The Further Adventures of The Joker (44 page)

Batman could pick out Bullock’s thick baritone over the other voices as he crept silently through the shadows outside. “. . . forty-three confirmed dead, including the woman driving by when the wall was blown out. Ninety-four injured, seventeen of those critical.”

Gordon was scowling at the ceiling. Much of it had caved in, and he could clearly see the blackened ruin of the fourth-floor ceiling beyond it. “Has the rest of the building been evacuated?”

Bullock’s jowls quivered slightly as he shook his head. “Not completely. Several patients in intensive care aren’t ambulatory. Ride could kill ’em. Some docs insisted on staying behind to take care of ’em ’til they were strong enough to move.”

“What caused it?” Batman asked as he stepped into the light.

Gordon and Bullock turned as one, the sergeant making a noticeable effort not to look startled. “Some kinda incendiary,” Bullock said. “Took out the nursery and a pediatrics ward right below it.”

Batman noted the pattern of destruction. “But the explosion took place in the nursery.”

Bullock nodded. “Chemical residue on some shards of glass suggest the bomb was planted in a baby bottle. Witnesses confirm the blast occurred right after a nurse took in a cart for the two
A.M.
feeding.”

Batman looked at Gordon. “I’ll want some of the shards for analysis.”

Gordon peered back at him through the smoke issuing from his pipe. “You’ll get them. Parquette and Silva already took them downtown to the Department labs. I’ll signal you the minute they’re through.”

“What do you have on the nurse?”

Bullock drew out a dog-eared notepad from his coat. “Cassandra Alvarez, thirty-seven. Registered nurse, twelve years, exemplary record. Well-liked by her co-workers. No criminal record. Died in the explosion.”

The Caped Crusader dropped slowly to one knee, reaching out two gloved fingertips to the edge of the crimson puddle at his feet. The blood shone against the dark fabric of his gauntlet.

“I’ll need her dossier,” he said finally, “plus those of anyone else who might’ve had contact with the cart.”

“I’ll get right on it,” said Bullock, and went back to coordinating the other detectives milling about the wreckage. Batman continued to stare at his fingertips as Gordon watched him intently.

“How many children?” he asked softly.

Gordon breathed out a cloud of smoke. “All twenty infants in the nursery died in the blast. Five of the kids in this ward were crushed to death when the ceiling caved in. The other three suffered second-degree burns and multiple broken bones, but they should make it.”

“Children . . .” he whispered.

A draft was blowing into the room. Gordon thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his trenchcoat. “I don’t mind telling you I’m scared. Few clues, no suspects, not even a motive . . . it’s my worst nightmare come alive.” He paused, frowning at the street. The last of the ambulance doors were slamming shut, sirens kicking in as they drove off to St. Matthew’s, across town. Gordon listened as the whine faded into the distance. “This city’s child mortality rate has gone through the roof in only a few weeks. Kids falling out of windows, drownings, gas leaks, fires . . . Too many fatalities in a very short time. Now this.”

“Our quarry’s becoming more ambitious.”

“Then I take it we’ve drawn the same conclusion.”

“Probably. You believe in coincidence even less than I do. But we’ll find him.”

“You sound certain. I wish I could be. But my gut tells me we’re going to see a lot more death before this is over.”

“No.” Batman closed his fist over the blood and stood up. And it seemed to Gordon suddenly that the figure beneath the flowing blue cape and cowl was no longer merely frightening, he’d become menacing. “No more deaths. Tell your men, Jim. Warn the public. We’re dealing with a terrorist bent on mass infanticide. Do what you can to protect the kids.” He turned back to the hole in the wall, his cape billowing as he strode toward it.

“What about you?” Gordon asked.

Batman stopped at the jagged edge of the floor, staring calculatingly at the blackened skyline of Gotham City.

“I’m going to bring him down.”

He took hold of the line that waited for him outside the hole and vanished into the night like a dark wind.

He longed for sleep, yearned for the calm and serenity that came with blissful unconsciousness. Yet the solace he so craved somehow always eluded him, for in his most private moments he would lay awake remembering, always remembering, until he at last closed his eyes, only to find himself suffocating in his dreams.

He could still see Mommy walking into his room as he scratched contentedly away at his sketchpad. “Sweetie? Can I talk to you?”

He looked up at her. “Sure, Ma.”

She glanced briefly at the cartoons flashing across the TV screen. His toys, of course, were scattered everywhere, and she smiled warmly when she spotted his favorite, Mr. Giggles, the old purple harlequin doll he’d kept since he was a baby.

Then she did something very odd: she sat down on the floor next to him. “So how was school today?”

“Z’okay,” he said. “Mommy, are you awright?”

The grin spread across her face uncontrollably. “Just fine, sweetie. But you see, I’ve got a really big surprise, and I’m trying to think of a good way to tell you.”

“What? What is it?”

“Well, you know that baby your friend Stevie’s family just had?”

“Yeah.”

“Well . . .” Mommy looked left and right, as if to make sure no one could overhear, then leaned real close and whispered, “We’re gonna have one, too.”

His eyes popped. “Aw, cool! Really? When? Can we go tonight? You got enough money?”

“Whoah, honey, take it easy.” She laughed. “It isn’t like buying a new TV. The baby’s gotta grow first.”

He frowned. “You mean like fruit?”

“Uhh . . . not exactly. It’s a little different.”

“I thought we hadda go to th’ ospital.”

“That comes later. We won’t have the baby until next year, around the beginning of summer.”

His face fell. “Aw, why so long?”

“I told you, sweetie, the baby needs to grow.”

“Where?”

She took his hand and pressed it to her stomach. It felt warm. “In here.”

He looked up at her doubtfully. “You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Wow.” He sighed. “Can I pick if it’s gonna be a boy or a girl?”

She took him in her arms and kissed him, then winked. “We’ll see. But listen, sweetie, I’m gonna need a lot of help, and you’ve got be my special guy until the baby arrives. You think you can do that?”

“Sure. What do I gotta do?”

“Just stay close to me, and help me, and protect me, and keep me warm, and don’t ever forget I love you very much.”

“But what about Daddy?”

“He’ll be helping, too, but he’s gonna be working real hard at his job. So when you’re not in school, I might need you to keep me company.”

“Didja tell him yet?”

“Sure did. I just got off the phone with him.” She pinched his chin. “He’s pretty darn excited, let me tell you.”

“Are you happy, Mommy?”

“Oh, you bet I am.”

He looked down for a moment, as if thinking hard, then looked up at her again. “Me, too.”

Then she hugged him again, for a real long time.

After Daddy got home from work that night, he took them all out to a restaurant. He kept kissing Mommy and asking her if she felt okay. Mommy just laughed and told him she was fine. It took him days to calm down a little, to stop bringing home baby stuff and to quit running around, as Mommy said, like a chicken with his head cut off.

“See, sweetie?” She laughed. “This is how your father acted before you were born.”

Daddy looked up from the crib he was building and scowled. “Hmph,” he said, and dove back into the instructions.

But a few weeks later, Daddy lost his job, and nothing was ever quite the same afterward.

It really wasn’t so bad at first, but as time wore on, his father found that no one would hire him, and he quickly became more and more depressed. Then he would drink, and the depression became anger, and he and Mommy would start yelling at each other. Sometimes after a fight, Daddy would storm out of the house, slamming the front door, and she would sit alone in her room and cry.

Then one night the boy awoke to find Daddy sitting in the dark by the bedroom window, head bowed, staring vacantly at the harlequin doll he held in his lap, sounding as if he’d been crying.

“Just isn’t fair, sport,” he mumbled. “I mean, I’ve tried so hard. So hard. I played the game their way. Two years I’ve been dry. Why doesn’t anybody understand? It was only one drink, one stupid drink.” Daddy looked up at him, and in the pale moonlight shining through the blinds, his eyes looked shriveled. His breath smelled of whiskey. “But those guys, those guys, they’re like wolves. They watch you all the time, waiting for you to slip, then they eat you alive.” His hands worked Mr. Giggles, wringing it, twisting it. “I can handle losing a job, but my wife’s pregnant, dammit! They didn’t have to blacklist me, too! They didn’t have to take everything away!” Then he started sobbing, and continued for several minutes.

“World hates us, sport, you know that? Oh, yeah, it hates us. Bastards! It lets—it lets us pick ourselves up from the sewer and build a decent life, and then it takes it all away as if nothing matters! Nothing matters.”

“Daddy . . .”

“Daddy? Daddy?” He started laughing as his fingers continued to claw at Mr. Giggles. “Daddy. God, what a joke! Everything I’ve been doing to clean up my life is somebody’s joke!

“Baby can’t live, you know,” he told Mr. Giggles. “Oh, no, baby can’t live if Daddy doesn’t have a job. No job, no money. No money, no food, no home, no life! Might as well all of us be dead. Better off, better off in this sick, sadistic world! Better off dead!”

Suddenly furious, Daddy flung the doll across the room. The boy let out a strangled cry as, to his horror, Mr. Giggles crashed against the wall, losing pieces of its porcelain head as it hit the floor. It landed face up and grinning, shafts of moonlight streaking across its painted visage
.

Shaken, his father got up suddenly and fled the little room, bumping into things as he stumbled out the door.

Later still, the boy lay awake in bed, sweating, and didn’t fall asleep again for quite some time.

He never forgot what happened to Mr. Giggles.

Eight nights went by like slow torture, the longest quiet time since the killing spree began. Batman had slept little since the Grandvue bombing, watchful for any more unnatural child deaths, trying to find a pattern in those that had gone before. To his disappointment, no pattern emerged. The incidents seemed to have no common denominator.

Bullock’s incendiary turned out to be a homemade job. Any idiot with a chemistry textbook could’ve put it together. Consequently, Batman had nine suspects in the bombing, including the late Cassandra Alvarez, but nothing he could find connected any of them with the previous killings. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make the deaths seem unrelated.

He reached for his car phone as he sped south along the Martin Luther King Drive. “It’s me,” he said. “Anything new at your end?”

“Nothing helpful,” Gordon replied. “The tension level’s rising all over. You can feel it. Like the calm before the storm.”

He’d felt it, too. “Who’ve you got at the orphanage tonight?”

“McCord and Tabler. They check in every two hours, but the reports never vary. Situation negative.” He was silent a moment. “I dunno . . . I keep thinking we may lose this one.”

“Pessimism isn’t like you, Jim.”

“Maybe not. Damn arthritis is acting up again, and these cold nights don’t help a bit. How the hell do you do it, anyway?”

“Mirrors. It’s all done with mirrors.”

“You’re a real bastard, you know that?”

“Has Bullock finished pulling together that information on the victims’ parents?”

“Not yet. He would’ve been done tonight, but there was some gang trouble in the Alley.”

“The Alley?”

“Yeah. Real mess, too. It’s all over now, but there was evidently a rumble shortly after ten
P.M.
Not enough that some nutcase is after the kids. They have to kill each other, too. Whole damn city’s going to hell.”

“G’night, Jim.” Batman hung up and tightened his grip on the wheel. Cursing silently, he hit the accelerator and thundered down the drive. He thought about Leslie, besieged at the clinic with a sudden flood of cut-up, bullet-ridden teenagers.

A slight motion of his wrist against the wheel and the car suddenly darted into an oncoming exit like some angry black eel. Block after block became a blur through his windshield, and the smooth steel and glass of Gotham’s midtown gave way to the decay and squalor of Crime Alley.

In the streets, all manner of nocturnal vermin fled at his approach, his headlights blazing like starving eyes as they cut through the night. One street near the clinic was unusually dark, the lamplights having been recently shattered, no doubt to cloak the rumble. Batman made use of the darkness and parked where the shadows were thickest. Blood and broken glass littered the street.

He got out and took in his surroundings, seeing them vividly despite the darkness, a setting burned forever into his memory. There on the corner beneath an undamaged lamp, the spot where he’d watched his parents die, the gunshots resounding eternally through his head. Not far from there was where he’d met Jason, years later, as the boy was trying to boost his tires. Jason . . . whom he’d buried, as he’d buried his parents.

Jason . . .

Somewhere in the shadows, something moved.

Counting on the darkness and his cape to conceal him, Batman held very still and listened. A rustle on his right, coming from a narrow alley across the street. Two, maybe three people, heading toward the clinic. He caught a minute flicker of red in the shadows, reflected off the moonlight. A grim smile lifted the corners of his mouth, and he waited.