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Most things become clear if you knew where to look.
Those jumps. I was so young when I saw the Flying Graysons, but I remembered. The jumps took me to Dick Grayson. Dick Grayson took me to his adoptive sister.
You can see just about anything if you know where to look. There's just one thing I haven't figured out yet: Where is Batman?
"I don't know," Barbara said, "I only met him as Batman, and even then only a few times. Ow, Dick!"
"Pain is the body's way of telling you something is wrong," Dick growled as he scrubbed out the bullet graze on his sister's arm.
Her blood swirled through the basin of soapy water between them. I stood between the curtained windows and changed into civvies. I knew her story: She was inspired by Batman from afar and put on his costume after he disappeared. Her pesky little brother Dick found her out, the way little brothers do, and after some threats and arm-wrestling decided to help. "I know you don't know. You must have looked, though," I said.
"Only a hundred times." Barbara frowned at Dick. Dick frowned back. He hated that she was the Bat, but he got training as a paramedic for occasions like this. He threatened more than once to tell my parents, but he dipped into his trust fund and bought me a motorcycle to match Barbara's. Her favorite marshmallow, Barbara said.
"Does it matter?" Dick asked. "He was the Bat. He stopped. Babs, because apparently someone dropped her on her head when she was a baby, took up the mask."
"It matters," I said. "Whoever killed him will probably come after Barbara, too."
Barbara looked up at me. "Do you really think he's dead?"
I thought back to the wind against my face as we swung through the buildings, the elation of stopping a bank robbery with smarts and fists. "I don't see how he could just stop," I said.
Dick made a face and taped a bandage over Barbara's arm.
I looked into it in the library during lunch and study hall the next day. Sure, it's just high school, but we had the Gotham Gazette on microfilm all the same.
The Bat started flying four years ago. The Batman was operating at least four years before that. Barbara said they overlapped by about a month. The newspapers don't know this, of course; they think it's the same Bat. A lady reporter even made a feminist point about it in a column: How telling that everyone thought Gotham's protector had to be male.
They don't look closely enough at their own pictures. Six years ago, someone snapped a decent picture of the Batman standing on the dog-faced gargoyle on St. Anthony's. Two years ago, someone else caught the Bat in the same pose. Blurry, sure, but you can compare the length of each shin to the head of the gargoyle and spot the difference. Barbara is at least six inches shorter than the Batman.
I wasn't researching her, though. I printed out the photo of the Batman and took a good look: big frame, broad shoulders, square chin. Bigger than Dick. A lot bigger than me.
Who are you, Batman? Where did you go?
I knew the answers were out there--maybe even in here, in the papers. But I'm Tim Drake, Ace Student, so I headed to math.
I saw Dick in his patrol car on the way home, but neither of us acknowledged the other. Officially, we're strangers. Not even Commissioner Gordon knows about me--or about Barbara, officially. It's safer that way.
You need someone behind you in this line of work. We're only human. We get stabbed, we get beat on. I haven't been shot yet, but Barbara has, and Dick was the one who carried her home. He's a steady guy. A good cop and a good brother. A pal, I hope, once he gets past my age.
Did Batman have a partner? I don't know. The papers didn't think so, but the papers haven't twigged that the Bat has a Fox yet, either.
My cell phone--my bat phone--rang and I pulled it out of my pocket. "Hello?"
"Ever gone hang gliding?" Barbara asked.
"No." Sky diving, yes. Bungee jumping, yes.
"After tonight, you will not be able to say that. Dick worked it out."
"Cool. Where?"
"Route 9, mile marker 7, the usual time."
"I'll be there."
Looked like I was going to be a flying Fox--or a gliding one, anyway. She and Dick had been working on wings for a while.
Barbara's a genius. Dick is no slouch, either. He got a mechanical engineering degree before he joined the force--and he did that for Barbara, too. I never believe him for a minute when he says he wants her to quit.
It's a question of patterns.
Some people live every day the same. They go to work, they eat lunch at the same place, they come home at the same time, they watch the same program. If they do something different, that's an event. Other people live in chaos: They do odd jobs, they eat sushi one day and pack a peanut butter sandwich the next, they go to the movies one night and drive out to the beach the next. If they do the same thing twice, that's an event.
I'm an orderly guy. I wake up at 7:00, I walk to school at 7:45, I eat lunch in the school cafeteria every day. We're not allowed off-campus. I leave school at 3:05, I do my homework, I take a nap, I have dinner at 7:00. I climb out the window and go to Barbara's at 10:00. We practice and patrol until 3:00.
I've been doing that for the past year. My grades have actually improved. From Barbara I've learned how to focus.
So, it was 10:00 and I was looking for patterns. Dick had copied a complete set of police reports on Batman onto CD for me--"This is illegal, junior, so when you're done, eat the disk"--and I was scanning through them, making a map.
Barbara did pull-ups behind me. None of the girls in my gym class could do even one, but Barbara's different. Dedicated. I've never met anyone like her before or since. "Find anything?" she gasped between sets.
"He had routes, like we do," I told her. I highlighted the broad circles on the screen and she dropped down from the bar and looked over my shoulder.
"Outliers," she said, pointing to the un-lit dots on the map.
"Most of these incidents are minor--drug dealers, muggings--but the incidents outside the delineated routes are almost all big. Drug shipments. The Joker trying to poison the water supply. Penguin's killer robot pigeons."
Barbara nodded. "So he operated the same way we do. Tim--seriously--what are you hoping to find?"
"Batman," I said without hesitation. "Isn't that enough?"
She looked me in the eye. I wasn't stupid--I knew I was probably going to find a corpse--but I had to know, whatever I turned up, because the Bats of Gotham all roost in the same cave.
His end might well be hers.
It took me a day or so of staring at the incident map before I realized it was comma-shaped.
That is to say, when I took out the big deals and left the minor bat-reports, it showed me his routes around the city, plus a little tail.
Of course. He gets in his car, he drives out for the night's prowl. But on the way to point A, he passes a mugging, and he's Batman, so he stops and helps--and another mugger threatens to sue the police department over the freak in the Halloween costume. And my map develops a little tail, pointing straight at Gotham's Nob Hill.
Of course. Of course. It was staring me right in the face. You have to have money to afford this stuff. The cost of batarangs alone... if we didn't have Dick and his settlement money, we'd be fighting crime on bicycles and swinging from building to building on tied-together rubber bands.
So who disappeared four years ago?
The society pages told me.
Harvey Dent.
Harvey Dent was a rising young assistant DA when he suddenly disappeared four years ago. He had the shoulders, he had the money, he played football in college, and his zeal for justice was plain in the trial transcripts I read. It seemed to fit.
His career was a mess when he disappeared. He'd been accused of soliciting bribes by Harry Sloan. Bunk, of course--we exposed Sloan for the grifter he was two years ago--but the accusation was enough to get him suspended. Then he disappeared entirely. Maybe he got careless on the job. Maybe he got disillusioned and gave up the costume.
Maybe he was on Bruce Wayne's spiritual trek to Nepal. I closed the paper and snorted; brother, was I tired of hearing about that. I wondered if he brought a laptop and a satellite phone up to his mountain hideaway. His girlfriend Selina Kyle was always spouting some bit of freshly enlightened hooey he told her and my friends were always happy to repeat it.
Mostly because the woman knew how to wear a mini-dress. I had to give her that. It was art.
I needed to map Dent's movements against Batman's. The papers were no good for that. Reporters only know what people tell them, and that's all too easy to manipulate. No, what I needed was a look into his personal life.
Officially, Dent wasn't dead. A cousin had been making some noise about declaring him missing, but that would be tied up in the courts for years. His house--Riverpoint House--stood empty.
Barbara was out on patrol. I could hear the motorcycle engine when she answered the phone. "Current theory is that Batman was Harvey Dent," I told her.
"The lawyer? Actually--I can see that." Of course she knew him. She knew everyone. "Going to check it out?"
"Yeah. I figured I would snoop around his house."
"Need me?"
"I don't think so. I'll meet you back here at--" I checked my watch. "One?"
"Got it. Watch your back, Fox."
"I will."
The house wasn't all that far from HQ--Dick's apartment--though Dick wasn't exactly living the life of Midas. In Gotham, rich and poor lie side by side like matches in a box.
I hid the bike half a mile away and walked up to the house along the riverbanks. Security was pretty lax; it depended on walls and burglar alarms, neither of which stop the Fox.
The yard was trimmed and tidy. Probably Dent had a housekeeping staff that kept going even in his absence. The house was sure to be alarmed out the yin-yang, so I slung a line over a balcony and walked up the wall.
The windows were alarmed. The skylight wasn't. I cut a pane and slipped inside.
The floors and furniture were dusty. Obviously housekeeping didn't venture inside. I hovered for a moment, but then decided just to land on the carpet. I would obscure my tracks on the way out.
Now, if I were Batman...
I'd hang out in the basement.
I looked for the servant staircase and headed downstairs. Bedrooms on the second floor, kitchen on the first... it was hard to know where to look, and I had to be careful where I put my feet. There was--
No. There wasn't dust. There was a thick layer under the fridge and around the floors, but none on the walking areas of the floor. Someone was in here regularly.
That changed things. I needed Barbara--I needed backup. I needed...
...to lie down...
...that smell in the air wasn't dust.
I came to suddenly. I was tied up on the dusty carpet--just rope, nothing I couldn't handle--and there was a man standing over me.
Harvey Dent. Clean-cut, dressed in a suit, just like the society page pictures except that he was in color.
My mask was still on. He hadn't peeked. I shifted my shoulders subtly, working my way out of the rope. He flipped a coin, caught it, and slapped it against his forearm.
He looked at the coin and looked at me. "You're a lucky guy, Mr. Fox," Dent said. "You're on my good side."
"I'm glad to hear that," I answered.
"So. Why were you looking for me?"
"I thought possibly you were Batman."
Dent stared down at me for a moment, a very long moment. I inched my wrists against each other; my gloves gave me sliding room in the rope. "No, boyo," Dent said finally. "They call me Two-Face."
"Why?" I'd heard about Two-Face, of course--a fence, a middleman--but Barbara and I always had bigger fish to fry. Two-Face didn't run a gang or kill people for hire, so we'd never given him much mind. If Harvey Dent was Two-Face, though, things suddenly didn't make sense. Why would a man throw away all this to be a small-time hood?
"'Cause I have a good side and a bad side." He turned the coin over in his fingers. There was just enough light to show me the black paint covering one face. "Batman, huh? Thought you worked with the Bat?"
"It's complicated. We could discuss it over coffee?"
Dent stared down at his coin. "Bats. You beat one down and another flies up," he said. "I should have remembered that."
Bad side and a good side.
I'm on his good side.
But Batman...
"You killed him," I said.
Dent spun the coin between his fingers wordlessly. He tossed a piece of paper down next to me and walked out of the room.
It took me a few minutes to work my way out of the ropes. I snatched up the paper--cardstock, good quality, green with embossed silver ink--and read: "YOU ARE INVITED to A SELECT SOIREE." There was an address and a date.
The address was a self-storage unit. The date was four years ago.
I called Barbara on my batphone and met her there.
"I tranked the dog," Barbara said. "I don't see any traps."
"Okay. Can you keep watch? I'm a little drugged still." She nodded and I bent down to pick the lock.
The lock clicked open and I stood to one side and slid the door up with a way-too-loud rattle. We both froze in the shadows as a dog barked in the next lot over.
"Oy," Barbara whispered finally. "Go ahead."
I stared into the darkness until my eyes adjusted and then stepped inside.
It smelled musty. Not bad, not exactly, but the air was thick with what I hoped was dust. I saw small cases around the outside of the room and something big in the middle.
Then I stepped on a bone. "Bat, I'm using a light," I breathed.
Two taps against the wall: stop. I flattened myself into a shadow.
There was a flurry of motion at the entrance, and then a light clicked on. "Dent," Barbara said.
"He was a friend," Dent said.
I knew what I would find. I'd always known in my gut. I took the flashlight from my belt and turned it on, illuminating the cage in the middle of the storage room.
"I could have done something, see," Dent said. "I got there first. I had no love for the Joker--none of us did--and I was thinking, 'Self, I could shoot that fool in the head and nobody would say boo.' So I flipped a coin. And the Joker was on my good side, so Batman stayed on my bad."
"That's despicable," Barbara growled.
"Sister--the joke's on me. He was the only one who believed in me, the only one who stood by me when that story was passed around. He knew I was a stand-up guy. He was going to get my job back." Dent laughed, sounding half a step from tears. "I thought Batman was against me, but he was my friend all along. The Joker pulled off that cowl and shot him in the heart: 'Who's got the last laugh, Batman?' I knew him since I was five. I loved him like a brother. The joke's on me, kid--the joke's on me!"
The skeleton was hung by its heels in the giant birdcage. like a roosting bat. The suit kept most of the bones together, but the skull rested on its side at the bottom of the cage and the phalanges of the hands were scattered like matches.
"Who was he?" I asked--but of course I knew.
"The last person I would have thought," Dent said.
This wasn't much like Nepal. I wondered if his girlfriend was a dupe or if she was in on the facade.
I hope you went to heaven, Bruce Wayne.
Wayne Manor was a spooky old gargoyle of a house perched on the top of Nob Hill. I was right about the location of his home base, just wrong about the guy.
Wayne. I couldn't believe it. My dad knew him. Once he said it was a good thing Wayne had such a thick neck, because his head was full of hot air.
We pulled up at the head of the drive. I looked at Barbara for my cue--do we sneak in, do we knock?--but she just stared up at the house and waited.
I must have been still drugged, because nothing was sinking in. Batman and the sad collection of dry bones in my saddlebag couldn't have anything in common.
Then the butler opened the door, dropping a long shaft of light across the drive. "I've been expecting you," he said.
"Dent told you?" Barbara asked.
I lifted the bag from my bike. "I've been expecting you for the past four years," the butler said. I crossed the drive and his shoulders sagged as he took in the burden I was bringing him.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I carried him from the hospital, young sir," the butler said. "It's fitting, I suppose, that I carry him to his grave as well."
Bruce Wayne died in an avalanche in Nepal. His body was shipped back to the States to be buried next to his parents.
In his will he left everything to the butler, and he didn't even have any cousins to contest that.
One day Barbara got a phone call inviting us to tea. "Formal dress."
"I think you'll find that things are not yet out of date," the butler, Pennyworth, said as he showed us down the hidden stairs. "Master Bruce was quite forward-thinking."
"This is amazing," Barbara said. A cave. A giant cave below the house, filled with bats and cars and toys.
"I've kept the Batmobiles in good repair. The batarangs are in those cabinets. The computer is, of course, all around you," Pennyworth said.
We stopped dead as we saw the woman and the glass case. The case held the Bat-costume. The woman was Selina Kyle, in a costume I recognized as Catwoman. Her cowl was pushed back and she was smoking a cigarette.
"He would never have let me smoke in here," Kyle said, and crushed the cigarette under one boot. "Who did it?"
"The Joker," I said.
"And we're not letting him get away with it, right?"
Barbara stepped forward and pushed back her cowl. "No. We're not."
There's a shadow world out there invisible to the untrained eye. But I look--we look--because someone has to. Because it's the right thing to do, even if it gets you killed.
Where is Batman? Batman is six feet under, but the Bat still flies. And that's how it's always going to be.
THE END.
All comments are welcome.