Peter's Pov:
"Dennis Carradine," Peter said quietly, to nobody, as he exited the alley in the opposite direction. "The informant said Central Park. I will have to move."
He swung.
It did not take long to get there. The previous Peter had known New York well enough that the geography was largely automatic, and Peter moved through the web-lines with enough efficiency now that distance was less of an obstacle than it had been an hour ago.
He came down in an alley near the park, stowed the shooters under his sleeves, and walked.
He found the bench he was looking for.
A man sitting on it who looked unwell in the specific way of people who have been making consistently poor decisions for long enough that those decisions have become visible on their face.
Peter sat down next to him.
"Hello," he said. "I heard you might be able to help me find something."
The man smiled. He produced a small plastic bag from somewhere and set it on the bench.
"For the right amount I can get you anything," he said. "What do you need? Weapons? Drugs? Something else?"
"You are being very casual about this," Peter said. "You do not seem concerned. For instance, you do not seem concerned that I could be an undercover officer."
The man laughed. "You are too dressed up to be undercover. So. What do you need?"
"One direction."
"Whose?"
"Dennis Carradine."
The man stopped laughing immediately and stood up.
"I do not sell that," he said, and started walking.
"What is the rush?" Peter stood as well.
He reached out and touched the man's shoulder, and the man spun around with a gun in his hand that had appeared from somewhere Peter had not tracked.
"Go to hell! Who are you?! I will kill you! I have done it before! DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS IS?! A GUN! I WILL USE IT! I WILL KILL YOU!"
Peter looked at the gun. He looked at the man. He shrugged.
"Go ahead," he said. "Shoot."
The man stared at him.
"The area is surrounded," Peter said, with the specific calm of someone who is not at all worried about the gun and is mostly improvising.
"My team has the exits. There is no way out. Go ahead and shoot if you want to. They will have you before you make fifty meters."
"Are you serious?!" The man was sweating now. "Are you actually law enforcement?!"
"No," Peter said, and shot a web into the man's face.
The man went down hard. Peter moved behind him, pinned his arms, and put a knee in his back.
"Stop struggling," Peter said. "If you do not stop I am going to snap that wrist like a dry twig and I will enjoy every second of it. Where is Carradine?"
The man stopped struggling.
"Cartel House!" he managed, through the web covering half his face. "Near the old casino! Carradine and his crew run store robberies and illegal weapons trafficking out of there! That is everything I know! I swear! I swear it, I swear it...."
Peter stood up, turned the man over, and put him to sleep with one precise application of force.
He looked at the unconscious figure on the park grass and felt a mild sense of professional satisfaction.
"Who would have thought," he said quietly, "that a straightforward sexual assault case would lead me directly to a wanted poster on my first night out."
He swung.
He found the Cartel House after several minutes of movement and a brief detour into the back seat of a parked police cruiser to access their system and confirm the address, during which the two officers in the front seats discussed coffee preferences without any awareness that their vehicle had a third occupant.
He exited the same way he had entered and covered the remaining distance on foot.
The Cartel House was a building that had been doing its best to look like it was not being used for anything and had not entirely succeeded. He was circling it looking for an entry point that would not announce him when he heard the screaming.
He went in through the nearest opening.
The scene inside was not what he had been expecting, which was a building full of Carradine's people.
The building was full of Carradine's people but most of them were on the floor, and the reason they were on the floor was a man with blood on his face and hands who was currently crouching over Dennis Carradine with a knife.
"I swear I have nothing to do with that orphanage, brother!" Carradine was screaming. "I swear it, Cletus! I SWEAR IT!"
"Nah!" Cletus Kasady said, with the bright and cheerful energy of someone who is genuinely enjoying himself. He drove the knife into Carradine's leg again, and Carradine screamed. "Big boys do not cry!" He drove it in again. "And if they cry, they DIE!"
Peter took out the phone he had liberated from the first thug in the alley, lined up the shot, and pressed the button.
Click.
"Now you have been caught in 4K," he said.
Kasady's head came up. His eyes found Peter. The cheerful expression remained, which was somehow more unsettling than if it had changed.
"Who the hell are you?!" He came off the floor fast, leaving Carradine, and covered half the distance between them in one motion.
Peter stepped sideways and intercepted the arm that was coming at his midsection, caught the wrist, looked at Kasady with the expression of someone reviewing a mildly disappointing test result, and applied a controlled rotation.
Kasady screamed. His other arm was already moving.
Peter stepped into it, redirected it, and introduced Kasady's face to the floor with the heel of his boot. Then the stomach. Then, because Kasady was already moving again and clearly had a high tolerance for pain, the face once more.
Kasady stopped moving.
"At least Woody Harrelson made you look good," Peter said, looking down at him. He took a breath. "God, I love doing that."
He surveyed the room. The bodies of Carradine's people were not in good condition but they were breathing, which meant Kasady had been interrupted before finishing. Carradine was bleeding badly from the leg.
Peter applied a tourniquet to Carradine's wound with the efficient speed of someone who had studied enough medical texts in the past several weeks to know exactly where to put it and how tight to make it.
Then he bound Kasady's hands and feet with web, triple-layered, and left him on the floor.
He took the stolen phone and composed an anonymous tip with the addresses of the two men from the alley, the man from the park, and this building, along with enough identifying information about Kasady to make the police's job straightforward.
He left the phone where it would be found.
Then he went up to the roof of the building across the street and watched.
The police arrived faster than expected.
Captain George Stacy's department, based on the vehicles.
They processed the scene with the efficiency of people who had received a detailed enough tip that they did not have to improvise.
Kasady was brought out in handcuffs and what appeared to be a considerable quantity of medical assistance. Carradine was escorted to an ambulance. The building was cleared.
Peter was already gone by the time Stacy looked up at the rooftop where he had been standing a moment before.
He swung home.
He came back through his bedroom window, moved quietly through the house, and spent twenty minutes cleaning up in the bathroom before getting into bed.
He lay in the dark with his hands behind his head and looked at the ceiling.
"Good for a first time," he said quietly. "Right?"
The ceiling did not answer, which he took as agreement.
He closed his eyes.