CHAPTER 7
It was one forty am.
He had less than twenty minutes to disarm whatever explosives Two Face had planted in the twin chambers, Gotham's centres of law and commerce.
The city's most famous twins.
Having faked, with some aplomb, a case of severe stomach complaint, Bruce Wayne had absented himself from the restaurant and the company of his spurious 'date'. Less than a minute later he was scrambling up the fire exit stairs to the roof.
I was wrong.
I cannot be wrong. Ever.
Night security, maintenance, employees working all night shifts. All of them die in fire and rubble if I fail now.
He tore open his shirt to reveal the midnight coloured bat armour, the golden oval of his insignia gleamed in the fluorescent lights as he dashed beneath them.
Seconds later he was on the roof, the snare drum sound of his footfalls on the gravel quickly smothered by the night's misty chill. Discarded designer clothing danced briefly in the slight breeze before fluttering gently to rest amongst the gravel. A booted foot on the raised ledge of the roof, The Batman pulled his cowl down over his face and fixed his glare on the twin chambers. They seemed to clamour for his attention, stretching pleadingly out past Gotham's famous skyline like enormous concrete arms.
He wrenched the grapple gun from out of his belt as images of broken, burned bodies crushed by tons of smouldering rubble taunted him.
Nobody dies tonight, The Dark Knight swore, Not on my watch.
In his minds eye, the imagined casualties of Two Face's diabolical scheme gazed up at him from beneath great chunks of concrete and twisted iron girder. Their blank stare was pregnant with the rebuke of potential failure.
He would not, could not fail.
The thought stayed with him as he spread his leathery black wings and plunged into the inky darkness of the Gotham night.
"Just hurry it up will ya. We don't got all day."
Mark "Nitro" Abraham thought that Keefe looked particularly ape-like in the wan, yellow glow of the flashlight. At fifty three he had hoped to be retired by now. As a younger man he thought that he would have been made for life over ten years ago.
In a place like Gotham, there's always someone who wants something blown up, right?
He hadn't realised quite how much jail time the average Gotham City working man faced between jobs, nor how much competition would start springing up here, there and everywhere when The Bat came to town. Firebug this, Firefly that. These days everyone had a gimmick.
"Yo, Nitro! I'm talkin' to youse."
Thugs today had appalling grammar. Did this strategically shaved primate have any idea how delicate the operation he was performing was? It was like asking a heart surgeon to 'hurry up' a triple bypass or asking Botticelli to 'hurry up' The Birth of Venus.
Yes, he liked that second simile.
"Mr Keefe, the explosive I am currently engineering is extremely complex. Your employer and mine paid me for my best work. My best work takes time."
Yes, Two Face was a man of intelligence and sophistication. A man who knew good work when he saw it. He probably hated being lumbered with this goon of Cobblepot's as much as Nitro did.
Keefe spat on the floor and cursed.
"Look, man. I gots me a schedule to keep. These buildings gotta blow up in ten. No, wait-" he checked his watch and corrected himself, "Nine minutes and forty seconds and, personally I'd like to get clear before that."
Nitro caught his hand with the soldering iron and became very annoyed.
"A little space, please, Mr Keefe." He hissed.
Enraged, Keefe returned to the building's floor plan which he lay out flat on the ground. He shone his flashlight over the salient points.
Nitro and his hissy fits aside, everything was going pretty well.
The two men worked in silence. Keefe started at a slight rustling, but swinging his flashlight around the room yielded nothing but yellow stained patches of concrete.
"Rats." He reasoned with a shudder, "I hate rats."
Nitro ignored him, hunched over his detonator.
Keefe was getting agitated.
He had been waiting in this cramped basement for hours. Busting the door open for Nitro and the others had been a short reprieve from sitting there all night but he balked at the idea of sitting around again while this old fart did his thing.
Eight minutes.
"I'm gonna go check on Sykes." He told Nitro who gave no indication of having heard him.
Prick.
He strode to the foot of the stairs leading to the ground floor, hopping up the first few and called up;
"Yo, Sykes! We ready to roll?"
Silence.
"What the Hell is this, National Ignore Me Day?"
He shone his flashlight up the stairs to illuminate his colleague who sat at the floor at the top of the stairs, his knees drawn up to his head.
"Sykes, if you've fallen asleep I swear to God-"
As he ascended the stairs the beam of the flashlight caused a silvery strand of drool to wink at him from the corner of Sykes' mouth. His pace slowed. He noticed the deep but gentle rise and fall of his accomplice's torso as he breathed. Sykes wasn't sleeping he was-
"Ah, Hell!"
Turning on his heels Keefe sprinted back down the stairs.
"Nitro!" he roared, "Finish up, we gotta get-"
Keefe's flashlight caught a swirl of yellow fabric.
"'Sup?"
Keefe raised his Glock and fired blindly into the shadowy confines of the basement below.
"It's screwed!"
He squawked as he strode down the corridor. With the butt of his umbrella handle The Penguin rapped on the door of what was, for the moment, Two Face's office. He thrust a flipper forward, shoving the door open with his considerable weight. It banged loudly on the adjacent wall.
"Dent, it's screwed. Everything's screwed."
Two Face was sitting, perched on his mahogany desk. Cradled in the crook of his neck was a telephone receiver. On the visible, unscarred side of his face Harvey Dent wore a smile of wry amusement.
"DENT! Are you listening to ?"
"Excuse me one moment, would you?" Two Face said calmly into the telephone. He looked up and fixed The Penguin with a murderous stare that caused even the hardened criminal to gulp.
"Shut. Up!" he growled through his teeth.
The Penguin simply stood agape. His flipper tightened around the trigger set into the handle of his umbrella. Nobody spoke to Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot like that.
Hesitant, dumbfounded he raised the umbrella so that its lethal point was directed at his scarred co-conspirator. He was halfway through the motion when the silvery barrel of a nickel plated Beretta rushed up to meet him.
"You'd be wasting your time." Two Face continued, "They don't know anything."
Two Face didn't even look up, still occupied by his telephone call. He chuckled slightly in response to something that was said on the other line, replying in his richest baritone.
"Who do you think you're dealing with boy? Nigma? I will broadcast my intentions in my own time. You just rest your tired little wings. You have a lot of legwork in front of you."
With a self assured little twitch of a smile Two Face hung up the phone and turned his attention to The Penguin. The Beretta was still trained in inch or so in front of his long, beak like nose.
There was an intense silence for two or three seconds that Two Face enjoyed immensely. The feeling of power over this stunted parody of a criminal mastermind was almost palpable.
Are we going to kill him?
Two Face cocked his head to one side, the acid ravaged half clenched into a wince of indecision. The Penguin felt like some kind of germ being studied in a Petri dish.
Don't know… Maybe.
But he could still be useful. Think strategy.
Strategy my freckled ass, Dent. Don't think I don't see what you're doing here.
The Penguin had spent enough time around Two Face to know when his two consciousnesses were at odds with one another and welcomed the opportunity for a distraction.
"W-Was that?" He stuttered, taking a half step back.
"The kid. The kid got to them first." Two Face, no it was more like Dent, replied.
"Then the bomb is-"
"Disarmed."
The Penguin gave a surprised squawk. If he had actually had tail feathers it would be the sound he made if one were yanked out.
"But... But, now how can we issue our demands?" he began to waddle agitatedly, his concern for money and status overriding his fear of the pistol still aimed at him.
"There are no demands." The reply was murmured, almost dreamy.
"Then… what about the money? What about-"
"THIS ISN'T ABOUT MONEY!" The roaring reply could have come from the throat of Lucifer himself, so raw was its malevolent rage. Two Face was clearly back behind the wheel.
"Not about money?" The Penguin was dumbfounded. His top lip twitched comically, "Are you insane?!"
"Demonstrably." Two Face replied calmly, fishing in his breast pocket for his coin.
Once again Oswald Cobblepot stood, paralysed by fear, as the silver dollar performed its decisive cartwheel before neatly clapping into Dent's waiting fist. His piercing eyes took their time drawing a line, like a blade, between the coin and Cobblepot.
With a mild grimace of irritation Two Face rose and strode out of the room.
"Lucky." He muttered.
"Lucky fat bird."
