The Punisher The Murdered World 3

'Cockroach' Flynn McAvoy was no one's idea of a dashing cat burglar, but at five foot six, he didn't need to be. There was nowhere he couldn't climb, wiggle, slip, or crawl. And in his own way, he was as careful and as calculating as Frank Castle. Long before he picked one lock, he knew everything there was to know about his target's security system, layout, and exactly what loot he intended to acquire.

McAvoy was returning from one of those preliminary excursions now, jubilant. Not just because his surveillance promised a good haul, but because in photographing the penthouse he planned to burgle, he'd gotten several good shots of the lady of the house with a young maid. And what that girl was cleaning was damn sure spic and span by the time she was done.

McAvoy didn't go for blackmail, but this was the kind of treasure it was damn nice to have around, for use in one way or another.

His phone rang. He picked it up so jubilantly, it could've been one of the girls in his photographs calling.

"Yello?"

"McAvoy." Castle's voice, cold and crisp, razored across the phone lines.

Panic seized him instantly. "What the hell, Castle? What the hell are you doing calling me? We're good, remember? We're square. That old guy, I didn't mean to startle him. He wasn't supposed to be there. And I got him help, didn't I? He's still alive. You can't kill me when I ain't killed anyone."

"When someone's in my sights, I don't give them a courtesy call." Castle sounded like he would be amused, if anything ever amused him.

"What do you want then, Castle? You know if anybody knew I was talking to you, I'd be dead as that skull on your chest."

Castle asked after four buildings in cities McAvoy had previously done the rounds in. McAvoy told him everything he knew about the security systems, guards, loot, whatever Castle wanted to know.

Knowing most if not all of Frank's questions were total bullshit. He might never set foot in Chicago or Seattle or Houston. But if the mob started asking for him in those cities, he'd know McAvoy had sold him out. Hell, he might not be planning to hit any of the targets. Just wanted McAvoy full of misinformation.

"One last thing," Castle said, after spending forty-five minutes grilling McAvoy and ruining his evening totally. "What can you tell me about Angel Mercader's mansion?"

"Angel Mercader?" McAvoy gasped. "Jesus Christ, you gotta be nuts. Now I know you're pulling my leg. Nobody goes against the Angel of Death, especially not in his own house. That place is a fortress."

"Do you know the way in or not?"

"Shit, man, even if I knew I wouldn't tell you. You know what he'd do to me if he found out I told you anything about him? It'd be worth my life if I let slip he had dandruff."

"What do you think I'll do to you if you stop being useful to me?"

"Fuck you, Castle. You're just one guy. Angel, he's an empire. I could leave town tonight and you'd never find me."

"Then I'd better not let you out of my sight."

Some intuition made McAvoy look down. He saw the red dot over his heart. He flinched and the dot followed him like it was sewn to his chest.

"Aw fuck, Castle, shit. That ain't right. You coulda faced me, man, like a man, and I would've given you respect. But you had to trick me, man, that's not fair. I thought I had some wiggle room."

"You can wiggle all you want. Most people do while the life is draining out of their body."

"Okay, look, man, take it easy. I'll tell ya. The mansion... aw shit, let me think!"

"Think all you want. This laser sight has a great battery."

"Alright, okay, shit... yeah, Angel's house, it's got this swimming pool that connects out to the ocean. there's a tunnel underground, underwater. And there's a gate that's supposed to lock out all the sharks and shit. It's supposed to be alarmed, but the saltwater fucked up all sorts of shit in there. The alarm kept going off for no reason. So they just shut it off. If you knock out that gate, ain't nobody going to notice."

"Is that right?"

"But then you're in the middle of this fucking guy's compound, and he keeps an army around. Gets off on it, having a bunch of armed psychos ready to do whatever he wants. You're nuts to go anywhere near the guy."

"Then I probably won't be bothering him. I'm not nuts, now am I?"

McAvoy gulped. "Yeah, Castle, yeah. You're probably just yanking my chain. I won't worry too much about it. We were talking, that's all. Just shooting the shit. Who remembers what they're talking about when they're just chatting?"

"We were talking about fishing, McAvoy. When you fish, you throw the little ones back. But if they get bigger, they should be careful not to get caught again."

The phone went dead at the same time the laser dot disappeared.

In Miami, Frank shut his laptop, trusting the drone's automated programming to pilot it back to its rooftop power pad. The quadcopter had no weapons, only a laser pointer. But it was amazing what you could get with a phone call and a bit of red, instead of just a phone call.

***

Cell phone towers. Ugly pylons of garish gray metal and toothy flanged antennae at the top. The rich hated having them ruin their billion dollar views, but didn't want to do without the wireless internet they provided. And so they insisted on the towers being disguised. In the case of Jupiter Island, it became an abnormally tall palm tree, all but indistinguishable from the real thing with its antennae concealed in a thick bursting of fronds.

There was a similar principle at work with Frank Castle's garb. When he worked, he always wore black. The skull, the body armor, the trenchcoat, and boots. So that when a Mafioso saw a man in running shorts, tennis shoes, and a hooded sweatshirt, all they thought of was that he was another jogger.

They thought nothing of him stopping to lean against one tall palm tree and retie his shoe, then sit down against it for a moment to catch his breath and hydrate from a workout bottle. And Frank was careful to sit so that his body blocked the view from the house. They couldn't see him pry open the access panel to the cell site, feel out the USB port, then draw his specially modified drive—smaller than a bottle cap—from inside his wristband and pop it into the port. A moment later, Frank's phone shook. He ignored it; the USB drive would only have sent a signal if it worked. He closed the access panel back up, then lifted himself to his feet. He slotted the bottle back into his Nike belt and started jogging again. It had all taken less than a minute. If they had ever noticed him, the guards on Mercader's property soon forgot.

They had no idea that Frank was now tapping every call they made outside of landlines. And who used those anymore?

Nine blocks away, Frank came to his parked motorcycle. He unlocked the saddlebags to take out a pair of khakis, which he put on over his running shorts, and returned his hoodie too, leaving him in an Under Armour gym shirt. He took a leather vest and 'brain bucket' helmet from the other saddlebag. Throwing them on, he now looked enough like a biker to avoid attracting attention as he drove out of the nice part of town and down to the slums where he could lay low, with an ounce of prevention to protect himself from everyone

else

who wanted to lie low.

It was a good deal. He could handle a run-in with a mugger or car thief. A cop who wanted to bring the Punisher in, that would be enough trouble to scrub the entire mission.

In ten minutes, he was parked at a low-rent motel, keeping itself on a shoestring budget until Spring Break could make it flush. Until then, the maid was a can of Febreze that the owner sprayed around while he was out. That was fine by Frank. He didn't want anyone coming across the two pistols and one rifle that he'd stashed around the room.

His main arsenal was in the Battle Van. A hundred dollars had bought him a week of parking at an underground lot. Any additional tools, guns, or money he needed was there, hidden inside a van that looked like it belonged to some cover band. A grateful artist had put on a decal right off of a heavy metal album. Frank couldn't say he cared for the irony of having a landscape of skulls painted on the Punisher's incognito conversion van, but so far, he'd only gotten comments from those who assumed him to be a big Terminator fan.

The TV was blaring when Frank came into the motel room. Another trick. Burglars assumed someone was watching the TV. And if someone tried to lay an ambush, them even turning down the mindless daytime television Frank left on would tell him he had a guest.

He paused at the door and listened, one hand on the knob, the other on his sidearm. He heard nothing but the morning news. He looked up to the hair he had closed the door on, up near the top tail where few men could reach. It was still there. He let himself in and the hair fluttered to the ground. He'd put another one into the closing door when he left the apartment again.

"He saved my life. There's no other way to—I was dead, all dead except for the dying, and there he was. Stopping those men from hurting me."

Frank had the remote off the dresser and up to power the TV off when he saw who was being interviewed. It was the girl from earlier. She looked better now that she wasn't out of her mind with terror or shock. In fact, she looked quite bright. Brave, too. Willing to face what were clearly painful memories in order to relay what had happened. Frank imagined that if he'd brought those animals in alive, the prosecutor would love putting her up on the stand and letting everyone hear her.

She didn't need to do that, now that they were gone. But here she was anyway. Letting everyone know. Why? Because it mattered? Or because she was trying to make it matter, make it something other than some horrifying scar on her past?

Frank left the TV on. He couldn't say why. He didn't crave recognition, was neither proud or ashamed of what he did. The word he'd use was

satisfied.

It didn't add anything to his satisfaction to hear the girl restate what had happened. Maybe he just didn't want to feel like he was running away from it.

"So you're saying both your attackers were killed by one man?" The interviewer seemed desperate to both keep up a morning show brightness and lend the conversation the gravitas it deserved. He wasn't actor enough to be a good newscaster. "I imagine in a situation like this, the police would call in backup. A SWAT team, at least, if there was a hostage involved."

"No, it was just one man," the girl said. Frank glanced at the chevron saying who she was. It identified her as Lucy Portman, a local college student. "And he didn't stop to call for help or anything like that. He just... saved me."

"The policeman?"

Lucy glanced at the television camera and it was like she was looking right through the screen, right to Frank. Her eyes on fire. Saying without speaking that she knew it was no policeman that had rescued her. "Yes," she lied.

Frank opened up a drawer in the nightstand, taking out his map of the Jupiter Island estate. He added to it his notes on the guards' placements and other details he'd gleamed from jogging by. He hadn't gotten lucky with them. It was a well-organized, professional defense. He would need a lot more surveillance to figure out a way in. And his usual tactic of renting an apartment nearby wouldn't work. Those hundred-million-dollar homes were out of his price range and Tony Stark didn't owe him any favors. The only way to surveil them would be to park a boat off the coast and use binos, but they'd notice a lone man in a yacht within a day. Frank Castle did not look like a member of anyone's yacht club.

"We're all very sorry for your ordeal. Thank you for sharing your story with us."

"I'm not," Lucy said.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm not sorry."

"Well, obviously we're all glad that the situation resolved itself as it did, but being accosted by two men, having to watch them die in front of you—"

"I'm glad I saw it," Lucy interrupted. "If it wasn't me, there, then, they would've been doing what they tried to do to some other girl. But because it was me, at that time, at that place, some... wonderful man was able to save me. And now those two fuckers will never hurt anyone ever again. I only wish I could thank the man who did that for me. I owe him everything."

She actually seemed to be breathing a little heavy as she finished speaking. It gave Frank ideas.

He might not be in any yacht clubs, but he'd kept enough drug money out of police evidence rooms that he could afford to rent a boat. And buy a bikini, if he had someone to wear it.

***

Lucy Portman felt a trickle of something foreign running through her as she returned to her parents' house.

They were off on a cruise, currently visiting Burma—it'd used to amuse her that two people in Miami were vacationing somewhere else. If she told them what happened, they'd probably come flying back. That wasn't why she hadn't called them yet.

It was the same reason she was now reluctant to go through her front door. She'd lived twenty-two years of a boring, average life. And as terrifying as her kidnapping had been... it'd been seismic, too. Like a dose of pure, uncut reality injected into her to crowd out all the nonsense people let themselves get obsessed with. Why else had she agreed to relive it on national television?

And as crazy as it seemed—as crazy as it

was—

she'd hoped that her unknown guardian angel would see the news report and come to her. Know how grateful she truly was. Realize that she wasn't just some screaming damsel in distress. That she could understand why he did what he did, as extreme as it was, because she was one of those people who'd needed him.

Lucy knew she couldn't make up for all the people who didn't understand, who couldn't understand. But she'd like to try. Instead of going back to an existence that had no more reason to it than simple inertia.

Why am I even here except that my parents wanted a kid?

And now she wanted this man to choose her. He'd already chosen to save her...

Well, there was no point standing on the doorstep of the upper middle class home she was house-sitting. Her savior had better things to do than to make sure she was sleeping well and eating her vitamins. She had to find better things to do with her life too.

She let herself into the house and as she did, a note flapped down from where it'd been stuffed between the jamb and the doorframe. She stooped to pick it up. All it said was

Don't scream.

"What's this?" Lucy asked unthinkingly.

"Good advice," Frank answered her, sitting on the third step of her staircase.

Lucy didn't scream. Something like a squeal popped out of her before she covered her mouth. Then uncovered it: "It's you," she said.

"I need you," Frank said.

Lucy didn't know how much she'd needed to hear those words until she heard them.

"I knew it. I

knew it!

You're the Punisher, right?" Lucy gushed, so peppy she could've been performing a cheer. "And you saved me because, I don't know, but you saved me—"

"I saved you because you were in trouble," Frank interrupted, his tone shutting her down. He was in little mood for her hero worship. "On the news, you made it sound like you wanted to help me. This is your chance. You in?"

Lucy swallowed. "What do you need?"

"Do you have a boating license?"