Chapter 66: The Underground King of New York!
A lavishly appointed office.
Fisk sat in his chair, methodically working through two sets of documents: the black-ink ledger of off-the-books income and the clean accounts of the legitimate business alongside it.
Behind him, his personal secretary Marina was applying every ounce of her strength to his shoulders.
Fisk's size was not fat. What it was was muscle at an unusually high density. With his physique and combat skills, he could hold his own against Daredevil, the Punisher, and Spider-Man simultaneously without losing ground. Which was why giving him an effective shoulder massage required Marina to work at full capacity, and occasionally to bring in specialized equipment.
Feeling the numbness spreading from his shoulders, Fisk paused over the documents.
"Marina. I've been noticing an uptick in the business index lately. What changed?"
Marina's hands stopped.
"Sir. This past month's recovery is mainly because Spider-Man has been showing up far less often to disrupt our operations. With him out of the picture more regularly, the numbers naturally improve."
"Spider-Man." Fisk nodded. "That makes sense."
He didn't know why Spider-Man's frequency had dropped, and it didn't particularly matter. Whatever the reason, it worked in his favor.
If all those street-level heroes disappeared entirely, he could run this city with considerably less friction.
"What about Bullseye? Any word?"
Marina seemed to have anticipated the question. "Mr. Bullseye just arrived, sir. He's in the waiting room. From the look of things, he's here to collect payment."
"Payment." Fisk made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "I hired him to make Daredevil stop being my problem. And right now? Daredevil is still out there, moving around completely unaffected. And now he wants to be paid."
He stood anyway.
Bullseye handled more of his difficult work than anyone else on his payroll. Losing him over a payment dispute made no sense. The list of things Bullseye had done for him over the years was long enough to justify some tolerance.
"Bring him in. I have something else for him while he's here."
"Yes, sir." Marina left with visible relief — the massage was not a task she ever enjoyed — and made her way down the corridor toward the waiting room.
The carpet was deep enough that high heels left no sound. On either side of the hallway, vases and paintings of no small value had been arranged to make what would otherwise be an ordinary corridor feel as expensive as everything else on this floor.
Marina was halfway down it when the elevator behind her opened.
Two tall figures stepped out. Black overcoats. Black cowboy hats. They moved with the steady, unhurried weight of something that had decided where it was going and saw no reason to rush.
The carpet absorbed their footsteps completely.
They reached the door to Fisk's office and looked at each other.
Both doors were kicked off their hinges simultaneously.
Splinters crossed the room. The paintings on the wall shook.
The two figures came through the smoke at full speed.
Fisk's reaction time was not that of a man who had survived in this business by accident. The moment he heard the sound, he was already moving. He drove his fist through the hidden panel in his desk, pulled out a modified Desert Eagle, swept the ledger off the surface with the same hand, and had the barrel trained on the two shapes in the smoke before the dust had settled.
Two shots. No pause between draw and aim.
Both rounds crossed the room, through the smoke, aimed at center of the forehead.
Fisk knew exactly what this weapon did. One shot from this gun could open the hood of a car. At this range, the impact force alone would put a man in body armor on the floor; a headshot would make the result resemble a dropped melon.
Both rounds hit their marks.
The Ivan Tyrants' cowboy hats flipped off their heads.
The slugs had embedded in the forehead bone like coins pressed into wet clay. No blood from either of them. One Tyrant's head shifted back slightly. Then returned to center. The expression on his face suggested someone had tossed a peanut at him.
Fisk fired the remaining six rounds in rapid succession: face, neck, chest. Every shot accurate. Every shot would have been fatal for a normal person.
The Tyrants did not slow down.
By the time the smoke cleared, two large black-gloved hands were already reaching for him.
Fisk moved to raise his arms.
One hand closed around his gun hand, fingers locking over it completely. The Desert Eagle, under that grip, compressed into something that no longer resembled a Desert Eagle.
The other hand went to his throat.
Fisk's muscle density, which had more in common with granite than flesh, had the same practical resistance in an Ivan Tyrant's grip as anyone else's. The hand pulled. Two hundred and fifty kilograms of Fisk came over the desk as though the mass were a minor consideration. The Tyrant carried him backward and drove him into the wall.
The concrete behind him cracked outward in a web pattern from the impact. The painting on the wall next to it dropped to the floor.
Fisk's vision went dark for several seconds.
He kept kicking anyway. Both legs, working without instruction from any coherent thought, driving at the Tyrants as hard as they could.
"Who sent you?! Answer me! Who sent you?! I'll pay ten times whatever you're getting!" He forced the words out through the grip on his throat, eyes locked on both of them.
The Ivan Tyrants registered this without any visible response.
One of them spoke.
"Inject."
The other reached into his coat and produced an injection: the superior-strain Las Plagas specimen Matthew had modified with Will Distortion.
The needle went in.
The Tyrants released him and turned toward the door.
"Mission complete."
Two hundred and fifty kilograms of Kingpin hit the floor like someone had switched off the mechanism holding him up. Fisk got onto his hands and knees, coughing, one hand going to his throat, the other to the small puncture mark at the injection site.
The sting under his skin was unmistakable.
"What did you do?!" The words came out loud enough to carry.
The Ivan Tyrant with the blue goggles stopped at the door. He turned his head back toward Fisk with an expression that carried, for a Tyrant, a notable amount of meaning.
"You'll find out soon enough."
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