Batman 4 - Batman & Robin Read Online Free PDF Page A

the home with whose care he was charged. And he wouldn’t allow a mess to remain there one second longer than it absolutely had to.

    Clayton Krupzic had ice water in his veins.
    At least, that’s what he liked to tell people back in Waumagansett Falls. “Nothing scares me,” he’d add, impressing the hell out of the old geezers who liked to gather at the filling station. “Nothing in heaven or hell or on God’s green earth.”
    But it was a hard thing for a farm boy like Clayton to prove. After all, the scariest thing in Waumagansett Falls was him, and after that it was his twin sister Coleen.
    It got to the point where he’d go to other towns and pick fights on Saturday nights. But he didn’t find much of a challenge in those places either. No one big enough, no one mean enough.
    So as soon as he finished the twelfth grade, Clayton hightailed it for the big city—despite the warnings of everyone in town—and applied for a job in law enforcement.
    Why not? Gotham didn’t require a cop to attend any kind of academy. If you’d finished high school, it was considered a bonus. In fact, it made you detective material.
    Trouble was, the Gotham Police Force was in the middle of some down-and-dirty budget cuts when he arrived. Someone suggested he go into security work until the department started hiring again.
    At first, Clayton was too proud for that. He hadn’t come to Gotham to be a rent-a-cop. But his pride lasted only until his savings ran out, which wasn’t long at all. Then he had to look for a job—or face the prospect of going back home and working at the filling station.
    Eventually, he found gainful employment at the Gotham Museum, a sprawling stone-and-glass palace set on the edge of Gotham’s Central Park. Unfortunately, the work was even more boring than he’d feared. Just a lot of strolling through big, empty corridors with nobody but the mummies for company.
    Oh, he saw some of the other guards sometimes at the stairways, their flashlights probing the darkness just like his. But that wasn’t more than a half dozen times a night. If not for the periodic walkie-talkie buzz from the main station, Clayton would’ve gone stark, raving nuts.
    So it took him by surprise one night when the building began to shiver, and the air was split with a high-pitched whine.
    At first, he thought it was an earthquake causing the commotion—even though there was no record of any earthquakes in Gotham’s history. Then he heard the frantic voice of Sanchez, the old guy down on the first floor.
    “It’s drillin’ up through the floor!” he wailed. “Ya better getcher butts down here!”
    Clayton didn’t think twice. He came running, though he was farther away than any of the other guards. He didn’t know what the blazes Sanchez was talking about, but if there was some kind of action in the museum, he was determined to be in on it.
    How else was he going to prove what he’d been saying all his life—about that ice water in his veins?
    Clayton went down the stairs two at a time, heading for the first floor. By the time he rounded the World of Lizards exhibit, the high-pitched whining had stopped. So had Sanchez’s calls for help.
    Pouring it on, Clayton sprinted through the Hall of Man and Wonders of the Weather. Up ahead and around the bend, in the vicinity of the central rotunda, there was something going on. He could hear sounds, though he couldn’t identify any of them.
    Then he turned the corner and he saw what was happening. And it took his breath away—just as if he’d been belly-whomped with a milk bucket.
    Inside the rotunda, the nose of a giant drilling truck was protruding through the rubble of the shattered museum floor. And everything—the mighty brontosaurus that dominated the rotunda and a host of other exotic antiquities— everything was covered in a layer of thick, blue ice.
    Out of the corner of his eye, Clayton saw movement and whirled to face it, gun in hand. Across the way, a case with