For a split second, hearing a customer say "car wash," the man's brain processed it normally.
Then his brain caught up.
Female voice. Underground parking lot. Middle of a negotiation between two bosses.
No sane person who still had all their marbles would pull this.
His gut said the car wash wasn't the point.
He reached for his weapon.
Daisy was faster. She shoved the car door open — hard.
CRACK.
Door met skull. She'd actually held back; she didn't want to damage the rental.
The man staggered. He hadn't even registered what hit him before Daisy caught his arm, yanked him back toward her, and pressed her taser to his neck. The "zzzt" was brief. His eyes rolled white and he went down.
She nudged him over with the toe of her shoe and went through his pockets.
No gun. No knife. Just a set of brass knuckles that tumbled out.
Useless to me, she thought, and straightened up to look at the remaining five men with complete calm.
Despite everything being deeply wrong with the situation, she stuck with her opening line.
"...You guys do car washes here, right?"
Every person in the garage — James Wesley in his square-framed glasses and perfectly pressed suit, and every Russian tough in the building — stared at her.
Wesley took two very deliberate steps backward. I'm watching this, his expression said.
The thin man wrestled his temper down. "I don't care who sent you. Get out. Now."
Three more of his people shifted to box her in.
Daisy assessed their weapons. No firearms — either by choice or preference, everyone here was carrying something cold: clubs, knives, chains.
"You've all got really bad paranoia," she said. "Seriously, I just—"
She moved before they'd fully tightened the circle. She cut left, toward the man with the chain — a bald guy who clearly had no idea how to use it. His technique was sloppy. Her reflexes were sharper, her speed considerably higher.
She threw a feint. He bit on it completely.
She slipped outside his reach, planted a heel in his backside, and launched him into his two nearest colleagues. She used the momentum to change direction, already accelerating toward Wesley.
His face went blank with sudden, genuine alarm. He had involvement in crime — no question — but Wesley was a strategist, an advisor. In the other timeline, he'd talked himself into a corner and taken several bullets from Daredevil's leading lady for his trouble. His personal combat ability was essentially zero.
By the time he processed the threat, she was already in front of him.
A kick to the stomach. As he bent forward, she reached into his jacket and came out with a pistol.
She dropped the magazine, counted the rounds, slapped it back in, and turned the weapon over once to look at it.
"An M1911?" She raised an eyebrow. "Collector's edition, if I'm not wrong. Good taste, Mr. Wesley."
She leveled the gun at him and made what was probably the most disorienting request he'd ever received:
"Quick. Tell them to wash my car."
"Are you insane?!" Wesley's jaw tightened. He was mentally cycling through every enemy, every rival, every operator who might send a woman to do this — and coming up with nothing that made sense. Part of him was still convinced this was some kind of ploy. The car wash couldn't possibly be the real goal.
The remaining Russians looked at their boss. Your call.
The thin man hesitated.
He was calculating. Wesley's presence here changed everything. Wesley wasn't just Kingpin's assistant — he was Kingpin's friend. If anything happened to him on the thin man's turf, the deal they were negotiating would die, and Kingpin's response would not be measured. It didn't matter who this woman was or who'd sent her. Saving Wesley was the only move.
"Do it," he told his men. "Go wash the car."
They obeyed. One of them opened the door, saw the back seat, and processed what he was looking at without comment. Professional.
They broke out a pressure hose. Ten minutes. Every surface, inside and out, scrubbed clean. The back seat cover was peeled off and replaced with a fresh one.
Daisy motioned Wesley toward the vehicle, then checked it over. These Russians were thorough — not a drop of anything left. She wasn't going to bring up payment. They weren't going to bring it up either. For a woman who had five hundred dollars to her name, this was a better outcome than she'd dared to hope.
The three remaining Russians watched as she prodded Wesley into the passenger seat and drove away without a backward glance.
"Get word to the other side," the thin man said. "Wesley's been taken by an unknown woman. What happens next has nothing to do with us."
He almost sounded like he was enjoying himself.
Daisy drove back toward the city.
"You're covering your face because I've seen you before," Wesley said, less as a question than a statement. He was already pulling at threads, looking for pattern.
She answered something entirely different.
"You're talented, Mr. Wesley. Multiple languages, strong social instincts, sharp understanding of capital and finance, exceptional organizational abilities. With a profile like yours — why work for a crime syndicate? Why not take that skill set somewhere legitimate?"
He looked at her sideways.
She had one hand on the wheel, the other holding the M1911 casually in his direction.
He made a short, dismissive sound. He wasn't going to answer that.
"If someone offered you a chance to step into the light," she pressed. "Media attention. Public recognition. Would you take it?"
Wesley genuinely couldn't place her. A headhunter? No headhunter in history had ever gone recruiting in mob parking garages at gunpoint.
"What are you actually trying to say?"
"Nothing. Driving is boring. I'm just making conversation." Not a trace of sincerity.
She checked the mirror. No pursuit.
Without another word, she brought the grip of the M1911 down behind Wesley's ear. Clean. Precise. He slumped.
She pulled over and dropped him on the curb.
There had been a moment when she'd thought about recruiting him. He was genuinely exceptional — the kind of talent that was hard to find. But the bond between Wesley and Kingpin ran too deep. And her current financial situation was too pathetic for that conversation.
She wiped the gun clean of prints and tucked it back inside his jacket. Call it a gesture of goodwill.
She drove to another part of the city, reinstalled the license plate she'd removed, stopped at a legitimate auto shop for a fresh coat of paint and a few cosmetic modifications, then returned the rental.
By the end of it, her five hundred dollars had almost entirely evaporated.
She exhaled slowly.
Daisy took the bus to check on Frank. If he'd recovered enough to be functional, maybe he could cover her expenses. She knew you weren't supposed to expect repayment for saving a life — but she was genuinely broke.
She unlocked the door and stepped into an empty room.
She ran a frequency scan. Nothing. Frank's vibrational signature was nowhere in range.
She checked the space carefully. He'd left cleanly. Deliberately. Not a cent of her two hundred dollars remained.
"He's already moving around?" She shook her head slowly, stepping back out into the street. "Is that man's constitution even human?"