In the taxi, Wade was already talking to Dopinder about something that was apparently captivating for both of them.
Peter pressed a section of his mask that activated the private audio channel.
The mask expanded slightly as it did, a small but functional adaptation modeled loosely on Stark's helmet architecture, just enough to create the privacy he needed without anyone outside noticing.
A small light had been blinking inside his visor since they had left the port.
"What do you need, my Lady in Blue?" he said quietly.
"Peter," Cortana said. "I think this might interest you." She began playing a recording on his internal display, visible only to him through the glasses. A news broadcast.
The reporter's voice came through: "Breaking news. During a trip, the famous billionaire genius known as Anthony Stark was kidnapped after testing his Jericho missile in Afghanistan, following a Stark Industries arms deal. The car in which Mr. Stark was traveling was attacked by a terrorist group calling themselves The Ten Rings.
A video has now been released."
A brief clip.
"Mr. Stark is seen imprisoned. We are informed that Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes is moving every available resource to locate him."
"Damn," Spider-Man said.
....
Somewhere darker than the taxi.
"Who killed him?!"
"We.... we do not know him, Lord Satannish! He simply appeared!"
Two yellow eyes shone from the dark above the speaker, and what surrounded them was not shadow but something that chose to express itself as shadow because the available vocabulary for what it actually was did not exist in any human language.
"Then go find him!" Satannish said. "And find this Spider-Man and bring him to me!"
"Y.... yes! My Lord!"
"Now take your face out of my sight!"
The yellow eyes gleamed.
"I will have your soul, Spider-Man. HAHAHAHA!"
....
"What?!.... oh shit! Shit! Shit!"
"What you gon' do when there's blood in the water?"
"No! Do not kill me! Please-...."
Crack.
"When there's blood in the.... uh, uh."
"Oh my God! No, please! I swear I was not part-...."
Bang.
"When there's blood in the.... uh, uh."
Drip.
Drip.
Beg me for mercyAdmit you were toxicYou poisoned me just forAnother dollar in your pocket
"Now I am the violenceI am the sicknessWon't accept your silenceBeg me for forgiveness," Spider-Man sang, withdrawing his hidden blade from the throat of the last criminal in the room and sitting on top of the pile of bodies that had accumulated, while the dim light of the warehouse caught the red and black of his suit and made it shine.
The warehouse doors opened.
Yuriko Watanabe walked in with four officers, each carrying a weapon.
"Welcome to the party, officers," Spider-Man said. "Unfortunately we have run out of alcohol."
"Ha ha," Yuri said to herself, looking around. "This place seems less gloomy than I expected."
"You are late, as usual." He stood up and walked toward her. "And to think that it is generally men who are late to their dates. I suppose women are wearing the pants in this relationship these days."
He stopped in front of her as the dim light caught the lenses of his glasses.
"Sorry, darling," Yuri said, taking in the suit, her hand moving to trace the visible lines of muscle through the tight fabric. "I would have arrived earlier if I could simply swing my coat and escape traffic entirely."
She looked at the suit's colors. "Beautiful. Blood red and jet black."
"Flattery could get you to many places, officer," he said, stepping back and walking toward a specific section of the warehouse, "but right now I think your priority should be this room."
"Damn," Yuri muttered under her breath as she watched him go.
"So close, yet so far," said a male officer nearby, earning himself a punch from his partner.
"Go to hell, John," the woman said. She looked at Yuri. "Do not listen to him. You were very close. Better luck next time."
"Thank you, Trish," Yuri smiled, and walked toward where Spider-Man was waiting. "Tell me, do you have something for me this time?"
"Oh my God, Yuri, we have been working together for two months," he said, throwing her a package full of files, "you should know by now that I always have something. I am dealing with people this time. If you move fast enough, you can catch the shipment of goods that is preparing to sail for Italy."
"Mmm." She hummed as she flipped through the pages. "This is all the evidence I need."
"That still will not be enough," he said, crossing his arms.
"I know," Yuri said, winking at him. "That is why I have you. You can kill. I get my justice. The police get their evidence. The problems are solved permanently. That is why we started this arrangement in the first place, right?"
"Right," he said. "I do the dirty work. You rearrange it artistically, altering the evidence to make it look like a shooting with no witnesses, and nobody knows the truth."
"Except for us," she whispered, stepping close to him and running her hand along his arm.
"Yes," he repeated quietly. "Except for us." He stepped back. "I will see you later then."
"Goodbye," she whispered, and kissed him through the mask, directly over his lips, then stepped back biting her lip and winked one more time.
"Haha," he said, smiling to himself as he turned and blended into the dark of the warehouse exit. "Cheeky woman."
....
Two months had passed since the Yuri incident and the news about Stark, and the increase in criminal activity during that time had been significant.
Because of this, he had become something of a celebrity in the specific sense that the boogeyman is a celebrity.
As night fell he cleaned the streets, and people knew he was not a hero.
They knew that behind each massacre there was a single person.
But no one said a word.
Those who did disappeared for a few days, and when they came back they were different people in the ways that mattered.
The general public had largely good things to say.
Part of it was that they categorized him as a superhero, which he was not, but people were fascinated by the category and he fit the silhouette well enough.
The other part was that however questionable his methods were, nobody could argue with the results.
The scum of the earth was purged, not cycled through a system that was designed to release them.
No dirty deals. No favors. No appeals. They were left on the ground...forever.
He had detractors.
The NYPD's command structure. A significant portion of the media.
People who believed the law and the system were sufficient, the same system that had been built to serve the people who had the money to use it. He did not care. If the world turned against him, he would not follow a system that had nothing good in it.
....
He landed on a rooftop, produced a device, activated it, and watched the building across from him lose power and communications simultaneously. He stepped off the edge in freefall.
"Rock and Roll! Baby!" He shot a web at the glass, used it for momentum, and broke through the eighteenth floor window. "Cortana, music!"
"Always."
The first guard inside the eighteenth floor did not have time to be surprised.
Peter hit him, grabbed his head, and introduced it to the edge of the nearest table with enough force to produce a concussion.
Before he was fully down, a pencil from the desk went into his eye with the specific efficiency of someone who has studied anatomy for exactly this category of purpose.
He took the guard's Glock 17, checked the magazine, closed it, searched for spare ammunition, pocketed it, and started walking.
At the stairwell door, two guards. The first one saw him coming and had approximately half a second before the shot arrived.
The second moved toward the glass to see what the sound was and received the same result.
He opened the stairwell door.
A guard emerged from a door in front of him. One shot, center of mass.
The door to his right opened.
A guard came through with a blade. He stopped the arm, kicked one knee out from under him, and the hidden blade did the rest.
He stood back up, ducked under a shot from another guard in the stairwell door, killed that one, and started down the stairs into the area that was filling with additional personnel who had been notified and arrived and were no longer a problem because he was moving through them before their eyes could track him.
When the magazines ran out he threw the gun into a face, jumped onto the man, opened his stomach with the blade, took the next man's weapon, backflipped over a shot that had been aimed well, and in the process killed two men who had positioned themselves in a straight line relative to each other, which was an unforgivable tactical error.
Ten more guards on the way to the CEO's office.
Then the office itself, empty, and an elegant wall in the center of the room with paint that was slightly inconsistent in texture compared to the surrounding surface.
He peeled the paint back.
"Typical," he said, producing the circular cutting device, attaching it to the vault door.
He stepped back as the concentrated energy released and the door converted itself into a liquid red substance.
"This is what happens when you use your brain."
Inside the vault: a large room.
Contents that did not belong in a standard financial vault.
Various materials and objects that registered, even at a glance, as old in a way that corporate security infrastructure was not typically designed to protect.
"These are not the kinds of things you keep in a typical vault," he said, making a bag from his webbing and beginning to transfer anything of value into it along with the unusual materials.
"Okay. Time to go."
He left the vault, distributed metal spheres around the room and the adjacent corridors as he moved toward the window he had entered through, reached the window, and told Cortana to activate them.
"Boom," he said, stepping out into the air.
Boom.
Behind him, Essex Companies, better known as Essex Clinic, began the process of no longer being a building. He landed on a rooftop two buildings away and watched it go with a feeling that was, he noted, genuinely satisfying.
"It is simply orgasmic," he said to himself, and then stopped. "Damn. Wade is getting to me." He laughed. "I hope that idiot is okay."
He went home, took the suit off, hid it along with the bag, and got into bed.
Tomorrow would come whether he was ready for it or not, and he had found that it was considerably better to be rested when it did.