"Man, my dear friend, you've really put on weight lately."
It was Christmas Eve in Gotham City, and light snow was falling.
Two men in black suits muttered under their breath as they staggered toward a blue car, jointly carrying something that seemed to be giving them quite a bit of trouble.
"Bang!"
They slammed the heavy object into the car's open trunk, and both men finally let out a sigh of relief. One of them laughed. "Now it'll sink faster."
Inside the trunk, the stiff corpse in a suit and a pencil mustache still wore that crazed grin, as if he had literally laughed himself to death.
Because that was exactly what had happened. He had laughed himself to death.
One of the men rubbed his hands together, pulled a cigarette from his coat, and lit it.
"Bang!"
A bat crashed to the ground. The car's trunk slammed shut, and the two men, who had still been feeling fairly relaxed, were instantly scared out of their wits. They opened their mouths to scream—
But Batman's two fists were already flying toward their faces.
"Curly? Angel?"
"Where the hell did those two idiots run off to?"
Maroni, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, smashed open the restaurant's back door. He was in a foul mood today. As the head of Gotham City's second-largest crime family, being threatened and interrogated with a gun pressed to his forehead had left him extremely displeased.
And now, the two idiots he had ordered to dispose of the body were moving too slowly. Ten whole minutes had passed, yet those two still hadn't appeared. They hadn't returned to report in at all.
Maroni stormed out with fury on his face. The first thing he saw was the blue car parked by the door, and his