"One hundred thousand dollars. Or the equivalent in hard currency. No credit."
Yang Ming took off his bloodstained white coat and tossed it into the medical waste bin. His tone was as casual as if he were ordering a five-dollar burger at a fast-food joint on the corner.
Frank stood where he was, his grim face betraying nothing.
He was broke. Ever since his family died, his bank accounts had been completely frozen. His tactical vest and M1911 pistol had all been stripped off dead men. Forget a hundred thousand dollars-he couldn't even scrape together ten bucks for a cab.
But Frank's head held the most valuable underground intelligence in all of Hell's Kitchen.
"Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn. The air-raid shelter beneath the ventilation shaft of an abandoned subway station. One of Kingpin's secret safe houses." Frank's voice was hoarse, steeped in bloodshed. "There's three million dollars in cash inside. The code is 0427. It's yours."
Yang Ming's eyelids lifted slightly.
"There's more." Frank kept raising the stakes.
"Pier 47. The container yard. There's a shipment of heavy weapons leaked from Stark Industries. Armor-piercing rounds, high-explosive grenades, man-portable missiles. I just blew up half of it. The other half's still there. If you can haul it away, it's all yours."
Two seconds of dead silence settled over the clinic.
Yang Ming turned, walked to the sink, and turned on the faucet. Cold water washed over his hands. He looked at the eyes framed by heavy dark circles in the mirror, and his heart gave two powerful beats.
Drugs were too dirty for his taste. But Stark's heavy weapons and those three million in dirty cash with nonsequential serial numbers were a windfall straight from heaven.
With his Storage Ring, he only had to stuff the weapons into subspace, turn around, and step through that iron door to unload them straight into Gotham City.
The gangs in Gotham City, including the many mobsters still using Thompson submachine guns and old-fashioned shotguns, would absolutely offer an irresistible fortune for firepower generations ahead of their own.
This deal would make him a killing.
"Deal." Yang Ming grabbed a paper towel and dried his hands. "If that code is wrong, I'll cut you into a hundred and eight pieces and feed you to the turtles in the Hudson River."
He turned toward Jessica, who was slumped behind the triage desk.
"Jessica, get the number two debridement kit. Treat his wounds. Get some practice with your suturing while you're at it."
Jessica rolled her eyes so hard they nearly disappeared. She'd just spent an entire night being tormented by dead pig flesh, and now she had a live person to deal with. But the boss had spoken, and that five-thousand-dollar monthly salary was still beckoning. She reluctantly stood, picked up a tray, and walked over to Frank.
Without a word, Frank unfastened the buckles of his tactical vest with one hand and took off his close-fitting combat shirt.
His lean, muscular torso was exposed under the dim yellow light. It could hardly be called skin. It was a map of flesh pieced together from countless knife scars, gunshot wounds, and burns. A cut slashed open by a throwing dart along his left ribs was still seeping blood.
"Sit down," Jessica snapped.
She picked up an alcohol-soaked cotton ball with forceps and, without the slightest concern for gentleness, roughly shoved it into Frank's wound to clean it.
An ordinary person would have screamed in pain. Frank didn't even furrow his brow. His breathing remained steady at twelve breaths a minute.
"Your muscles are hard as rocks." Jessica picked up the needle holder. As the high-carbon steel suture needle pierced his flesh, she felt tremendous resistance. "Relax, or the needle's going to break again."
"You're using too much force. Your insertion angle is off." Frank looked down at the wound and coldly pointed out the problem. "You're not mending clothes. You need to follow the muscle fibers."
"Shut up! I don't need some old man who's been beaten half to death teaching me how to stitch!" Jessica's temper flared, and she sharply forced her wrist forward.
Snap.
The steel suture needle broke under the force of her grip.
Frank looked at the half a needle lodged in his flesh, then at Jessica's furious face. Without a word, he reached out with his left hand, dug the bloody fragment out with his fingernails, and dropped it onto the tray.
"Get another one. Keep going." There wasn't the slightest ripple in the Punisher's voice.
The corner of Jessica's mouth twitched. This old bastard was an absolute lunatic.
At the same time.
Inside the Sterile Chamber, the Cardiac Monitor gave off an impeccably regular "beep... beep..."
Matt Murdock's eyes snapped open.
Beneath his dark red cowl, his eyes still saw nothing but lifeless darkness. But now that he was no longer on the brink of death, his heightened senses swept outward like radar rebooting at full power.
The air carried the scent of highly concentrated pure oxygen, mingled with an extremely sophisticated chemical compound similar to those used in Stark Industries laboratories. The temperature held steady at twenty-four degrees Celsius. The mattress beneath him gave a faint response from hydraulic shock absorption.
This wasn't equipment an ordinary back-alley clinic should have. This was a Hyperbaric Chamber fit only for the intensive care unit of a top-tier private hospital.
His auditory radar began constructing a 3D model.
Three meters to his right. A steady heartbeat. Long, even breaths. Frank.
A woman stood beside Frank. Matt's ears twitched almost imperceptibly.
He heard the muted sound of muscle fibers contracting as the woman moved her arms. That kind of muscle density and explosive strength couldn't belong to an ordinary human. It was more terrifying even than a mutant's. Like a lioness lurking beneath human skin.
But what truly unnerved Matt was the man standing beside the sink five meters away.
Yang Ming.
Matt's sense of smell penetrated the Sterile Chamber's filtration system. He caught an extraordinarily strange scent.
Damp. Cold. Carrying the sour rot of an old industrial city. This definitely wasn't the smell of tonight's rain in New York's Hell's Kitchen.
Worse still, beneath that rainwater scent lay an intensely concentrated smell of blood.
As a vigilante who had spent years prowling the night, Matt was acutely sensitive to the smell of blood. This wasn't the blood of one or two people. It was fresh blood from at least a dozen people, their arteries sliced open in an instant by an exceptionally sharp weapon and left to spray. They had died no more than two hours ago.
Yet the heartbeat of this man who had killed over a dozen people was as steady as a stone. Sixty beats a minute. No emotional fluctuations. No exhilaration after killing. No fear.
Like a precision machine wearing human skin.
Every hair on Matt's body stood on end. What the hell kind of place had Frank brought him to? This place was more dangerous than Kingpin's slaughterhouse!
He clenched his teeth, braced both hands against the metal bed, and tried to force himself upright to warn Frank to leave.
Hiss...
The Sterile Chamber's blast-resistant glass cover was pulled open without warning.
A hand shot inside like lightning and landed unerringly on Matt's right shoulder.
His heightened senses had clearly detected the movement a tenth of a second in advance, but the combat reflexes he took such pride in failed him completely.
Yang Ming's technique was too precise. This wasn't a fight. It was a dissection of a living subject.
His index finger and thumb clamped down like hydraulic pincers, fitting precisely into the depression above the spine of Matt's right shoulder blade. The suprascapular nerve had to pass through that spot.
Yang Ming applied a little pressure with his fingertips.
"Ngh!"
A muffled groan escaped Matt's throat. An agonizing surge of numbness, as if ten million steel needles had pierced his marrow at once, ripped through his central nervous system. His body, which he had barely lifted half an inch, instantly lost all strength and slammed back onto the mattress.
The right half of his body was completely paralyzed.
"I told you. If you keep moving and bring on another pneumothorax, not even a god can save you." Yang Ming looked down at him, his voice icy.
Matt's left hand clamped tightly around the wrist of the hand pressing on his shoulder.
What he felt beneath his fingertips sent his heart sinking.
That hand was covered in calluses. Along the outside of the index finger and the pad of the middle finger were pressure marks left by years of holding a scalpel. But the web between thumb and forefinger and the heel of the palm bore deeper, rougher calluses. Those marks could only have come from years of practicing killing techniques that ended lives in a single strike.
A miracle-working doctor, or a murderous butcher?
"Who are you, really?" Matt tilted his head up, his dark red mask facing Yang Ming. His voice was hoarse and wary.
"You smell of the blood of more than a dozen lives. You're no ordinary doctor."
A cold, mocking smile curled at the corner of Yang Ming's mouth.
He slowly released Matt's shoulder, pulled over a sterile cloth, and wiped his fingertips.
"Who am I? A back-alley doctor who cares about money, not people." Yang Ming pulled over a swivel chair, sat down, and crossed his legs.
"That hole in your chest? I forced it shut with a Defibrillator and a wonder drug that costs a hundred thousand dollars a vial. Your life is my asset now. Until your friend pays the bill in full, you'd better lie there quietly like a vegetable."