A silent puff of air came from between the
Batman’s lips. He opened his eyes as the 30 minutes finally elapsed. He placed
his hands on the steel cable in which his ankles had been supporting him, and
flipped himself around and downward. An acrobatic triple followed, with a tumble
raising him into fighting stance as he struck at the dummy in front of him…
shearing the head clean off. He
stood motionless for a moment. Then calmly spoke out loud to the recording
device near his practice area.
“Exercise failed. Excessive damage to dummy indicates either a loss of
equilibrium after protracted inversion, or a deteriorated mental faculty due to
inactivity. Daily regimen must be increased.”
He stopped speaking and walked toward the car. “Sloppy.”
The word echoed in his head. “You’ve grown sloppy.”
In the past, periodic lulls in criminal activity made him restless, and
he’d channeled the restlessness into longer and more vigorous workouts.
This time, what had he done with the precious boon?
Played footsie with Catwoman. No, that wasn’t fair. Romancing
Selina was the first non-Batman decision he’d made in a long time that worked
out okay. If his concentration was
off—and it most certainly was—it didn’t take the World’s Greatest
Detective to work out why: As the Batmobile cruised downtown the day’s headlines scrolled over a lighted marquee
in Gotham Plaza: FOUR DAYS SINCE
ARKHAM ESCAPE! CRIME WAVE CONTINUES! POLICE STYMIED…
Batman stymied.
Other than Catwoman, the only criminal he ever felt conflicted going up
against was Two-Face. Harvey Dent
had been a friend and an ally. Dent,
Gordon and Batman had taken an oath, like some medieval brotherhood, to draw a
line against the evil and drive it from Gotham for good. Where would they all be now if the acid hadn’t scarred
Harvey’s face and shattered his mind before they could even begin the task.
It was never pleasant taking down a friend.
Batman dealt with it by telling himself that this monster wasn’t his
friend– Two-Face was the thing that killed his friend.
Except Harvey Dent wasn’t dead. Harvey,
it turned out, was Selina’s friend. He dragged her to karaoke bars the way
he had once done his colleagues from the DA’s office. He’d told her the same stories:
the time his fraternity rigged the dance marathon and how he took the bar
exam with a hangover. He extorted the same hopeless wagers from the rogues on
the eve of the Harvard-Yale game as he had once done from Bruce Wayne.
Harvey Dent was very much alive inside Two-Face, and both Bruce and Batman had
written him off completely.
Now Two-Face had escaped—yet
again. What the hell were they running at Arkham
anyway, a Bed and Breakfast for the criminally insane?
It was less than a month since Dent was captured.
Now he was free again, and almost immediately he’d embarked on a
crime-spree—but not a typical Two-Face crime spree.
There was no Gemini or Janus tie-ins at any of his targets, no 2s in
the addresses or dates.
It wasn’t possible.
Obsessive
psychotics don’t wake up one morning and simply drop the core symbol of their
psychosis. Something very bad was
happening, and Batman knew if he didn’t figure out what, there was going to be
a double-digit body count.
What was even stranger than Two-Face’s break from his theme was the
peculiar silence of the witnesses. There
were police and lawyers at some of the locations, people who normally
remain calm and observant in a crisis, but their recollections were just as
vague as the civilians who were too terrified to notice much of anything.
Batman’s reverie was cut off by the appearance of the signal.
Damn.
Probably another useless status-report.
Gordon would’ve known not to bother him with trivia Batman could get from
news reports. The replacement
hadn’t learned yet.
As always, Batman neared the roof of Police HQ to observe before making his
presence known. This began as a
simple precaution: in the early days, his alliance with the police was
uncertain and strained. He had to
be prepared for a double-cross. In
the years that followed, it became his trademark.
He knew Gordon wasn’t planning anything underhanded, but he watched and
waited anyway, picking his moment to materialize without warning, like a spirit
of the night.
As he watched now, Batman couldn’t quite believe his eyes.
There was a figure from the past waiting for him, but it wasn’t
Gordon… It was Harvey Dent.
Fifteen minutes later, Batman understood why none of the law-enforcement witnesses
volunteered any details: They
weren’t random by-standers. Two-Face
was deliberately seeking out Harvey’s old friends, allies and colleagues, forcing them to witness his transformation—not into Two-Face, but into a
personification of raw rage and pain.
Before Batman could make his presence known on the rooftop, a hapless
patrolman arrived on the scene. Gordon’s
mutton-headed replacement couldn’t be bothered to check on the unauthorized
use of the signal himself and had sent this rookie. Idiot.
Two-Face leveled a gun at the rookie’s head, produced his coin to give the
condemned man the customary 50-50 chance for a reprieve—but instead of
tossing the coin, he railed against the night sky like King Lear, screaming with
a passion seldom seen outside of grand opera.
He denounced the hypocrisy of law, grounding tenets of freedom in a legacy of
slavery…
He damned lawmakers, insulating their own power rather than any upholding any
concept of right and wrong…
He cursed lawyers that care more about winning than punishing the guilty or
freeing the innocent…
He denounced a police force mired in racism and corruption…
And then he looked directly at the blackness where Batman lurked and
condemned the hypocrisy of vigilantes, claiming to be instruments of justice
while violating every principle of due process and constitutional protections…
It might have been an eloquent argument if he was addressing the Supreme
Court, or perhaps making the nominating speech at a political convention, but
it was a horrifying display delivered only to the moon and stars by a madman.
It was a horrifying display, even to those (especially to those) hardened to
the dementia and violence of costumed criminals.
No one who felt any sense of commonality with the one-time district
attorney could escape the haunting idea that, but for a wrong move or a quirk of
fate, they could become that.
With a trembling hand, Two-Face held out his coin and screamed that chance
was a faithless bitch. Good side
up, he would shoot the patrolman, scarred side up he would shoot himself.
Then he hurled the coin off the roof, and with a lightning move sent the
patrolman after it. Batman acted quickly, firing his grappling line in time to
save the patrolman. Unable to
prejudge the arc of descent or the effect of the patrolman’s added weight, the
landing on an adjacent rooftop was rough and painful.
By the time Batman recovered himself, Two-Face was long gone.
To be continued…
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