Beep, beep, beep.
The red indicator on the Miniature Magnetic Tracking High-Explosive Charge blinked with absolute regularity on Bullseye's chest zipper. Each flash came with the faintest electrical hum.
The air in the clinic basement seemed to freeze.
Yang Ming pulled over a stainless-steel instrument trolley, its wheels scraping shrilly over the broken glass littering the floor. He sat on a swivel chair and leaned forward slightly, meeting Bullseye's eyes as the man sat lashed to his chair by eight heavy leather restraints.
"Heart rate's at one hundred and forty-five, and still climbing." Yang Ming glanced at the monitor beside him, his tone flat. "Your sympathetic nervous system is pumping out norepinephrine like crazy. You're afraid."
"Afraid... my fucking ass!" Bullseye clenched his teeth, the white target on his forehead twisting with the violent spasms of his facial muscles. He stared venomously at Yang Ming, trying to hide his fear behind savage aggression.
Yang Ming ignored him.
He reached for a No. 3 scalpel handle on the trolley and deftly fitted it with a fresh No. 11 pointed blade.
"Human pain transmission depends on the lateral spinothalamic tract." Yang Ming lightly scraped the back of the blade across Bullseye's exposed left collarbone. The cold metal made every hair on Bullseye's body stand on end.
"Gang interrogation methods are too crude. Pulling out nails, cutting off fingers-all they do is cover the floor in blood and cause hemorrhagic shock. Once the subject passes out from the pain, the interrogation has to stop."
The blade tip traveled outward along Bullseye's collarbone, stopping just below his left armpit.
"I'm different." Yang Ming lowered his wrist slightly.
Slice.
The sound of flesh parting was barely audible. The blade cut through the skin and subcutaneous fat with extraordinary precision. It missed every major blood vessel, drawing a pitifully small amount of blood.
With his left hand, Yang Ming picked up a precision scalpel, slipped it into the incision-only two centimeters long-and gently lifted.
A white nerve fiber, barely thicker than a strand of hair, was forcibly drawn out of the wound and exposed beneath the dim yellow surgical light.
"A branch of the brachial plexus." Yang Ming set down the scalpel in his right hand, picked up a bottle of 95 percent medical alcohol, and unscrewed the cap.
"I haven't severed it. I've only stripped away its myelin sheath. Think of it as peeling the insulation off a high-voltage wire."
Yang Ming tilted the bottle, holding its mouth above Bullseye's armpit.
"One drop will feel like putting your left arm through a meat grinder a hundred times. But without major blood loss, your blood pressure will remain stable. You absolutely won't pass out. Your brain will be fully conscious to savor every last trace of pain."
A clear drop of alcohol fell under gravity.
It landed precisely on the exposed nerve fiber.
"AAAAAAAH-!!!"
Bullseye's eyes instantly bulged, their bloodshot whites looking ready to burst. A shriek tore from his throat that barely sounded human.
His nearly two-hundred-pound body thrashed wildly in the restraint chair. The thick leather straps creaked under the strain, biting into his flesh and drawing dark red traces of blood. His left arm jerked like a dead fish shocked with electricity, twitching at a grotesque frequency.
Jessica stood three meters away, still holding the cast-iron heating pipe. Watching Bullseye's utterly contorted face, she shuddered and instinctively took half a step back.
She had seen plenty of severed arms and legs in gang shootouts, but this pure, anatomy-based torture was on an entirely different level. It made her stomach churn.
The screaming lasted a full ten seconds before his lungs ran out of air and it became the wheezing of broken bellows.
Bullseye was drenched in cold sweat, as though he had just been pulled out of the water. Saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth onto his chest.
"Now we can have a proper conversation." Yang Ming picked up the alcohol bottle again and aimed its mouth at the wound.
"Tell me where Kingpin's funding comes from. Where are the ledgers for those legal shell companies he owns?" Yang Ming's voice remained perfectly level, like an emotionless machine asking questions.
Bullseye gasped for breath. He stared at Yang Ming, his chest heaving.
Suddenly, an utterly bizarre, crazed grin spread across his deathly pale face.
"Ha... hahaha..." Bullseye laughed wildly, coughing up bloody froth. "You want to go after the boss's money? You lunatic... you have no idea who you're fucking with!"
Yang Ming tilted his wrist slightly. A second drop of alcohol fell.
"AAAH-!"
Another agonizing fit of spasms followed.
But this time, after the screaming, the madness in Bullseye's eyes burned even brighter. It was the hysteria of a man driven beyond all hope.
"It's no use! Cut me into a thousand pieces, and I still won't tell you shit!" Bullseye roared, spittle flying. "Kingpin doesn't spare anyone who betrays him! And he doesn't spare anyone who dares challenge him!"
Bullseye abruptly turned his head, sweeping Yang Ming with a venomous look before fixing his gaze on the Sterile Chamber.
"You! Daredevil! And that gun-toting Punisher! You're all going to die! The boss will turn Hell's Kitchen upside down! He'll smash your bones inch by inch and feed them to the sewer rats!"
Bullseye whipped his head back and stared at Yang Ming, a feverish desire for death in his eyes. "You'd better kill me now! Otherwise, as long as I've got one breath left, I'll shove that bomb down your assistant's throat and blow this shitty clinic to the ground!"
Bullseye's crazed curses echoed through the clinic.
Yang Ming did not administer a third drop of alcohol.
He glanced at the Cardiac Monitor. Bullseye's heart rate had passed one hundred and sixty, and his brain waves showed extreme excitation.
Yang Ming placed the alcohol bottle on the tray.
He understood now.
Kingpin's control over his men rested not merely on money, but on absolute fear etched into their very bones.
Bullseye would rather be flayed alive here than reveal even a fraction of Kingpin's core secrets. He knew the consequences of betraying Kingpin would be ten thousand times more terrifying than his current pain.
Since no intelligence could be extracted, this "asset" had lost its cash value.
Yang Ming did not like wasting effort.
"Jessica," Yang Ming said suddenly.
"Huh?" Jessica was still dazed.
"Open the door."
"The door? What for?"
Yang Ming did not answer. He reached out and briskly pulled the miniature high-explosive charge off Bullseye's chest, pressed the control panel on the back with his thumb, and disarmed the detonation sequence. He casually tossed it into his pocket.
Then Yang Ming took a glass syringe filled with cloudy liquid from a drawer.
Bullseye's wild laughter cut off abruptly. Looking at the syringe, he instinctively sensed something was wrong. "What are you doing?!"
"Since you're so loyal, I'll grant your wish." Yang Ming walked behind Bullseye.
He pressed his left hand against the back of Bullseye's head, forcing him to lower it and expose his cervical spine.
"Anatomically speaking, the descending motor pathways are all concentrated in the cervical spinal cord." Yang Ming's voice was as cold as a morgue freezer.
"You... don't you dare! If you kill me, Kingpin will-"
Puncture.
Without warning, the thick needle pierced the gap between Bullseye's first and second cervical vertebrae. With extraordinary precision, it avoided the vital centers in the medulla that maintained breathing and heartbeat and plunged directly into the anterior horn of the spinal gray matter.
Yang Ming pressed his thumb down. Five milliliters of highly concentrated Neurolytic Agent were instantly injected into Bullseye's spinal canal.
"Ugh..."
Bullseye's pupils dilated to their limit. He did not even manage to scream.
His body felt like a machine whose power cord had suddenly been pulled. Below his neck, every sensation and every ounce of strength vanished completely within a tenth of a second.
His heart still beat. His lungs still breathed on their own. His eyes could still see the dim yellow light.
But he would never move even his little finger again.
High-level paralysis. Irreversible nerve necrosis. The sharpest blade in Kingpin's arsenal had become a lump of rotten flesh that could only breathe.
Yang Ming withdrew the syringe and casually tossed it into the trash. He unfastened the chair's leather straps. Bullseye's body slid down like a puddle of sludge and hit the floor hard. Only his eyes still moved frantically, filled with utter terror and despair.
Yang Ming flicked his right hand. The silver Optical Camouflage Medical Blanket wrapped around Bullseye.
"Watch the shop," Yang Ming told Jessica.
Then, carrying Bullseye in the Invisibility Blanket with one hand, Yang Ming strode toward the ruined rolling shutter and disappeared into the rainy night outside.
At four in the morning, the downpour over Hell's Kitchen showed no sign of easing.
Outside the New York Police Department 15th Precinct.
Two police lights rotated feebly through the curtain of rain. In the duty room, an old cop held a cup of hot coffee and dozed in front of the surveillance monitor.
Suddenly, a muffled thud came from outside the entrance.
The old cop jumped, spilling coffee all over his crotch. Swearing, he drew the Glock at his waist and pushed open the bulletproof glass door.
A burly man weighing nearly two hundred pounds lay on the steps.
Rain had soaked his entire body. His black combat suit was in tatters, and bloody fluid still seeped from his left armpit. The white target on his forehead stood out glaringly beneath the police lights.
"Dear God..." The old cop sucked in a sharp breath. He recognized that face. This man's bounty ranked among the top three on the entire 15th Precinct's wanted list. Bullseye.
The old cop approached nervously with his gun raised. He nudged Bullseye's leg with his foot.
No response.
But he noticed that Bullseye's eyes were open. They darted frantically from side to side, filled with despair and pleading beyond words.
Gathering his courage, the old cop leaned closer and checked Bullseye's carotid artery with his fingers.
His pulse was strong and steady.
Yet apart from his eyes, his whole body was like a corpse.
There was no note, no bill.
Only a gang's utterly destroyed ace, dumped like a bag of garbage on the steps that represented New York's law.
In a dark alley three hundred meters away.
Yang Ming put away the Optical Camouflage Medical Blanket, folding it and slipping it into his coat pocket.
He watched a group of cops rush out of the station and hurriedly carry Bullseye inside. A cold, humorless smile curved his lips.
Didn't Kingpin want to intimidate people?
Turning his top assassin into a vegetable and dumping him outside a police station-now that was intimidation on an entirely different level.
Yang Ming turned and walked through the puddles toward the clinic.
He had thoroughly stirred up the stagnant waters of Hell's Kitchen. Kingpin's retaliation would be nothing short of devastating.
It was time to take those three crates of Stark Industries heavy firepower through that iron door and expand into some new business in Gotham City.