Chapter 20: A Favor Paid in Blood
"What's the issue?" Sean asked him, his tone light and rather casual. Normal for their interactions of the past, but it wouldn't be after today. While Jim would've loved to get into some light banter with the man, but when it came to things of this nature anytime to beat around the bush. He just wasn't that sort of guy. It would leave a bad taste in his mouth.
"You've gotten a hit put on you," It was such a cold sentence, something that caused Sean's ever-present smile to falter on his face. "Seems a certain up-and-comer doesn't like how you've been talking, afraid that your loose lips will bring him some unwanted attention."
O'Leary wasn't the highest of Made-Men with the Kitchen Irish but he was someone that they relied on for a lot of information. Who to bribe, who to stay away from, and even who were the players were
Sean didn't speak, he just turned his back to the younger man, his hands grabbing onto a set of glasses that were stacked next to two cans of beer. The only sound that was made was the crack of the cans as the elder mobster poured them into the glasses.
It was only after chugging down a full pint that Sean spoke once more, voice thick with a seething rage.
"Did he send you, laddie?" The glass cracked under the pressure of his hand, only enough for an audible creek to move through the air. "Send you to get rid of me? Before I can find out his name?"
"Why? You close?" Jim deflected, the hand in his pocket fingering the handle of a revolver. It wasn't like he wanted to use it, the father of one just needed to look out for his own. Sadly that meant doing jobs like this for beings like Wilson Fisk.
"You wouldn't be here if I wasn't, close." Over Sean's voice, Jim could hear the sound of the door creaking open behind him, telling the man that he had some company.
But it didn't bother him, in fact, he'd been expecting it for some time. "You tell Fisk that we don't appreciate his like thinking that he can just walk in, take over our turf, and make himself out to be some sort of boogie man."
O'Reilly should've been surprised that the other man had known he'd started to work for the new crime lord, but he couldn't really bring himself to be. O'Leary had ways of knowing things that you didn't want him to, no matter how hard you tried to keep it from him.
It was the sound of four footsteps that told O'Reilly just how many people were surrounding him at this very second. Without taking a second to think about it, Jim turned, angling himself so he could see both the two men who'd just arrived and Sean on the other side of him.
"Will I tell him that?" The former co-worker glared at the men to his side, causing all both Sean to flinch back in fear. "I'm here as a favor to you, Sean. Ain't no reason to be calling a bunch of no-name goons into our private talks."
"Why? Because Fisk won't like me spilling his name to everyone that wants to hear it!" O'Leary shoved his finger into Jim's chest, the sharp shape pressing against a bandage the man hid underneath his shirt. "Because you didn't think we'd find out that you spilled the beans on the dock job a few months ago!"
It started slowly, from deep inside his chest, something that Sean wouldn't have expected from the younger man, not with how the man had been holding himself over the years.
But over the next few seconds, Jim O'Reilly started to laugh, it was a deep and energetic laugh that sounded more like it came from a clown than a career criminal.
A slap rang out in the room as flesh hit flesh, O'Leary's hand smacking into the redhead's nose with enough force that crimson started to spill out like a leak from a water tower.
"Don't think because we let you out that you can come in and disrespect me, laddie," Sean warned him, wiping the red from his own hand with a cloth that had been on the nearby counter. "I was making deals, killing folks, and running things around here before you were a sparkle in your pop's eye and don't think that wife or girl of ours are off-limits to my wrath, Laddie."
Jim spat out a wad of blood onto the floor, coating the ground in a thick glop of red. The sounds of cocking guns came from the two men on his sides, neither of which had spoken yet, only aiming right for the father of one's head with flat expressions
"I came here to give you a warning, maybe help you fake your death," O'Reilly said, his hands shaking as fury started to raise throughout his body. "I ain't no killer but I can't accept someone that would threaten my famil-"
"I was your family!" Sean interrupted him, slamming a fist down on the wooden counter with enough force that the glasses left there crashed to the ground. "I brought you into the life, I made you the man ye've become, and now you've made me a fool-"
Jim didn't let his old friend finish the sentence, instead, he just ducked beneath the guns and rolling into the men's feet, causing them to trip onto the ground in a hard crash.
Before they could even attempt to rise to their feet once more, O'Reilly took out his revolver and shot two bullets into the back of their heads.
Killing them instantly.
But O'Leary was not a passive man, instead of cowering in the corner of the room he threw himself into a tackle, ramming into Jim's stomach with enough force that the gun was flung from his hand and their heads snapped against the tile floor. Sean managed to get to his knees, launching a fist out towards Jim's head.
He barely managed to move his head just slightly to the right, causing the punch to hit into the floor instead.
The fingers snapped, Sean's mouth flung shut barely holding back the scream of pain that the older man let out before Jim's boot smashed into his chest and walked him away with all the force of a truck.
Sean's head snapped against the edge of the counter, the loud crack signaling the state his neck was left in.
The doors to the room were practically broken as a barrage of people started to barrel in, causing Jim to let out a large sigh as he stood to his feet once more, letting the four new men surround him in a semi-circle. Each one of them holding a weapon, some batts, and some of them were holding pipes.
"Guys… didn't Sean teach ya?" he muttered, stepping forward just enough that his left foot was beside the leg of a nearby stool. Another stool within reach of his right foot. "Ya don't use pipes, we're a classier sort of operation."
None of the men spoke, some seemed to be surprised at the still body of Sean, who could do nothing but gurgle at the world around him.
As the first of these new attackers came towards Jim, the man kicked up the stool, catching it in one hand and banging it against the man's skull. The wood exploded around the room, causing splinters to fly outward, forcing the rest of the men to cover their eyes with their forearms.
Leaving them wide open for O'Reilly to swipe out the leg of the second, nick their baseball bat and ram that into the heads of the final two. Knocking them all out all in a single string of combat that belonged more in a video game than it did in reality.
"Sean," Jim's voice was much smaller now like he was suddenly feeling a great deal of pain. "This isn't what I wanted, but you've forced me down this path," Using a subdued pace, he picked up his revolver once more, making sure to pop a single cap into the foreheads of all the men here, leaving O'Leary for last. "I'm sorry that it's come to this."
"Such a waste."
x-x-x
(Louise)
You wouldn't be able to tell due to her size, but Louise was actually very good at sneaking around. It came from how much she liked to get out of the house to explore the neighborhood when she was young but her Pop had thought it was far too dangerous.
Which it would've been for any other girl, but the O'Reilly girl was far too much for any thug like that to handle. Even when she had been a small child.
The building was what she expected from an apartment complex turned science lab. It didn't have as many corridors as it would if it were designed as a lab complex first.
The width of the halls though was obviously expanded at some point, to let lab equipment by without accidentally getting struck.
It was either a holiday season that plenty of the lab workers here shared… or it was because there was meant to be no active projects here at the moment. Something that the deserted state of the halls seemed to confirm to her.
A bit risky in security terms given the kind of information that would be on the computers but Louise was sure that anything dangerous would've bee wiped from their drives ages ago.
At least that would be how her Pop would handle it. Personnel files, on the other hand, would still be accessible through a network.
Louise managed to get inside one of the computer rooms, no cameras in sight. while her eyes roamed the room the door behind her creaking as she found herself surrounded by a series of machines that were far more advanced than anything she'd ever seen before.
"Well isn't this… wizard" she muttered to keep her voice low, just in case there were any security sensors that get activated by sounds over a certain volume. Those sorts of things couldn't be too sensitive, if they were it would only pick up noise from the outside.
Would cause too many false alarms otherwise.
With a slow, deliberate set of steps, Louise sat down next to one of the many Stark computers. A grin on her face as she spotted the open USB ports that were on the device. Something that she expected and had come prepared for.
It took once click of the power button to turn the device on, another hand coming out to plug in a USB stick, an LED on the back flashing green as the computer booted up.
It went against many people's perception of her, but Louise wasn't some kind of jock, just because she was big and jacked up.
That was something that Pops had insisted on, wanted to know that she could protect herself from any thug.
But she wasn't a computer expert either, this little device that she was using came from a contact her Pop had made… well, the guy's fifteen-year-old son. Kid was a hardcore hacker, no doubt soon to be arrested for hacking the CIA or the NSA before he's twenty-two.
All she had to get was to ask nicely. Miles was easy like that, only needed a smile and the guy folds like wet paper, though he wasn't to be trusted at all, He was a bit of a fleck. The device was a neat little thing for those without a genius-level intellect.
It would simply back through the password protection on the computer, giving her administrator access to all the functions, all the files that she'd need to figure what kind of person this Doctor was. As her eyes scanned through the display in front of her, Louise released something very quickly.
That for someone that told Pat she was studying dimensional fields and travel and other junk. The woman's actual main focus had been in robotics, mostly cybernetic interfaces but other areas were something that the Doc also excelled at. The spacial studies were but an afterthought, something she had read about but not researched directly…
… till the month of her leaving. Where she apparently wanted to force Stark to shift the nature of her research, away from cybernetic limbs for prosthetic purposes and toward technology that would be better suited towards dimensional and spatial manipulation.
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Chapter 19: The Line Jim Can't Uncross
The head man himself was on a bit of a spree currently, shutting down weapon research facilities but only replacing them with labs researching other things when they'd finally gotten another project off the ground.
The biggest reason this wasn't a massive PR disaster for Stark was that there weren't any layoffs because of it, the personnel were simply given extended holidays or transferred to other departments.
Not that there wasn't a big scandal going at the moment. Some guy with energy whips had attacked a formula one race that Tony Stark had gotten himself into, the CEO had nearly been assassinated… but that only seemed to increase Stark Industries' reputation.
All this meant that in New York there was but one Lab that could've had Doctor Octavius on staff.
"We're here," Louise said, zipping her jacket up and stepping behind me. The lab was in an odd place, the building used to be an apartment complex, something that I would've thought meant that there couldn't be much in the way of dangerous experiments, something about public safety.
But if the Doc had been working here when she claimed that her experiments would kill at most three people? Then I'm going to say that some shit might be here.
"What's the plan?" I asked her as we stared at the doors to the building, the Stark Logo acting as a beacon to our eyes.
"Go in the front, tell whoever's manning the desk something… and just make a lot of noise," She told me, her voice low and her mouth now close to my ear. "I'll sneak in and get a look into their project files, see if we can't find what we're dealing with."
With those words, Louise walked away from me, a grin on her face telling me how much she was looking forward to this.
"Am I sure I'm the reporter?" I asked, feeling confused at the events happening. Making my way through the front door, the thing sliding open for me before I even get within arms' reach of it as my mind continued to churn out ideas.
How could I distract them? Fake a heart attack?
No, that would only lead the guys to call an ambulance and I would hate to be the reason why someone else didn't get theirs in time.
Act crazy? Start throwing chairs around? Maybe speak gibberish at the same time?
No, while it could work out to get them to call security, it's also something that could get their guard up and get in the way of Louise sneaking in. This would need a gentler hand than such direct methods.
My plan set, I walked towards the man sitting at the front desk, his smile clearly painted on while his eyes were staring out blankly towards the wall nearby. The glow of their computer screen was hitting their face in such a way that I could tell it had gone to screensaver from the light shine.
"He-he-hello," I stuttered out, twisting my foot on the surface of the floor as if I was a character out of Oliver Twist and letting my eyes fill with tears. It was time for a performance. "M-mister, I s-seem to be l-lost."
"Oh," the man raised one of his rather grey eyebrows up, his eyes shifting over to look at me in better detail.
But I didn't let our eyes meet, deciding instead to let mine drop to the ground. He didn't say anything for a few seconds, instead humming and underneath that I could hear the sound of a button depressing under his desk. For some reason, this guy found me very suspicious and was calling security.
"Where do you want to be?"
My mind froze, having not really considered the answer before now but I could use this to my advantage.
"Ah… hum," I went, letting my tongue rise to the roof of my mouth to create a lot of gibbering noises.
Adding to my guise I started to scratch the back of my head, rubbing the skin beneath my hair with just enough force to be believable. "Yeah, I know that I wanted to be… in a residential neighborhood a-and p-people pointed towards this d-direction but now I'm worried that I'm in the wrong place…"
Letting the sentence trail off, I continued to nervously grind the heel of my foot onto the ground. Not with all that much force, only enough to make it look convincing to this man's eye.
"What seems to be the problem?" A Newly arrived man piped in, a Stark Industries security uniform on his body, as he adjusted a baton that was fixed to his waist and giving me a passing glare before his eyes fell to his fellow employee.
"Nothing Frank," The sitting man of the two waved his security guard friend off.
"Just a false alarm, kid was afraid that he'd gotten lost. But I wouldn't worry about it kid, the building was an apartment complex a few years ago, but Stark bought it out, the idea being you could work and live in the building. It only took a year's worth of renovations. "
"S-so. I'm in the right place," I heard my phone beep, signaling that I've just received a text. Didn't need to check it to know that it was Louise, telling me that it was safe for me to back off. "And by which I mean that as in the area… not this building."
The rest of my sentence was said in a rush like I was trying to win a contest for who can speak the fastest. It only added to my performance of being a meek, nervous foreigner not sure of where things were in the big American City… something that was only mildly true.
I wasn't sure where things were in the big American City.
"That's right," he nodded to me, his hand turning to the security guard, the guy the man had called Frank. "Why don't you show him out?"
The two of us, as in Frank and me, shared a brief glance, a period of time where I had dropped my meek act but only for a second. Something that the guard hadn't noticed, as far as I was aware.
"Sure, that would be nice," I replied, getting in there before the guard could either accept himself or deny the request. "And again, I'm sorry for bothering you guys."
"It's fine, sir," Frank replied, his thick New York accent nearly causing me to laugh out loud now that I'd noticed it. My mind almost brought up the phrase I'm walking here! because that was the kind of thing that I'd expect from that sort of tongue. "Just glad we could help."
x-x-x
(Jim O'Reilly)
The O'Reilly father hadn't wanted to get in involved with this sort of work. At least not when he started his criminal career two decades ago, as a young man looking to make a quick buck to help his ailing mother.
Jim had stayed away from drugs, he'd stayed away from… the more mature enterprises and he never touched… whacking people.
But as he moved away from his prior connections, he moved away from belonging to the Kitchen Irish. Jim found that his morals were being tested in ways that not even the Mob had forced him. No one had said anything about prostitution yet… but now?
O'Reilly was about to engage in an act that almost hit the same cord inside him.
So with a heavy heart, he walked into a pub, one open even into the early hours of the morning.
There weren't many people there, on the outside of the place, not yet but the Irish liked to operate from this place, so there were always at least some people there. Hiding in case some rival came in thinking that they could take on the Kitchen Irish.
But the former member knew that none of that mattered, it wouldn't make a difference for what he was about to do.
"Sean," Jim yelled out, his hands in his coat pocket as he approached his former boss or at least the man that he used to report to. O'Leary had been the guy that brought him into this life, not by threat but by a promise of a better life. "We need to talk."
There was dread in his voice, something that Jim couldn't hide no matter how much he tried.
Sean O'Leary was only a few years older than Jim but his hair had greyed much more thoroughly.
Where O'Reily's red hair was freckled grey, the older man's was the inverse, with red flecking grey. On Sean's chin was a massive beard, oddly lacking any flecks of grey at all but Jim knew that his old friend liked to dye his beard.
The man only wore suits, the cheap kind that had patches at the elbows, the material that would never even bothering to match the color of the rest of his jacket. The browns and blacks clashing in a way that made O'Leary one of the more recognizable figures in Hell's Kitchen's crime scene.
"If it isn't Clean Jim!" O'Leary grinned, his blindingly white teeth contrasting against his dirty attire. "What are you doing back in these parts, thought you wanted out of the game?" he continued, referring to the excuse O'Reilly had used to get out of doing any more jobs for the Irish groups. "Don't tell me, you missed the life?"
Jim scoffed, shaking his head, absentmindedly thinking about how it was impossible to miss what he never lost.
"Something's come up," Jim explained, his heart beating rapidly in his chest as Sean waved him to follow into the back of the bar that he'd been sitting in. Back into an area that they wouldn't be overheard in.
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