They thought they were alone on the scene. They weren’t. Five stories up, on a roof, across the street, a black-shrouded, solitary figure watched, waited, and pondered what had gone wrong.
He’d passed through the neighborhood earlier in the night. He’d spotted the abandoned building for what it was: a drug depot, a gang’s fortress. It was quiet enough, if you didn’t count the four-wheeled boombox parked outside the front door. The gang wasn’t going anywhere. He figured to bust it later on, after midnight. Before midnight he liked to stay loose and outside, ready to go where he was needed.
His parents died before midnight. All the years he’d been Batman, and all the years before he became Batman, Bruce Wayne never forgot how his parents were murdered on the Gotham sidewalks because no one was around to come to their defense. The Batman costume and persona were designed to put fear in the hearts of those who walked on the wrong side of righteousness, but Bruce had become Batman because the innocent had to be protected—especially when they got lost in the dark.
So when he’d heard the woman screaming in the next block, he’d gone immediately, tracking it down without the least suspicion until he beat down the door and saw the deceitful videotape player flickering in the middle of the empty room. Empty—except for the message scrawled on the virgin-white wall:
The body’s not here. It’s in an alley, up the street.
It’s your fault—you on the rooftops—you made him jumpy
Drug gangs—terrorists and scum.