Batman - Mask of the Phantasm Read online

  As he sped away, he shot a nervous glance into the rearview mirror. The apparition lay sprawled on the hard concrete floor, one arm twitching feebly above its body. Sol grinned fiercely. He slammed on the brakes, forcing the car into a tight U-turn. “Lousy, stinkin’—this time I got you,” he rasped.

  The car took off with a squeal of tires, heading directly toward the crumpled form. The figure struggled weakly to its feet as the car hurtled toward it. Black-clad arms appeared from beneath the ragged cloak and waved mystically in Sol’s direction. A thick dark mist rose to completely envelop the figure. Sol hunched down behind the wheel, his teeth clenched in a fierce grin as he waited for the awful impact of steel crunching flesh and bones. The silver sports car plowed into the dark mist and out the other side.

  “Huh?” The gangster craned his neck over his shoulder, scanning the rooftop behind him, his jaw hanging in amazement. Black mist still clung to the car. Now it seemed to expand, pouring in through the shattered windshield and filling the interior of the speeding car.

  “Wha-a-at?” Sol swiped at the air in front of his face, completely blinded. The mist cleared a bit and he leaned forward, trying to gauge his location. Several yards in front of the racing car stood a low retaining wall.

  Beyond it was empty air.

  THREE

  Batman was racing along the elevated bridge when he heard a muffled shout followed by the protracted screech of tires. He raised his eyes to the rooftop parking lot just as the silver sports car crashed through the concrete retaining wall and sailed into the space above the walkway.

  Moving with the speed of instinct, he drew his grappling gun from his cape and fired it toward an undamaged portion of the garage roof wall. He swung out from the walkway as chunks of concrete rained down. As he made a graceful arc toward the garage, the sports car spiraled overhead and smashed nose-first into the window of one of the Grand Imperator’s suites. It hung there, its horn blaring, embedded like a silver thorn in the side of the hotel. Black smoke billowed from its back end, and shards of glass fell toward the distant ground as the car’s rear wheels spun slowly to a stop.

  Batman swung down to the ground. Expensively dressed men and women had started to pour out of the casino. He stood unnoticed in the shadows at the base of the garage, and turned to look up at the smoking wreck. As he watched, the ruined car settled a foot deeper into the hole it had punched in the side of the building. The movement caused its back door to fall open. The latch of the battered briefcase had been sprung by the crash. Now flurries of counterfeit money began to drift down onto the gathering crowd below. The bystanders gazed up in awe, many of them moving swiftly to take advantage of the unexpected windfall.

  “Hey!” A man in a tuxedo had appeared on a lower balcony of the hotel. He pointed down at the Dark Knight through the money storm. “Look—it’s him!”

  Eyes turned and other fingers began to point. Batman ignored the shouts and questions directed at him. As he turned to leave, a flicker of dark movement on the roof of the garage caught his attention.

  A dark silhouette with a pale head was standing next to the ragged gap left in the retaining wall by Chuckie Sol’s sports car. Batman stared at the apparition for a moment, then pulled out his grappling gun. Simultaneously, a cloud of thick black mist appeared out of nowhere to surround the motionless figure.

  Batman narrowed his eyes at the garage. There appeared to be only one stairwell connecting the roof to the floor beneath it. He aimed the gun and fired upward. The grapple caught on an edge of the concrete wall. The Dark Knight pressed a stud on the gun and the slender line hauled him toward the roof with a faint humming sound. He swung into the level just below the roof and raced for the stairwell, confident that whoever he had glimpsed up above had not had time to use the steps. He stepped out onto the roof and scanned the area. There was no one there.

  He raced to the parked cars and checked each one carefully. Nothing. He went to stand by the shattered wall, frowning thoughtfully as a wisp of dark vapor dissolved slowly into the night breeze. As he turned to leave, his black boot crunched on something lying on the concrete rooftop. He knelt to retrieve a two-inch fragment of clouded glass. Dropping the shard into a compartment of his utility belt, he straightened and headed back toward the stairwell.

  FOUR

  “I’m telling you, friends, it’s vigilantism at its deadliest!”

  Gotham City Councilman Arthur Reeves raised the forefinger of his right hand and looked squarely into the nearest television camera as he made his point. The crowd milling around the steps of City Hall murmured its approval as the handsome young politician paused for effect.

  “He’s playing them like a revivalist preacher,” television reporter Summer Gleeson murmured to her cameraman on the sidelines. “He’s slick, all right. Watch—now he’ll go after Gordon.”

  “Commissioner Gordon,” Reeves thundered, turning to the gray-haired man standing just behind him with a group of police officials, “I ask you. How many times are we going to let this happen?” Summer winced as the councilman’s forefinger wagged inches beneath the older man’s nose. “How many times are we going to let Batman cross the line?”

  “Let’s try to keep things in perspective, Councilman.” James Gordon raised his hands placatingly. “We don’t even know that a line’s been crossed.” Inwardly he was cursing the impulse that had made him agree to attend Reeves’s impromptu press conference. He snorted. Press conference, indeed—the way Reeves ran things, it was more like a public indictment of Gordon and his methods. All that was missing was the tar and feathers.

  “Excuse me?” Reeves blinked in surprise. “Do we not have the body of one Charlton Sol in residence at this very moment in the city morgue? If that—”

  “I’m sorry, Councilman.” Gordon raised his voice to cut through the rhetoric. “But you can’t blame Batman for what happened to Chuckie Sol.”

  “What?” Reeves gaped at the crowd, inviting them to share his astonishment. “Why on earth not?” He snatched a newspaper from an aide and held it up to the battery of TV cameras. The front page headline proclaimed GANGSTER SLAIN above a photograph of Chuckie Sol’s silver sports car embedded twelve stories up in the side of the Grand Imperator. “Numerous eyewitnesses have placed this self-styled crime fighter at the scene,” Reeves continued. “He was there and he was after Sol. And now Sol is dead.” The councilman lowered the newspaper with a doleful shake of his head. “He’s a loose cannon, Commissioner.”

  Summer Gleeson repressed a sigh. She could see that Reeves was on the verge of working himself up into a fire-and-brimstone frenzy again. The man made some sense once in a great while—but he had too much flash and far too little substance for her to take seriously. Watching the crowd’s reaction to the councilman’s charges, she had to admit that he was a world-class manipulator. Poor Gordon didn’t stand a chance.

  “It’s not just my opinion,” Reeves was saying in his most reasonable tone. “A lot of people—police officers included, I might add—have thought for quite some time that this Batman is every bit as unstable as the criminals he occasionally manages to apprehend.” The councilman gestured toward his left, where Detective Harvey Bullock was trying vainly to hide his unshaven face behind the collar of his rumpled trench coat. Gordon glared meaningfully at his subordinate.

  “Now I ask you, Commissioner—and I ask you, Gotham City”—Reeves brought his handsome face back to the camera—“just what kind of city are we running when we choose to depend on the support of a potential madman to enforce law and order?” The councilman paused for a breath, then—noticing that Gordon was moving toward the microphones with the intention of offering a rebuttal—he lifted his arms and leaned smoothly forward. “And that, concerned citizens and ladies and gentlemen of the press, is all that we have time for tonight. Thank you for coming and for your continued support—Gotham needs you!”

  Summer shook her head, watching Gordon’s expression change from dumbfounded to furious. He had a right to be upset, she reflected, scanning the crowd as they reacted to Reeves’s final words. At least for the moment, the cheers outnumbered the boos by an easy ten to one.

  “Such rot, sir.”

  Alfred Pennyworth shook his head in prim disapproval as Arthur Reeves’s passionate features shrank to a pinpoint of bluish light on the large video screen, then vanished altogether. The butler set the remote control on a nearby outcropping of stone and turned to his employer. “Why, I’ve always found you to be the very model of sanity. Oh, by the way—” He paused to make a slight adjustment to the black-and-gray costume draped over his right arm. “I’ve polished the Batboat, pressed your tights, and put away your exploding gas pellets for the evening.”

  Bruce Wayne was hunched over a long laboratory table, poking at a fragment of discolored glass with a pair of tiny forceps. He brushed a lock of dark hair back from his forehead, a wry smile tugging briefly at his lips. “Thank you, Alfred.”

  The lab table sat in the center of a wide plateau of natural rock, one of many workstations occupying different levels in the vast cavern located beneath Wayne Manor. Lights placed strategically in the vaulted ceiling shone down on an array of highly sophisticated computers and an interlocking arrangement of laboratories furnished with state-of-the-art equipment, all designed to provide the best in crime-solving techniques. Ramps connected the workstations to a gallery of strange souvenirs—trophies from past cases—and an assortment of high-tech vehicles that provided unparalleled transportation capabilities in the air, on or beneath the water, and on the highway. In addition to the two men, the cavern was host to numerous other inhabitants, their presence signaled only by the faint, ceaseless rustling of their leathery wings high above the workstations.

  Alfred left the
video monitor and crossed the plateau to peer over Bruce’s shoulder. He raised a thin black eyebrow. “Might one inquire as to the object of your current investigation, Master Bruce?”

  “It’s a piece of safety glass I found at the scene of the accident.” Bruce tugged at his chin, leaning back to regard the fragment thoughtfully. “Part of the late Chuckie Sol’s windshield, if my hunch is correct.” He reached out and pressed a small button on the console in front of him. To his right a rectangular section of metal flipped open. He placed the glass fragment into the shallow chamber and pushed the lid shut. With his left hand he tapped rapidly on a tiny keyboard.

  A magnified image of the shard appeared on a monitor mounted above the lab table, the degree of amplification specified in blue numbers in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Other information was given in green on the left. “See there?” The numbers and letters changed rapidly as Bruce’s hand played over the keyboard. “There’s a chemical residue baked onto it, as I suspected—some kind of dense, long-chain polymer.”

  “Ah.” Alfred raised the other brow. “I should have known.” He turned with a minuscule shrug and moved toward the cylindrical elevator that connected the Batcave to the mansion above. “Dinner will be served in precisely one hour, Master Bruce,” he announced over his shoulder as the door slid open. “Do try to tear yourself away from your dense chains before the vichyssoise grows too warm.”

  FIVE

  Burton Earny did not like to work, and that was about all there was to it. This was less a result of any inherent laziness, Burt believed, than the fallout from a long series of ill-suited placements in the vocational world. His first job, acquired after much protest when he was seventeen, had been at a combination coin-op laundry and soft-serve ice cream parlor down the block from his parents’ home in the sleepy surburban community of Perry Village. The Frostee Fluff occupied two halves of a modest one-story brick building. A big plywood ice cream cone sat on the shingled roof above the soft-serve half, while something that was intended to be a laundry basket piled high with soiled clothing adorned the other side. The company that manufactured the ingredients for the soft serve had supplied the ice cream cone, but the laundry basket had been designed and executed by the wife of the Frostee Fluff’s owner, and most customers told Burt that they took it to be a representation of a rather unappetizing hot fudge sundae.

  Burt was almost always miserable on the days that he worked at the Frostee Fluff, but he particularly disliked Sunday afternoons between 1 and 5 and Thursday mornings from 8 till noon. Those were the hours that the owner, Mr. Fred Datwillig, chose to spend in the bosom of his small family, leaving Burt alone to handle both sides of the enterprise.

  A single doorway connected the soft serve shop with the laundry, and a small silver servants’ bell sat attached by a string to a counter on each side. Burt quickly grew to detest the sound of those bells. Years later, certain noises still gave him goose bumps—the ringing of those little metal devices that were sometimes mounted on bicycle handlebars being the worst. Until he was in his mid-twenties, he would wake up about twice a year in a cold sweat from a nightmare in which he was standing at the exact center of the connecting doorway of the Frostee Fluff, trying to dole out Chocolate Mountains and Banana Buddies to hyperactive children with his left hand, while simultaneously keeping an army of little old ladies supplied with dryer change with his right. When his breathing had calmed, Burt would inevitably find that his alarm clock had been ringing for the past half hour, and that he was now going to lose another job due to chronic tardiness.

  In the years following his stint at the Frostee Fluff, Burt had tried his hand at a variety of vocations. From parrot wrangler at the Perry Village Pet Parlor to fry cook at the Greenfeed Health Food Café, his attempts at finding gainful employment of a rewarding nature had met uniformly with failure.

  During the summer of his twenty-eighth year, Burt and his mother and father had joined thousands of others in making the two-hour pilgrimage to the big city to attend the Gotham World’s Fair. While there, Burt had been coaxed by his parents to sign up for a battery of aptitude tests offered by a corporation that used computers to assess one’s likelihood of finding employment. The skills analysis was disappointingly inconclusive, while the examination of likes and dislikes revealed that Burt—who had only once ventured farther from Perry Village than the mall located two exits down on the interstate—craved the experience of travel more than anything else in the world. Unfortunately, one needed money to travel and a job to make money, and Burt hated to work.

  Two days after his thirty-seventh birthday, Burt Earny had left the quiet neighborhood where he had been born and headed off with a new necktie, an old suitcase, and a bus ticket to seek his fortune elsewhere. Burt had purchased the necktie himself. The suitcase and the bus ticket were provided by his parents who, while they loved their son dearly, had been planning for several years to convert his old bedroom into a showplace for Mr. Earny’s kaleidoscope collection and his wife’s macramé animals. Two days and three hours after his birthday, Burt had disembarked at the Gotham Bus Terminal, suitcase in hand.

  Surprisingly, the employment situation was not much better in the big city than it had been in the small town. Burt had already gone through three jobs (fruit waxer, fish scaler, and washroom attendant) by the time he applied for work as a chip buffer at the Shady Lady.

  The Grand Imperator Hotel had recently embarked on a campaign designed to attract a more upscale clientele to its casino, and the consultant they had engaged to choreograph their upward movement had suggested that someone be hired to sit in a ground-floor window and polish betting chips of various denominations with a chamois cloth.

  Burt felt the interview had gone well, though he had choked a bit when the discussion wandered to “previous buffing experience.” Luckily he had remembered an uncle who had shown an almost pathological fondness for polishing his old Ford pickup in the Earnys’ driveway every other afternoon, and Burt had been able to draw upon his observations of his uncle’s technique when framing his response.

  At the end of the interview, Burt left the casino and made his way down the short corridor that connected the Shady Lady with the hotel lobby. Strolling to the bank of gleaming elevators, he stepped into a waiting car and punched the button for the top floor. Apparently the highest floor was reserved for those wealthy enough to afford the penthouse suite—and access to a private elevator—for the car deposited him instead on the floor beneath. Unperturbed, Burt sauntered down the corridor to the red exit sign, pushed open the heavy metal door, and accomplished the remaining flight under his own steam. He emerged red-faced and puffing from the stairwell and went straight to a large window at the end of the carpeted hallway. He stepped up to the windowsill with his eyes closed, took a deep breath, and looked out.

  Gotham City was spread out before him in all its spangled glory. Lights winked on and off at the tops of nearby skyscrapers, blazed in executive office towers occupied at this late hour by regiments of custodial engineers, and wove red and white streamers in complicated traffic patterns beneath him. Burt dusted off a small area of the windowsill with his sleeve and set down the rumpled brown paper bag that he felt obliged to carry tucked under his right arm any time he left his tiny rented room to go forth into the city. The bag contained a camera, a birthday gift from his mother and father, given to him on the condition that he use it in another town—preferably one outside a fifty-mile radius of Perry Village.

  Burt made sure the bag was safe, leaned his elbows on the sill, and rested his round chin in his palms. He looked out over the sparkling immensity that was Gotham and gave a contented sigh.

  Then he noticed the man with the briefcase.

  A parking garage was attached to the Grand Imperator by concrete walkways on several different levels. The topmost walkway extended from the penthouse floor, accessed through a door at the other end of the corridor from the window where Burt now stood. A sudden flash of motion in the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he craned his neck to watch as a middle-aged man with a brown briefcase came jogging along just inside the outer wall of the garage on the same level as Burt. The man kept looking back over his shoulder.