~Three~


The dark, silent stillness of the aptly named "Crime Alley" was broken by the whisper-soft pattering of a rat in search of its next meal. Whiskers twitching in anticipation, the creature edged toward an overflowing bin of garbage, ready to pounce on the decaying contents inside, when a sudden strident whining sound from above startled it, sending it scampering down the other end of the alley.

Batman, unaware that he'd just spoiled the dinner plans of a very hungry animal, took his jets gradually offline, bringing himself and Max slowly down to the narrow, dark space. They landed softly, with a barely audible thump -- and the area was once again blanketed in an ominous silence.

Terry sighed softly as his wings retracted, and Max released him, turning away to adjust portions of her costume that had shifted during the flight. "Well . . . here we are. The heart of Gotham City."

"The heart? Smells more like the armpit." She sounded less than thrilled as she looked around the shadowy locale. "So this is where the criminal element does its thing, huh? An abandoned alleyway in the wrong side of town. How typical."

"Actually, the crooks tend to stay away from this place, well - maybe except for a stray Joker or two." He looked around instinctively. "Today's creeps do their dirt behind closed doors in boardrooms . . . labs . . .bedrooms . . ."

"~Bedrooms?~"

"You'd be surprised." He peered down the alley, his eyes focusing on the squat buildings visible just at the end of the path. "Let's go this way," he said, nodding in the direction of the buildings. "We'll have more of a selection."

"Great . . . oh, yuck." She kicked in disgust at an enterprising rat that had been bold enough to emerge from the trash give her boots an exploratory sniff. "I can't believe how run-down they've let this section get. It's the ~historical~ part of the city, for goodness sakes. And Gotham's one of the oldest cities in the nation. You'd think they'd want keep it spruced up for the tourists, at least."

"Wayne told me that Old Town was never much of a tourist attraction after the 1960s," Terry said as they moved cautiously down the alley. "The factories all moved to the outskirts of town then, and a lot of people moved with them. The city just lost interest."

"It's a shame." She pressed closer to him, and he instinctively wound an arm around her shoulders, guiding her down the path. The lenses in his cowl were outfitted with a night vision option, making the murky passageway much more navigable. They wound their way around dumpsters and boxes and shapeless castoffs. "But the preservation should do something to bring it back to what it used to be."

"Uh huh." They exited the alley and rounded a corner, moving toward a row of dark buildings. Terry glanced to his right, shivering slightly when he caught sight of the Majestic Theater - the theater that a young Bruce Wayne watched the movie "Zorro" with his parents - the last outing Bruce would have with them. Terry's breath nearly left him when he realized that the alley he and Max had just been in was more than likely the alley in which Bruce watched his parents die - both of them killed in cold blood.

"You're shivering again." Max had linked arms with him, and they walked down the dimly lit street arm-in-arm, passing moldering buildings and scrawny alley cats scrounging for scraps. "I thought your suit was insulated."

"It is, and I'm not cold." His eyes darted back to the alley. "This place just gives me the creeps sometimes."

"I know what you mean . . . but then, everything is scarier in the dark, right?"

"Maybe." His eyes flicked to a square, sprawling building directly across from where they were walking. It was a structure built low to the ground - well, low in relation to the taller buildings surrounding it. Like the other buildings, it looked as if it'd seen better days and like it was about to see worse. It was boarded up like the rest, planks of wood covering doors and windows in uneven X-shaped crosses. The brick façade was crumbling into gritty heaps that powdered the sidewalk and street, and the immediate area around it was covered in refuse and waste. Terry looked up - noticing a faint outline where a sign had lain. He couldn't make out some of the letters, even with his enhanced vision, but he could discern enough of the writing to guess at what the building had once been.

"Looks like it says . . .Marty's . . . Furs?" He squinted upward. "Hmmm . . . a fur coat ~factory~? Here? That doesn't make much sense."

"No. It doesn't. Let's see what we've got." Terry started as he noticed Max typing away on her personal data assistant. "Hmm . . . all right, here we go: Marthey's ~Furnishings~ . . . opened in 1950, closed in 2008. Site of the biggest rally against labor practices in history . . . made four-poster beds for eight presidents, three kings, five prime ministers and one shah of Iran . . . oh, and get this, Ter - it was razed in 1994, bought and built up again by . . . guess who?" She misread his stunned expression as ignorance, and gave him an exasperated smile. "Wayne Enterprises. A neat little coincidence, huh?"

"Nothing about Wayne is coincidence." He gave her a searching look. "Max . . where'd you keep ~that~ stashed? The suit has pockets I don't know about?"

"My little secret." She grinned. He reeled, his mind racing with all sorts of possibilities on where she could have hidden it. "But I think we've found our test spot."

"Good a place as any," he agreed as they crossed over, advancing toward the still edifice. "Wayne really tore this place down? I wonder . . ."

"What?" She ran a little ahead of him, the click of her heels against the sidewalk echoed through the street. Reaching the building first, she hunted around the front, inspecting the place. "Watch your step . . . there's a lot of junk around here."

"It's just that the old guy is all about preservation." Batman joined her at the front of the building, carefully sidestepping gravel and shards of broken glass. "He fought Derek Powers and the twips who wanted to trash this whole section and build one of their multiplexes. This place had a lot of history; it's not like the old guy to knock something like this down."

"Maybe he didn't know." Max tapped a few keys on her PDA. "Didn't you tell me once that he really didn't get involved a lot in the day-to-day stuff of his company?"

"Yeah. He had . . . other things to do. That's why he had Lucius Fox - the guy who founded FoxTeca - pretty much in charge of Wayne Enterprises. But it's still kind of weird." Terry took a step back and let his gaze climb higher up the building's walls. Several dozen feet above ground, he noticed another patchwork of wooden planks. "Hey . . . there're windows up there. They're kinda high up . . . guess there weren't any offices with a view in ~this~ place."

"Hmmm . . ." Max appeared to be enthralled with something on the electronic device. "Interesting. In the property records for this building, it says that the original place was deemed "unsound" after getting damaged in a fire that started at the place next door. That's why it was torn down." They both glanced over at the vacant lot adjacent to the furniture factory. The emptiness seemed sinister; almost like a living thing -- an evil living thing, lying in wait in the shadows, waiting and ready to pounce.

"The fire totally took the other building out, and it spread to the upper level of this one. They were able to rebuild it in a year, and . . ." she trailed of with a gasp, and Terry spun quickly, frowning slightly.

"What is it?"

Max continued to stare at the device, before looking up at Terry. Her eyes glittered from the eyeholes in her mask, and her expression was mixture of bemusement and excitement, tempered with a little awe.

"The place that burned down next door? It was once a Wayne property, but it changed owners in the late '80s. Says here that it was a place that manufactured double-barreled guns . . . and was the reputed hideout of mobster king and former Gotham D.A. Harvey Dent -- a.k.a. Two-Face -- burned to the ground during an attempt to arrest him on smuggling charges."

They both fell silent a moment, staring again at the empty lot, then at the abandoned factory, and then at each other. The smile that spread across his face was gratified and smug. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, muttering something that was swallowed up by the wind.

"What was that, Max?" he asked innocently, cocking his head. "I couldn't quite hear you."

She glowered at him, her lips pressed into a tight line beneath the cowl. "I said . . . looks like I was wrong."

"Sorry . . . I think my ears are on the fritz." He playfully banged his hand against the top of his cowl. "Could you repeat, please?"

She walked over to him, her mouth twisted into a sneer. Bring her face so close to his that their noses were almost touching, she looked into his eyes - or, rather, the lenses built into the mask - and held his gaze. Terry's breath caught in his throat, and he willed himself not to stare at the full lips as she spoke to him. Speaking in a low, but steady tone, she said, slowly and deliberately. "It. Looks. Like. I. Was. Wrong." She punctuated every word with a poke at his chest - right smack in the middle of the Bat symbol.

Max stepped back a little, and brought her hand to her forehead. "Holy hell. They did it. ~He~ did it." She looked up at him, grinning in wonder and disbelief. "He really did it."

Terry smiled back, his chest tingling slightly where she had poked him. "Yeah. He sure did . . . and now, it's time to find out how."

He went over to the front entrance of the place, noticing with some surprise that the boards in the doorway had been pried away, exposing the rusted door. Even more surprising to Batman, however, was that the door was slightly ajar, allowing him a glimpse of the dank, dark interior. "That's strange. All the places around here should be locked up tight . . . wonder why this one's not."

"Revitalization work gets pumping next month." She was by his side, trying to peer around his shoulder and into the gloom. "Maybe they're going in and cleaning up the places first. These buildings have been closed for decades, there's probably all sorts of junk inside."

"Hmmm." Terry wavered a moment. He had a strange feeling about the place. It was not necessarily a bad feeling, but it wasn't a good feeling, either. Just strange. "Maybe," he said uneasily. "Wayne says they're already behind schedule. But anyway, I guess we better get going." He shifted his gaze over to her. "You ready for this?"

"Guess so . . ." She tugged at her mask, and ran her hands down her sides, smoothing out the suit. Terry watched in covert admiration, wondering for the zillionth time if Barbara Gordon had looked as incredible in her costume as Max did in hers. If she did, he thought wryly, it's no wonder the old guy fell for her.

He stopped short at the thought. ~Focus, McGinnis. Focus.~ Terry again faced the door, exhaling slowly, every muscle in his body on high alert and prepared for the job before him. He was surprised at his nervousness. It was strange that he felt so anxious, but then, this was a very important exercise to him. A true test of his Batman mettle would come that night, because now that he knew without a doubt that Bruce had escaped a fiery death, his desire to figure out how it had been done grew until he was hardly able to think straight. But he knew he had to if he wanted to have any chance of solving this little mystery..

"Okay," he said, stepping up to the door, his hand poised to push it open. He got a Batarang ready just in case whoever - or whatever - had opened the door was still in there. "Now remember -- once we step through this door, I'm the Batman of the past, and you're Rob-- uh, his costumed partner. And we take it from there. All right?"

"Okay." She stood next to him, her voice low and soft. "Ter - er - Batman?"

"Yeah?" He regarded her curiously. Her eyes were downcast and she held herself aloof from him. He wondered if she was having second thoughts about going in. "Max? What's wrong?"

"You can say it, if you want," she paused. "I know you want to."

He flinched slightly. "What do you mean? I wasn't going to say anything. What'd you think I was going to say?"

"That you told me so. That I never should have doubted. . . . you know." Max wrapped her arms loosely around her body, a gesture Terry found both touching and slightly sad. "I'm sorry I didn't believe you . . . or him."

"Max," he said, resting his hand on her arm. "It's okay. You never doubted us. You always knew it was true."

"What are you talking about?" she asked, puzzled. "I said it was all a scam."

"Yeah, that's what you ~said~. But you didn't ~really~ believe it . . . 'cause if you did, you wouldn't be here with me now." He rubbed her shoulder gently. "And I want you to know . . . I appreciate it. I appreciate your always believing in me, Max."

"You've earned it," she said with a nod, squaring her shoulders. "So let's do this. We go in . . . and then get ~out~ without the flames getting us."

"Deal." He pushed the door open, wincing as it groaned on its hinges, slowly swinging inward, and exposing the blackness within. He did a UV scan of the interior, but did not pick up any heat patterns any living thing. Still, a feeling of discomfort surrounded him, and he reminded himself to play it cool and cautious . . . for while he was used to hairy situations, and Max had been in her fair share of tight spots, he had to be mindful of her safety.

"I'll go first; you never know what you might find in here," he said, taking a few small steps forward. "Stay behind me."

"I always am," she answered, holding onto his elbow and allowing herself to be guided into the dim interior.

Terry smiled. "I know," he said, and they were soon swallowed up by the darkness.

*****