Wayne of Gotham Read online

  “But you won’t. You’ll take me in.”

  “No! I’m gonna save this city a lot of trouble and expense…I’m gonna…”

  “You’re a good cop, Gordon.” Batman moved ever so slowly, raising both hands. “You’re going to take me in. You’re going to see that justice is done.”

  Batman placed both hands behind his head. He closed his eyes.

  Justice is blind.

  Gordon raised his weapon, stepping forward. The muzzle of the service revolver jabbed against the base of Batman’s neck below his fingers.

  At the base of his skull.

  No amount of armor—active or otherwise—would protect him at this range.

  “That’s right, Batman!” Gordon seethed. “I am going to see that justice is done! I am justice, you son of a—”

  The cape reached up, suddenly flying in Gordon’s face.

  Not just for show anymore.

  Gordon fired just as Batman’s head shifted aside.

  The muzzle blast exploded in Batman’s ear as he spun around on Gordon. The neurobionic interface was disrupted, and for a moment Batman was truly blind as he opened his eyes. The cape was still affixed around the police commissioner’s wrist, pulling him forward and into Batman’s reach.

  The spin kick cost Gordon his glasses, but the commissioner was fueled by rage, revenge, and despair. He managed to fire his weapon twice more in wild rage before Batman could force it from his hands. It tumbled into the void around them as they locked in combat. Gordon had nothing to lose in the death of his opponent. Batman had everything to lose.

  At last, Gordon fell quivering beneath the careful blows of his old friend. Batman secured him as he had the others, although perhaps not so tightly.

  He stood up and closed his eyes.

  The cowl was responding once more.

  The game was over.

  It was time to claim his prize.

  “I’ve done your bidding, master,” she mumbled. “Everything exactly as you asked. Did it please you, master? Did I please you?”

  Batman found her in a small room with a single, high-back winged chair. She was seated before a shrine.

  On the shrine, a ventriloquist dummy stared at the intruder with dead, glass eyes as he approached.

  Batman set his jaw. He knew the wooden doll too well to turn his back on him.

  He had been called Woody when he was first carved in Blackgate Penitentiary. The gallows had been dismantled after a botched execution in 1962, and a “lifer” by the name of Donnegan had salvaged some of the wood to keep his hands busy. Donnegan was a big fan of noir and gangster films, and managed to dress his puppet creation in a miniature gangster suit with wide pinstripes and lapels to match. As Blackgate became more crowded, Donnegan and Woody were joined in his cell by a rather unlikely murderer, a usually timid man by the name of Arnold Wesker. Wesker tried to hang himself but, according to the prison psychiatrist reports at the time, was “talked out of it” by the dummy, who Wesker claimed had started speaking to him. Woody convinced Wesker to attempt an escape with him using a tunnel that Donnegan had abandoned digging the year before. Donnegan agreed to help finish the tunnel for Wesker to use. However, when Donnegan discovered that Wesker was planning to take Woody with him, Donnegan became upset. He was happy and safe in his cell with Woody and would not let him go. Wesker, under delusions that the mute dummy was actually goading him on, attacked Donnegan in their cell with a corkscrew. His initial lunge missed Donnegan but slashed Woody’s face, leaving a long, ugly scar. Wesker killed Donnegan and escaped with the dummy. The escaped lunatic and his puppet both took on new personas: Wesker became the Ventriloquist, while Woody was billed as “Scarface” because of the irrepairable gash left by the corkscrew. The Ventriloquist turned out to be a terrible performer—mispronouncing all his Bs and Gs—but he always claimed that the advice of Scarface made him a criminal mastermind. Both eventually vanished into the dark underside of Gotham. Wesker eventually was killed by his own gang, but Scarface continued on as a strange icon among Gotham shadow society. The dummy was said to have been cursed or possessed, and there were those in the criminal underworld who swore that it spoke to them, too.

  The dummy’s eyes seemed to follow Batman as he walked around the chair.

  Fay Moffit sat staring blankly at the dummy as she mumbled a one-sided conversation. “You really are too kind, Scar-boy! Thank you. Thank you…”

  She lapsed into silence, her eyes unfocused and her breath shallow. Her head lolled to one side in the chair.

  Spellbinder…is spellbound? Who hypnotizes a hypnotist?

  Batman bound her wrists. She barely moved, let alone resisted. He slung her limp body over his shoulder and turned to leave.

  “Solved another one, eh, copper?”

  Batman turned at once.

  Scarface was talking to him.

  “You missed the mark, flatfoot.” The dummy’s mouth moved as it spoke, the dead eyes fixed on Batman. “Lettin’ the big fish get away. I’m the brains of this operation, and you’re just pickin’ up the crumbs. But then, you never did see straight.”

  It’s a device. Audio player coupled to actuators. But it’s aimed at me. This whole thing was to deliver a message…but what’s the message and who’s it from?

  “Take your folks, fer instance! Salt of the earth! Saints of Gotham! So sad that some crazed hood gunned ’em down in Crime Alley.” The dummy’s head shifted back and forth. “That’s the way they told it to you—a nice bedtime story so you could sleep at night in your nice warm bed in Bristol.”

  Batman froze.

  Whoever is behind this knows who I am.

  Scarface shook his wooden head violently from side to side. “But you’re a big boy now, aren’t you? You have new toys to play with, so maybe you don’t need fairy tales anymore. Maybe you can wake up and know that all saints pay a price and that their souls ain’t always clean. I’m gonna throw a party, just for you. Do you think you’re old enough to come?”

  The dummy suddenly stopped moving.

  It was only then that Batman noticed the card held in the dummy’s hand. He would take the dummy with him along with any of the audio equipment. It would not do to have those words replayed during any subsequent police investigation.

  But first he reached down with his gloved hand and picked up the offered card. To his eye it was a standard size, blank on the back with a single line of text on the front.

  “You are invited.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  COLD CASE

  * * *

  Batcave / Wayne Manor / Bristol / 5:51 a.m. / Present Day

  Batman opened the gull-wing door of the Batmobile, gripped the titanium frame, and tried to stand up. His legs shook under him but held as he painfully rose out of the low-slung seat. He had exhausted the capacitors for the Batsuit’s power in Spellbinder’s Fun House, which was on Amusement Mile, on the north shore of the Newtown District. Normally he would have recharged the Batsuit during his return using the vehicle’s onboard power, but it had been too short a trip from Newtown under the Kane Memorial Bridge and into Bristol. So now the Batsuit hung on him as extra weight that his aching body was struggling to support.

  He slowly rose to his feet next to the car, tapping the release points at the base of his cowl in sequence. The smooth collar fitted to his neck loosened and he pulled the cowl off with urgent vehemence. His dark hair exploded outward at odd angles, sweat dripping down off his brow. The mask was off, and he was Bruce again, breathing a little harder than he would like and staring down at the cowl in his hand as though it were a part of him removed. He reached up, rubbing the back of his gloved hand across the prominent stubble on his face. The new Batsuit worked well, but it could be improved.

  Everything needs to be improved. It’s not right. Not yet.

  Bruce looked back at the Batmobile.

  Batmobile…what a joke. It was a name that the Gotham press had given his specialized vehicle when he had first appeared in
one. It defied their classifications of standard transportation systems, and so they slapped a name on it that they could handle: the Batmobile. In truth, there had been many different Batmobiles at his disposal down through the years, some specialized and some made obsolete by the passage of time and technology. One of his favorites was a heavily converted 1955 Lincoln Futura. It had been his father’s car originally, and Bruce had managed to salvage it from the junkyard just in time. He had spent years working on the car. He never used it, but he liked the look. Most of the vehicles were more practical, designed for the specific requirements of the time, and nearly all were in a constant state of rebuild and upgrade. Many were easily recognizable as a Batmobile—their bodies sweeping into the ubiquitous sculpted and scalloped fins that somehow always made it into his designs. The models from the 1980s were muscular, built around jet engines or enormous power plants that screamed in the night. He had been younger then and relished the power under his hands. As the Batmobiles evolved, they were becoming subtler if not less muscular, with stealth technologies incorporated into their brute strength.

  The current version was, as always, an improvement over the last. Gotham was largely an island severed from the continent by the Gotham River. That meant there were only a handful of bridges connecting the boroughs of the city proper to the outside world, many of them a commuter’s nightmare during drive time.

  Bruce flashed a rueful smile. The image of a Batmobile—black fins, menacing angles, and screaming engine—crawling along across the Trigate Bridge while stuck in traffic was laughable.

  Justice must be swift…and sure…and final.

  So this particular incarnation of the Batmobile was a modification he knew as TS8c. It had started from a military scout vehicle frame. He had married it to a modified aircraft power plant and a custom-engineered combined gearbox and differential. It normally ran on RP-1 kerosene rocket fuel—relatively common and easy to obtain. Keeping the sound dampened from the screaming, high-torque engine had been a major problem that was solved, in part, with a secondary electric drive system when distances away from the power conduits were short and stealth was required. There were also four sets of modified RCS rocket motors mounted on gimbals—each shrouded by the vehicle’s shell and drawing on the same RP-1 rocket fuel used for the drive engine—that could give him some control over the vehicle’s attitude should it become airborne. There were also four downsized PAM-D solid-rocket boosters fixed to the back of the frame in a cluster. He could use those one at a time in case he needed a significant push. The deployable weapons hard-points were specifically designed to allow for different load-outs depending on what Batman considered to be required for the mission at the time. The cockpit had its own layer of passive armor, while the shell of the car used an active armor similar to his own Batsuit—not only protecting the control, weapons, drive, and sensor systems, as well as the Caped Crusader himself, but also allowing the exterior shape of the vehicle to shift. It could find its own aerodynamically optimized shape at high speeds or could modify its look at lower speeds simply to confuse his prey in the middle of pursuit. There were no windows in the vehicle at all, and no lights—the driver depended entirely on an array of cameras, radar, and sonar sensors to give him a picture of his surroundings. However, as the exterior surface could become alternately polished or dull from one plane to the next, it could impersonate the look of smoked glass found in more common vehicles—temporarily blending in with traffic when necessary.

  It did nominally look like a “mobile,” Bruce admitted but, that, too, was something of an illusion, because the wheels on the vehicle were not solely designed to operate on streets. Bridges were choke points too easily cut off by civilian traffic or the misguided vigilance of the Gotham City Police Department. So for the last year, Gotham Power and Light had been upgrading—thanks to the influence of a number of Wayne Industries subcontractors—power, water, and sewer systems throughout the Gotham network. The real purpose had been to install rapid access points at key locations throughout the city where the TS8c could turn a corner and vanish from the street, the suspension shifting the wheel positions as the vehicle plunged down abandoned subway tunnels, utilities-access conduits, or even main subway lines, if traffic permitted. His favorite system involved a pair of rail clamps that could extend upward out of the front and rear of the vehicle and attach themselves around the specially designed power conduits that ran the length of each of the Gotham bridges. The variable suspension could then rise upward against the bottom of the bridge structure as though it were an upside-down road, allowing him to cross the river beneath the bridges unimpeded, while above him the snarled traffic contended with the occasional roadblocks set to catch him.

  Bruce walked slowly to the test bench. It was set on the walkway that partially surrounded the turntable on which the car now rested. He set down his cowl, leaned against the bench, and took in several deep, painful breaths. He looked down into the glossy surface, his reflection staring back at him.

  I was young once…or was I? I don’t remember being young. The face is still strong but there are more lines in it than I remember. Dusk to dawn, fall to spring…Did the wheel of the years turn and I never noticed? There are no seasons in this cavern tomb where my soul resides. Does Gotham exist in an eternal rain-soaked night, or do I only see it that way?

  Bruce turned around, leaning back against the bench. The Batmobile was resting in the center of the turntable. The original entrance to the cavern was flanked now by six dark tunnels—four black maws on the left and two more on the right—that led away down into the forgotten veins beneath Gotham. Older models of his vehicles had once exited through the waterfall beyond the natural access, careening through the night-shrouded woods and onto the back roads of Bristol Township, with the forbidding silhouette of the city just beyond the riverbanks, calling him back toward Crime Alley. Calling him on to the chase once more. He used to relish driving through the cleansing water of the falls—a ritual baptism that sanctified his quest.

  Time changes everything. Time changes nothing.

  Bruce listened to the falling of the water echoing toward him down the cavern’s natural exit. The gentle green of the surrounding forest on his estate lay beyond. It was a different world.

  The tunnels are better than the water. Not perfect…but better.

  “Master Bruce!”

  The irritatingly familiar voice echoed down through the industrial platforms, suspension rods, and turnbuckles throughout the cave. Bruce closed his eyes, considering for a moment whether he would simply not answer, but thought better of it.

  “On the vehicle platform, Alfred,” he called back. The noise of his former butler’s clattering hard-soled shoes on the metal platform grating sounded like the jabbing of an ice pick. “This version of the TS8 performed well tonight.”

  “It should, considering what the components cost,” came the echoing reply. “Mr. Fox wanted me to mention that there may have been some cost overruns—”

  “Don’t sweat the ledger, Alfred,” Bruce chuckled. “It’s not in your job description.”

  “My job description, as you put it, has always been a bit nebulous,” Alfred responded, stepping lightly from the metal staircase on the far side of the vehicle turntable. He was a tall, slender man with an anachronistic thin mustache and a mane of white hair combed straight back. Alfred Pennyworth moved in his exquisitely tailored Collezioni charcoal pinstripe suit with an agile confidence that belied his years. He spoke with an upper-crust British accent that had a hint of London about it despite the fact he had been largely raised on the Wayne Estate and only visited London occasionally. His father, Jarvis Pennyworth, had been the family retainer, as such men were so quaintly called during the time of Bruce’s grandfather. The accent, it seemed, came with the family business. To Bruce, the Pennyworths had simply come with the house, like the grounds or the furniture. They had always been there, although to Bruce, Alfred had become the only breathing link to his own past…th
e only family that he knew.

  Family relationships can be complicated.

  “What is it, Alfred?” Bruce sighed. “Why are you bothering me?”

  “There are matters that require your attention, Master Bruce, and I had hoped…”

  “Don’t call me that,” Bruce snapped.

  “But, sir, I’ve always…”

  “Just how the hell old do I look to you?” Bruce raged.

  “We both know your age well enough, sir, and you will be yet another year older this coming February 19,” Alfred said with his nerves suddenly placed on ice.

  How long have I been running this mad race? Has it really been that long?

  Bruce raised his head, the vertebrae in his neck cracking as he did. “I’m the president of the largest multinational corporation based in the United States, and you still talk to me like I’m wearing short pants. You would never have talked to my father this way.”

  The words fell between them.

  “You are not your father, Master Bruce,” Alfred said.

  “So you never fail to remind me,” Bruce replied, shaking his head as he stood upright and stretched. “I don’t suppose you have come this far below your station just to polish the brass?”

  “No, sir,” Alfred responded in his best businessman tones. “As you so eloquently put it yourself, you are the head of the largest multinational corporation in the United States…although perhaps not for long.”

  Bruce stepped around the platform, drawing the fuel nozzle out of its cradle, the hose slinking along behind it toward the vehicle. Bruce touched the pattern on the surface of the car and the fuel cap enclosure opened where the surface had previously appeared seamless. “Is it the board of directors again? Are they singing that old song about ousting me?”

  “No, sir…well, yes, sir, but this time the pressure is coming from the Securities and Exchange Commission,” Alfred pressed on. “You remember the scandal involving Tri-State Home and Hearth?”

  Bruce pushed the fuel nozzle into the opening and activated the pump. He leaned back against the side of the vehicle, feeling its malleable surface give slightly under his weight as he crossed his arms. “You would think that with all this power and a butler standing at hand, I wouldn’t have to pump my own gas, would you?”