“Are the rest of the savior scouts around here or am I actually going to have a good day today?” Castle sneered. Mockingbird glared at him through those yellow tinted goggles of hers. She looked uninjured but…
“I hit you, didn’t I? The hell kind of body armor do you have?”
“As if I’d tell you,” she retorted.
“Yeah, whatever. Get out of here, Avenger. Leave this trash to me and go save a kitten from a tree or something,”
“I was trying to find their supplier, idiot,” she snapped at him. “This is stolen Stark Tech.” She gestured at the computer. “You don’t have the means to deal with it.”
He racked a bullet into the chamber of his gun.
“I can deal with them just fine.”
Bobbi vaulted the table between them and slammed the muzzle into the air. “You raging asshole. I’m not going to let you murder them in cold blood.”
“Get off the horse you road in on, Barton,” he said coldly. “I know you, remember? I’ve seen the end result of you being pissed off.”
“Things are different now, Frank. I’m different. And you don’t need to kill them. Just go. I’ll take it from here; I’ll call the NYPD. I’m not a wanted vigilante.”
Anger snapped through him like an electrical current and she saw it.
Mockingbird disappeared into the shadows like a ghost. How the hell did she she do that? She was wearing white!
Frank snarled. He wanted to execute these scumbags but if he turned his weapon off her she’d come at him and she hit hard when she wanted to. He moved out of the light, keeping some kind of cover between himself and the area where she had disappeared.
He had a few choices. He could do what she’d said there and bug out. These guys would go to jail; that was something at least.
They’ll all get released in a couple weeks, tops. The leaders, anyway, the important ones. They had money behind them, money walks.
The injustice of it all burned him, as it always did. These vicious punks would be walking around on the streets again in no time, flooding the school yards and playgrounds with poison, ruining the lives of kids who mighta grown up to be decent citizens.
The Avengers didn’t see that stuff, up there in their literal ivory tower. They all thought in terms of operations and publicity and networking. It kinda hurt; he’d worked with both Mockingbird and Black Widow before, here on streets. They were both straight shooting, cool, calm and ruthless.
Or they had been, before Rogers got his hooks into them. Out here, no one could afford nobility.
Now Mockingbird was protecting these waste cases…
In the shadows, Castle saw movement and without thought shot at it, then spun to his left, further away from the light.
He’d aimed for the head. He knew it.
He grabbed a piece of rickety equipment nearby and threw it to one side, hoping to use the sound to cover his next motion. He hoped he needed too.
For the first time in his life, Frank Castle really hoped his shot had missed.
He got his answer when a flung baton struck him in the arm, wringing a grunt out of him, and a furious Mockingbird came out of the dark to catch it on the rebound.
Great, Punisher now she’s mad (Go to 5)