A handsomely dressed man stepped out of the limousine with an umbrella and an envelope in one hand and a mixed bouquet of flowers in the other. A few of the elderly people sitting on the benches watching the rain craned their necks up to take a look at the gentleman. He was not the usual type of person to visit this place.

The man exchanged a few friendly glances with the people, and allowed a woman who was being pushed in a wheelchair to pass through the sliding door.

He walked to the receptionist's desk. The receptionist was a college-aged, blonde-haired woman who was slouching over her desk, but she sat up straight when she saw the handsome stranger.

"Hel-lo," she said in a sultry voice. "How can I help you?"

"Hi," he responded, deftly avoiding her flirty eyes. "I'm Bruce Wayne, here to see Agatha Haggschwarz."

"Oh yes," she answered, with a hint of disappointment in her voice. "She had told us she was expecting you. Let me page someone to walk you back to her area of the building."

A middle-aged nurse with frizzy blond hair appeared. She stood for a moment and regarded the handsome visitor. Then she remembered why she was there, and walked up to Wayne.

"Follow me," she said.

She led Wayne back past rows of rooms down a tiled hallway. As he passed down the hallway, he couldn't help but look into a few of them. Some rooms were full of flowers and pictures of families, with televisions playing soap operas or talk shows. Other rooms were dark, and he could feel the loneliness of the person in the room, as they waited for any visitors who would come to see them.

At last they arrived at their destination.

"Here we are, Room 13. Miss Haggschwarz," the nurse announced. "Your visitor is here."

A thunderclap sounded outside. The thunderstorm would be upon them any minute.

Wayne entered the room to see an old, wrinkled woman hooked to a respirator. There were tubes coming into her nose, and out of her arms, and monitors hooked up to her. She had a shock of dark black curly hair, with the ends having just a little gray. The face was just a little familiar to Bruce, but he did not know why.

"I came in response to your letter," Wayne stated. "I don't usually visit people who write, but I must say your letter intrigued me."

"Sit down, Bruce," the woman said in a voice that was not as weak as she looked.

As Wayne sat down in a hard wooden chair with a red vinyl seat, the woman did her best to prop herself up to speak with him.

"Well..." she said. "Well, here you are at last. I'm glad you came. Tonight they are transferring me over to the hospital, where I can't get as many visitors as I can here."

Bruce kept looking at her, wondering what it was about this woman that was so familiar.

"You don't remember me, do you, Bruce?" Wayne shook his head in response. "Well, it's probably better that you don't, considering what I did to you...."

At that moment the recollection of who Agatha Haggschwarz was suddenly came into Bruce's head. Twenty years ago, he had seen a figure blocking the escape from the alleyway when his parents were killed. That same figure pumped bullets into his mother and father with murderous abandon. That figure was the Hag, and the Hag was Agatha Haggschwarz.

A louder thunderclap sounded outside, and it began to rain hard.

"I know, Bruce. I did. That's why I asked you to come here." Her eyes took on a sad glow in the face of Wayne's rising rage. "I've been carrying the guilt of that crime around all my life. It was not worth the five thousand dollars I got for it..."

"Five thousand? You've just confessed to a murder, old woman. I'll have you taken out of here...you're not too old to go to a prison for invalids. I'll pay you back for what..."

The nurses were starting to notice the yelling. One of them came over to the door. She was a petite Asian-American woman, and she was very angry.

"Listen, mister! If you don't stop yelling, I'll get security to throw you out!"

"I'm sorry," he responded.

"Just keep it down. We have a lot of sick people here." She turned, and Bruce heard her heels clicking against the tile floor as she walked away from the doorway.

Bruce sat back down in the chair. He would have to stay calm if he was going to hear any more from Haggschwarz.

"Bruce.." she said, trying to calm him down. "I'm dying. Any day now, and this lung cancer I have is going to take me away for good. It could be today, it could be tomorrow, it could be next week. You've already got your revenge...I won't be around to bother you anymore."

She looked at the rain pelting the ground outside. "If the lung cancer doesn't get me, then..."

The old woman sat back and thought upon hearing Bruce's question. "No, your parents and the Starks were the last people I killed."

She moved forward a little and spoke, although it was obvious that the effort of talking was wearing her down. "As the Black Assassin, Justin Hammer and I were running away from the scene of the crime, I could see you huddled over your parents' bodies...and it was the first time I felt remorse for anything I had done, in my thirty years of being a crook and a killer."

"I went away to the Mediterranean with the money I got from Hammer, and some other dough I had stashed around," Haggschwarz stated. "I spent a long time there just thinking about the life I had led before killing your parents. I saw how the people down in the Mediterranean lived together without preying on one another, unlike the people in our country...they accepted into their homes as a guest...it made me not want to kill anymore."

Bruce cleared his throat and gave her a scrutinizing look. "And I'm supposed to believe this..."

"I wouldn't have asked you to come here if I didn't want you to know that I had done this...and that the other ones who killed your parents are still on the loose. Justin Hammer hasn't been in touch with me since after I got paid for killing your folks. The Black Assassin is another matter..."

Lightning struck, and the lights in the hospital flickered.

Bruce flashed back to that night, where he had caught a glimpse of a hooded man all in black firing bullets from a submachine gun into his parents and Tony Stark's parents' bodies.

While he lay under his parents' dead corpses, Bruce had thought he heard the Black Assassin readying his weapon and asking if Justin Hammer wanted him to make sure that Bruce was dead, too. Hammer had told him that they didn't have time, and that the police were coming.

Haggschwarz coughed, and brought Bruce back to the present. "When we returned to Hammer Island, I was able to steal Black Assassin's half of the money for the hit on your parents. I needed it to get away to start my new life, and he would find someone else to kill for money soon, anyway. I know he's probably still sore at me about that..."

"Has he tried to kill you?" Bruce asked.

"More than a few times," Haggschwarz responded. "Wherever I have been over the last twenty years, he has caught up with me, whether it was in Malta, or Argentina, or even Madripoor. He has nearly killed me almost every time-I was surprised that I could still escape him. But now, I'm old and weak. I have a feeling he knows where I am now, and he's coming to get me. "

"Well, if he got you, it wouldn't be like you didn't deserve it," Wayne muttered. He felt a little guilty after he said this to the bedridden woman. "But keeping you alive may be the only way I can track him down."

"You have a point there. That's why I wanted to tell you that I was sorry, Bruce. The Black Assassin is coming soon, to put an end to my life. I didn't want to die without knowing I had apologized to you."

"I don't know if I could ever forgive you," Bruce said. "But I won't let you be killed."

At that moment, lightning struck the building and all the lights flickered one more time, and then went out completely. The backup generators on the life-support machines started up. Panicked voices began to echo down the hallway.

"He's here," the old woman said weakly. Even though she was under a lot of wires and tubes, and even though it was mostly dark in the room, Bruce could detect the old woman shaking with a little fear.

"It could just be the weather," Wayne said. "Maybe the lights will flicker back on."

"Yes, if you must go, you must." The old woman lay back in her bed and relaxed. "Goodbye."

"I'll be right back," Wayne said as he stepped out of the room into the darkened hallway.

Bruce stopped one of the nurses in the hallway, the one who had told him to stop yelling before. "Hey, I'm sorry about before. Can you keep an eye on Miss Haggschwarz for me?"

"I'll try," the woman responded curtly. "Everyone else is in a panic too, you know."

"I'd appreciate it," Wayne said as he started to walk quickly down the hall.

Bruce rushed through the hallways, asking a few people for directions through the rest home, and eventually found the electrical closet. The door had a lock on it, but it was just slightly open. Bruce went into the closet, pulled a penlight from his pocket and shone it on the fusebox.

Once he opened the fusebox, Bruce noticed that someone had deliberately pulled the fuses controlling the lights for the wing of the rest home where Agatha was. Why would someone want to do that? Unless it was...

Lightning crashed outside.

Off in the distance, Bruce heard a scream. There was a frantic call over the intercom for help to come to room 13. Bruce reconnected the displaced fuse, then walked back toward Agatha's room. The nurses were rushing about.

He started to run toward Room 13. When he got there, he saw that next to the door was the nurse whom Bruce had asked to watch Agatha, lying on the floor, with a small bullet hole in her chest. As Bruce rushed into the room he caught a glimpse of a ghastly sight.

There, sitting with a blue face, was Agatha Haggschwarz. She had been strangled in her bed by the IV's that were supposed to keep her alive.

But who had done it? Agatha would not have been able to kill herself so quickly.

Bruce happened to look out the window at the same moment that a figure dressed all in black darted away from the building and disappeared into the driving rain. The figure in black darted into the bushes.

Bruce knew that to catch the assassin, he would have to get going fast. He ran through the rest home hallway, through the sliding doors, and past an elderly man who nearly tipped over his walker.

Bruce had to catch the man in black. He reached the bushes where he had last seen the man in black and looked around.

A motorcycle revved and started up. Bruce rushed at the man on the motorcycle, but the assassin started up his motorcycle and zoomed away. Bruce could hear snickering laughter as the motorcycle flew down the road away from him.

Wayne ran down the road through the driving rain, but he could not catch up with the assassin. He finally stopped running, although he did not have to catch his breath. The rain, however, had drenched him head to foot, and he had broken the sole of one of his dress shoes.

Bruce thought for a moment. He could call the Batcopter and pursue the assassin, but he had to talk to the police first. The nurses had called the cops, and squad cars were coming up the road with their lights blazing. There would be some explaining to do about the dead nurse and the murdered Miss Haggschwarz.

The Black Assassin had struck, this time even more stealthily than when he had brazenly helped kill Bruce's parents, and he had escaped.

As Bruce walked back to the rest home, he felt sorry for the Hag, even though she had helped kill his mother and father. Hopefully she had reached a kind of peace before she had been murdered. Somehow she did not deserve to die like this.

Bruce knew that he had to find this Black Assassin somehow. As he was about to reach the back door of the rest home, he noticed a scrap of the assassin's coat that had come off in the bushes.

Wayne picked the scrap up and took a look at it. It was a rough fabric, the kind to make a coat that would withstand rain, and possibly bullets. This was definitely a start.

Bruce now had one piece of the killer; maybe this would be enough to track the Black Assassin down, and bring him to justice.