CHAPTER 8

If the poker game went on much longer, Mickey would lose his underwear, of that he had little doubt; he was doing that badly. But, a guy had to get his way out debt somehow, and since the economy sucked and nobody was hiring, he did what he could.

The game that happened every Friday night in the back room of The Sweet Irish Pub collected its usual players. There was muscular Luiz “The Wall” Roca, sitting in a chair that creaked beneath his weight every time he moved. Luiz sat beside Aimone and Clemente Bianchi, the brothers who had started the riot on Lemon Street the night before. Mickey was surprised to see them both here, with their busted lips and Clemente’s swollen left eye and all. Directly to Mickey’s right was Sol Marx, who blew rings of smoke ostentatiously in Mickey’s direction, even though he knew that Mickey didn’t like it in his face.

The small, dark storage room had been cleared of boxes for the high-stakes game, and except for Antonio coming through every couple of hours to drop off the cash he’d gathered from his people on the street that sold his jabs of coke, there wasn’t anybody coming through to bother them.

“Yo, Mick, you in?” demanded Sol, who hadn’t won a hand in the last twelve rounds and was getting more and more anxious to find his winning moment.

“I’m in,” Mickey said, tossing in three chips to meet Sol’s raise. At the moment his chips landed on top of the others at the center of the table, though, the window behind Mick shattered and two flash-bang grenades came through, landing on the floor beside him. He had just started to back off and draw his gun from his waistband, as the others had, when the two flash-bangs exploded and the magnesium powder flooded the room. The noise shot his ears instantly, and he was blind to everything.

Mick thought he heard a gunshot, but couldn’t be sure. Something moved around him, he could feel something long and flowing like a towel or a cape slap him in the face, and then someone large fell on top of it. He felt certain it was Luiz, who was 250 pounds of solid muscle. But Luiz had gone limp, and just lay on top of him. Mickey pushed and pushed, and just as he was about to get Luiz off of him, a hand reached out to snatch him up by his throat, and he knew the score.

* * *

IT WASN’T NECESSARY to hang him upside down from a rope anymore. The Batman knew that Mickey O'Shaughnessy understood how things worked by now. But he did have to rough him up a little, and not just because it felt good. Mickey took a shot to his ribs that would undoubtedly leave a large bruise, and the Batman also gave him a shiner with a swift hammerfist to the side of the head, which would likely give him cauliflower ear later.

Batman surveyed the area. They were three blocks away from The Sweet Irish Pub, alone on the roof of Rod & Gus’s Auto Dealer. Mickey was huddled on the side of the rooftop, holding his ribs with one hand and tentatively touching his head with the other. “Jesus, man, why ya gotta be so rough?”

Batman loomed over him, an unhappy parent waiting to deliver more punishment. “Every so often, it doesn’t hurt to remind your friends that you feel the brunt of my anger, too,” he said, keeping his voice in its low pitch and the half growl so that it could never be mistaken for Bruce Wayne’s. “It makes them less suspicious when your friends all around you get taken down and you’re still free and walking the streets. You know as well as I do that you don’t want to give these people reason to suspect you.”

Mickey coughed, and touched the blood that was running through his green-dyed hair. “Ya mean, it keeps ’em from knowin’ I’m a rat.”

“Think of yourself however you like,” he said, stepping around him and walking over to the edge of the dealership building, which faced Uptown Westside. A siren went off someplace, and Batman had to turn the volume down on his police scanner. “You’re helping me to put an end to the Falcones’ new consigliere, which will save lives if we can accomplish that. If I were you, I’d think of this as finally giving back to a community that you’ve always preyed upon.”

Mickey had nothing to say to that. He pushed himself up off the rooftop, and winced in pain as he staggered for balance. “I won’t be doin’ ya any good if I go disappearin’ for a while—they’ll assume ya cracked me, made me talk. Whatever I hand ya tonight, if ya use it, they’ll know it was me.”

“I tied two of the others up, Luiz Roca and Clemente Bianchi, and I took them someplace safe and left them there. They’ll find their way to freedom eventually. If the others suspect you, they’ll also suspect Roca and Bianchi.”

“Honesty through paranoia, huh?” Mickey sighed. “Ya know, there’s another contract out on ya. Dreaded Sun’s offerin’ eighty grand—I know it’s a paltry sum considerin’ the others that’ve been put on yer head, but still, that’s just more incentive. It’s gettin’ worse out there for ya. Ugly rumors are circulatin’. Some of ’em think ya drink blood now. Did ya know that?”

Batman said nothing. That’s good. Let them think it.

Mickey looked at him. “What’s with the new blue-an’-gray duds, man? Needed a change o’ pace, or is it spring fashion?”

“Blue and gray are harder to see at night,” he said. “Black stands out more.”

“Need every trick ya can get, I guess, right? T’stay ahead o’ the game?” Batman didn’t respond. Mickey licked the inside of his lip, and then stuck a finger there to check for blood. “I heard there was a problem in the Bowery last night, an’ that one o’ the Juarezes is in police custody, charged with murderin’ somebody. So, I guess ya moved on the four-one-one I gave ya, huh?”

“I did. And that’s what I came to talk about.”

“Look, man, I already told ya all that I know. You’re lucky I knew that much.”

“You told me all you knew about the meeting,” Batman said, turning away from the city and facing Mickey. “I’m here with more names and faces, and to ask you about them.”

The green-haired deviant sighed. “When does this crap ever end, Bats?”

“It ends when you’ve done all you can do, when I’ve bled you dry, once you’ve made amends for all the hate and pain you’ve caused.”

Mickey snorted, and leaned against one of the steel supports for the neon sign that announced Rod & Gus’s great prices. “I’m not retirin’ anytime soon then, is what’cher sayin’. No freakin’ rest for the wicked, eh, Bats?”

Batman allowed the punk to drown in his own sorrows for a moment. On one level, he felt sympathy for Mickey O'Shaughnessy. A lot of what he’d done to attract Batman’s attention had been done before he ever turned seventeen, but the things he had done were practically unforgivable by anyone else’s standards. He had been a member of Dreaded Sun, had the tattoo on his chest to prove it, and had assassinated three members of a rival gang that had cropped up momentarily in the wake of the Joker’s last hoorah, and had been given the task of killing a politician in Illinois who had disrespected Dreaded Sun on national television. Through other sources inside Gotham’s underworld, Batman had intercepted the young man before he could reach his target. Before that assignment, Mickey had only ever killed other animals like himself, never an officer or elected official or innocent civilian. When Batman had grilled the sixteen-year-old as to why he’d done it, Mickey had broken down into tears, begging to go to prison because he had nowhere else to go, just a dad somewhere who would be even more ashamed of him for his actions.

Mickey O'Shaughnessy’s sad little story started when he was in middle school, following his two older brothers around who’d gotten him into slinging crack rock at first, and later helping them out with their fledgling meth lab. By the time he was thirteen, both of them had been killed by rival gang members. That gang had been called the Roosters, and their only enemy was the then-developing Dreaded Sun. Mickey had joined the Suns, gone through their violent initiation trials, and gotten their symbol tattooed across his chest after he made his first kill, a sign of manhood amongst the Suns.

In the wake of the Joker’s mad run across the city, Batman had needed every little bit of help he could get, and he’d just started recruiting help from the underworld itself, making use of characters such as Mickey that had earned a deal of trust amongst the underworlders, and yet was just maybe salvageable—it was either use him as another CI, or criminal informant, or send the youth off to prison for the rest of his life, where he’d never be any use to anybody again. Mickey was intelligent for a young tough—he had to be in order to get the drop on the three Roosters he’d killed—and he spoke the criminals’ language. The lingo and the way the criminals spoke around Gotham City had changed with the advent of the masked vigilante, their speech relied even more now on double meanings than it even had before, like the vory v zakone (Russian Mafia) that had developed their own language called Fenya in order to dupe law enforcement. It wasn’t quite so extreme as that yet, but the language was evolving, and now Batman needed something more than just advanced surveillance equipment to infiltrate Gotham’s nest of fiends—he needed an interpreter.

“Victor Edgar Hughes and Gaspare Gianfranco Calabria,” Batman said, stepping closer to the young punker. “Do you know them?”

“No, but I heard of ’em.”

“Where?”

“Here an’ there,” Mickey said, moving his head around to test his neck, and then opening his mouth and closing it several times to ensure everything was still in working order. “Couple o’ the guys at the card game tonight have mentioned those guys before, actually. Luiz has said he’s been lookin’ for some work, ya know? He says his friend Lars Ruckes gets work with Calabria from time to time, an’ Luiz has been askin’ Lars to recommend him to the Calabrias, especially Gaspare. He’s their golden boy. He’s kind of a consigliere of his own to the Calabria family, a representative o’ their business interests here in the States—the Calabrias mostly remain in Italy, where they’re untouchable to the laws here, but Gaspare, he’s makin’ friends with the Juarezes these days.”

Batman considered that. “So, the Calabrias are enemies of the Falcones?”

“Kinda. They’re obviously here to help fill a void, but I dunno…they’re facilitating Stewart-Paulson, wherever he’s at these days, and ol’ Nate speaks for Carmine Falcone these days, so it’s probably one o’ those things where Falcone knows he’s got potential competition in the Calabrias, but he needs all the friends he can get right now. I hear bein’ locked up makes a man desperate to have any kind o’ friends outside o’ those walls.”

I’m sure it does, he thought. “So they’re all using each other. Carmine Falcone has given Nate the go-ahead to deal with the Calabrias, and the Calabrias get to be close to the action in Gotham and surrounded by professionals who know how the game is played in this city, probably hoping to ditch Mulcoyisy Stewart-Paulson as soon as they have a significant hold over the city.”

Mickey shrugged. “That’s my guess. An’ that seems to be what Luiz an’ Clemente an’ Aimone an’ everybody I know seems to think.”

Batman nodded, and saw a potential war happening in the streets if the Calabrias suddenly turned their backs on Stewart-Paulson. Things were getting bad enough as it was, what with Gordon gone from the job that allowed him to be more hands-on with the police force, and that police force being kept in the Dark Ages while the criminals of this city progressed at an alarming rate. Dreaded Sun had access to body armor now, and some believed it was because they had made connections to the Joker’s old resources—after all, the clown had to get his supply of nitroglycerin and ammonium nitrate from somewhere, and whoever had supplied it obviously saw a market for it in Gotham—and now that the clown had opened that door, it was proving exceedingly difficult to close.

“Where can I find Lars Ruckes?” he asked.

Mickey sighed heavily. “This isn’t gonna come back on me, is it?”

“Has it ever?”

The punker reached up to his head to touch at the injury, and then held the bloody fingers up to the moonlight and said, “I dunno, you tell me.”

* * *

THE ID BADGE with the coded magnetic stripe and the beautiful smiling face of Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel was still there in her apartment. It ought to still get her in. After all, she hadn’t been fired or suspended without pay, she had just been put on a little forced vacation time, “to keep from getting burned out,” as Dr. Bates had said.

She ought to be able to see the patient. After all, it was partly because of her that he had been brought here to Arkham instead of being held inside a federal prison. Harley had reminded doctors at both penitentiaries and at Arkham that gunmen and killers who plan their attacks are rarely psychotic, and that they don’t hear voices in empty rooms. She had said this in front of Mr. Jay, just within earshot, and she was positive that he had heard her because the next day he was claiming, “The people upstairs are always telling me to do things.”

He listens to me. We’re working out a plan and we haven’t even discussed it verbally. Harley knew it was crazy even as she thought it. We’re made for each other.

Two weeks later, after a great deal of seizures had suddenly come over Mr. Jay where he lay strapped to his bed, and after he had continued talking to “the people upstairs” for hours into the night, they had recommended moving him to Arkham Asylum, as per Dr. Quinzel’s orders after more careful analysis, at least until they could adequately study him and make sure he wasn’t faking. Arkham Asylum was far more equipped to deal with inmates/patients such as Mr. Jay, who needed constant watching to make sure he didn’t hurt himself and others, rather than with the general population of a penitentiary. In a pen, he would have access to too many organized criminals; in Arkham, he would be surrounded by maniacs who spoke gibberish and couldn’t help him escape because they were too busy talking to their toenails. Arkham, meanwhile, had fastening equipment and loads of restraints, a medical wing filled with antipsychotic drugs and a host of doctors well versed in handling the most dangerous and insane people the world had spawned.

Harley didn’t like that term, insane. Insanity was as legal term, and could be found nowhere in any psychology dictionary. And what was insanity? Who could define it? So far, no one could, and the Rosenhan experiment had proven that much.

The Rosenhan experiment was conducted in 1973 by Dr. David Rosenhan. In that experiment, Dr. Rosenhan and several other mentally healthy volunteers—including a psychology graduate student in his twenties, three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife—had called several psychiatric hospitals and feigned having hallucinations. Not a single one of them had had a history of mental illness, but even so, they fooled the hospital staff into believing they were all insane, and were admitted to the psychiatric wards. However, once they had been admitted, the patients were instructed to act normally, just writing or painting as they usually would, and, interestingly enough, the more normal they acted, the more the hospital’s staff saw them as spiraling out of control. The writer was deemed to be writing a little too much and was called “pathological” in his note-taking, and the painter’s meticulous attention to color and pattern was seen as disturbingly obsessive. Eleven of the volunteers were diagnosed with schizophrenia, and all were eventually discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia “in remission,” which Harley agreed with Rosenhan was proof that all mental illness is perceived by academia as something irreversible, incurable, and therefore the label of “mental illness” only creates a negative and unfair stigma, rather than producing any real solution.

“We’re not crazy,” she said to herself as she walked up the steps of Arkham Asylum. “We’re not crazy…are we?”

Then, from just behind her somewhere, Harley could hear Mr. Jay’s voice. “No, sweetums, we’re not.”

Harley smiled, but tried to keep herself from crying from sheer joy at the thought of him. She was feeling better now. Earlier, she had picked herself up off the floor, washed herself in the tub and made sure all of the ants were out of her skin before she dressed herself in the best dress suit she had in her closet. She did her hair, her makeup, and her nails. She put on jewelry she hadn’t worn in a long, long time. Men like a woman in jewelry. They’re all more likely to accept me if they see me dressed as they think I should be.

The gun that she had bought was a Walther PPK—she knew absolutely nothing about guns, but like any Gothamite she knew that the Bowery was an excellent place to find just about anything you wanted, as long as you didn’t mind taking the risk of getting robbed, raped, and/or killed. Harley didn’t. Not anymore. The only thing she had been worried about was running into the bat, who she had read about in the newspapers and figured that, if anyone deserved to be locked away inside Arkham, it was the Batman.

He did this to us. He separated us. We could’ve been together already, me and Mr. Jay, if the bat hadn’t thrown him to the cops, those wolves.

That Batman had in fact brought them together never crossed her mind. Harley’s mind was focused on many things, not the least of which was trying to keep a straight face whenever she looked off to her right and saw her father, naked and hogtied with an apple shoved in his mouth, where Mr. Jay had put him just for her. “You like what I did with your old man, sweetums?” Mr. Jay asked.

“Yeah,” she said breathlessly, blushing. “Yeah, I do, snoogums.” That was her pet name for him now, snoogums. She thought it was cute and adorable and fitting.

“Um, ma’am?” This voice came from someplace else. Harley blinked, and looked at the guard standing right in front of her. “Ma’am, you need to scan your ID before going through.”

Harley bristled. “I remember how this works,” she scolded him, and swiped her card through the scanner so quickly that the top of her thumbnail caught on the side of the machine and partially ripped off. The guard didn’t notice it (and neither did Harley), he just blanched and nodded that she could go on inside.

Harley breezed by the front desk without checking in. Behind that desk was the control center, a sterile, white-and-green room. Behind this control center was chest-high bulletproof glass, and its white-brick walls hid the armor plates that reinforced all of it. To the right, there was a door inside the control center made of steel bars, and it took the same magnetic pass to go beyond this point, where there were over three hundred keys kept on a wall almost as high as the ceiling. There was one key here for each door inside the asylum, and whenever one key was taken then a brass chit with the engraving of the guard who took it was put in its place, so that each key could be tracked at all times. Outside of the office and to the right, there was a door made of inch-thick round steel bars that only her magnetic pass could get her through.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Hi, Dr. Quinzel!” called Scott Beasley, a new addition to the A Wing infirmary. He waved from across the room, walking a less-dangerous patient named Maggie Patterson through the halls.

To her right and just behind her, Harley heard Mr. Jay say, “Ask him how he’d like his brains blown out.”

Harley called back, “Hi, Scott! You want your brains blown out?”

The smile Scott had been giving her faded as he was just about to step into his office. “What?”

“Nothing. Inside joke!”

“Hahahahahaaaaaaaa! Good one!” Mr. Jay said.

Scott watched dubiously as Harley walked towards D unit.

At the maximum-security wing, there was the ID check by the unarmed guard on the other side. Beyond this barred door were two more just like it, each one ten feet tall and six feet wide, all with guards stationed at each point, and beyond them was the entrance to the facility proper, with long, narrow halls that led to examination rooms, security monitor rooms, and one of two infirmaries—the other being on the other side of D unit, where many of the “problem” patients were held, where Mr. Jay was kept—and at the end of the corridor there was a desk with a check-in guard stationed at a bottleneck created by a conjoining hallway—the bottleneck was no engineering accident, of course, it was meant to hold back the “crazies” if a riot ever broke out.

Here, at the end of this gauntlet of redundant security systems, were two cameras that faced the offices of the asylum’s council members. Harley knocked on the door of Dr. Reginald Bates, who headed up Arkham Asylum. “Come in!” She opened the door, and saw the doctor look up at him in surprise. “Harley!” he chuckled. “I thought I ordered you on vacation, young lady. C’mon in, sit down. How’s it going?”

She stepped inside, and sat in the chair facing his desk. “I’ve…something’s been on my mind, Dr. Bates.”

“Really? What’s up?” he said, closing a file on a patient that he’d been examining and removing his bifocals. He gave her his undivided attention.

She started straightening her skirt, even though it didn’t need straightening. Stop fidgeting, she told herself. Or was that her mother’s voice? Mother always hated when I fidgeted. “Well, it’s concerning Mister—” She stopped herself from saying Mr. Jay; on some level, she still knew how that sounded. “It concerns Mister John Joe, sir. I think…this isn’t easy for me to say, and I don’t know quite how to say it…but…”

Dr. Bates smirked. “You think you made a mistake in your recommendation.”

Harley looked up at him. “How did you know?”

He took on a grandfatherly look and tone. “I know when one of my doctors is getting overworked,” he said. “And I know that we all have regrets. You regret having to make the recommendation, and I regret having to always be fair—we have the Hippocratic Oath, though, and we did what was completely fair for our patient, despite what he’d done, and I believe you know that.” He sighed, tossing his glasses across the table. “We all have regrets in this. Everybody does. The whole city over. So why should we be any different?

“In any case, we did what we’re obligated to do for Patient Two-one-seven, as well. I’ve spoken with Warden Sharp and I’ll be contacting the courthouse and Judge Cavanaugh later today, informing them that the interviews have been completed. He’ll stay at the courthouse another few days so that he can attend his arraignment and a few other proceedings, but he’ll come back here to stay for a time, bounce back and forth for his court appearances.”

Harley nodded. “So he will be coming back here,” she clarified, and forced herself to put on her best look of disgust.

“Of course.”

She sighed. “I suppose that’s for the best. I know you share my view that the American prison system isn’t one for rehabilitation, it only trains criminals to be better criminals, makes them more violent. Whatever his past, and whatever we may think of him, he’s obviously had enough of that.” Harley fidgeted.

Arkham Asylum tried to take a more Norwegian approach, focusing more on rehabilitation than punishment—in Norway, less than 20% of persons released from prison ever returned to prison, while in the U.S. more than 50% returned. Harley felt confident in the Norwegian approach, but still feigned uncertainty at Patient 217’s return.

Dr. Bates appeared sympathetic. “Look, Harley, I understand. I don’t like it any better than you do, after what he tried to do to you.” He looked uncomfortable even hinting at the attack. “This obviously hampers us a bit. Having such a patient here at Arkham means we’ll have control over one of the most notorious criminals in America’s history, and that brings on all sorts of baggage, the least of which is all the extra attention that will need to be given to him just to make sure there’s no trouble from him, no trouble from weirdo ‘fans’ of his, and no one in the media who feels we’re treating him inhumanely. But, maybe we should consider ourselves lucky.”

“Why’s that, sir?”

“Because we have the Joker. Some facilities would clamber for that prestige, just so one of the doctors could interview him and write a book, make history like Capote’s In Cold Blood.” Dr. Bates looked at her. “Who knows? You keep on this job long enough, and you and he might go down in history together.”

Harley could hear Mr. Jay whispering something right now, but she couldn’t make out what it was. She thought she heard something about “the gun.” Briefly, she considered taking out the Walther PPK from where she kept it hidden inside her bra and shooting Dr. Bates, so detached was she in that moment, though Harley still managed to maintain appearances of sincerity and professionalism.

She looked at Dr. Bates and said, “Well, Doctor, if you don’t mind I’d like to do another check of his room. I know we regularly clean and check those rooms for hidden contraband, but I’d feel safer if we checked it again, before he returns from the courthouse’s jail cell. Just to be safe.”

Dr. Bates shrugged. “Well, I can certainly do that, Harleen, but I really don’t want you worrying about this. You’re on vacation, remember?” he laughed. “Now I want you to go and be on vacation. Actually live in it, exist in it. Relax. Have some fun.”

“I will, Doctor,” she said, standing up and shaking his hand. “And thank you.”

“You’ll also blow a hole in his head so big that when wind passes through it it’ll sound like a cavern.” That was Mr. Jay, being silly again. Always being silly, Mr. Jay.

* * *

HE’D ALMOST CONSIDERED breaking up a gang fight between a few Dreaded Sun gang members and some small-timers that he’d never seen around before, but no guns or knives had been drawn, so the Batman had remained ensconced in the shadow cast by a dilapidated tenement building.

This was Parkinson Avenue, and it was far more lively than the Bowery, though it was only six blocks outside of that condemned zone. Throughout this neighborhood, young toughs could be heard shouting, blasting their music, peeling out their tires, setting off fireworks, and, on occasion, shooting their guns into the air. Street races were common occurrences, as were disastrous wrecks that turned the souped-up cars into so much twisted scrap. Parkinson Avenue was another burgeoning version of Compton, L.A., yet it had the opposite vibe of the Bowery, which was so dark and dreary, and existed only for the lowest dregs to slink away to and hide. Here, however, on Parkinson and some of its surrounding areas, there were lights on at all hours of the night in almost every window, and a party was being held on at least one balcony of every building within sight, with music blasting at all hours.

This was one area that the Batman hadn’t made much progress with yet. Gotham was a huge city, as big as New York, and a lone vigilante couldn’t be everywhere at once, not if he was serious about excising the most destructive and corruption-spreading organized mobs in the city—because that required a great deal of focus—not even when he had the help of the police commissioner and a few good cops.

The cops called it the “Blood Zone” and rarely went near it, which probably explained why Calabria felt it was safe to stay here. Portions of Dreaded Sun and the Molehill Mob found shelter here. Idly, the Batman wondered if Stewart-Paulson was in here somewhere, hiding out amongst all the ruffians, thieves, gangsters, murderers, and ne’er-do-wells.

Those who lived in this area called it Park Empire, or just Empire, or sometimes Parkville, as if they had their own little city, and Batman was determined that his next major project would be to sweep through this area, perform all the proper surveillance, collect all the evidence that Gordon’s people needed, conduct fear campaigns by destroying some of their operations and striking at the heart of this criminal scum, and, hopefully, draw the public’s attention to the problem.

The place was also special to him, because, not too far from here, was Park Row, or “Crime Alley” as they called it. There, as a boy, Bruce Wayne’s whole life had changed.

That project’s got to wait, he thought bitterly. Right now, I need Gaspare Calabria. And he’s in here someplace. At least, as long as Mickey keeps batting a thousand as far as intel goes.

Since there was no way that the Batcycle could get through these streets without being spotted, Batman moved through this dangerous territory from rooftop to rooftop, keeping low and close to the various coups that housed the carrier pigeons, which were now being used to send written messages that the feds couldn’t intercept with “ping” technology—They’re all becoming more sophisticated in more ways than one.

A gunshot rang out, and he turned to head towards it, moving instinctively and without hesitating. Then, he heard laughter, and some gangbanger shouting at another, “You idiot! I’m prob’ly gonna be deaf now! Haw haw!” Just a bunch of morons clowning around.

The bat went back to his proper course. The buildings were close enough that he could usually just hop from one rooftop to another, here and there having to avoid a group of kids or even some adults who had come up to the rooftops to chill or look up at the moon or do whatever. His cape helped conceal his form wherever he might have stuck out, making him appear to be just one of many tarps or clotheslines that were tied off on the roofs, and it also made a perfect tool for a short glide over to a rooftop that was a bit too far to reach by a simple jump.

He alighted quietly on the duplex, and moved in a low crouch. Across the street, there was as young girl sitting out on a balcony, looking through a telescope. She seemed to be looking up at the stars, but one never knew. In Parkville, like in many crime-infested neighborhoods throughout the world, children were often used as lookouts and scouts for the rest of the scum, even granted the occasional firearm to defend themselves. The Batman thought that was ironic, considering the very people they were fighting against, the police, were paid to defend them.

Biting the hands that feed them, he mused as he un-holstered the GTEM gun and prepared to repel down the side of the duplex. Mickey had said that Lars Ruckes was known to stay here, along with a group of fellow thugs that he gave sanctuary to. Batman’s target was the second-storey window, because entering on the top floor gave him the element of surprise.

He pulled some slack out from the GTEM gun, and wrapped it around the chimney. He clipped the gun to his utility belt, which had a climbing harness attached, and he quietly slipped over the side of the roof. Five steps down the side of the wall was all it took to bring him to the window where blue, translucent curtains had been pulled tight. Still, he could see movement inside, and he heard murmurs as it looked like someone paced back and forth, talking on a cell phone. He used his directional microphone to listen.

“—tell him that if he’s got a problem with what I’m charging, he can go someplace else,” a man was saying. “We’re not the only game in town, and I’m not putting a gun to his head. You tell him that. We have ancillary costs to consider, shell companies that need to be set up, transfer certificates that need to be forged and notarized, and other variables that determine the cost. And tell him that next time he has something to say about the prices I’m charging, come and say it to my face. Don’t tiptoe around me like this and dodge me like a prick, and then start telling my other customers that he knows how much I’m overcharging.”

Batman had the voice analyzer up, and he waited to have a good enough sample to verify before he went crashing in.

“No…no, listen to me! I know he’s your brother, and that’s the only reason he’s not floating down Gotham Harbor right now, and you can tell him I said that.” Inside, the person lit a cigarette, and put it to his lips; Batman could just make this out through the translucent curtains. “Maybe that’ll shut him up. I got enough problems on my hands right now. I’m supposed to care about this crap?”

The analyzer finally had enough of a sample. It came back 99.828% certain that the person speaking was the big bald fellow from the night before: Gaspare Calabria.

Good enough, Batman thought, and pulled himself back up the rope a bit to get a few feet above the window. He flipped down his eye-screen, which had flash-suppressor technology, and then took out a small rebreather mask from his utility belt and put it around his nose and lips. He prepared a flash-bang in his hand, pulled the ring off and let the fuse burn for three seconds, and then made his move. His adrenaline was already pumping. Like a SWAT leader at the cusp of an operation, he was both primed and yet calm under pressure—he had done this countless times before now.

With one hard push off of the wall, he swung out and away from the house, gave himself some slack, and swung into the window feet first. The glass shattered immediately as he tore through, the curtains flying wide open as Gaspare Calabria leapt back. He had a cast over his arm where he’d been shot by Gutierrez’s people the night before, but he moved just fine, leaping over an unmade bed and diving for cover. Batman tossed the flash-bang into the room before he had even unclipped himself from the harness, and then threw two more smoke bombs for good measure. The noise suppressor in his antennas kept all volume around him at a manageable level, and saved him from being made deaf from the explosion.

Batman landed in a crouch, and as soon as he saw Calabria coming up with a shotgun in his hands he dived for the nearest piece of cover, which was a chest of drawers. Calabria was blind and deaf from the flash-bang, firing wildly in the general direction of what he thought was the window where he’d seen the dark wraith come in. He got off four shots with the shotgun before he finally released one hand to grope along the wall for the bathroom doorway, hacking and coughing against the smoke.

The bat made his move then. He came out from behind the bureau and bolted across the room, slapping the end of the shotgun down at the ground before slamming an elbow into Calabria’s head, then a knee into his gut, and then jerking him up by the collar of his shirt and pressing a hand into his face before slamming his head into the wall.

By the time Calabria dropped to the floor unconscious, there were already sounds of people running up the stairs. He kept the rebreather mask on to ensure that he didn’t inhale any of the smoke, but swtiched off the flash-suppressing setting and instead relied on his usual heads-up display, which he put to new settings via the controls on his left wrist.

And just in time, too, because the bedroom door was flung open, and he could hear men out in the hallway hacking and coughing against the smoke that wafted out. “Boss? Boss! Gaspare, you in here?” That voice sounded familiar. Hughes.

The bat could have done just fine with Calabria, but if he let Hughes go tonight then the man might go to ground for God knows how long, and he needed as much intel as he could get on the movements of Nate and Falcone’s operations. In a low, low voice, Batman whispered, “Help…help me…”

“Gaspare, that you?” Hughes said, coughing. “Is it a fire? We heard gunshots!”

“Yeessssss…help…”

He coughed some more. “Hang on…*cough*…just hang on, I’m comin’ in!” Hughes shouted to someone to give him a towel, which Batman supposed he was wrapping around his face, and then came inside. “Boss…where you at…I can’t see!” Hughes’s eyes would be burning from both the smoke and the remaining magnesium powder.

Batman had no more flash-bangs; he’d used two up at the poker game earlier that night and used his last one on Gaspare. So now he pressed himself against a wall, waiting for a moment when they were ripe for attack—Batman had trained to move stealthily, to remove opponents one by one should they separate, but he had also trained in advanced CQB tactics to deal with fighting in tight spaces.

His HUD allowed him to spot people and animals moving even in smoky environments; the sebum secreted from their sebaceous glands, combined with echolocation technology, revealed their distance. Their natural movements along their body’s sagittal, coronal, and transverse planes gave them greater definition on the heads-up display, with general size and dimensions. All of this created a blue, 3D image of them on his screen.

“Gaspare! Where…*cough*…where are you, man?”

“Right here,” the bat whispered. The moment before he slammed a fist into the side of Hughes’s neck, the man seemed to understand something. His HUD revealed a look of terror on Hughes’s face an instant before he went down. Outside, in the hallway, others started calling out.

“Hughes! Hughes! Gaspare!” Then, someone shouted, “Gimme that gun!” A few seconds later, “Whoever’s in there, we’re comin’ in!” The jig was up. The stories of the Batman were out there on the streets, and everyone now knew that the GCPD was not as serious as the Dark Knight. They knew that if the cops came, they would have to declare themselves at the front door, they would have to come in with search warrants, and they wouldn’t use tactics such as these.

They know who’s in here, he thought. They just don’t want to believe.

Batman went to the window and quickly reclaimed the GTEM gun. He’d be needing it in a second.

“You guys ready? One…two…three!”

When they came into the room, there were four of them, all armed with pistols and pointing them around with one hand, their other hands trying to wave the smoke out of their faces. Some of the fog had started to dissipate, but the bat still had plenty of places to move around. He moved behind the bed as they fanned out in the room—They should know by now to stick together—and then moved quietly around the biggest one of them as he approached the chest of drawers. He wouldn’t taze any of them just yet, he needed to maneuver them in a way that they were clustered but disorganized, so that he could finish them all off together.

“Anybody see anything?”

“N—” Batman delivered a swift chop to the side of the big man’s neck, which stunned the carotid artery and sent him limply to the floor.

“Anthony?” someone shouted.

Then, they all moved in to where they had last heard Anthony. The room was too small to move that quickly without being heard, and three gunmen closed in around him before he knew it. Batman remained in a low crouch until they were nearly right on top of him, and then he launched himself at them. Two gunshots went off simultaneously, but he had slapped the hands away from him so that the bullets went clear of him. He then used an attack called a pensataq, taught to him by the founders of a modern fighting system called the Keysi Fighting Method, which could take out multiple opponents by bringing the hands up to the head, the elbows creating natural ram-like horns, allowing him to slam into opponents all around him. He had trained in the best arts for the best ranges—Brazilian jiu-jitsu for grappling on the ground, Indonesian silat for ground fighting, Filipino kali for improvised weapons, and KFM for the best three-dimensional fighting system against multiple assailants.

Since no street thugs had the patience to train in any martial arts—they were naturally lazy, hence why they found it easiest to put a gun in someone’s face and demand their money—he almost never had any problems with them. Couple that with the hard edges of his suit and its toughness against impact, and Gaspare Calabria’s friends were no problem at all.

They hacked and coughed at the smoke, so that helped him. They staggered across the shards of glass from the shattered window, utterly confused and desperate in the fight. He slammed an elbow into the sternum of one thug before plowing another elbow into his face, a technique called pensataqariete, and then spun to slam another elbow across the jaw of an assailant behind him, and then shot out a hammerfist to crash into his nose before he delivered yet another pensataqariete into his cheek. He dropped low on the next attack, swaying down with his elbows and placing the pensataq into the thug’s thigh, which bent him over in pain before Batman raised a wing arm, or an ala, up into his face. There was the familiar cracking noise of a tooth snapping loose. A shot was fired, but it nicked the armor on his right arm and did no other damage. Batman wheeled around the stunned opponent closest to him, using him as a human shield as he drove him into the other two, knocking them all off-balance. From behind the cover of his human shield, he finally used the GTEM gun to stun one of the attackers as he drove the other into the bathroom, where he fell over into the tub. Batman head-butted the man he’d used as a human shield in the back of the head, which knocked him unconscious, and put him in the tub on top of his friend.

Rather than finishing the last thug off, he ripped the shower curtain down and tossed it on top of him, leaving the thug to hack and cough and bumble his way free of the tub. Batman swept out of the bathroom and grabbed both Calabria and Hughes by their collars and pulled them over to the window. Calabria was stirring, and Batman had enough time to inject both of his captives with the same cocktail he’d used to keep Enrique Gutierrez unconscious. He quickly fired the GTEM gun out the window to the adjacent building, which was another duplex, and attached it to his harness. In the bathroom, he heard the last thug finally staggering his way over to the door and fumbling with the doorknob.

Batman grabbed hold of his two big catches, and used more slim Dyneema rope from his utility belt to attach them to him. He clipped on the spare karabiners, attached the GTEM gun to his belt, and slapped the quick-reel button. He was pulled out first, Calabria dangling behind him, and Hughes pulled up the rear. They swung across to the other duplex, where he shot his feet out towards the exterior wall and tried his best to soften the blow for them, but they were scum and they were unconscious so he hardly cared for their well-being.

At the top of the next roof, he quickly cuffed them. Shouts were going up all around the neighborhood in response to the gunfire, and no doubt the final thug was alerting everyone that the bat was near, so he had to move fast. Batman picked up Calabria first, and used the GTEM to take him over a few more rooftops, where he hid him behind a chimney. Then, he quickly returned for Hughes, running with him in a fireman’s carry and did the same for him.

It took him over two hours to make sure he did this safely and without alerting others to his location. Sweating from the effort and from the adrenaline rush, Batman finally had his two prisoners free and clear of Parkville, and left them atop the Morgan Telephone Company building nine blocks away. A tipoff to the police later would have them found, and hopefully GCPD interrogators would give them the attention they deserved.

But right now, he needed some rest. He hated to admit it, but Alfred was right, he had been working too hard lately, going out almost every single night and getting shot at twice in as many nights. But at least it had been worth it. They now had two major players in the Calabria family who could point them not only in the direction of Nate, but perhaps also to the Muslim Center bomber.

The Batman would’ve preferred to take care of the interrogation himself, as he had with Gutierrez, but it had been a long night, and he trusted Jim Gordon to take his time and force his people to get what was needed out of the scum. Batman was also interested to see if Gordon had gotten any more information out of Gutierrez, and was anxious to return to their new dead drop spot behind Glen’s Bakery.

He glided from one rooftop to the next, and was determined to get some good sleep tonight so he could stay sharp, but then he heard a 261A (attempted rape) reported over the police scanner. He listened to the description of the suspects as it came over the radio, and the general location of where they had fled to. It was only five blocks away, near Polmerry Boulevard.

While gliding from one building to the next, he lightly rolled his body and banked right, changing course. He could be there in three minutes.