Batman 6 - The Dark Knight Read Online Free PDF Page B

drug use was about, at first, killing pain and later about simply quelling the need. But this . . . It was always impossible to convey to lucky nonaddicts—and he admitted that they were lucky—why putting the liquid into a vein or sniffing the powder or puffing the pipe was happy-making. But this . . . he couldn’t explain it even to himself!
    When the high was done, he became worried that something that powerful must have damaged his body somehow. But he could detect no new problems. He’d been undernourished for years, and pale, and a bit yellowish in certain light, and he still had all those symptoms. But no new ones. Oh, he desperately wanted some more of the white powder, but after a high, he always wanted and needed more. Maybe the wanting and the need were a bit more intense, but hey . . . small price to pay, right?
    The second transaction was better than the first—more civilized, more friendly. The merchant came to Rupert’s apartment: no meetings on dark street corners, parks, bars. No, a call from the doorman, a doorbell ring, and in came a pleasant-looking fellow in his early 30s who introduced himself as Crane. They shook hands and Crane asked if he might trouble Rupert for a glass of water. Water was all Rupert could supply because, as usual, his pantries and refrigerator were empty, but that was okay—water was all Crane wanted, really.
    Rupert handed Crane a wad of bills, which Crane did not bother to count—classy!—and received in return a baggie with a few ounces of white powder visible through the plastic.
    “Try it,” Crane suggested.
    Rupert snorted directly from the bag . . . and looked up to see Crane with a crude burlap mask over his head.
    Why was he screaming? And why was Crane putting tape over his mouth?
    He slid over an edge, and drowning or burning or being torn apart would be better than this namelessness and no no no no no no no no no . . .
    Rupert was dead. Crane used a cell phone to call for help in removing the body. “I want to examine it more closely,” he told somebody.
    The so-called authorities would have said that Jonathan Crane wasn’t qualified to conduct an autopsy since his license had been revoked after his activities as the Scarecrow became known. He knew this because the information appeared in the last paragraph of a story in the Gotham Times about the chaos in Gotham City that ended, somehow, when a commuter train car exploded. Crane had fled Arkham Asylum by then. He was in hiding and not, himself, at all certain what had happened after he’d been thwarted by that insane meddler in the bat costume; that was why he was bothering to read news reports.
    Crane wondered exactly where he would examine Rupert’s body and, more particularly, Rupert’s brain. It would have to be a place with plenty of light and . . . yes, plenty of running water. Autopsies could be messy. If he were still in residence at Arkham, he would have no problem. Although the asylum was, in most ways, a bit old-fashioned, even Gothic, someone somewhere along the way had equipped it with a first-rate morgue.
    That morgue was just one of the reasons Crane had found a home at Arkham. He’d found the institution’s relaxed attitude toward the silly rules of ethical practice congenial, not like his previous place of employment. Not that rules didn’t have their place, but they were for those of limited intellect who needed them, and Jonathan Crane did not need them because he had known from an early age that his intellect was anything but limited. He was a visionary. He was a genius. To hamper him in any way was to do a disservice to mankind.
    The fossils he’d associated with earlier in his career were too dense, too involved in “procedure,” to comprehend the benefits Crane’s work could eventually confer on the herd known as humanity. Not that anyone doubted his brilliance. He had, after all, gotten his doctorate in psychology as the absurdly early age of twenty-one, after submitting a