Rogues Gallery #20 - The Joker

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Rogues Gallery
Issue #20: “Ride Along”
Written by Kyle Bridges
Cover by Joe Jarin
Edited by Mark Bowers

Gotham City sucks.

I know I should probably talk up the nightlife or the fine dining or whatever. I mean, much of my business is carting tourists around. I pick them up from the airport, I drive them to one of the many hotels or tourist attractions, I pick more of them up from said tourists attractions and so on and so on.

But none of them stay out too much after dark. Nobody decent ever stays out after dark.

My ma used to say that Gotham was cursed, that the pioneers disturbed something that shouldn’t have been disturbed and the people of Gotham have been paying for it ever since.

My dad used to tell her that she was full of it.

When I was about eight years old, he lost his job in Metropolis, so we all had to pack up and move out here. I remember a lot of fighting between the two of them. I remember my ma packing up and moving in with an old high school friend of hers and leaving the two of us to fend for ourselves. Dad started looking for her at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, and things, if you can believe it, started to get worse from there.

I starting driving a cab after high school, and as soon as I got the scratch together I got the hell out of my dad’s house.

I’m hitting my forties and I’m still driving the cab. It’s a living.

Tonight starts like any other night. I drive my little yellow car to the airport, pick up a couple going to The Iceberg Lounge, drop them off. Same old thing. I watch them flash some cash at the bouncer and vanish into the club.

Behind me, two more cars pull up. The valet approaches them, ready to earn his tips for the night.

But then, there’s a horrific bang. In the cold night air, it’s all too easy to see the smoke rising up, from the rear window of the car.

Then there’s screaming, more shooting. Armed goons, more of them than there should have been in the cars, emerge from the vehicles, murdering their way into the building.

The gunshots are so loud; I can barely hear myself think. All I know is that I’m not going to die today.

I put the pedal to the floor and bolt towards the Amusement Mile. It isn’t that much better an area, but I want to be, I need to be, anywhere but where I am right now.

I’m halfway across Gotham before I realize I’m not alone. I glance up, into my rearview mirror, and my eyes find his reflection.

I’ve seen his picture on the news before, usually holding a smoking gun or a blade, usually in connection with some horrible incident. But that’s nothing compared to seeing him up close.

His skin’s pale, more pale than skin has any right to be, as if someone has cut him out of a sheet of white paper. So pale that I can see the veins under the skin of his face.

His thin lips are painted red, and they stretch over bleached bone teeth in what can only be very loosely defined as a smile.

But I’m not looking at his teeth or his skin. His eyes are what catch my attention. Toxic green. Burning, like a chemical fire, eyes that could look right into you, eyes that looked right through you.

And he was looking at me.

The Joker was in my cab.

“So where we headed, pal?” he croons. His voice is much more… somber than you’d expect. Like a music box filled with gravel.

My tires squeal as I slam on the brakes. He barely blinks, only tilting his head like a confused animal would. He straightens out a crick in his neck and loosens his bile-colored tie.

“Because wherever you’re going can wait. I’m hiring you out,” he adds, pointing to the roof of my cab. I look to my dashboard to see that my “on duty” sign is still on. I swallow a gulp of air.

I manage to choke out a feeble “D-didn’t you have a car?”

He chuckles darkly and I immediately wish I hadn’t said anything at all. He leans forward, peering at me from between the front seats.

“You mean those cars I left at Cobblepot’s?” he replies, “They weren’t mine to begin with anyways. I don’t really see the point of owning a car when I live in the city, you know what I mean?”

He leans back, placing his arms behind his head. “Besides, if we all had cars what would happen to all those fine public transportation workers?”

I don’t say anything. I figure I shouldn’t interrupt him. I may have not gone to college but I’m no dummy.

“I mean, those guys back at the Iceberg, I may have led them to their deaths…. Job security, now that’s a joke!”

He’s laughing again, and I’m trying my best to push back the vomit that’s inching its way up my throat. He cocks his eyebrows and stares at me, licking his lips. It’s like he can taste the fear on me. He sighs heavily, almost like he’s disappointed.

“Look, I need a driver. You need the fare. We’re gonna make three stops, and that’s it. After that we can just drift off, go on our own separate ways. Nothing could be easier.”

He throws something heavy into the passenger seat. A wad of cash, probably the biggest wad of cash I’ve ever seen. I thumb through it, looking at the portraits of Jackson, Grant and Franklin. There’s more money there then I’d make in a month.

“And all that’s yours if you drive,” The Joker says. “However…”

I hear the telltale click of the hammer going back on a revolver. Then there’s some pressure on the back of my seat.

“You shouldn’t try anything funny. That’s my shtick, after all.”

* * *

It’s 12:30 AM, and I’m on my way to a flower shop.

“I have to send a message,” The Joker says, idly shuffling a deck of cards on his lap. “Not a big deal, I’ll just be in and out.”

He notices my puzzlement at his choice of destination.

All he says is, “You know how women can be.”

I’m quiet for most of the ride, letting him pick at the ceiling of the car, watching him clean the bottoms of his boots onto the seat of my cab. Everything he does makes me uncomfortable. He seems to realize this, by the looks he keeps giving me.

I feel a tickle in my throat, and before I can stop it, I cough. His eyes dart upwards at me, and he smiles.

“So do you ever get bored?” he asks, nonchalantly digging the blade of a long knife into the tread of his boots.

I stammer out an “Ex-excuse me?”

“You know, driving around the same spots, working the same territory, doesn’t it ever get… dull?”

He runs the blade across his own neck at the word “dull”, as if to darkly emphasize his point. He smiles as the blade reaches the opposite side of his neck and flicks it back into his sleeve. I try not to notice the slight dribble of red that runs down his pale neck.

“Not always,.” I say, taking a deep breath to steady myself. “Customers make it interestin’ sometimes.”

He guffaws. “Like right now for instance?”

I crack a smile and he notices. I straighten my mouth out the best I can, but he flings himself forward wrapping his arm around my neck. I can smell something… something horrible on his jacket sleeve. He grips me with the one arm, while using the other to point out the shop. I pull to a stop and he releases me.

“I’ll be right back.”

My heart races, my breath is choppy. I watch him all too casually break into the shop, smashing a window with his bony elbow, flipping the latch, and throwing the door open.

It’s then I realize that I could just drive away. He’s gone for the time being, and my cab could put enough distance between the two of us to keep me alive.

Then, a package comes out the door, followed by The Joker. He scoops the parcel up from the ground and begins walking back to the car. The realization that I’ve missed my window hits me harder than a ton of bricks.

I don’t even think to ask him what’s in the package as he slides into his seat and motions me to head down the road.

And even if I did, it would have been hard to hear me over the sound of the flower shop exploding. The shockwave blows out my windows, sending glass shards into the cab. I feel the glass cut my hands as I raised them to cover my face. As I try to gain my bearings, I find myself looking in the back seat, only to find my fare idly removing the jagged glass from his rather haggard purple suit. My heart is threatening to jump out of my chest, my eyes wide with terror. I want to say something. I want to curse and scream at him, but I don’t have the air. He removes the last glass shard and grins.

“Snapdragons,” he says, as if that explains everything. He peels back the paper on the parcel, revealing several oddly-shaped red blossoms. I’m dumfounded. Between my shock from the explosion and everything I find myself frozen in space.

I snap out of it, courtesy of a leather glove slap to the face. He scolds me for holding him up, wagging his finger at me like I had been chewing gum in class or something.

“We still have two more stops, pally,” he says, putting his feet up on the back of the passenger side seat, “and I figure you don’t have long before the heat comes around the corner…”

As if on cue, I hear the sound of sirens. I put the cab into gear and we head out into the night.

* * *

It’s 1:30 in the morning now, and The Joker’s told me that we’re headed to a party.

I don’t imagine he’s invited, but I can’t think of anyone who would want him anywhere. The news never talks about how his breath is hot and rank with god knows what. They don’t talk about the blood on his suit of varying levels of freshness.

And none of those newscasters have ever had him sit behind them for a long car ride. Right now he’s talking to himself, rehearsing what sounds like an old Abbot and Costello bit, except I’m pretty sure that Bud and Lou never played Russian Roulette with themselves as they delivered the lines.

He looks to the mirror, and moves the gun from his own temple and points at the back of my head. I try my best to act like I haven’t noticed.

He pulls the hammer back. Eyes forward.

I can hear the leather in his gloves rub together as his finger tenses on the trigger. I can’t tell if he’s giggling or growling. My life is flashing before my eyes.

I’m a senior in high school. I plan to confess my love to Marissa Cross on the last day of school. I wait for her outside after the last bell, but she never shows up. I go to her house, and her parents say that she’s run off to Europe. I never see her again.

I’m in the second grade, Tommy Verci tells me about the monster under his bed, something with yellow eyes and sharp teeth. I tell my dad about it and he hits me. When he’s finished he tells me I’m too old to believe in monsters. Here in the present day, the irony is not at all lost on me.

Lights in my rearview mirror. Red and blue.

He lowers the gun, and that skeleton grin stretches further across his face than should be possible.

“Pull over.”

I almost ask him if he’s joking, but I get the feeling that I’d regret it. So instead I just slow the car down and bring it to a stop on the side of the road. He puts a gloved finger to his blood red lips and motions for me to be quiet.

Behind us, the cop exits his patrol car. He shines his light towards us, projecting his authority with every step. What happens when he reaches my window? Will he shine his light into the cab? Will he peer into the darkness of my cab and see my passenger?

He’s at the rear of the cab now, edging his way towards the front. He stops and cocks his head at the side of my cab. He’s noticing my lack of windows; he runs his finger along the empty spaces where the glass once was.

He leans closer to the window.

I close my eyes.

* * *

There’s a squishy sort of sound, then the sound of a dull thud. I hear something scrape against the window. When I open my eyes, I’m not alone in the front seat anymore.
I’m now sitting next to the copper. There’s a lot of blood, blood on his face, blood on his neck, blood all over my cab.

The Joker is nowhere to be found.

I panic. I stumble out of the car and step out onto the road. It’s there that I find The Joker.

He’s standing over a body, a uniformed body. My new co-pilot’s partner. The clown looks to me, and beams proudly, falling to his knees next to the body and propping it up.

“Look. I made him all pretty…” He laughs.

In the dim light of the street lamps, I can just make out the damage that has been done. There are gashes all over his face. A crude smile has been carved into his flesh, exposing his teeth through his cheeks.

He’s trying to breathe. He’s still alive. The officer tries to choke out a few words, but all he’s doing is coughing up more blood.

The Joker throws him to the ground harshly and rises to his feet.

“See, that’s the best joke I could ever tell,” The Joker muses, and he slinks back towards the cab. “The best punch lines are the ones that come out of nowhere, cut your legs out from under you and leave you helpless.” He cackles a little, adding a bit of a skip to his step.

He looks back at the cop, waving like he’s the Queen of England. He shifts his body to look back at me.

“Now… shall we?”

* * *

It’s nearly three in the morning, and we’re parked outside a bar. There’s a steady string of drunken twentysomethings fumbling their way into the street. The Joker is playing solitaire in his lap, muttering to himself. He’s instructed me to wait until his signal, then I’m supposed to turn my “On Duty” light on. I keep looking at the bloody patch on my seat where the dead cop was sitting, only mere minutes ago. Joker had thrown him in the trunk just before we left the scene of the crime.

He suddenly snaps to attention, and I find myself wincing as he speaks.

“She’s got a red dress on. Blonde hair,” he sneers, peering out of the darkness. “Daddy calls her Sugar…”

And there she is, leaning on the arm of some goon. Neither of them look sober enough to realize that they shouldn’t be climbing into my cab. Joker pokes my shoulder, hard enough to bruise. I turn my light on. He moves next to me in the front, unfurling a police officer’s jacket across the seat.

“Nothing’s more embarrassing than blood on your seat you know.” He giggles, silencing himself as they approach. The goon opens the door for her. She climbs inside. He clambers in after them. The Joker glares at me. My cue.

“Where to?”

The girl gives me her address. The goon looks at her lustily, as if he knows where the night is going.

He doesn’t. How could he possibly know?

The ride up to the apartment is unbearable.

The goon climbs out first, he holds the door for her, she starts to wiggle her way out of the cab. Thunder cracks in my ear as the goon hits the ground. The Joker is leaning out the passenger side window, smoke rising from his revolver.

“Hey look, chivalry is dead!” He laughs madly, shutting the door on the poor woman. Men come pouring out of the apartment building with weapons. As the bullets begin to penetrate the side of the cab, I suddenly recognize our new guest.

She’s Peyton Riley. She’s the crown princess of the Irish Mob. He just keeps laughing harder as I put the car in gear and accelerate out of there. She’s screaming now, the terror of her situation has removed all the alcohol’s influence from her system, The Joker now procures a roll of duct tape from his pocket, and fastens a long strip of it over her mouth.

“You see Sugar, sometimes the sins of the father must be visited upon the son a thousand times…. I guess in your case it’d be the daughter…” he says, his hands on either side of her face, his own face so close she could probably count his pores. “I don’t really know, scripture isn’t exactly my deal.”

He slaps her hard with his right hand and whoops. He turns to me, and bellows for me to turn at the intersection. We’re headed towards the Shipyard.

I’m led into a maze of shipping containers, winding around and around, at times it was difficult to fit the frame of the cab between the enormous metal shapes. Peyton is whimpering in the back seat, her heavy eyeliner running down her face. The Joker is applying Peyton’s own lipstick to the duct tape over her mouth, painting a messy smile across it. Afterwards, he freshens his own lip coloring.

“Not a bad shade. It’s hard to find the right color, and I’m such a winter….” He cackles, putting the lipstick back into Peyton’s bag, He takes a quick note of our surroundings, and shrieks and gestures for me to park the car. We’ve stopped in front of one of the shipping containers.

“We’re herrrrrreeee!” He’s positively giddy, dragging the helpless Peyton out of the car. “Aren’t you excited, ya gotta be excited, c’mon!”

He pushes her in front of the container, pulling a Polaroid camera from seemingly endless jacket pockets. He thrusts the snapdragons into her hands, and drops to one knee.

“Now…smile!”

I see the flash of the camera go off. I watch him take the pictures. I even watch him as he throws his victim to the ground so that he can open the container; I find myself straining to see what else is inside the container.

The Joker takes one more picture, the flash of the camera lighting up the interior of the space. Thousands of black, glittering eyes, pale porcelain faces… it’s filled with dolls.

He notices me looking, and shouts back, “So she isn’t alone, I’m not a monster!”

And although the tape muffles much of her voice, I can still hear her scream as he locks her inside.

* * *

My night is almost over. I’m making my way down Miller Drive. There’s apparently a safe house there for him, something he’s set aside for such emergencies. I’m not exactly sure what else he says, everything is just… blurring together. My hands on my watch seem to just be spinning without meaning. He’s looking through the photos he took of Peyton Riley, leafing through them as if they were slides from a vacation.

“There’s nothing like a Polaroid. Instant gratification. Click. Flash. Whirr. Print,” he muses as he compares two shots. “Oh, I think I really captured her here…”

He hands the photo up to me. It’s a shot of her on the floor of the container. I can almost hear the cymbal crash in my head.

Then the street behind me lights up. Blue and Red. My plates have been flagged, and I’m probably a suspect in murder, arson, and God knows what else. There’s no way around it. For the first time tonight, my thoughts seem to mesh with the raving psychotic’s.

“Punch it,” he whispers in my ear. I have no trouble with complying.

The cops round the corner, flying down the road. I’m pushing my poor car to its absolute limit; I can feel the engine straining as my foot pushes down on the pedal, letting the metal touch the floor. My passenger loves every minute of it. He’s laughing, firing his revolver wildly out the window, not even caring if any of his shots hit.

One of them sinks into the front right tire of one of my pursuers, sending it spinning to the side of road. As it spins out, it manages to take out the other cop car, sending the two of them careening into the glass display window of a nearby building.

If it’s at all possible, he starts laughing even harder. It fills the cab like a crushing atmosphere of ha-ha-has.

And for some reason, I start laughing too. My cab’s full of bullets, with a body in the trunk. My windows are blown out and half the Gotham PD are after me, and I’m still alive.

Oh God, am I alive. I’ve been driving a cab in this town for most of my life and never a once have I ever felt this way. Adrenaline surges through my body, making every sense light up. It’s almost beautiful.

I turn to look at my fare, his smile faded into a self-satisfied smirk.

“Feels good don’t it?” he practically purrs into my ear. “Like everything’s all neon and electricity inside you. Pretty lights and carnival rides.”

And it is.

He laughs, and I feel my own laugh drown under his. He isn’t laughing at me, or himself. He isn’t laughing like I was, laughing at the thrill of being alive.

I feel like he’s laughing at the whole world.

It’s only then that I feel the piano wire around my neck, and suddenly I can’t breathe. He doesn’t give any warning, and I get the feeling that this was his intention all along.

I struggle, but he only tightens his hold on my throat. I flail my arms and legs to throw him off, but it just can’t be done.

Everything starts going black, but he’s still laughing. I’m drifting away and he’s still laughing.

Figures. It’s all over the minute I start having fun.

As it gets darker and darker, I get to thinking, maybe Gotham is cursed. . Maybe it does take hold of good folks and makes them rotten. Maybe those settlers did upset some Indian Spirits. Maybe there is something ancient and evil stalking through Gotham City.

With red lips stretching over bleached bone teeth, with green eyes that burn like a chemical fire.

Maybe Ma was right.

Maybe...

The End

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