Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King by Alan Grant (best english novels to read .txt) 📗

He saw Cassandra start visibly, but Jim Gordon was long used to Batman's surreptitious comings and goings and had learned to take them in stride.

"Sorry about this." Gordon turned toward the shadows, and Batman saw that the older man looked uncomfortable, even embarrassed as he briefly nodded in Cassandra's direction. "She refuses to talk to anyone else. If I've brought you here on a wild-goose chase, call me an old fool and–"

"Never that, Commissioner," Batman said quietly, keeping it formal for the benefit of the girl.

Batman's friendship with Jim Gordon went back a long way, to the very first nights when Batman took to the rooftops as the city's guardian. A dozen years earlier, eight-year-old Bruce Wayne had stood by, young and terrified and helpless, as his parents were gunned down before his eyes in a street robbery gone wrong. The boy's life seemed to end then.

Later, when terror had turned to grief and then to guilt, the child had knelt on his parents' grave and made a solemn vow in their memory.

"Mother, Father, I promise you this," Bruce Wayne said, the tears that rolled down his cheeks lost in the driving midnight rain. "Someday, somehow, I will prevent other innocent people from dying. What happened to you will never happen to anyone else, if I have the power to stop it!"

For more than a decade, young Bruce Wayne worked obsessively to attain the goals he'd set for himself. Regular punishing exercise turned him into a perfect physical specimen. He developed reading and memory skills until he could recall almost anything he'd ever seen at will. He expanded his general knowledge until his head swam with facts and figures, and took in-depth courses on subjects as varied as forensic science and the psychology of criminality.

He traveled extensively, training under a variety of masters: detectives, martial artists, and gymnasts. The Wayne fortune meant that he could afford to employ only the very best teachers.

Finally, when he was twenty-one, he decided that his training had come to an end. After all these years, he was ready. It was time to fulfill the promise he'd made to his parents. Time for justice.

He chose the image of the bat as his disguise because it inspired fear, particularly in criminals. It never ceased to amaze Batman how the much-maligned bat was reviled as a demon, a symbol of evil and a harbinger of death, throughout the world.

But Bruce Wayne would be the bat-demon from heaven. He would help ordinary people. He would bring justice to those who mocked it. He would bring law to the lives of those who hated it.

And it would all have ended within weeks, had it not been for James Gordon.

Gordon had broken a long-running corruption racket in his own force in Chicago. Memories were long, and a lot of cops didn't like one of their own who blabbed. So Gordon was transferred to Gotham City, as harsh a way as any for a policeman to be punished.

Jim Gordon was appalled both by the lawlessness of Gotham, and the ineptitude and corruption of its police. He immediately saw an ally in this new vigilante–the "Batman," as the media called him. Both men thought the same way, both would confront any danger in the cause of what they knew was right, and both loved justice with a passion.

Sometimes, lying awake late into the night, Gordon had wished that he too could become a costumed crimefighter. No paperwork to bury him, no boss to order him around, no more petty squabbling and jealousies from his subordinates. But Gordon had a wife and child, and he owed it to them to build a reliable and stable career.

Not long after Batman's presence in Gotham had first become obvious, a police team had laid an ambush for the vigilante. Committed to never using firearms, Batman found himself trapped in an empty house surrounded by more than a dozen sharpshooters. He'd already taken one bullet, a high-velocity rifle shot that seared through the flesh of his thigh and made it difficult to stand, let alone run.

Without Jim Gordon's help, Batman would have died that night.

The righteous cop followed the dictates of his conscience. He turned a blind eye when it was needed most, and allowed Batman to escape to fight again another night. To become one of the few men in the world that Gordon would trust with his life in the war against crime.

A lot had changed in the past dozen years. Jim's good work saw him promoted again and again, until he'd eventually become Commissioner. But in the interim, his wife left him, taking their son with her. His niece Barbara was shot and crippled by the Joker; now, unknown to her uncle, she had become the mysterious Oracle, whose computer expertise was invaluable to the Justice League.

Finally, Jim's hopes of finding new love were smashed when his second wife, Sara Essen, was murdered.

Only one tiling hadn't changed: through everything, his friendship with Batman had endured, unwavering.

"I'll wait out of earshot," the commissioner said now, snapping off the heavy switch on the Bat-Signal projector. The stylized black bat disappeared from the clouds.

"No," Cassandra said emphatically. "What I have to say might sound crazy, but the police should hear it, too."

Gordon nodded his agreement, and Cassandra's brow creased as she tried to penetrate the roof shadows. She knew Batman was there, she'd heard his voice, but there was nothing in the darkness she could pin down as a human shape. She could feel his presence, though, steady and calming.

"Please, go on," Batman said, as if he sensed her dilemma.

"As you know, I'm an empath," Cassandra began, her voice quiet and steady. "In scientific terms, my unconscious mind picks up tiny signals from other people and amplifies them. Sometimes, I can extrapolate these feelings into the future, so I can tell what's going to happen before it does."

She broke off abruptly, afraid that Jim Gordon would laugh at her.