[Press Play: Filter - "Hey Man Nice Shot"]

Los Angeles.

January, 2006.

"You take him down, and I might have some more work for you."

Even as he said it, Daniel Rigg knew that there was no question about if the man in front of him could wipe Xavier Chavez off the streets; it was simply a matter of when.

"I'm not your errand boy, Rigg," Frank replied flatly, the low rasp of his voice smacking faintly off the crumbling brick walls of the alley in which they stood. Two armored figures, one in black fatigues, the other in blue, stood appraising one another through the wan glow of a sputtering streetlamp overhead.

"No, but think of it as an... investment, on my part. Got to know you are who you say you are," he countered, palms spread and hands extended in a gesture of vague futility. "There's a lot of folks running around in the world pretending to be you, ever since you blew the lid off Tampa."

Rigg was right, of course; Frank couldn't deny that fact. Vigilantes had been cropping up in droves since he had made an example out of Howard Saint's burgeoning criminal enterprise. Portland had its own avenging angel with a .308 rifle. An entire band of self-titled "Regulators" had vowed to retake Dallas from the cartels- and done a decent job so far. People had been standing up, one on one, against those who had done them wrong across the entire country, usually ending with both sides dead and no better for it. Then there was the Bay Harbor Butcher, whose appearance timed perfectly with Frank's own exodus from Florida. Sick bastard. Good idea, but he's all about the method, the ritual. It's just a matter of time before the wrong person ends up chopped up into little fuckin' dog treats. One day, maybe, he would make his way back down south and put the Butcher down.

Maybe "some day" would be once the Russoti and Franchetti families went back to cutting each other's throats over turf skirmishes, instead of trying to smoke him out. Three safehouses gone in a single week had been enough to send Frank to ground, at Microchip's suggestion.

So here he was. City of Angels. (Fallen angels, maybe.) 1911's in their holsters, M4 looped around his shoulder and hanging discreetly under his coat. Meeting with a SWAT Commander with a stack of commendations for being good at his job- and an even bigger stack of citations for doing what was right no matter what the handbook said. Micro had dug him up and reached out, said he was someone they could trust.

Might as well make the first impression count.

"Where's his turf? This guy's small-time enough he didn't show up on my need-to-know list- but big enough to be a thorn in your side. Must have territory, probably a couple of enforcers who ride with him."

So he was taking the job. Rigg breathed a sigh of relief, reaching into the parked squad car that separated him from the vigilante and pulling out a manila envelope. "Details are all in there," he said, setting the file on the still-warm hood of the car and sliding it toward Castle. "It's a decent chunk of jungle, but you should be able to canvass it before the sun's up."

Chavez had proven to be... cunning, Rigg might have said if asked to choose a word to describe the heroin dealer. Despite dozens of attempted busts, nothing had ever stuck; he had always turned out clean, always pawned the charges off on some initiate who would cop to it out of a misguided sense of loyalty to Los Escorpiones. Any junkies who had ratted on him to save their own skin always turned up missing soon after hitting the streets again- and usually showed up once again, hacked apart and stuffed in a burning oil barrel. And what would you expect, the captain would always say, people like that have enemies on every side, all thinking they got flipped.

"Right. Time to get to work." Frank laid the dossier back on Rigg's interceptor, all the necessary details scored into his mind already. "Be seein' you, Rigg."

It was only a matter of hoofing it a solid twenty minutes north before Frank found the edge of Xavier's territory- and only about twenty seconds before he found a solid vantage point atop an abandoned box truck tucked halfway into a loading bay of an abandoned packing center. The frigid aluminum dug relentlessly into every unarmored inch of Frank's body as he lay prone, wedged between the mouth of the bay and the frost-striped ceiling panel of the truck- but it offered a good line of sight and plenty of concealment. That was all that mattered.

As it happened, he didn't have long to wait. A figure he recognized from the dossier he had skimmed was approaching the lot, completely oblivious to the vigilante waiting overhead. Slowly, carefully, Frank threaded his suppressor into place, powered on his holographic sight...

...and waited for the man in his crosshairs to make a deal, to confirm beyond any doubt he was in fact Triple. Idiot fucking bangers can't even be bothered to have real, grown-up names, Frank mused as he drew a languorous figure-8 across the man's back, debating where best to place the shot to bring him down. A leg shot was a gamble; if he was high, he could shrug off anything physics and gravity didn't have an immediate say in. A round to center of mass had the potential to tumble too far, shred a major artery and bleed him out before he could be made useful. Triple was big, too- both burly and fat, which meant enough mass to do some actual damage in close quarters. He needed to be put down in no uncertain terms.

"Hell with it," Castle murmured, flipping his fire selector to semi-auto. As soon as the buyer had gotten clear, he squeezed the trigger twice, driving hot lead into Triple's liver with a pair of muffled coughs from his rifle. The dealer hung on his feet for one uncertain second, reaching back incredulously toward his wounds before collapsing onto his back, wailing like a half-bled pig. Frank slid from cover, dropping onto the pavement and closing to the dying man's prone form.

"I'm going to talk to your boss. And you're going to tell me where." It wasn't a question; rather, a demand for total and immediate cooperation. "You tell me where, maybe you don't bleed out over the next five minutes. You don't-" Frank punctuated the alternative by driving his boot down onto Triple's wrist as he fumbled toward his waistband- "five minutes is gonna take a long damn time."

"No- no fucking way, I'm seeing shit, you're some kind of urban legend, m-" Triple's expression of disbelief was cut off abruptly when the barrel of one of the vigilante's Colts collided with his teeth.

"Feel legendary to you?" Frank extracted his now-bloodied sidearm from the dealer's mouth, pressing it instead into the hollow of his windpipe. "Chavez. First chance, last chance."

Triple weakly spat several shards of tooth out of the corner of his mouth, a pinkish slime of blood and spit trickling down his cheek before he managed to speak. "Three streets over... old subway station, don't run anymore." He attempted weakly to sit up, blood slicking the once-white shell of his jacket, gripping at Frank's ankle. "Don't leave me like this, man, I gave you what you-"

Three pounds of pressure to the trigger, and Triple's windpipe exploded from the larynx, backward. He expelled a gurgling cough, spraying a mist of blood onto his own face before falling still, glassy eyes fixing on the infinite.

Subway station. Chavez was smart. Points of entry formed a bottleneck, multiple checkpoints that offered pre-made fortification against attack, and the tracks offered an escape route if everything went sideways. He needed to die before he had a chance to make life complicated for more junkies. Before innocent people got caught in the crossfire.

He never made it that far. The faintest rustle of skin on fabric, the whisper of a hand on his shoulder- and a syringe found its way into Frank's neck, its contents pushing darkness into the corner of his vision even before his heart had beat another count. He turned toward his assailant, Colt swinging to bear-

Is that a pig?