The silence inside the bank was deafening. There was an incredible tension in the air that was shared by everyone, even the henchmen inside the bank wearing clown masks. Shared by everyone except one man, that is.
Suddenly, though, the silence was shattered by the ringing of a phone in the back of the bank.
"Hey boss," one of the henchmen, who appeared to be second-in-command, called across the bank toward the manager's office, "we've got a phone call out here."
"Well Marks," came a cold, high voice from the office, "the logical thing to do would be to answer it, isn't it?"
"Yes sir."
Marks, who was a lumbering tower of a man strode quickly towards the phone and nervously answered it.
"Hello?"
"This is Lieutenant James Gordon of the Gotham City Police Department, to whom am I speaking?"
Marks hemmed and hawed for a moment, and Gordon, sensing that he was not speaking to anyone of significance, quickly replied to Marks' nothing answer, "listen, I don't know if you're friend or foe, but I need to speak to the man in charge. Is he there? Is the Joker there for me to talk to?"
Again, Marks froze up, unable to form coherent sentences, before settling on, "Hold on," as his response.
Marks quickly shuffled toward the bank manager's office and called out, "Hey Boss, I need you out here now."
With this, a groan of disdain echoed out of the office, quickly followed by footsteps moving across the marble floor and appearing out of the darkness, clad head to toe in purple with a wicked smile of evil upon his face and an aura of supreme confidence around him stood the source of all this chaos, the Joker himself.
"I knew that job was going to be too tough for you Marks." The Joker yelled at his henchman, mocking him and smiling a wide, despicable grin.
"It's Gordon, he wants to talk to you."
"OF COURSE HE WANTS TO TALK TO ME! Are you serious right now? Who do you think he's going to want to talk to? You?" And with that, the Joker lets loose a deafening cackle, clearly very amused by his own attempt at humor. "What did you tell him Marks?"
"I-I-I told him to hold on."
"Hold On? What the hell does that mean? Are we a customer service line? Hold on? You know what you're supposed to tell him? I'll show you, how about that?"
The Joker walks across the room, picks up the phone, and realizes that Marks hadn't actually even managed to put Gordon on hold. He sighs, shakes his head, and says into the phone, "Thank you for holding for Joker, but we regret to inform he cannot come to the phone right now, please leave your name and number and he'll get right back to you. Have a good day buh-bye," and, clearly satisfied with himself, the Joker slams the phone back into place, hanging up on Gordon. Clearly furious with Marks, the Joker tears the phone out of the wall and smashes it against the wall. "Marks, it's time for you to do something useful. Come here." Clearly eager to try and appease the psychotic villain, Marks comes running towards the Joker who reaches deep inside his purple coat, whips out a gun, aims and fires a round right into Marks' face. "Aahh, much better." He looks sharply at the rest of his henchmen, who are clearly started and says snidely to them, "what were expecting to happen, the gun to shoot out a flag saying BANG! on it?"
Seeming to feel things were resolved, the Joker walks back toward the manager's office and calls out "Jackson, you're in command out here now, please do try to do a little better job than your predecessor."
Outside the bank, Jim Gordon, clearly frustrated by the fact that he had been wildly unsuccessful in his first attempt at contact with the Joker, re-dialed the same number, but this time there was no signal to be found, a clear sign the phone had been disabled.
"Get me the numbers of the other phones inside that bank," Gordon called out, and was instantly rewarded with several new numbers to call.
"Gordon, hold on a second," came the familiar voice of Police Commissioner Hughes. "What's the story Jim?"
"The Joker and roughly 10 of his men have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 civilians hostage."
"How did we get these numbers?"
"We tapped into the surveillance camera footage. Before you even bother asking, I'll tell you that the Joker had his men disable the cameras before he entered the building, so we still don't have any clue what the real Joker looks like, and all his men had on clown masks."
"Have we tried making contact," was the police commissioner's next question, though Gordon was hoping that it wouldn't be.
"Yes, I just tried, sir, but was quite unsuccessful."
"What happened?"
"Well I got through to one of the underlings inside and he couldn't have been any less competent, so I asked for the Joker, and he went off to try to find him and forgot to put me on hold. I heard the Joker berating him in the background, and then he picked the phone up and promptly did an impersonation of an answering machine before hanging up on me. It seems that phone has since been disabled."
"So, wait a minute, you actually spoke to the Joker? Well, congratulations Jim because you are the first one to have recorded contact with the man. On the down side, though Jim, I don't think I have to tell you that isn't quite the result we hoped for in our first contact with him."
"Listen what else could I have done there, he didn't give me a chance to speak," Gordon protested, but was quickly quieted as Hughes continued on as if he hadn't heard Gordon speak at all.
"We need to keep trying, try the other lines if that one has been disabled. He's waiting, but if he doesn't want to talk to us, or at least is making it seem as if he doesn't want to talk to us then there must be something else that he has in mind." Hughes said as he began to think out loud.
"Agreed" was the only reply Gordon would give.
"What could he be waiting on then?" Hughes seemed vexed at this thought, but his train of thought was quickly interrupted by a clamor in the background.
Gordon stood up at this moment and said aloud to the commissioner, "maybe it's not WHAT he's waiting for commish, but WHOM.
Hughes turned around to see where Gordon and the rest of the crowd were looking, and saw a lone figure walking towards them from next to the bank, Batman had at last come for what seemed like his inevitable showdown with the Joker.