Gordon moved along the casino wall in careful steps, testing each footfall before committing to it. Beside him, his partner Harvey Bullock walked straight through the center of the room, planted one shoe in a pool of congealed blood without breaking stride, and lit a cigar.
"Watch where you step. Don't contaminate the scene."
"Contaminate it?" Bullock turned a slow circle, cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth. "Jim, the guy didn't even try to clean up. He left us everything. The scene is the evidence."
He crouched down and peeled a playing card off the floor. It came up slowly, trailing dark red strings that snapped back to the tile with a wet sound.
"Ace of spades." He held it to the light. "If I were a betting man — and I am — I'd say whoever owned this was having a hell of a night before things went sideways." He glanced down at the body beside it: split from shoulder to hip, a scatter of chips still spread around it like an unfinished sentence. "Lucky hand. Unlucky everything else."
He straightened, and with two fingers lifted a single hair from the card's surface.
Coarse. Stiff. Thicker than it had any right to be.
"Lab," he said, and handed it off to the nearest forensics officer without looking.
"What've you got over there?" he called to Gordon.
"Come look."
Gordon was standing at the far wall, flashlight aimed at a set of marks in the plaster. Claw gouges — deep, evenly spaced, running floor to ceiling in a vertical line. He held his hand up beside them to gauge scale.
The spacing between marks was around four inches. The lower ones were fine and shallow. The upper ones were short, wide, thick.
Primate. Classic primate scratch pattern.
Gordon spread his fingers and compared the width. If these had come from human hands, the palms would be the size of car tires.
He lowered his hand slowly.
"Harvey."
"Already saw them." Bullock blew a long stream of smoke toward the ceiling. "Hey, did you hear they finally filled the DA slot? Some kid from New York, just a couple years out of law school. Harvey Dent — same first name as me. Apparently he put half the money in Manhattan in prison before anyone thought to stop him."
"Why are you telling me this."
Gordon straightened, still studying the marks. Bullock shrugged.
"Commissioner Loeb called me twenty minutes ago. Wants the case wrapped before Dent gets his feet under him. Can't have a New York prosecutor poking around a Maroni bloodbath, apparently."
Gordon said nothing.
He'd spent enough years in this building to understand the geometry of it. If Dent was genuinely straight, Loeb couldn't afford him near anything connected to the families. If he wasn't, Loeb couldn't afford him taking a cut. Either way, the commissioner needed this buried fast and under his own name.
Gordon had stopped being surprised by this kind of thing around year eight. He'd stopped being comfortable with it too, but comfort and necessity had stopped keeping the same hours a long time ago.
Barbara, he thought. Just keep thinking about Barbara.
"Hey — over here!"
A young officer poked his head around the corridor corner and waved them over.
The bathroom floor had been torn up. Not broken — excavated, in chunks, like something large had pushed up through it from below. In the center of the tile, a rough hole opened onto darkness. The smell coming up from it was old water and old earth and several other things Gordon didn't want to catalogue.
The officer pointed. "I think they came up through the storm drains. Should I send someone down?"
Gordon and Bullock looked at the hole. Then at each other.
"After you," Gordon said.
"Happy to," Bullock said, "but fair warning — if something moves down there, I'm running in front of you."
Oswald came to slowly.
He got as far as his knees, braced against the alley wall, and was sick. Then he stayed crouched until the world stopped tilting, one hand flat on the ground.
"Where are we." His voice had the ragged, uncertain quality of someone reassembling themselves piece by piece. "Where is that woman."
"She ran. You think I could've caught her alone?"
Will was looking at a point somewhere over Oswald's left shoulder, which he recognized, dimly, as what people did when they were editing something out of their answer.
"I was in the casino." Oswald pressed two fingers to his temple and tried to sequence it. "We were upstairs. Then the room — the woman — and then—" He looked at Will. "How did I get outside?"
"You chased her. I came with you. You passed out about halfway down." Will spread his hands. "I thought you'd been poisoned. I didn't know what else to do."
The lie was constructed badly. The mortar was still wet. Oswald stared at him for a long moment with a face that was doing complicated arithmetic.
He couldn't make the sum work. He let it go.
"There was screaming," he said. "From the casino floor."
"Yes."
Oswald looked at the alley mouth. The sounds from the direction of the casino had stopped. That was worse, somehow.
"We should go back."
"I was thinking that too," Will said, and stood.
They made it to the end of the alley.
Four large men were waiting in the street, backlit by the nearest lamppost. The light kept their faces dark. What it didn't keep dark was the way they were standing — weight forward, hands loose at their sides, the specific posture of people who were not asking.
Oswald pulled his jacket back and found his knife in one motion.
"You've made a mistake tonight. Whoever you work for — Maroni's people are going to take this city apart looking for you."
"Boss sent us," one of them said, flat and unimpressed.
In Gotham, boss meant one person.
Oswald's knife hand didn't drop, but the tension in it changed.
He stepped forward and looked at them properly. He recognized the nearest one. Then the second. Maroni's personal security — Blackgate graduates, every one of them, the kind of men who were kept close and kept quiet.
They were never away from Maroni's side. Not once in three years had Oswald seen them operating separately.
He put the knife away.
"Right." Will stepped backward, toward the other end of the alley. "You two have a lot to talk about, I'll just—"
A rifle barrel found the space between his eyebrows from behind.
He raised both hands.
They put black hoods over both of them.
Will's hands were wrenched behind his back and he was folded into a vehicle with the practiced efficiency of people who'd done it many times. Doors closed. The car moved.
In the dark, with nothing to do but think, his mind went to Maroni.
In the comics — in the films — Maroni was almost a footnote. A stepping stone. The man who existed to throw acid at Harvey Dent's face and produce Two-Face, after which the story moved past him. Against Batman, he was an obstacle. Manageable. Temporary.
Will did not have Batman.
What he had was a direct appointment with Gotham's second most powerful crime boss, a man whose personnel file — assembled from fragments of films and secondhand accounts — included: ruled by punishment, specific about loyalty, had beaten a man to death with an ashtray in his own study during a meeting.
The car stopped.
The hood came off in a dim study.
Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the left, packed tight. A single wooden desk on the right, uncluttered except for an ashtray with a half-spent cigar balanced on the rim, a thin thread of smoke still rising from it in the still air.
Oswald's breathing beside him had gone shallow.
"Will," he said quietly. The name came out clipped and careful, like he was conserving something. "We're in serious trouble."
He recognized the room. First time he'd ever seen Maroni had been here, three years ago, new to the organization and escorted in with no warning. He remembered there had been another man in the room. He remembered the ashtray being used.
He did not say this out loud.
Will was barely listening. The moment they'd bundled him into the car, the comic had updated — new panels, filling in from where the blank pages had started. He had it out now, angled toward the thin light from the desk lamp, turning pages as fast as he could read them.
His eyes moved fast.
His expression did not improve.