CHAPTER 24: AMATEUR HOUR
The plan was simple. That should have been my first warning.
Fisk's people were meeting at a warehouse on Forty-Eighth Street—I'd picked up the intel from one of Ben Urich's sources, a dockworker who owed him a favor. The meeting would happen tonight. Important people, important discussions. The kind of information that could accelerate our investigation by weeks if I could document it.
All I had to do was get to a rooftop with a good vantage point, take some photographs, and leave without being noticed.
Simple.
I dressed in dark clothing—black jeans, black jacket, black beanie pulled low. Brought binoculars, a camera with a zoom lens, and enough confidence to fill Madison Square Garden. I'd been training with Matt for weeks. I'd survived six Russians. I'd been evading professional surveillance for a month.
How hard could rooftop surveillance be?
Very hard, as it turned out. Impossibly, humiliatingly hard.
The first problem was finding the right rooftop. In my head, I had a clear image of the building I needed—a four-story warehouse with a flat roof overlooking Fisk's meeting location. In reality, Hell's Kitchen's industrial district was a maze of nearly identical structures, and none of them matched my mental map.
I spent twenty minutes wandering alleys that all looked the same. Turned left when I should have turned right. Doubled back twice. My phone's GPS was useless in the narrow corridors between buildings, bouncing my location around like a pinball.
When I finally found the right building, I discovered problem number two: getting up.
The fire escape was on the opposite side from my approach—I'd have to circle the entire building to reach it. That meant exposing myself to any watchers on the street, which defeated the purpose of the mission. I needed a different way up.
The loading dock had a ladder attached to the wall. Old, rusted, missing several rungs. But it led to a platform that connected to another ladder, which might lead to the roof. Probably.
I started climbing.
The first ladder held. The platform creaked ominously but supported my weight. The second ladder was where things went wrong.
Three rungs up, the mounting bracket gave way. Metal screeched against brick. The whole structure shifted sideways, swinging away from the wall with me still attached.
For one terrifying moment, I was suspended over nothing. Arms wrapped around rusted metal, legs dangling, my brain screaming that I was about to die in the most embarrassing way possible.
Then the other bracket broke too.
The fall was maybe fifteen feet. Not enough to kill me, probably not even enough to seriously injure me if I landed right. The problem was what I landed in.
The dumpster broke my fall. The garbage inside the dumpster broke everything else—my dignity, my sense of smell, my faith in my own competence. I plunged into a mixture of rotting produce, industrial waste, and things I refused to identify, sinking deep enough that extricating myself required several minutes of thrashing.
When I finally climbed out, dripping with substances that would haunt my nightmares, I looked up.
A shadow stood on the rooftop I'd been trying to reach. Man-shaped. Still as stone.
Even from three stories down, even through the mask, I could feel Matt's judgment radiating like heat from a fire.
He didn't say anything. Didn't move. Just... watched.
I opened my mouth to explain. To justify. To salvage some shred of dignity from the disaster.
Then he leaped away into the darkness, disappearing over the rooftop like gravity was optional.
I stood in the alley, covered in garbage, and seriously considered a career change.
The shower lasted forty-five minutes.
I used every cleaning product in my apartment—soap, shampoo, that expensive body wash I'd been saving for special occasions, everything. The smell clung to my skin like a curse. Three rounds of scrubbing, and I could still detect traces of whatever had been rotting in that dumpster.
The clothes went in the trash. The binoculars and camera had survived somehow, but they'd need professional cleaning. The beanie was a total loss—I didn't even try to salvage it.
I stood in my bathroom, wrapped in a towel, staring at my reflection in the mirror. The face looking back at me was the same one I'd worn for months now—Roy Smith's face, the inherited features of a man I'd never met. But the expression was pure humiliation.
Six weeks of training. One Man Army powers that could let me fight multiple opponents. Enough money to buy half of Hell's Kitchen.
And I couldn't climb a ladder without falling in a dumpster.
My phone buzzed. A text from Matt: The meeting ended two hours ago. Next time, try the stairs.
I threw the phone on my bed and went to scrub my skin again.
The next morning, I met Claire at the warehouse on Eleventh Avenue.
She took one look at my face and started laughing.
"Matt called you."
"Matt texted me." She was practically wheezing. "He said, and I quote, 'Ask Roy about his surveillance operation.' I've never heard him sound so amused in a text before."
"I fell in a dumpster."
"I gathered that from context." She wiped her eyes, still grinning. "Roy, you've been here for two months. You've fought off trained killers. You've built a network of safe houses across Hell's Kitchen. And you fell in a dumpster."
"The ladder broke."
"The ladder broke because you tried to climb an obviously ancient fire escape in the middle of the night." She shook her head, but there was affection underneath the mockery. "You're not an action hero. You know that, right?"
"I'm beginning to realize."
I slumped against the shelf where we'd stacked medical supplies, suddenly exhausted. Not physically—I'd slept fine, once I'd finally stopped smelling like garbage. But the emotional weight of failure was pressing down on me like a physical force.
"I wanted to help," I said quietly. "Matt's out there every night, risking his life. Karen and Ben are digging into Fisk's empire, putting themselves in danger. And I'm just... writing checks. Organizing safe houses. Supporting from the sidelines."
"That's not nothing."
"It's not enough either." I looked around the warehouse—at the medical station, the emergency supplies, the infrastructure I'd built with Claire's help. "All of this, and I still can't do what Matt does. Can't even do basic surveillance without making a fool of myself."
Claire was quiet for a moment. Then she walked over and sat down next to me, shoulder to shoulder.
"You want to know what I think?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Not really." She bumped my shoulder with hers. "I think you're trying to be something you're not. You've got these powers—which we still don't fully understand—and you've got money, and you've got this idea that you should be out there on the rooftops like Matt. But that's his skill set. His training. His whole life."
"So what's mine?"
"This." She gestured at the warehouse around us. "The safe houses. The funding. The network. The boring, unglamorous work that makes everything else possible." A pause. "Matt can fight the bad guys. But he can't do it without a place to hide, supplies to heal with, people to support him. That's you, Roy. That's what you're good at."
I thought about that. About the families I'd helped relocate after Fisk's acquisitions. The legal battles that were slowing his expansion. The investigation that was getting closer every day.
"I still want to help directly. To be there when things go down."
"Then train harder. Get better." Claire's voice softened. "But don't beat yourself up for not being a superhero after two months. Matt's been doing this his whole life. You're playing catch-up. It's going to take time."
I exhaled slowly. She was right. I knew she was right.
But the memory of Matt's silhouette on that rooftop, watching me flounder in garbage, wasn't going away anytime soon.
"For what it's worth," Claire added, "Matt said he was impressed you didn't give up. Said most people would have gone home after getting lost the first time. The fact that you kept trying, even when everything went wrong... he respects that."
"He has a funny way of showing it."
"He's Matt. Emotional expression isn't exactly his strong suit." She stood, offering me a hand up. "Come on. Let's do an inventory check. I need to make sure we're stocked for whatever disaster comes next."
I took her hand, let her pull me to my feet.
The surveillance mission had been a failure. But failure wasn't the same as giving up. I'd learn from this. Get better. Find my role in this war against Fisk.
And maybe—someday—I'd even be able to climb a ladder without incident.
First things first, though.
I had a lot of training to catch up on.
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