still worked in the old building. What better place, they’d reasoned, to hide the swag? To further cement this theory, the last time Simms went down, the Huntress had busted him near there.

  The sister wasn’t around any longer. She’d keeled over from a heart attack one afternoon while attending to her azaleas, and no treasure had been unearthed at her modest house.

  That brought them to the sealed door and the metal stairs.

  “Hey, slow down,” the man with the gray mustache said. They reached the sixth floor, and he was sweating despite the cool of the evening.

  “Too many cheeseburgers and brews,” the man with the missing lobe chided. He too was feeling winded, but wanted to macho it out. “C’mon, we’ve just got a couple more floors to go.” He pointed his flashlight up the stairs, and thought he saw something move.

  “He�
�s got a point,” the third man said. “If the swag’s up there, it ain’t going anywhere in the next few minutes.” He leaned against a rail and sucked in air.

  “Okay,” the man with the missing lobe said, setting his bag down. “Take five, then we hit it so we can quit it.”

  17

  Not all that far from the trio of former henchmen, Harvey Bullock idly scratched his whiskered cheek. As usual, he was dressed in a rumpled suit several years out-of-date, the lapels stained with his recent meal of chili dogs and nacho fries. The suit looked like something he slept in.

  In his other hand he held a flask, and he took a sip of bourbon. He stood in the small back room behind the counter of the Aparo Motel. Venetian blinds offered a view of the parking lot, and beyond that cars and trucks zoomed past on the expressway. The Gotham City skyline loomed even further away, past the park that held the statue of Judge Solomon Zebediah Wayne, a nineteenth century Bible-thumping abolitionist who had helped turn a fishing village into a modern-day center of commerce.

  A cheap cracked mirror sat on a wobbly table near two hard-backed chairs. There was also a threadbare couch, and a smaller table upon which sat an ancient black-and-white television. On the screen the Gotham Knights played the Star City Rockets baseball team, the volume down low. On the mirror resided the remains of some green powder, next to a razor blade and cut-off straw from a fast food joint. Thea Montclair used the blade to chop and line up the narcotic.

  “Damn,” she said, admiringly, “that’s some primo giggles.”

  Bullock took another swig from his flask, leaning against the back of a chair. His shoulder rig was draped over the chair, holding a department-issue three-inch-barrel revolver. His badge in its leather holder was clipped to the holster. He leaned forward as he talked to Montclair.

  She sat in another chair, her foot tapping a beat on the floor. She was dressed casually in jeans and a flannel shirt, a bit of cleavage showing that Bullock tried not to zero in on too much. Montclair was the night manager of the motel. Once upon a time, however, she’d been a Calendar Girl.