The purse snatcher didn’t even see the ice patch. One moment he was sprinting down a damp alley with a stolen leather clutch tucked under his arm, and the next, his boots lost all traction. He hit the asphalt hard, sliding ten feet before slamming into a dumpster.
Before he could scramble to his knees, the temperature in the alley plummeted. Frostbite stepped out of the shadows, her breath pluming in the sudden cold. She didn't say a word. She just pinned the thief’s jacket to the pavement beneath her frost-rimed boot, plucked the clutch from his trembling fingers, and left him shivering. She tossed the purse back to the breathless civilian waiting at the mouth of the alley, grappling up to the fire escape before the thief even realized his shoelaces were frozen to the ground.
Three blocks down, Frostbite crouched on the edge of a brick parapet. Her attention was drawn by the rare clink of coins sliding into a rusty payphone on the street corner below.
It was Tony Pachino. The mob boss rarely showed his face outside his heavily guarded nightclub, and he only used public payphones when he was deeply paranoid. Frostbite leaned over the ledge, tuning her cowl's auditory sensors to filter out the passing traffic.
"Listen to me, Larry," Pachino rasped into the receiver, his voice tight with anxiety. "I don't care if you gotta tear the walls down. You get in there and you find what that snoop dug up."
Frostbite knew exactly who was on the other end of the line. Larry Pastel was Pachino’s favorite blunt instruments”a heavy-set, brutal brawler with fists like cinder blocks.
"My crazy ex-wife actually hired a private eye," Pachino continued, pacing at the end of the phone's short metal cord. "He’s got photos, Larry. Maybe ledgers. The PI is out of town until tomorrow, so his apartment at 442 West Mercer is empty. Break the door. Smash the place. Just get the files and burn them."
Pachino slammed the receiver down and hurried into a waiting town car.
Frostbite tapped her wrist console, immediately pulling up an encrypted channel to the local precinct. If she went after Larry herself and a fight broke out, Pachino’s high-priced lawyers would argue the evidence was tampered with by an unsanctioned vigilante. The police needed to catch Larry in the act to make the breaking-and-entering charge stick and legally secure the PI's files. She fed the West Mercer address and the impending threat directly to dispatch, framing it as an anonymous, high-priority tip.
Twenty minutes later, Frostbite watched from a rooftop across from the apartment building. Two unmarked cruisers rolled to a silent stop just as the heavy oak front door splintered inward. Larry Pastel had barely made it into the first-floor hallway when tactical officers swarmed the entrance, floodlights blinding the massive henchman.
"Hands in the air, Pastel!" a sergeant barked.
Instead of surrendering, Larry roared. He dropped his shoulder and plowed into the first two officers like a runaway freight train. Riot shields cracked under his immense weight. He didn't bother trying to fight them all; he just used his sheer bulk to bulldoze a path straight through the blockade, shattering the lobby's plate-glass window and barreling out into the labyrinth of the neighboring alleyways.
The police scrambled to give chase, shouting into their radios, but the heavy-set brawler was shockingly fast for his size and vanished into the darkness.
Frostbite exhaled a thin stream of chilled air, watching the chaos unfold. Larry had slipped the net, but the flashing red and blue lights illuminated the intact apartment upstairs. Pachino’s evidence was safe, and a police perimeter was already locking down the building. She fired her grapple line into the night sky, ready to track down a bruising henchman who had just become the city's most wanted fugitive.
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