Bigger, Alfie, and Steiss were finally working, unloading boxes, and it was about time. They had arrived at pier fourteen at eight-thirty, as Mr. Falcone insisted, and then waited around for three hours until the huge overhead crane had swung a cargo container from the deck of a freighter onto the dock. The night was growing cold and Steiss and Bigger pulled the zippers of their jackets higher. Suddenly headlights from an approaching sedan lit the scene and the three stopped and for several seconds did not move.
Detective Flass got out of the car and strode briskly to one of the unloaded boxes. He parted its flaps, reached inside, and brought out a stuffed bear. He tossed it onto a nearby pile of bears. Next to the bears was a pile of stuffed rabbits.
“Cute,” he said.
He went to where a limousine was parked at the curb and let himself into the backseat. Carmine Falcone was already there, a stuffed rabbit in his lap.
“Looks fine out there,” Flass said. “So the bears go straight to the dealers—”
“And the rabbits go to our man in the Narrows,” Falcone said.
“What’s the difference?”
“Ignorance is bliss, my friend. Don’t burden yourself with the secrets of scary people.”
“Scarier than you?”
“Considerably scarier than me.”
Outside, the work of unloading the containers continued beneath a single overhead lamp. Steiss handed a box to Bigger, who took it away down a narrow passageway between the stacked containers. Steiss turned back to the darkness in the open container and was yanked inside.
A moment later, Bigger heard a muffled groan. He set the box down and called, “Steiss?”
There was no reply. Bigger pulled a gun from under his jacket and nodded to Alfie, who was coming from the docks.
Bigger said, “Come on, we gotta—”
Alfie drew his own gun and together they moved toward the open container.
Behind them, something whistled from the shadows and the overhead lamp shattered. The two men jerked around, raising their weapons. The thing that had hit the lamp fell to the ground and Alfie lifted it, trying to see exactly what it was in the darkness. His gaze went past it to the huge crane that loomed against the sky and the winged shape that hung from it.
The shape moved.
Alfie blinked and whispered, “What the hell . . .”
The winged shape dropped and its wings whipped out and became rigid. The shape—was it a man?—somersaulted and enveloped Alfie.
Bigger ran, his arms pumping, the breath exploding from his mouth. He charged down the narrow passage between the stacks of containers, came to a corner, slowed and rounded it, and raced toward the street. A blackness with wings descended on him and he screamed.
In the limo, Falcone and Flass heard the scream. Flass got out of the car, pulled an automatic from a shoulder holster, and eyes scanning the area, moved toward the docks.
“Where the hell’re the lights?” he muttered.
He slipped into the passage between the containers and his foot hit something soft that moaned. He knelt, struck a match, and saw Bigger, alive but unconscious.
Flass ran to the limo, jerked open the door, and told Falcone, “Call the club. Get some more men. Tell ’em to bring guns.”
Less than five minutes later, eight men bolted up the steps from Falcone’s club and, puffing, ran to the docks, a block away. Falcone, cradling a shotgun, waited for them beside the limo. He told them that somebody was around who did not belong and to find that person and kill him.
As they crept toward the containers, guns leveled ahead of them, the smallest of the gunmen whispered, “I wish we didn’t haveta do this.”
His nearest companion said, “Shut up, Jimmy.”
“I didn’t mean nothing, Willy, only . . .”
“Shut up,” Willy repeated. Willy turned to a third man. “You got any idea what we should do, Lou?”
“You heard the boss,” Lou replied. “Find something and kill it.”
“Maybe we oughta split up,” Willy said.
“That ain’t such a good idea . . .”
This time Lou said, “Shut up, Willy.”
They separated, Willy going into the passage between the containers, Lou and Jimmy circling around to the loading area, the other five creeping through the narrow spaces between the stacks of containers.
A dark shape fell on Willy and then Willy fell, unconscious.
Lou inched onto the dock, saw nothing, returned to where the containers were stacked. The dark shape leaped from the passageway. An arm flashed into view and yanked Lou back into the shadows.
Jimmy saw Lou and the shape vanish from where he had been standing forty feet away. He lifted his gun. The shape reappeared and Jimmy fired at it. The dark shape darted across the space between two crates and Jimmy fired again and kept firing until the hammer of his gun fell on an empty chamber.
He fumbled in his coat pocket for a fresh clip and, his voice edged with panic, shouted, “Where are you?”
He heard a whisper in his ear: “Here.”
Jimmy turned his head and was looking into a masked face, inches from his, hanging upside down. Something closed over him and he fell to the ground.
Flass was still outside the stacks of containers and crates, his gun held loosely at his side. He was listening, hard, and he heard only the lapping of water and the distant rush of traffic. He went to Falcone’s limo, opened a rear door, and poked his head inside.
“What the hell’s going on?” Falcone demanded.
“You’ve got a problem out there.”
“Yeah? Then I’ll solve it.”
Falcone, gripping his shotgun by the stock, left the limo and he and Flass went into the stacks and separated. Falcone lifted his shotgun to waist level, aimed the barrel ahead of himself, and curled a forefinger around the trigger.
He heard noises coming from the containers: grunts, groans, the dull thud of blows. He just stood, shotgun half raised.
After fifteen minutes, Flass rejoined Falcone and together, guns stuck out in front of them like the prows of ships, they searched for and found their men. All were unconscious except for Jimmy, who was babbling about a big black bird. They did not bother to help their fallen employees.
“What do you think?” Flass asked.
“I think we get the hell out of here until we know what’s going on.”
They returned to the limo and Flass continued on to his own car. Falcone got in the back, tapped on the Plexiglas partition between the passenger compartment and the driver’s seat, and said, “Let’s go.”
There was no answer. Falcone lowered the partition and shook the driver, who fell, forward onto the steering wheel.
The limo shook as something landed on the roof. Falcone’s head whipped around and he peered up out of the sunroof window at the silhouette above him.
“What the hell are you?” Falcone murmured.
For a moment, there was stillness.
Then the glass sunroof shattered and a pair of black-clad arms grabbed Falcone by the lapels and yanked him up through the opening until his face was level with another face, one hidden by a mask.
“I’m Batman,” the masked man said.
A block away, Joey, hugging his cashmere coat around him and warming himself at his blazing oil barrel, heard a stifled shout. Cautiously, he left his fire and crept up the block, keeping himself against the walls, scurrying past the island of light from the street-lamps. He reached the docks and gasped—could not help but gasp—when he saw a tall figure in black, with a scalloped cape blowing behind it, standing on the roof of a limousine.
“Nice coat,” the figure told Joey and vanished—upward into the night sky!
Joey looked down at his coat and back to where the figure had been. “Thanks,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rachel Dawes sat in the monorail car, alternately staring out the window at the lights of the city blurring past and back into the car at the graffiti that c
overed virtually every surface. She was alone except for a thin man who sat at one end of the car, head bent, speaking into a cell phone.
Rachel allowed her head to fall forward and closed her eyes. She was exhausted. She had just finished a sixteen-hour day at the office where she had achieved nothing except frustration. It sometimes seemed as though all of the city’s criminals except jaywalkers were immune from prosecution. So much disappointment in her life right now . . .
Rachel was not one to feel sorry for herself, but she had to admit to a chronic low-level depression. She had grown up assuming that she and Bruce Wayne would go through high school and college together and then get married and begin having it all—children, friends, and careers, a lifetime spent improving Gotham City. But Bruce had been gone for years, only resurfacing recently. Yet he had made no effort to contact her or see her. She could not help but feel stung by this.
As for improving Gotham City—big laugh. You could not improve the unimprovable. Rachel had graduated at the top of her Harvard law class and had been besieged with offers from the big-bucks firms in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles . . . If she had accepted any one of them, by now she’d be pulling down two-fifty k, easily, driving a Beemer, living in an expensive apartment, dating congressmen. Instead, she’d chosen to return to Gotham and take a job in the D.A.’s office that barely paid the rent on a cramped studio apartment in a borderline neighborhood and kept her eating the tuna salad that was her main sustenance. She’d kept that job a lot longer than she expected she would, despite an unblemished record of successes. In Gotham, apparently, there was no such thing as a deserved promotion.
Because, dammit, she wanted to make a difference! She’d seen the law as a bulwark against life’s chaos and a way to create meaning and harmony, not the endless succession of compromise and sleazy deal-making that was her daily lot.
And her love life? Another laugh. Oh, sure, she’d dated a few guys, some lawyers, some junior entrepreneurs, but after an hour either they bored her or seemed intimidated by her. She was aware that her boss’s interest in her was more than professional, but although Carl was a sweetheart, he did nothing for her. After a while, she tired of being hit on by the courthouse crowd—the lawyers, cops, even some judges.
The train rounded a bend and slowed to a halt, breaking her thoughts. They had arrived at her station. Rachel moved out onto the platform, unlighted because its lamps had been broken for months, and stepping through litter, descended the staircase, dimly aware that the thin man had also left the train and was somewhere behind her. That made Rachel uneasy, but almost everything in Gotham made her uneasy these days. Instinctively, she hugged her bag to her chest.
Halfway down the stairs to the parking lot, a large man appeared, blocking her way. Rachel’s unease became alarm and she scanned the area, seeking help. But the station was deserted and the parking lot empty except for her car and a black SUV parked near the exit. The thin man was descending toward her. She ran down the remaining steps and tried to push past the large man. He grabbed her arm, but she slammed her bag into his head. Reaching inside it, she brought out a Taser, and aimed it at the man she had just hit.
“Hold it!” she yelled.
The thin man was only a couple of yards away and her weapon needed to be reloaded after every use. If she shot the large man the thin man would be on her . . .
In the dim light from a distant streetlamp, she saw the large man’s expression change as he looked past her, over her shoulder. She heard a rustling sound and chanced a glance back. She saw a black shape enveloping the thin man, tearing him off his feet and into the shadows.
The large man spun and lumbered off.
“You’d better run,” Rachel shouted after him.
Rachel turned and caught her breath. A black, demonic shape was crouched on a railing, a dark cape billowing behind it. Rachel did not hesitate; she shot the Taser. A projectile, trailing two wires, struck the demon-thing and, Rachel knew, hit it with fifty thousand volts of electricity. Sparks danced around the projectile and in their flicker she saw a masked face calmly regarding her.
The masked man casually pulled on the wires, tugging the projectile from his chest.
He said, “Next time, try Mace.” The voice was low and hoarse, possibly disguised.
“Are you with . . . him?” Rachel asked, pointing to the thin man, who had tumbled to the bottom of the steps.
“No. Falcone sent him to kill you.”
“Why?”
“You rattled his cage.”
The masked man produced some photographs from somewhere under his cloak and tossed them to Rachel. She held the photos to let the light from the distant lamp strike them. They were compromising pictures of Judge Faden and some woman. Rachel would even call them damning.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Leverage.”
“For what?”
“To get things moving.”
Rachel stepped closer to the masked man and tried to peer at his face. There was something familiar about him . . . “Who are you?”
“Someone like you . . . Someone who’ll rattle the cages.”
A train pulled onto the platform above them and for a moment Rachel was blinded by its headlight. When her vision cleared, she was alone. But not exhausted, as she had been only minutes earlier. No, now what Rachel felt was something akin to excitement.
Jim Gordon sipped coffee from a paper cup. Lousy coffee, already cold. He dropped the half-full cup into a trash container, buttoned his trench coat all the way up, and walked onto the dock to where a uniformed cop was shining his flashlight onto six men whose backs were against a cargo container. All six were unconscious and bound with nylon rope.
“Tell me,” Gordon said.
“We got a call, anonymous,” the cop said. “Found a coke shipment in the container worth maybe four mil on the street.”
Gordon gestured to the men on the ground. “These guys?”
“I’m not sure, Sergeant. Maybe Falcone’s men?”
Gordon shrugged. “Does it matter? We’ll never tie them to him anyway.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that.” The cop pointed at a harbor light, normally used to help ships navigate the narrow entrance to the piers at night. Its beam had been redirected from the water and was shining into the sky. Carmine Falcone, unconscious, was strapped to it, his arms spread, his coat ripped and hanging from his arms; Falcone’s shadow was cast onto the clouds.
“Looks like a big bat,” the cop said.
“Cut him down,” Gordon said.
He needed time to think. He started back toward his car. Two reporters from the Times tried to block his way and a photographer ran past him.
“Sergeant Gordon,” one of the reporters called, extending a small tape recorder.
“Not now,” Gordon growled.
A block away, he saw something blowing from the side of a building. A black flag? No, a man wearing a cape, perched on a ledge, watching . . .
Rachel did not want another adventure in the monorail parking lot, at least not right away, so the next morning she drove her car all the way into downtown Gotham and spent about a third of what she would earn that day to park in a private garage. Leaving the garage, she glanced around nervously and, inside her purse, gripped the Taser.
No, she told herself. If they scare you, they win.
She released the Taser and sauntered on.
Outside her office, she dropped two quarters into a machine and grabbed a copy of the Gotham Times. She paused to scan the front page, and then grinned.
Ten minutes later, she dropped the paper onto her boss’s desk and grinned again as she watched Finch take in the picture of Falcone strapped to the harbor light.
“No way to bury it now,” Rachel said.
Finch raised his eyes. “Maybe so, but there’s Judge Faden . . .”
“I’ve got Faden covered.”
“And this ‘bat’ they’re babbling about . . .”
“Even if these guys’ll swear in court to being thrashed by a giant bat . . . we have Falcone at the scene. Drugs. Prints. Cargo manifests. This bat character gave us everything.”
Finch straightened the knot in his tie and said, “Well, then. Let’s get frying.”
At that moment, a block away, in the fortress-like stone edifice that housed Gotham Central Police Headquarters, Commissioner Loeb was holding up the Gotham Times and shouting to a conference room full of captains, sergeants, and lieutenants, including James Gordon.
“Unacceptable. I don’t care if it’s rival gangs, Guardian Angels, or the Salvation Army, get them off the street and off the front page.”
A captain named Simonson said, “They say it was only one guy . . . or thing.”
“Some nutcase in a costume,” Flass added.
Gordon raised his hand. “This guy did deliver to us one of the city’s biggest crime lords.”
Loeb glared at him. “No one takes the law into their own hands in my city, understand?”
Everyone nodded solemnly.
Alfred Pennyworth pulled open the curtains on the window of Wayne Manor’s master bedroom. The afternoon sun shone on the bed and the man lying in it.
Bruce Wayne blinked and said, “Bats are nocturnal.”
“Bats, perhaps,” Alfred said. “But even for billionaire playboys, three o’clock is pushing it. The price of leading a double life, I fear.”
Alfred picked up a tray from a sideboard and set it down on a table next to the bed. On it was a health shake, a bunch of grapes, an orange, a small knife, and that day’s Gotham Times.
Alfred unfolded the paper and displayed the photo of Falcone strapped to the light. “Your theatrics made quite an impression.”
Bruce looked at the photo. “Theatrics and deception are powerful weapons, Alfred. It’s a start.”
He threw aside the bedding, rose, and stretched.
Alfred peered at the bruises on Bruce’s bare chest and arms. “If those are to be the first of many injuries . . . it would be wise to find a suitable excuse. Polo, for instance.”
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