DC Comics novels--Batman

by Christa Faust

  “Y’know, I’m positive you won’t regret this purchase,” he said. “The place isn’t that dilapidated. Some of the rides are still pretty sturdy…” A smile played across the Joker’s features. Yes! “Really, this could be one hell of a carnival.”

  The Joker came forward, putting a hand on Kovaks’ shoulder, and he was grinning again. Kovaks was sure he’d just dodged a bullet.

  “Oh, you’re so right,” he said. “Thanks to your smooth salesmanship and your silver tongue you’ve completely sold me on the place.” He clapped a hand on the ex-cop’s back and stuck out the other one. “Let’s shake on it.”

  Kovaks looked at the hand. Seeing nothing gleaming in the half-light, he stuck his out, too.

  “Uh… well, sure,” he said. “It’s my privilege.” They shook. There was a buzz, and a pinch, and the Joker was beaming like a sophomore who’d just been kissed by the head cheerleader.

  “Indeed it is,” the thin man replied. “Naturally, I won’t be paying you anything.” His words were becoming more distant, difficult to make out. “My colleagues persuaded your partner to sign the necessary documents just over an hour ago,” the Joker said. He had no colleagues and he had no idea or could care less who owned the carnival. “The property’s all mine.” He undid the hand buzzer that hadn’t been there before, leaning in close to Kovaks’ face. “I take it you’re happy with that?”

  Kovaks’ body went rigid. He stopped rocking on the elephant, and his face felt tight.

  “I can see that you are,” the Joker said, tossing the buzzer aside. “I’m so glad. You know when you see the improvements I’ve planned for this place, I guarantee you’ll be absolutely speechless. And incidentally,” he snickered, “that’s a lifetime guarantee.”

  The Joker turned his back and walked away. “Well, I must dash. There’s equipment to hire, and workers who’ll suit the general tone of the establishment.” He put on his hat and twirled his cane as he walked away. “And then, of course, I’ve yet to secure my main attraction. Do feel free to stick around.”

  Gavin Kovaks stared straight ahead. There was a rictus grin on his face, a bit of blood trickled from his mouth, his red-veined eyes bugged out, seeing nothing in death.

  28

  “I still don’t know why he chose me to live, and everyone else to die,” Zach said. “It’s crazy, right? I mean, okay, so like this chip that I’m developing is pretty cool. I mean, it’s important. Like big time important, and Professor Stephens knew it—but it’s still so sad to think of everyone that died. Survivor’s guilt, I guess you’d call it.”

  Zach knew he was talking too fast, his words tripping over each other like excited puppies, but he couldn’t help it.

  “I’m so sorry, Zach. This must be so hard for you.”

  Her name was Lisa MacIntosh. Wild auburn curls and dark doe eyes and the cutest freckles. She was just a little bit taller than him and still awkward with her long smooth limbs. Even though she tried to hide the fact under loose, bulky sweaters, she was definitely at least a C-cup. He spent most of their shared classes wondering if those freckles were all over, and trying to come up with clever things to say to her.

  Now she was standing next to him in front of his dorm room door, smelling like clean laundry and secret flowers, and all those clever things just went right out the window. He fumbled around for his key and opened the door.

  “Do you want to come in?” he asked. “I mean, I could show you the schematics. I just… I feel like I shouldn’t be alone at a time like this. You know, after everything that happened.”

  She smiled a crooked, awkward smile and looked down, crossing her arms. The move had the effect of pushing those C-cups upward so a little bit of cleavage showed in the V neck of her sweater. She was blushing. That was a good sign, right? Girls blushing? And she didn’t say no either. Another good sign. It was working! He figured this was it. His big chance.

  He leaned in and kissed her.

  Lisa’s whole body went stiff, like she’d received an electric shock, and she made a weird noise, a sort of a half-swallowed gasp. Her teeth clenched tight. He pulled back, confused and embarrassed. He was blushing too now. Definitely NOT a good sign.

  “Lisa, listen…” he began.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I mean, I’m sorry for what happened to you, I really am, but I just don’t think of you that way, Zach.”

  “But I thought you broke up with Steve,” Zach said, hating the way his voice suddenly sounded all high and whiny.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” There was anger in her voice now. Her dark eyes went narrow and cold, and he felt pinned and helpless. “You think because I don’t have a boyfriend anymore, that I should just make myself available for anyone who comes along?”

  “Of course not,” he said, offering defensive and conciliatory palms, trying for what he hoped was a disarming smile. “Maybe just me?”

  As soon as he said it, he knew it was a mistake.

  “God, Zach!” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and he died a little more inside. “You’re such a creep. You just don’t function right.” She turned to walk away.

  “Hey, wait,” he said to her back as she walked away. “I was just kidding…”

  She didn’t slow down.

  He stood there for a moment in front of the open door, feeling simultaneously hot and cold and more than a little nauseous. The hallway was empty—thank god. His mind was going a mile a minute, replaying every awful moment of the exchange. Why did this kind of thing keep happening to him, over and over?

  “Women…” a voice said, speaking from the dark interior of his dorm room. It was high-pitched and strange. His roommate Kevin was working over in the computer lab, so the room should have been empty.

  He peered into the darkness, and his desk light clicked on. Someone was sitting in his chair with their back to the door. The desk chair spun around, revealing a leering grin and mad eyes in a gaunt, pale face.

  Holy shit, it’s—

  “…can’t live with ’em,” the shadowy figure continued, “and it’s against the law to kill ’em. Am I right, Zachy boy?”

  “How did you…?” Zach looked both ways down the dormitory hall, drowning in shame and wondering if he should just run. “Were you sitting there the whole time?”

  The Joker stood, straightening his crooked purple lapels and pushing his fingers through greasy green hair.

  “Here’s the thing about women,” he said. “They’re holding all the cards.” He produced a deck of cards from his suit pocket and started artfully shuffling them with his left hand.

  “Girls like that will spread it all over campus,” he added, “but won’t give guys like us the time of day. And why not? Okay, so maybe we don’t exactly have teen idol good looks, but aren’t we nice guys? Good sense of humor. Always there for them. ‘You’re such a good friend,’ they say, until it’s time for a little reciprocity, and then what? Then all of a sudden, we’re creeps.”

  Zach blinked. He didn’t know how the Joker could claim to be a nice guy, but he did have a point.

  “See, the system’s slanted in their favor,” the Joker continued, cards shuffling hypnotically back and forth now between his slender gloved hands. “Supply and demand. You try to play fair, you try to follow the rules, but they keep shifting and changing, moving the goalposts until the next thing you know, they’ve run off with some Cro-Magnon whose dick size is greater than his IQ.”

  “Yeah,” Zach said. “It’s like you can’t win.”

  “Exactly,” the Joker replied, leaning close in the semidarkness, mad eyes twinkling. “So what do you do when you can’t beat the system?”

  “Um…”

  The Joker sharply arched his fingers, causing the cards to fly up and out like a fountain. Like when Zach was a kid, and his older brother used to trick him into playing a game he called “52 Pickup.” As the cards fluttered down to the carpet around Zach, he noticed they were all Jokers.


  “You fuck the system,” the Joker said. “That’s what you do.” He cocked his pointed chin, gesturing toward the door. “Want to go for a ride?”

  * * *

  They stood in a cavernous warehouse space. Zach was still shaking with excess adrenaline from the trip through Gotham City.

  Joker’s “ride” had been a green-and-purple motorcycle, speeding through traffic, almost colliding with moving vehicles and stationary objects alike. He hadn’t wanted to seem weird or gay by clinging to the Joker’s waist, so he just clung desperately the edges of the seat until his fingers ached, and kept his head down so he didn’t have to see all the times they nearly died. The Joker cackled all the way, the sound sharp enough to break through the noise of the chopper, his iridescent hair snapping in the wind.

  Above ground, this secret headquarters looked like a crappy, dilapidated old fun house in an abandoned amusement park, but underneath lay a massive storage space where top-of-the-line equipment had been wheeled in on portable tables, converting it into a makeshift tech lab.

  How can he afford this stuff?

  “I’ve had my eyes on you, Zach-boy,” the Joker said. “You’ve been waiting months for a grant proposal, so your new chip can be reviewed.” He slung an arm around Zach’s shoulders. “Now, with the murder investigation gumming up the works, who knows how long it will be before you receive funding? If you receive funding at all, after all the negative publicity.” His face went sad and long, like a theater mask.

  The Joker paused, and then spread his arms wide, spinning around like a maniac.

  “But why wait, Zach-man?” he said gleefully. “You have everything you could want, right here. Work for me and you can start today—right now! You’ve got a blank check. Anything you need, just send one of your new assistants down to… I don’t know. Computers-R-Us.”

  As he spoke two stunning, lingerie-clad girls came forward to flank Zach, one running long pink nails through his hair and the other slipping a hand up under his untucked shirt. He tried not to giggle, but couldn’t help himself.

  “Hi, I’m Tandy,” one of them said.

  “And I’m, uh,” the other one started. “Oh, yeah… I’m Clarissa I guess.” She looked nervously at the Joker, whose expression was unreadable.

  “Are you our game boy?” the supposed Clarissa asked with a giggle.

  Zach didn’t know what to say.

  “Is this real?” he asked finally. His head was spinning.

  “Is anything real?” the Joker responded with a lazy grin. “For that matter, what difference does it make?”

  Zach couldn’t argue with the logic.

  * * *

  “So,” the Joker said. “How close are we?”

  Zach had no idea how much time had passed—it had been a blur. Never had such wonderful resources been available at the snap of his fingers. Hell, the camera alone was top of the line. Once he began, he hardly slept or ate. It was heaven.

  All he had to do was ask, and Tandy or Clarissa brought him any equipment he needed, all the while offering sweet words of encouragement. That lent greater urgency to his work. He was pretty sure that, once he was done, another form of heaven would await him.

  “Nearly there,” Zach replied without looking up from the tangle of the board in front of him. A grey pall of soldering smoke hung over his work station, but he hardly noticed.

  “Excellent,” the Joker said. “When the module is complete, will it broadcast both stills and video?”

  “Broadcast isn’t exactly the right word, but yeah,” Zach said. “You’ll have everything backed up on floppy, too. Easy peasy.”

  “Easy peasy,” the Joker repeated. “That’s the way I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh.” He danced around, darting in and out of the shadows.

  * * *

  The kid had been working around the clock for several nights in a row, fueled by manic energy and sugar. When he wasn’t working, he sat there like a wide-eyed and dutiful sponge, soaking up all the toxic rhetoric the Joker could pour into his eager little head.

  It was almost too easy.

  Whenever Zach seemed to waver, he just called in Candy or Wendy—“Tandy” and “Clarissa.” A few giggles, a few wiggles, and the kid was back on task.

  Honestly, the Joker didn’t care much about women one way or the other. They were fine for stress relief, of course—some more so than others—but he had the voices in his head to keep him company. He had bigger fish to fry. A point to prove. A date with destiny. Or Batman.

  Whichever showed up first.

  Still, he knew exactly how to get the kid to do what he wanted. Knew how to play on his insecurities and repressed anger. He gave Zach a fake story about Barbara Gordon, that she was this stuck-up librarian who broke the Joker’s heart, and then he hard-sold his clever plot to get back at her with a brilliant, comical and embarrassing prank that would make Zach look like a rock star to all his friends. Implying that if Zach helped him with his revenge, then he would naturally return the favor. After all, isn’t a blow against one stuck-up bitch a victory over them all?

  All the Joker had to do was provide the tinker toys and that kid would build a whole fairy tale inside his head. One in which the mean librarian stood in for every girl who ever rejected him.

  Because that’s what they always did.

  The Joker lived his whole life in a near constant ebb and flow of lies, delusions and ever-evolving, self-fulfilling fictions. It was easy for him to allow the people around him to try to make sense of his nonsense, to believe whatever they wanted to believe, to cushion themselves from the truth at the heart of all madness. He believed in breaking eggs to make omelets.

  Or just breaking them, anyway.

  When he’d first conceived of this plan, back at Arkham, he’d been thinking he’d take photos. He’d dress like a tourist, with a big camera around his neck. Then he’d met the dear Professor Stephens and realized how much more wonderful his revenge could be. With Zach’s ingenious new technology, he could rip away every last vestige of control and drive his intended victim irrevocably mad.

  Even better, the madness would be eternal, reaching everywhere and lasting forever. Like a malevolent ghost in the machine, replicating endlessly before a captive audience of millions. Pictures could be burned. Negatives could be destroyed. But, what did Zach call it? Cyber-something…

  Oh yeah, cyberspace! How Stanley Kubrick.

  Yes, cyberspace would be forever.

  This caper would be the Joker’s masterpiece. Final and incontrovertible evidence that the line between the sane and the insane was nothing but a social construct that could be obliterated at the drop of a hat. Or the click of a keyboard.

  It had always been difficult for the Joker to see other people as living breathing individuals, with lives and loves and inner meaning beyond whatever temporary use he might have for them. He didn’t really care about the pretty librarian or her fine, upstanding father. He certainly didn’t care about the angry little nerd. They were tools. Puppets in his grand puppet show.

  There was one person for whom he did care deeply, though. The person for whom this whole horror show was being orchestrated. His cosmic dance partner, the law to his chaos, the truth to his madness. His audience of one.

  After this was done, there would be speculation and discussion and dissection as they tried to figure out what really had happened. What he really meant to accomplish. None of that mattered, though. Let them twist and dance and spin. They would never understand his delicious madness. In the end, there was only the final punchline, flawlessly delivered just as the curtain fell.

  For him, the end of the show was the end of everything.

  Like a kid on Christmas Eve, he could hardly wait.

  29

  Commissioner James Gordon regarded the chess board that sat on the kitchen table as he and his daughter played a game in his modest apartment. Nearby was the shelf unit that included his wet bar, and held one-of-a-kind curios such as an old-fashioned pocket watch f
ormerly owned by Jervis Tetch, the Mad Hatter. The shelves also held his many scrapbooks, one of which he had taken down and set on the table beside the chess board.

  Folded on top of that was the morning edition of the Gotham Examiner. The headline announced the Joker’s escape.

  ASYLUM SECURITY UPROAR

  MANIAC ESCAPES AGAIN

  Fingers pinching his rook, he glanced up at Barbara’s face and wasn’t surprised to find an expression of utter calm. This unreadability, which would have been the envy of any poker player, was just enhanced by her eyeglasses—glasses she didn’t really need. She’d adopted them when Batgirl had appeared on the scene, thus cementing the public image of the staid librarian.

  As a college student Barbara had mastered in library sciences, at the same time taking many a criminal studies course. Given her dad’s profession, no one had questioned her apparently intellectual curiosity. It provided fodder for many a fascinating father-daughter discussion, most recently involving the work of that British professor, Alec Jeffreys, and the use of human DNA to more accurately identify criminal suspects.

  It was amazing, Gordon reflected, how far criminal investigation had progressed since he’d been on the job. Since even the appearance of Batman.

  “Take your time,” she chided, breaking into his reverie. “I know your synapses don’t fire as quickly as they used to.”

  “You young whippersnappers could learn a thing or two from us old war horses,” he fired back, weighing a move with his knight. “There’s value in patience, and estimating the pros and cons before going off half-cocked.”

  “Yet some situations call for quick thinking, and even quicker action,” she countered. “It’s all about the preparation.”

  “That may be so,” the senior Gordon replied. He played his bishop, putting one of her knights in jeopardy. “Yet even if you’re in tip-top physical condition, it’ll never make up for a lack of experience. You know what they say, ‘old age and cunning will overcome youth and skill every time.’” He liked that.