by Peter David
He heard a low sigh from the waiting individual, and knew it immediately.
He allowed the shadows to part from him and said in a slightly ironic tone, “Commissioner Gordon?”
Dr. Chase Meridian turned with a start, her hand to her bosom. Her breath came out in mist through the chill night air. “He’s at home. I sent the signal.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Last night at the circus. I noticed something about Dent. His coin. He’s obsessed with justice. It’s his Achilles’ heel. It can be exploited.”
He couldn’t believe it. She was telling him nothing new. Hell, she had to know it was nothing new. It was in the case files.
She had only a small amount of time, and apparently zero interest, in dealing with him as Bruce Wayne. And yet she was willing to go to any lengths, no matter how preposterous . . . no matter how transparent . . . to garner Batman’s attention.
He stepped in close to her, his voice rough, his manner intimidating. “You called me here for this? The Bat-Signal is not a beeper.”
She didn’t back off. Instead she took a breath and said, in a rush, “I wish I could say my interest in you was purely professional . . .”
He paused a moment, contemplating the best way to handle the situation. She wanted dark . . . mysterious . . . all the elements that terrified criminals, that froze thugs in their tracks . . . these were what attracted her.
He thought of Dick Grayson, the teenager. Even in his grief, he was effortlessly able to summon up the façade of a swaggering smart-ass. The antithesis of Batman’s somber, mysterious persona.
No harm in throwing her off the track. Who knew? Maybe it might divert her back into Bruce Wayne’s train station.
He stood in a slightly relaxed position, one knee bent, and pitched his voice slightly higher. “Are you trying to get under my cape, Doctor?”
“A girl cannot live by psychoses alone,” she replied.
Which was not exactly the response he’d hoped for. Nonetheless he pressed on. “It’s the car, right? Chicks love the car.”
Chase, true to her name, pursued him. “What is it about the wrong kind of man?” she asked wistfully. “In grade school it was guys with earrings. College, motorcycles and leather jackets.” She pressed up against him. “Now black rubber.”
“Try a fireman. Less to take off.”
“I don’t mind the work. Pity I can’t see behind the mask.”
“We all wear masks.”
“My life’s an open book. You read?”
He looked at her eyes, at the amusement there, and he dropped the attitude. His tone becoming darker, he said, “Where do you think this is going to go?”
“Depends. Where are you going to take me?”
He took her rather ungently by the wrists. “Am I just another specimen, another lab animal for your maze? Or perhaps you thought of bringing me home to meet the folks. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not the kind of guy who blends in at a family picnic.”
“We could give it a try. I’ll bring the wine, you bring your scarred psyche.”
“You are direct, aren’t you?”
He squeezed her wrists more tightly. She didn’t flinch, but her voice was more defiant. He was stripping away the banter, cutting to the core of her interest in him. “You like strong women,” she said. “I’ve done my homework. Or do I need skintight vinyl and a whip?” she added sarcastically.
“I haven’t had much luck with women . . .”
“Maybe you just haven’t met the right woman.”
He wasn’t entirely certain how their mouths had drawn as close as they had. But he was suddenly very aware of their proximity . . . and of her warm breath against him . . .
“I saw the beacon. What’s going on?”
Batman’s head snapped around as he saw Commissioner Gordon standing by the roof entrance. His trenchcoat, flapping in the breeze, couldn’t completely conceal the fact that he’d yanked on his pants over pajamas, his flannel pajama shirt peering out.
Gordon looked from one to the other, puzzlement slowly turning into suspicion.
“Nothing,” Batman told him, turning away from Chase. “False alarm.”
“Are you sure?” asked Chase.
He didn’t even glance back at her as he leapt onto the adjoining roof, the shadows welcoming him back within their embrace. Chase Meridian watched him go and then heard a stern “harrummph” behind her. She turned and met Gordon’s hard gaze.
“You have some explanation for this?” he demanded.
She shrugged. “I needed to bring him up to speed on some thoughts of mine.”
“Then you do it through me,” said Gordon. He cocked his head slightly. “Or, in this case, did you feel that three would have been a crowd?”
In what she hoped was her most disarming manner, she smiled.
The Batmobile streaked along the aqueducts extending through the cityscape of Gotham. Flared arches supported one roadway over another . . .
. . . and behind one set of arches, Two-Face lay in wait.
“Public calls for help cut two ways,” Two-Face said to no one in particular as he sat within his sleek armored car. “We’ve seen the general direction you come from enough times, Bat, to know where the optimum points for ambush are. And all we had to do was wait for some fine night that your services were requested. Apparently, this is the night. Your night . . . and ours . . . and we dance the final dance.”
On an underpass just below, the Batmobile shot past. Two-Face spoke into a microphone, alerting the other cars. “Gentlemen . . . start your engines.”
And two cars roared from side entrances. Each was painted red and black. They moved so quickly that their undercarriages scraped along the asphalt, sending up sparks, as the cars tore after the Batmobile.
Batman looked off to the left. He was passing by the site of his first meeting with Harvey Dent. The combination of himself and Dent, working both sides of the fence, had seemed a legitimate, beneficial way to go. Everything had seemed so filled with potential back then, so brimming with promise.
Well . . . promise had been the problem, hadn’t it? The promise that he hadn’t kept.
Should he have known better at the time? Or was it that he was so brimming with confidence that he had overreached himself? How much could he be expected to accomplish and then be able to lean back and say, “I did it. Good day’s work.”
How much would ever be enough? Would there never be rest? Would there never be an end to it?
Then an internal warning system began to beep at him. One or more vehicles had been detected as moving too quickly, and too directly toward him, to be considered mere “other traffic.”
“Tactical.”
Flashing graphics of the Batmobile and the pursuit cars winked into life on the windscreen. Suddenly two more snapped into the picture as well.
Cars pursuing him in a two-by-two formation. Cars that were determined to provide Batman with the rest he craved. Unfortunately, it was a rest from which, if they had their way, there would be no awakening.
“He needs another hobby,” Batman muttered.
Up ahead of him was traffic. Innocent people, going on about their lives. Driving home to the family, or out on a date, minding their own business and not caught up in an existence that sent every lunatic in Gotham howling for their heads.
He thought about his early escapades, and the previous Penguin fiasco, and suddenly he had very little desire to give the residents of Gotham more reason to fear the sight of the Batmobile. But he knew that Two-Face would have very little trepidation about smashing through whatever cars might stand between himself and his target.
Which meant his target had to make himself scarce.
It began on the rooftops. Perhaps it would end there.
He cut hard to the left, skittering across two lanes to an off ramp. And then, in a maneuver that most routine observers would have termed completely insane, the Batmobile veered off and plowed straight through th
e guardrails that stood between the off ramp and the city. Like a missile, the Batmobile shot through the air, tires spinning, engine roaring.
It landed on the rooftop with two distinct thuds, back and then front. An instant later the car roared past chimneys, across the rooftops so close to one another that it was as flat and easy as driving on the Salt Flats. Except these flats were made of tar paper.
With any luck, this getaway would put a quick end to the pursuit.
Unfortunately he couldn’t remember the last time he had had any serious luck. And this occasion was not about to start a trend. His tactical display informed him that a car was in pursuit. The chances that it was a Gotham City black-and-white, pulling him over to ticket him for reckless driving, seemed fairly slim.
Sure enough, a moment later he heard the familiar clattering of bullets ricocheting off the Batmobile’s armored hide. He wasn’t particularly concerned about his own welfare. Nothing short of a surface-to-surface missile was going to put a dent in the Batmobile, although Batman wasn’t willing to disallow the notion that Two-Face might have one stashed away for just such an occasion.
But the flying bullets might blast through a window somewhere. He didn’t need some sleeping three-year-old getting a bullet in the brain that had bounced off the impregnable Batmobile.
The situation was quickly in danger of becoming moot, however.
After all the roofs that stayed tightly one upon the other, he was finally approaching an area where there was a gap. It was a fairly significant one. He was coming up on it too quickly to slow down in time.
He slammed his foot on the gas, kicked in the afterburner, and hurtled towards the abyss. He gunned more speed out of the vehicle, and the Batmobile hit the gap, soaring through the air. It looked like nothing so much as, naturally, a massive bat.
The Batmobile thudded down to the roof on the far side and kept on going.
There were two thugs in the car. The passenger looked at the driver with a face like rancid oatmeal. And the driver, the picture of calm, said smugly, “Not a problem.”
He revved the engine to maximum and sent the car leaping into the air . . . and down.
Batman glanced at the tactical display once more, expecting to see no more cars. Instead there was another one. Looking at his surroundings, he saw that it must have come in from another angle, down the side of a nearby apartment complex.
Ahead of him was a chasm, but a much narrower one. This time what was beyond the chasm posed the problem. It was a steep, angling roof, which Batman immediately recognized as belonging to the Gotham Insurance Building.
Still . . . this might not be a problem.
“Suction,” he said, as the car propelled itself across the gap.
Instantly, hundreds of miniature suction cups blossomed on the Batmobile’s tires. The car hit the roofside squarely and kept on going, up at a forty-five-degree angle.
Not realizing that the Batmobile had an edge, the pursuit car made the jump as well. It landed on the roofside with no effort, and the driver slammed the stick forward.
Unfortunately, this did not begin to compare with the tendency of the car to slide backwards. Which it did, skidding smoothly down the roof and, a second later, dropping off.
The buildings seemed to be converging, the rooftops becoming narrower. The Batmobile streaked down it as if running a gauntlet. Directly behind him raced three cars: Two red-and-black pursuit vehicles, and Two-Face’s own armored car.
And Batman was running not only out of luck, but out of options. Directly ahead was a big fat dead end. A huge mural on the side of a giant building.
“He probably always wanted to make a big splash on the art scene,” said Two-Face. And then, into the microphone, he snapped, “Cook him.”
From the pursuit cars emerged oddly-shaped cannons which, instants later, discharged their payload. Massive fireballs blossomed forth like lethal flowers. They roared toward the Batmobile.
Within the cockpit, Batman rapidly ran through his options and narrowed them to two . . . unless he ruled out dying, in which event he was down to one. He took it, and hit a button on the dash.
A tiny hood-hatch blew off, shooting a Bat-grapple high into the air. The grapple grabbed the wing of a giant stone gargoyle atop the roof of the mural building. A powerful hood-winch was activated, gripping a powerful cable in the car’s front, and the Batmobile was jerked vertical. He drove the powerful car straight up the side of the building.
The two foremost cars slammed into the side of the mural, arriving just seconds after the fireballs they had launched. A second later the ruptured gas tanks fed the fireballs, inflating them to massive proportions. The drivers were thrown clear.
Two-Face’s armored vehicle skidded to a halt barely inches away from the mural. He stepped out and, surrounded by licking flames, screamed his rage into the night. The image of the bat symbol burned into his mind, and in his imagination it was surrounded with flames.
And as the Batmobile vanished over the elevated cityscape, Two-Face knew that he was going to live to bring that image to fruition. Nothing was going to prevent it. Nothing.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In the stone bowels of an ancient support arch near the Gotham Bridge, Two-Face stewed in his hideout.
The décor of the place was suitably unique. It was split right down the middle. On the left half, the décor was one extreme—cheerful, upbeat, with a look and style that seemed straight out of a 1950s sitcom. Simple mahogany furniture, pleasant orange shag carpeting, cheerful wallpaper with little flowers on it.
On the right-hand side, it was a stroll down memory lane, if one’s memories happened to be those of a porn star or sexual deviant. Everything, everywhere, was black. Black leather, stretched over black metal. Chains hung down, and there was a thick stench of something unpleasant burning. Whips, hooks, and studded collars decorated the walls and harsh lighting flickered overhead.
On each side of the room there was a woman preparing a meal. They were dressed according to the theme and mood of the respective rooms.
Two-Face wasn’t paying them much mind. Instead he was staring into space, murmuring, “The Bat’s stubborn refusal to expire is driving us insane.”
He stuck a cigarette in the left side of his mouth. A delicate hand offered flame from a silver lighter. It belonged to the woman from the cheerier side of the room. She was dressed in a lacy outfit that displayed her to her best advantage. Next to her was a rolling cloth-covered table bearing a closed silver service and white, hand-tapered candles.
Two-Face then shoved a cigar into the right side of his mouth. A small blowtorch flared, lighting it up. The torch was wielded by another woman, her blonde hair spiky and moussed as compared to the around-the-shoulders, gentle look of her counterpart. And whereas the other’s outfit was airy lace, this one was clad in black leather and spike heels. She likewise had a rolling table with food, but it was of butcher block, with a pit of coals searing a twitching lobster.
The former was Sugar.
The latter was Spice.
“I’ve prepared your favorite, mon cher,” cooed Sugar. “Quail eggs and aspic.”
Two-Face rose and stepped over to her cart, examining it . . . and her . . . approvingly. “Light to shine as your beauty does. Foie gras. Excellent.”
With a disdainful sniff, Spice called over, “Liver. Don’t make me puke.”
Interest piqued, he stepped over to the other side, moving with Spice toward her rolling cart. His mood with her altered completely. Rather than flowery compliments, he simply said, “Trollop.”
“Scold me again.”
“No.”
She licked her lips. “Sadist.”
He lifted a flagon from her rolling table, gulped back some liquid. Some of the liquor spilled into the fire pit and burst into flame. It was like Happy Hour in Hell.
The girls nodded toward each other, the little game following its usual course. They moved the two tables together, and Harvey sat at the h
ead.
And a voice from the dark said, “I hope you made extra.”
Two-Face was on his feet immediately, shoving the table away and pulling out his twin Colts. He aimed them squarely at the mysterious silhouette that had materialized in the darkness at the far end of the room. The figure made no effort to get out of the way, but the fact that he had the intruder squarely targeted only slightly mollified him. “Who the hell—”
“Just a friend. But you can call me . . .”
The figure stepped out into the light, slowly so as not to spook the man who had two guns trained on him. Two-Face squinted in confusion. Up until now, he’d had a lock on being the oddest-looking guy in the room. But that was quickly being challenged.
He was faced by a gangling individual clad in a lime green leotard covered with question marks, and a similarly patterned green jacket over it. He wore a green eye mask, a bizarre derby perched on his head, and he was leaning on a cane with a large question mark for a handle.
“. . . The Riddler,” he said after a suitably dramatic pause.
Two-Face tossed the girls his guns, and then stepped forward and grabbed the Riddler, slamming him hard into the wall.
“We’ll call you dead, more like it. How’d you find us? Talk.”
“Ah, I think not, my twinned pals. For then what would keep you from slaying me?”
Two-Face was in no mood for games . . . unless, of course, he was making the rules. “You got sixty seconds to spill how you tracked us here. After that, you’ll beg for bullets.”
The Riddler giggled a high-pitched laugh. It was hard to tell whether it was from nervousness or simple glee over Two-Face’s ire. “Has anyone ever told you you have a serious impulse control problem? All right, all right, I’ll talk,” he added, sounding like Edward G. Robinson.
Deftly he slipped downward, leaving the frustrated Two-Face clutching his jacket. The Riddler walked in a circle, studying the lair. “I simply love what you’ve done with this place. Heavy Metal with just a touch of Home and Garden. It’s so dark and Gothic and disgustingly decadent. Yet so bright and chipper and conservative!” He looked to the left and then right, saying respectively, “It’s so you . . . and yet so you!” He sauntered back to Two-Face and touched the fabric on his bisected suit. “Very few people are both a summer and a winter. But you pull it off nicely.”
