Super Intelligence took about ten seconds to come up with a plan.
Hell's Kitchen's drug trade had a clear food chain.
At the bottom were distributors like Murphy and Red Ghost, with several area managers in the middle and Kingpin's organization at the top.
Each level had to pay the one above it.
The key to paying up was two words: a cut.
Red Ghost's monthly drug revenue was somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000. By the rules, he had to hand over thirty percent to Kingpin's middle managers.
But Lynn had caught a detail in the small talk when Murphy came to the clinic: Murphy had said, "That bastard Red Ghost reports three grand for five grand's worth of product."
If that was true, Red Ghost had been underreporting his revenue and pocketing the difference.
Kingpin's organization had zero tolerance for that.
All Lynn needed was a trigger.
Super Senses had a stable listening range of about two hundred meters.
The clinic was only a block and a half from Red Ghost's hideout, around 120 meters away.
That night, Lynn sat by a second-floor window, closed his eyes, and turned his hearing up to its limit.
A flood of background noise poured in: televisions, arguments, barking dogs, the hiss of water pipes.
But his mind worked like a precision audio filter, peeling away the noise layer by layer until only the sounds inside Red Ghost's hideout remained.
Three men were talking.
"...For last month's books, I told Old Fei it was 125 grand."
"What was it really?"
"178 grand."
Another voice laughed. "Red Ghost, you're getting bolder by the day."
"What's there to worry about? That idiot Old Fei can't even do elementary-school math."
Lynn opened his eyes.
That was enough.
He used the clinic's landline—not his cell phone, since landlines were much harder to trace—to dial a number.
He had happened to memorize the number while Murphy was getting surgery. Murphy's phone had rung once, and Super Senses had caught it from the caller ID in that instant.
The number belonged to one of Kingpin's middle managers in Hell's Kitchen, a fat guy named Old Fei.
The phone was answered after three rings.
"Who is this?"
Lynn didn't say a word.
He played a recording from his phone: the conversation he'd just intercepted with Super Senses, dubbed onto the clinic's recording equipment and stripped of background noise.
"...For last month's books, I told Old Fei it was 125 grand."
"What was it really?"
"178 grand."
"Red Ghost, you're getting bolder by the day."
"What's there to worry about? That idiot Old Fei can't even do elementary-school math."
The recording ended.
There was silence on the other end for about five seconds.
Then came a heavy breath, followed by the sound of gritted teeth.
Lynn hung up.
The next morning, two black SUVs pulled up outside Red Ghost's hideout.
Four men in dark clothes went in and took Red Ghost and two of his underlings away.
The whole thing took less than ten minutes.
That afternoon, the iron shutter at Red Ghost's hideout never opened again.
Lynn sat behind the clinic's front desk, listening to the empty silence inside the building 120 meters away.
He lifted his coffee cup and found it had gone cold.
He made himself a fresh one.
The next day, he called a repairman to replace the sign.
The new sign was a little better than the old one, made with a tempered-glass panel that wouldn't break as easily.
He embedded a tiny camera inside the back of the sign, aimed at the entire area in front of the clinic. It recorded around the clock, automatically uploading the footage to an encrypted cloud drive.
From beginning to end, he never left the clinic, came face-to-face with anyone, or resorted to violence.
An anonymous phone call.
A recording.
Red Ghost had vanished from Hell's Kitchen.
Lynn picked up his phone and checked the news.
There was nothing new about Tony Stark today.
But another story caught his attention:
The New York Post's local section: "East Harlem Shooting: Suspected Superhero Intervention Fails to Prevent Tragedy; Twelve-Year-Old Girl Shot."
The accompanying image was a blurry phone photo. It showed a large, muscular Black man in a hoodie, walking away from the shooting scene with his back to the camera.
The muscles in his arms, visible beneath the hoodie, were unnaturally defined.
Lynn finished comparing the man's build in a second.
Luke Cage.
He put down his phone and suddenly heard footsteps coming from the direction of the clinic's back door.
Not the back door.
The front door.
2:17 a.m.
Lynn was already upstairs, lying on the hard folding bed.
His sleep had grown lighter and lighter. His brain stayed half-alert to the sounds around him, and anything unusual was enough to bring him fully awake.
Footsteps.
Coming from the south.
Uneven intervals.
The left foot took about 0.2 seconds longer to hit the ground than the right, suggesting the right side of the body was bearing extra weight or in pain.
The soles were rubber, the kind found on hard-soled combat boots.
Every three steps came a faint metallic clink: shell casings knocking together in a pocket.
A little farther away.
Heavy breathing through the nose, carrying a strong smell of gunpowder and a rusty, bloodlike odor.
It wasn't someone else's blood. He was bleeding himself.
A lot of blood.
With every step he took, blood dripped onto the ground. The drops came about 0.8 seconds apart.
Lynn sat up in bed.
What happened next gave him no time to prepare.
"Bam—"
The clinic's front door was kicked open.
It wasn't pushed or rammed open. It was a real kick.
One of the hinges snapped clean off, leaving the door hanging at a forty-five-degree angle in the frame with a harsh metallic screech.
Lynn hurried downstairs.
He saw the man from the turn in the staircase.
A tall man stood in the clinic doorway.
No, not stood. He was bracing himself.
His left hand gripped the doorframe. In his right, he held a silver M1911, its muzzle pointed toward the stairs.
He was covered in blood from head to toe.
It wasn't splattered on him. It was flowing out of him.
His black jacket was soaked through, its color turned from black to a sticky, dark brown.
The jacket hung open, revealing a black bulletproof vest underneath. A white skull was emblazoned across the center of his chest.
At least four bullet holes had punched through the skull emblem, blood seeping from the edges of each one.
Frank Castle.
The Punisher.
Lynn stood on the stairs, about six meters from the doorway.
He looked at the M1911 aimed at his head, then at the face behind the muzzle. The man's pale-gray face was smeared with blood and gunpowder. His eyes were sunken, but his pupils burned with a terrifying brightness.
Those weren't the eyes of a dying man.
They were the eyes of a man who refused to die.
"You the miracle doctor who can fix anything?"
His voice was hoarse, like sandpaper scraping against iron.
Lynn's gaze lingered on the gun for a second.
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