Asprin, Robert Lynn – Catwoman – Tiger Hunt (With Lynn Abbey)

Batman’s options had been reduced to a single imperative innocents were being slaughtered. It was time to go below. Snapping the filament into a pliable steel groove in his gauntlet, he vaulted over the capstone. The last thing he saw was Catwoman glowering at him.

Despite the billowing cape and the dragline, Batman dropped like a stone, as he’d expected. He was ready when his feet touched the pavement and the dragline began to recoil. For an instant—less than a second, less than a heartbeat—his body was going in two different directions; then the dragline whipped out of his hand and his knees bent to absorb his excess momentum. No gymnast dismounting from the high bar or rings could have stuck the landing better. The cape was still furling around his shoulders when Batman took his first defiant stride toward the gunmen. In his peripheral vision he could see that two of six ex-citizens of the former Soviet Union were lying on the pavement. Two more had panicked and run, but the last pair was fighting back, no quarter asked or given, bare hands and a particularly nasty-looking knife against modern firearms.

The Gagauzi would be a force to be reckoned with if they managed to arm themselves into the twentieth century, although it was Batman’s self-appointed task to see that didn’t happen. He advanced on the nearest satin jacket. The kid—he couldn’t have been more than fourteen—pumped to the gun and fired, aiming right where he was supposed to: at the yellow-and-black emblem on Batman’s chest where the thin polymer armor was bonded to a sturdy layer of Kevlar. Batman didn’t blink. The kid threw away his gun with a scream and headed for the 4 × 4. Batman let him go.