If Batman had been driving blindfolded, he could still have pinpointed the moment the car crossed into Crime Alley. It wasn't just the smell – a blend of urine and cheap booze and an overtaxed sewer system – or the sound: the crunch of glass under his tires immediately announced his whereabouts. It was the feel – a tense, pregnant silence, interrupted often by drunken epithets, firecrackers or gunfire. The Narrows gave off a sullen, bitter energy Batman wanted to – but couldn't – loathe. It made him feel at home. Spiritually, he had been born here.

People living in Gotham's shrinking middle class sections often lamented the encroachment of crime in their neighborhoods. "The neighborhood is changing," someone would say. The Narrows had been the same for 40 years. Things were no worse, because they had been impossibly bad to begin with. Of course, they were no better, and during the few times in his life Batman had allowed himself to despair, this bitter reality was on the top of his list of self-designated failures.

He spent more time here than in any other section of the city and yet it remained the most problematic. Gang-bangers, drugs, illiteracy and poverty had simply sucked all of the hope from this forsaken cluster of city blocks. The only stirrings of optimism Batman had witnessed recently had not come from the impact of his feet and fists, but rather from Josh Greenberg's series of poverty programs, most of which involved significant participation from members of the aided families and an intense emphasis on education. The programs were expensive and Greenberg got a lot of flack for them from conservative council members and Gotham's tiny wealthy community, who resented the flow of tax money from their lined pockets into The Narrows.

Still, Batman thought, as he swung the car toward Nelson Rockefeller High School, a dozen families lifted out of hopelessness translated into a fewer criminals – and fewer crime victims. He wasn't sure you could put a price on that.

One of Greenberg's more successful programs was a GED course for teen parents. It let out every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30 PM at the high school and there were often fights there, ordinarily between students and punks from the neighborhood; sometimes between the students themselves. Batman always cruised by to make sure everyone got off campus in one piece. He was a little late today, but everyone seemed to have cleared out without incident….except…. He squinted at a blur of shadows just around the rear corner of the building. Something was going on back there.

He was out of the car and across the schoolyard in seconds, rounding the corner in time to pry two solid-looking girls off of a third, smaller one before some of their vicious but wild kicks split open her head. She was already bleeding from the nose and mouth.

Batman seized both attackers and cuffed them to the fence that surrounded the school's running track. His quick, efficient dispatching of the girls did absolutely nothing to stop them from cursing out their victim – and now they were mouthing off to him too. Unbelievable. Nothing seemed to scare these kids, not a single thing.

He helped the smaller girl to her feet. "You OK?"

"Yeah." Instead of gratitude towards Batman, her eyes blazed in anger towards her cuffed, cursing attackers. "They're gonna pay."

"I'm going to make them pay. You're going to go to school and give your kid a better life. How old are you?"

The girl spat blood and glared at him. "Fifteen."

"You've got to be the smart one," Batman said. "Anyone that would double up on someone half their size – they're lost. Your revenge is you get out of here and live a good life."

"They bloodied me," the girl said through gritted teeth. "I can't let them get away with that."

Inwardly, he sighed. "You're not going to press charges, are you?"

"I ain't no snitch," she replied.

"Of course not," Batman said. He didn't know how to combat this sort of warped thinking. "But you owe me, right?"

She bit her lip and rolled her eyes distrustfully toward his.

"Got a boy or a girl?" Batman asked. He saw two Gotham cops approaching. Apparently they'd spotted the Batmobile and come to investigate.

"Girl."

"Go home. Pick her up. Take her over to a mirror. Take a look at the two of you holding each other. Then imagine yourself out of that picture. She's all alone. She's got no one. Whoever raised you is raising her and they're screwing it all up. Think about whether revenge over a bloody nose is worth doing that to her. Because growing up without parents? It's not so great," he said.

Without checking to see if he'd made a dent in her street-tempered armor, he turned sharply and walked away, his cape billowing in the October breeze.

The rest of the night went much better. Two men tried to rape a middle-aged nursing assistant walking home from a bus stop, a trembling crackhead attempted to knock over a convenience store and a sniper fired a poorly aimed shot at a rookie cop as he made his way nervously down K Street. All of them resisted when Batman tried to intercede. He was grateful. The job was much more satisfying when you were able to punch someone.

It had been a busy night and he was maybe an hour away from heading home when saw them. There was just a flicker of a shadow crossing into the dull glow of a fading streetlight, but Batman felt his skin tighten like a silent alarm. This encounter would be different than the night's previous skirmishes. He parked the car a block ahead and triggered the lockdown mechanism.

The alley was lit perfectly for his needs – dark enough so that he would be invisible, with enough ambient sound so that his approach would be perfectly silent, undetectable even to the most seasoned prowler. A tinkle of broken glass and a muttered curse drew him to his quarry.

Cartoon-like is the only way he could describe the first man. He was built like Popeye's perennial nemesis, Bluto, with a massive, muscular upper torso and almost sticklike legs. His companion was dressed in black, but Batman could see his lean, muscular frame and graceful, cautious gait. Batman silently nicknamed him "the ninja" and decided he was the one to look out for.

Bluto's sweat-stained t-shirt was a midnight blue, but Batman could see darker straps encircling his shoulders and realized he was wearing something. Maybe a backpack – or a weapon.

Batman found a convenient niche in an alley wall and waited for them to pass. Neither so much as shivered as they walked by him, so close he was able to yank the nylon sack off Bluto's thick shoulders without stepping away from the mildewed brick. It was a backpack – a heavy one. Batman was pretty sure it wasn't full of religious tracts.

It took nearly five seconds for Bluto to realize he was no longer wearing the backpack and in that time Batman had determined that the contents of the bag included three bootleg videos and at least a kilo of a powdery substance that was either cocaine or corpulthesizine, an active ingredient in the Joker's lethal laughing gas, Smilex.

Bluto's reaction to losing the back-pack was loud and obscene. He immediately spun around and stomped back down the alley. His companion proved Batman right by hanging back and slipping closer to one shadowy wall. A lightning left cross to Bluto's temple retired him for the night. He crumpled onto the filthy asphalt. The ninja was running as soon as he saw his partner start to wobble.

He gave good chase, but Batman tagged him by the second block, and both men rolled onto the broken ground. Most thugs couldn't fight well at such close range. The ninja wasn't bad, but he wasn't Batman, either. In less than a minute, the caped crusader had flipped him onto his belly and cuffed him. The ninja, who hadn't said a word, struggled to catch his breath. He seemed to be waiting for Batman to speak first.

Batman hauled him up by the plastic cuffs and threw him face first against the crumbling alley wall. He positioned his lips close to the ninja's ear and whispered, "I know about your boss. Tell me where he is."

He wasn't actually sure Joker was behind this – even if the powder was corpulthesizine, it could have been a freelance gig. There were plenty of underworld types eager to sell to the Joker, who was known to pay handsomely – when he didn't just use the stuff on his connection and steal the rest. But the ninja didn't know that he was bluffing. Not a lot of people were willing to call Batman's hand.

The ninja didn't answer. Batman shoved his face into the wall by jerking up on the cuffs. The man winced in pain, but he remained silent.

"All right." Batman's voice was an ominous hiss. He wrapped his hand around the ninja's right index finger. "We can go through this finger by finger."

If Batman had really intended to break the man's finger, the ninja would have heard the snap before he felt any actual pain. Instead, Batman squeezed the digit as hard as he could and started bending it slowly against the knuckle.

The ninja gasped, "I don't know. They move."

They move.

"Joker and Fray," Batman whispered menacingly.

The ninja nodded, unintentionally banging his forehead against the brick wall.

"How often do they move?"

The ninja seemed to sense his future options involved either a prison cell or a grave and this realization sapped the fight from him. He sagged against the bricks. "I don't know."

"Where were you meeting them tonight?" Batman asked.

The ninja closed his eyes. "We weren't. Fray's got us in cells. We were supposed to wait until someone contacted us to make the exchange."

Batman had more questions, but this wasn't the place. He was careful not to break the man's elbows as he dragged him down the alleyway by the handcuffs. He was less surprised than frustrated to find that Bluto was no longer face down in the alley. Either he'd recovered extraordinarily quickly from the punch, or someone had dragged him away.

The Joker would have laughed with demented glee had he known that the Batmobile bolted by his current hideaway before dawn each morning as the caped crusader headed back to Wayne Manor. Fray had accessed the computer records of a local upscale supermarket and determined who had groceries delivered to their homes on a regular basis. He then cross-referenced those names with a variety of other services that suggested the customers in question did not get out much. Of particular attraction to the Joker was an elderly, very rich couple who lived a few mansions away from such well-heeled Gothamites as Orest Lyakhovolska and Bruce Wayne. Joker did not believe lying low had to be an uncomfortable experience. Nor did he believe it was particularly fair of some people to lay claim to a longer lifespan than nature intended. All of these vitamins and miracle drugs had cluttered up the world with old people, he remarked airily to Fray, who might not have heard him through the gas masks they wore as they watched the aged couple writhe on the floor, laughing themselves to death.

That had been several days ago, and in that time they had lost one of their best henchmen, Michael Hartrampf, who was now pacing a padded cage at Arkham Asylum. In the last hour, there had been word that a second member of the gang had fallen to Batman. Fray seethed, but the Joker took the news with his usual maniacal stride.

"Seannie, Seannie, heads do roll," he cooed as Fray paced the length of the frilly, antique-strewn living room. "But we can always play a lovely game of croquet with them later."

Fray twisted towards toward his hero and nearly spat the words, "Langer was one of our best men. That bastard –" he meant Batman.

"Did what he does best, Seannie," Joker said. "He's caught in a cycle, you see – find the bad guy, punch the bad guy, jail the bad guy. He's been doing it for 30 years." A thought struck him and he started giggling madly. "Do you know the definition of insanity?" he asked Fray, who shrugged morosely.

"It's doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." The Joker cackled. "Gives you a little insight into who's really wacko, doesn't it? Does Gotham look any safer to you?

"Anyway, Langer was nothing but a gymnast with a Bruce Lee complex," he added. "It's losing Michael that breaks my heart."

"Yeah, and what the fuck was that about?" snapped Fray, whose resentment of Batman had snowballed into irrational proportions. "When does Bats need half the Justice League to take in one man?"

"Well, Michael isn't just one man, as you know," said Joker. "Though it was a precious combination that bested him: A bat and two bimbos." He looked immensely pleased with himself. "Wouldn't that be a lovely name for a band?"

"That bitch, Quiver," said Fray. "She's been a real pest since she moved here. You think Bats is boning her?"

"His friend Arsenal's daughter, Seannie? You know better than that."

"And why's Superwoman hanging around so much? I thought she lived in Metropolis," Fray groused.

"She's a little worldlier than her father," said Joker thoughtfully. "You do have a point. Batman is pesky enough. We might want to do something before the whole Justice League moves to Gotham."

"Like what?" The Joker's tone intrigued Fray enough to calm him.

"Oh… something special. With sprinkles on it." The Joker's grin grew wider as his new idea began to take form. "Let's take a stroll through the Yellow Pages under Big Guns. I'll need some pretty powerful alliances to take on the Justice League."

Fray's foul mood returned. "I'm a powerful alliance," he said. "I'm telling you, I took down Bat –"

"Oh, Seannie, you have got to let that go. Liberating me from Arkham – and the splash you made downtown with those adorable butterflies – was more than enough to prove your worth."

"He was dead!" shouted Fray. "I nearly ripped his freakin' leg off!"

"And yet he was swinging around Gotham a day or two later," Joker said. "Legs and all."

"It – it was a robot or something," Fray sputtered. Batman's Justice League partners had taken turns masquerading as their teammate while he recovered from his gruesome injuries, but the technopath had no way of knowing that.

"A batbot? Do you really think it could have fooled so many people?" asked the Joker. "Honestly, Seannie, it's all right."

No, thought Fray. It wasn't. It wouldn't be all right until he finished what he'd started.

Next Chapter: A one-man gang, Harvey Dent, metaphors and lots of tea.