Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King (15 page)

"Oh, one last question, if you don't mind." He slipped his hand in his pocket and brought out a sheet of folded drawing paper. He opened it, and Jenny squinted at it in the fading light. "Does mis mean anything to you?"

There was a pencil sketch on the sheet, showing a human figure dressed in animal pelts and wearing a bull-like horned headpiece. Jenny stared at it and shook her head. "Sorry," she told him. "It looks like some kind of tribal shaman–similar to the ones depicted in cave art in some areas of Europe. But I'm afraid I don't know enough about the subject to be any more precise. I can recommend some books, if you like."

"Excellent." Dag refolded the sheet and stuffed it back in his pocket.

Jenny reeled off a short list of titles he might find interesting, then watched as Dag retraced his steps along the footpath and through the bushes. She heard the sound of his car engine start and caught a fleeting glimpse of the glow from his taillights as the Charger bounced back along the gravel track toward the highway.

She felt drained, but strangely more at peace than she had since Peter's disappearance. Even Hamish Stewart's pointed comments about "the wasted afternoon" didn't faze her.

As far as Dag Rawlings was concerned, the afternoon had been far from wasted. He had learned more than if he'd spent a week in a library.

The Dodge barreled back down the highway toward Gotham in light traffic. The rush hour had started, but most vehicles were headed in the opposite direction, out of the city.

Dag thumbed a button on the dashboard, and the glove compartment popped open. He reached over to take out a moist towelette and rubbed it across his head. When he tossed it aside, it was smeared with the silver highlights from his hair. Instantly he looked twenty years younger.

As he continued on, his tongue pushed at the broken tooth in the corner of his mouth, dislodging the small plastic camouflage cap. He spat it out.

Jenny Ayles and Hamish Stewart–and anyone else who'd seen him that afternoon–would remember a middle-aged man with a broken tooth and a bad limp. Not the most elaborate disguise he'd ever used, but it had served his purpose.

No one would ever connect Dag Rawlings with the man who really drove the car–Gotham City's billionaire playboy, Bruce Wayne.

Celebrity TV shows and newspaper gossip columns often reported on Bruce Wayne's comings and goings; after all, he was reputed to be the city's wealthiest man–and its most eligible bachelor.

According to the reports Wayne was a fop, a handsome but weak-willed man whose major mission in life was to spend the vast fortune his father had bequeathed him. His exploits on the ski slopes of the Italian Alps or in the sun-drenched resorts of South Africa gave the tabloid reporters reams of column space as they speculated on who he was dating, who he had dumped, and who had dumped him.

He'd been romantically linked with supermodels, Hollywood actresses, and the daughters of European aristocracy.

Not one of them would recognize the man who sat at the wheel of the Dodge, his face grim, eyes intent on the road ahead even as his mind raced to integrate everything he'd learned from Jenny Ayles.

Too many coincidences,
he thought.
All of this is connected somehow
–
Robert Mills's murder, Peter Glaston's disappearance, the weird blue lights, the unbelievably powerful figure who faced the Justice League . . . and beat them. But how? What are the connections?

Wayne took the service road for the Gotham Narrows Bridge and was halfway across it before he saw the golden beam of light that lanced upward from a city roof. It was focused on a single low, dark cloud, and as he drew closer he could make out the shimmering shape of the Bat-Signal projected on the cloud's base.

Commissioner Gordon needs to see the Batman.

A half mile past the end of the bridge, Wayne turned the car off the main road into the old Industrial Zone. Back in the nineteen thirties and forties, a nationwide network of rail lines had terminated here, bringing raw materials from the hinterland to feed Gotham's insatiable factories. When the new, postwar light industries started to expand, they relocated to the area of the docks, abandoning the I.Z. to the rats and vandals. Now even the vandals had moved on, leaving a ghost town stripped of everything that had even a glimmer of value.

Wayne dimmed his headlights and drove swiftly through the rutted, disintegrating streets. There were no streetlights here, but the so-called playboy knew exactly where he was going.

As the Dodge approached a crumbling red sandstone warehouse, Wayne depressed a button on a small infrared control panel concealed behind the car's radio display. Immediately, a section of brickwork slid back, revealing a space just large enough for the Dodge to squeeze through.

The secret doorway dosed automatically behind him as the car shot inside, drawing to a halt in the deep shadows. Over the years, parts of the building roof had collapsed, falling into the interior, leaving mounds of rubble and glass heaped up on the storeroom floor.

Wayne slid out of the car, with not a trace of the limp he'd feigned that afternoon. It was almost pitch-black in here, but his movements were smooth and confident; obviously, he knew the place well.

A cursory check assured him no one had been here since he'd last taken the Dodge out in the early hours of the morning. The thick dust on the floor hadn't been disturbed, and the all-but-invisible lengths of cord that he'd threaded across the open areas were unbroken. He stepped quickly over them, carefully keeping to the brick stepping stones scattered here and there, seemingly at random, as he made for an indistinct, six-foot-high pile of rubble.

He bent suddenly, reaching underneath a twisted pile of corrugated steel panels. His fingers encountered hard, cool plastic and sought out the control buttons set into it.

The air shimmered for a moment as the hologram projector shut off. The high pile of rubble was suddenly revealed for what it really was–the sleek, menacing lines of the Batmobile, the Batman's high-tech car.

Wayne held the palm of one hand against the infrared reader pad recessed in the car door. Soundlessly, the door slid open. If he'd been an intruder, several hundred volts would have sent him on his way.

Seconds later the Batmobile shot out of the building, its massive engine barely ticking over, all of its lights running on infrared mode. It wheeled in a tight semicircle and sped toward the junction with the highway into downtown.

The man seated behind the wheel, hidden by smoked glass and steel plate, was no longer Bruce Wayne. A lightweight cowl covered his head; short, stubby, batlike ears jutted up from it. His eyes were hidden behind a mask, the bat-symbol emblazoned on his chest.

He was already doing well over a hundred miles an hour as the car hit the near-deserted highway.

Three miles, and fewer minutes, later, Batman parked in the Stygian shadows of a narrow city center alley.

The Batmobile's roof slid noiselessly open. A grapnel snaked upward, and Batman swung himself up into the nighttime rooftops. Swinging, running, and diving, never setting a foot wrong, he made his way swiftly toward Police Headquarters.

A huge electronic billboard blazed on a building roof. ONLY 2 DAYS 2 GO! its flickering neon letters declared. Beneath them was an array of grotesque masks, their features lighting up and darkening again in an eye-catching display that had been the talk of the city when it was first erected a week earlier.

MEGA-MASKS was emblazoned along the bottom of the board. WE PUT THE 'HELL' IN HELLOWEEN!

Batman grimaced as the inertia reel of his line swung him past the face of the massive billboard, his trailing cape briefly covering the winking neon lights. Halloween was far from his favorite time of year. It always seemed to draw out the worst of Gotham, as if the old legends about it being witches' night were firmly grounded in reality–as if, under their masks, people's inhibitions disappeared. And, of course, it provided the perfect cover for criminal activity.

Villains like Scarecrow always seemed to be revitalized as the autumn nights heralded the coming winter. Last year it had been the turn of Cornelius Stirk, the cannibal, who'd escaped from Arkham Asylum and brought terror to the city for days before Batman managed to return him to his padded cell.

But this year promises to be the worst of all.
The unwelcome thought ran through Batman's mind.
The Justice League's mightiest members gone
–
captured or abducted by who knows what? And me armed with only a handful of suspicions and even fewer leads.

He shrugged the nagging thought aside. Jenny Ayles had given him much to consider, and once he dealt with whatever emergency Jim Gordon was calling him to, he'd devote himself full-time to trying to piece Jenny's data into what little he already knew.

There was a sense of some grand scheme behind all the seemingly disparate events of the past month or so. It would take time and hard thought before he could begin to pin it down.

Batman flexed his ankles and knees as he dropped fifteen feet through the air, landing atop the roof of the insurance company building that stood next to Police HQ. Slightly below him, at the far end of the roof, he could see two figures waiting by the huge lamp that projected the Bat-Signal. Jim Gordon was unmistakable, his overcoat collar turned up as he hunched himself against the cutting wind that blew at this height above the city's concrete canyons. There was a dull red glow as he puffed furiously at the pipe clamped in his teeth.

Obviously fallen off the wagon,
Batman thought, knowing that Gordon was having difficulty implementing his decision to quit smoking. The stress of the job made it doubly hard for the lifelong nicotine addict to break his habit.

Batman's eyes narrowed as he saw that Jim Gordon's companion was a woman. She was bundled up

in a dark cape, a scarf knotted over her hair. And it was her hair, struggling out of its covering in platinum locks, that gave her identity away.

Batman had met Madame Cassandra once before. At his wits' end while striving to bring to a close one of the Joker's insane murder sprees, he'd turned to Cassandra for help. She'd been of little assistance, but he remembered her as a sincere and serious young woman.

Not a sound betrayed him as Batman dropped down onto the lower roof. He moved through shadows thrown by the forest of air-conditioning boxes toward the waiting couple. Only when he was half-a-dozen feet away did he cough slightly to alert them to his presence.

He saw Cassandra start visibly, but Jim Gordon was long used to Batman's surreptitious comings and goings and had learned to take them in stride.

"Sorry about this." Gordon turned toward the shadows, and Batman saw that the older man looked uncomfortable, even embarrassed as he briefly nodded in Cassandra's direction. "She refuses to talk to anyone else. If I've brought you here on a wild-goose chase, call me an old fool and–"

"Never that, Commissioner," Batman said quietly, keeping it formal for the benefit of the girl.

Batman's friendship with Jim Gordon went back a long way, to the very first nights when Batman took to the rooftops as the city's guardian. A dozen years earlier, eight-year-old Bruce Wayne had stood by, young and terrified and helpless, as his parents were gunned down before his eyes in a street robbery gone wrong. The boy's life seemed to end then.

Later, when terror had turned to grief and then to guilt, the child had knelt on his parents' grave and made a solemn vow in their memory.

"Mother, Father, I promise you this," Bruce Wayne said, the tears that rolled down his cheeks lost in the driving midnight rain. "Someday, somehow, I will prevent other innocent people from dying. What happened to you will never happen to anyone else, if I have the power to stop it!"

For more than a decade, young Bruce Wayne worked obsessively to attain the goals he'd set for himself. Regular punishing exercise turned him into a perfect physical specimen. He developed reading and memory skills until he could recall almost anything he'd ever seen at will. He expanded his general knowledge until his head swam with facts and figures, and took in-depth courses on subjects as varied as forensic science and the psychology of criminality.

He traveled extensively, training under a variety of masters: detectives, martial artists, and gymnasts. The Wayne fortune meant that he could afford to employ only the very best teachers.

Finally, when he was twenty-one, he decided that his training had come to an end. After all these years, he was ready. It was time to fulfill the promise he'd made to his parents. Time for justice.

He chose the image of the bat as his disguise because it inspired fear, particularly in criminals. It never ceased to amaze Batman how the much-maligned bat was reviled as a demon, a symbol of evil and a harbinger of death, throughout the world.

But Bruce Wayne would be the bat-demon from heaven. He would help ordinary people. He would bring justice to those who mocked it. He would bring law to the lives of those who hated it.

And it would all have ended within weeks, had it not been for James Gordon.

Gordon had broken a long-running corruption racket in his own force in Chicago. Memories were long, and a lot of cops didn't like one of their own who blabbed. So Gordon was transferred to Gotham City, as harsh a way as any for a policeman to be punished.

Jim Gordon was appalled both by the lawlessness of Gotham, and the ineptitude and corruption of its police. He immediately saw an ally in this new vigilante–the "Batman," as the media called him. Both men thought the same way, both would confront any danger in the cause of what they knew was right, and both loved justice with a passion.

Sometimes, lying awake late into the night, Gordon had wished that he too could become a costumed crimefighter. No paperwork to bury him, no boss to order him around, no more petty squabbling and jealousies from his subordinates. But Gordon had a wife and child, and he owed it to them to build a reliable and stable career.