The gunshot was clean and singular.
When the room found its silence again, Jude blew the smoke from the barrel, turned the gun once around his finger, and holstered it.
Across the room, Two-Face took three steps back, crouched, and picked up the coin that had been rolling upright on the floor. He held it up to the remaining gunmen with an expression of genuine regret.
"My apologies. It landed on the edge." He pocketed it. "Nothing I could do."
On the floor, Arnold was howling.
He clutched Scarface to his chest—the puppet now featuring a precise hole through the forehead, eyes gone still, jaw locked in its final position. Whatever presence had occupied the wooden face had apparently decided that a bullet through the skull was sufficient reason to vacate. Arnold rocked back and forth and screamed and did not give the order to retaliate, because Arnold without Scarface was just a frightened old man who had never been able to do anything terrible on his own.
He was only a supervillain when the puppet was talking.
"I think you all might have a diagnosable condition," Jude said, taking a slow step back. "That thing wasn't even good-looking. The doll face gives me the uncanny valley feeling. Like a haunted amusement park."
"You mean the uncanny valley effect," Killer Croc said. "Read more books."
"Same concept, close enough—the point is, how do you make something like that your commanding officer? It's not alive. It's a ventriloquist's split personality wearing a felt hat."
"How dare you! Woody will return! Kill all three of them!"
"Wait—if your boss comes back, doesn't that make revenge for him a bit redundant?"
The submachine guns came up anyway.
Jude was already moving—retreating from the shooting position back to Killer Croc's side, drawing level with Two-Face.
"Waylon." Two-Face said it like a command.
Killer Croc moved forward.
He put himself between the guns and the other two, arms out, and the burst hit him like weather—metal on scales producing sparks, a few rounds finding the gaps and pushing into muscle, stopped within a centimeter or two by tissue dense enough to treat gunfire as an inconvenience. His blood hit the floor, the walls, the ceiling in various small contributions. The pain was genuine. He processed it and kept going, driving straight toward Arnold, who was still on his knees over the puppet.
The guns came down when he picked Arnold up.
"If anyone pulls a trigger," Killer Croc said, "I don't die. Your boss does. Everyone put the weapons down."
They did.
"Good. Now we leave."
"No," said a voice from the direction of the window. "All of you are coming back with me."
In the Riddler's hall, every head turned toward the phone.
He'd been listening through the device planted on Jude—standard operating procedure, not something he apologized for. Villains bugged each other constantly. Complaining about it only demonstrated that you hadn't thought to look. The ones who got caught were cannon fodder; the ones who found the device first were the ones running things.
He'd been winning tonight. All three of his people in the same situation, no escape hatch available, Jude unable to trade them away for his own exit. A clean resolution to a recurring problem.
The Riddler recognized the voice from the phone.
His expression moved through several states and arrived at something controlled and cold.
"Since he's there," he said, "the Bike Stripper probably won't be coming back this time." A beat. "It's a loss. But a necessary one."
Then Jude's voice came through the receiver, low and close.
"Waylon—I don't think we're getting out of this."
"Not all three of us." Killer Croc, barely audible. "If someone covers the rear, the other two can move."
A pause.
"I'll cover you," Jude said. "Both of you go."
"No." Killer Croc's voice was flat. "You're the relay. I'll cover. You run."
"Waylon's right," Two-Face said. "He's the only one here who can hold Batman and still have a chance of breaking loose. Neither of us can."
The room in the hall was very quiet.
The Riddler sat with this for a moment, listening to the sounds from the other end—the creak of a grapple gun deploying, the snap of the cable going taut and tight.
"Harvey." Jude's voice, sharp, alarmed.
A roar from Killer Croc.
The second grapple hook, firing.
"I've got the line—go, go!"
Something that sounded like a wall coming apart.
Then nothing from the receiver for a long time.
The Riddler sat in his chair and looked at the phone in his hand and felt, with some precision, exactly how this had gone.
Waylon was clever, he thought. At least two of them got out.
It didn't help much.
He set the phone on the table. Around the room, Poison Ivy, Clayface, Zsasz, and Firefly were there—what remained of the roster he'd started the Battle of Jokes and Riddles with. The Joker was doing marginally worse: Man-Bat, Mr. Freeze, Mad Hatter, Oswald, Solomon Grundy. Five cards left. The ordinary soldiers on both sides barely registered as a factor anymore.
Twenty minutes passed.
A soldier came in from the corridor and stopped in the doorway.
"Boss."
The Riddler looked up.
"The Bike Stripper is back."
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