[ WP ] A police officer releases a criminal sociopath each night from prison to clean up the streets .

James walked down the row of rooms; they did not call them prison cells, since the occupants were not prisoners. The asylum was for mental health patients, and James ’ wing housed the violent offenders. Unlike all the other guards, James liked nights at the asylum, the inmates were quieter, usually sleeping. A night person since he was a little boy, James didn ’ t mind the nighttime noises that emerged when the cacophony of daytime died down. The quiet padding of rats in the walls, the drips of a leaking pipe somewhere off in the distance, the way the wind whistled through the gaps in the stone walls. The sounds were all lost in the gaggle of mindless conversations that filled the daytime shifts. 
 
 He ignored all the residents until he came to the last door on the left. The room was called the penthouse, since the window showed beyond the asylum walls, all the way to the city lights in the distance. He peered through the door and saw the room ’ s lone occupant, crouched on his bed staring out the window at the darkness. James unlocked the door and went in, standing next to the bed staring out the window, shoulder to shoulder with the patient. It was a waning moon tonight, barely any light from the pale crescent, but the lights of the city still twinkled. The streetlights painted yellow circles on the road leading away from the gates, making the road appear to be a polka dotted belt leading away from the asylum. 
 “ Hello James ” 
 “ Bruce ” 
 “ It ’ s a nice night out there. ” 
 “ I know ” 
 “ How ’ s your wife James? ” 
 “ Still dead Bruce. ” This wasn ’ t a new conversation; in fact, they had it almost every night. 
 
 Bruce was the most dangerous resident at the asylum. It wasn ’ t that he was larger or stronger than the other inmates, but his background in martial arts and the years spent surviving on the streets of the city had made him faster and more deadly with his bare hands than any one James had seen come through the asylum. In Bruce ’ s first week at the asylum, he had killed two other patients in the recreation yard, claiming that they had “ killed his parents. ” No one knew much about Bruce ’ s background, he was an orphan, picked up for petty crimes several times during his youth, put into different foster homes, but always managing to run away until finally at 16 he had simply disappeared from the system for ten years. The Bruce that re-entered the system at 26 had extensive martial arts training, was covered in scars and angry as hell at the world. 
 
 James suspected Bruce had lied about his age and joined the military, but the military had no record of him. James had been a beat cop in those days, still fresh from the academy, still convinced he could change the city, make it better by arresting the bad people. It would be a few years until the reality of the situation would hit him like a ton of bricks. The justice system was broken; the only criminals it caught were the ones too poor to buy their way out, or too dumb to pay the right people. 
 
 Bruce was one of the poor ones. In an out of jail, James had picked up Bruce several times for fighting, vagrancy, even auto theft once. Other cops had been terrified of Bruce, after seeing what he would do to the men he fought, and would subdue him with extreme force, but Bruce never fought back, never hit a cop, he always went with them willingly, apologizing for inconveniencing them, contrite for his actions. James usually just asked Bruce to get in the squad car, no handcuffs, no sucker punches, just a polite request, to which Bruce always complied. 
 
 Then, five years later, something changed in Bruce. He snapped mentally, and started suffering delusions. Delusions of grandeur and war and violence, and he had ended up here, in the asylum. After years of hard work, only to see the same crimes committed by the same people over and over, James became disillusioned with his police job and quit, ending up at the asylum as a guard around the same time Bruce showed up, just on the other side of the locked door. Bruce had recognized him from his cop days and a dialog had started between the two men. The psychologist had encouraged James to continue to talk with Bruce, said that: 
 “ Expanding Bruce ’ s world beyond the one he has created in his head is good; it shows him a little glimpse of reality ” 
 James didn ’ t buy the psychologist babble, he thought Bruce had experienced some crappy things in his life, and whatever he made up in his own head was probably far better than the institutionalized reality. 
 
 “ Ready to go Bruce? ” 
 “ I ’ m ready James, what ’ s the plan tonight? ” 
 “ No plan, just the usual place and time. ” 
 
 James led Bruce out the unlocked door, down a back staircase, through a set of maintenance doors, past the loading dock to the employee parking lot. James unlocked his old beat up sedan; it had once been a cop car, now it was just another black generic sedan with way too many miles on the clock. He got in the driver ’ s seat, and as was his custom, Bruce got into the back, a remnant of the days when James used to arrest him no doubt. 
 
 The drive in was quiet, Bruce usually stared out the window while James drove him into the city. The old sedan twisted through the dirty streets, splashing through puddles, the old suspension protesting with a thunk at every pothole. Eventually they reached their destination, an overpass near the center of the city. James pulled to the curb and shifted the car into park. 
 “ Meet you right here in... ” He glanced at his watch, it was ten pm “ …eight hours ” 
 He turned to confirm the time with Bruce, but his passenger was gone, the door to the sedan open, and the street around him empty. James hated it when Bruce did that. 
 
 On the drive back to the asylum, James reflected on what he had just done. The idea had come to him after he witnessed Bruce ’ s fight that first week. James had still been working day shift and had foreseen trouble before it even began. Bruce had spent the night screaming about a nightmare and some of the other patients did not appreciate their sleep interrupted. James had heard the whispers and tried to get Bruce put into the protective wing, but the transfer wouldn ’ t happen until after breakfast. He ’ d gotten to the cafeteria just as the fight had started. He didn ’ t remember the other two patients, just that they were big. The fight took slightly longer than ten seconds, and even the cameras couldn ’ t capture exactly what had happened. One minute the two patients had cornered Bruce near the far wall, and then a few seconds later both were writing on the ground, one with his hand at his neck, slowly turning from red to blue and the other clutching his stomach dry heaving and then finally vomiting blood. The first had died of a crushed windpipe, the second from massive internal bleeding. Bruce had been moved to the isolation wing after that. James ’ remembered asking Bruce about why he had hit the two other men a few weeks after the fight: 
 “ So why ’ d you hit those two guys Bruce? ” 
 “ I didn ’ t hit them, I killed them ” 
 “ How did you know that? ” 
 “ Because I ’ m trained to kill ” 
 He had said this before, but, James had just chalked it up to his delusions, this was the first evidence he had that he wasn ’ t just making it all up. 
 “ So why ’ d you kill them Bruce? ” This was the type of question the psychologist would have shit his pants to hear a guard asking a patient, but he didn ’ t really care. 
 “ Because they were bad men, they killed my parents, so I killed them. ” 
 “ What about other bad men, are you going to kill every bad person you come across? ” 
 “ Only if they deserve it. ” 
 
 The plan took a year to perfect and by now, almost four years later, it was more of a routine. James would drive Bruce into the city at night, he would strike terror into “ bad people ” and James would take him back to the asylum in the morning. In four years, crime had dropped so much that in the most recent year the police department shot more people than all of the criminals in the city, combined. There were grumblings about a serial killer, but to tell you the truth, police don ’ t work very hard when the killer seems to focus on the worst the city had to offer. 
 
 James was parked under the overpass as the sum came up. It was starting to get lighter a little earlier these days, they ’ d have to schedule the pickup earlier next week. He didn ’ t hear the back door open, or even close, but suddenly, Bruce was staring at him in the rearview mirror from the back seat. 
 “ Let ’ s go home James ” 
 “ How ’ d it go tonight? ” 
 “ A rapist, a murderer, a mob guy and a dirty cop. ” 
 “ Dirty cop, that ’ s going to raise some eyebrows. ” 
 “ He was with the mob guy, both up to their eyeballs in shit. Hard to do one without the other. We may want to lay low for a few weeks ” 
 James turned onto the road out of the city, towards the asylum. 
 “ Good idea, maybe we ’ ll come out again in three weeks? ” 
 “ Let ’ s see how the investigation goes. It should implicate the mob guy, but you never know. ” 
 
 The asylum was still quiet and the sun was just breaking the horizon as James pulled into the parking lot. Bruce followed James up the stairs to his room; he locked him in and signed out. His shift over, James walked back to his car, walking through the yard back towards the employee parking lot. As he pulled out of the gates, he turned onto the road, driving towards home, towards Gotham City, the Arkham Asylum gate fading from the rearview as he rounded the first bend. 
 
 

