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Matt Murdock found the latest potential client very, very distracting. Judging by his heartbeat and the way his joints sounded, he seemed to be pushing fifty, but from the creaking of his chair, the rustling of his clothes, even his breathing, he was in never-ending motion. Despite the fact that he was sitting down. And they hadn't even started the meeting yet.
For all that, their new client wasn't obnoxious. In fact, he seemed to go out of his way to be the opposite. The only scents about him were his soap, shampoo, and conditioner, all of which had an inoffensive herbal scent, and his breakfast. When they shook hands in introduction, Matt accidentally caught a feel of his shirt sleeve: it felt like cotton, with an agreeably soft hand. And when he finally started talking, his voice was pleasant: not exactly trained, with far too many extremes of expression to be called “modulated,” but still one that was comfortable with talking and comfortable to listen to.
“I wanted to begin by apologizing. I'm sorry I'm late, and I'm sorry my partner can't join us this morning,” he assured the two attorneys. “So I guess I'd better begin, so I can stop wasting your time.” He pulled out a file from the bag next to him and laid it on the conference table—very thick, from the thud it made. “My partner and I want to sue the State of New York for failing to meet their obligations under this contract.”
“All right,” Foggy said slowly. “We usually handle criminal defense, not contract law, Dr. Sandburg. I'm not sure we're really the guys you want to use.”
“Oh, no, you are,” Dr. Sandburg blithely assured them. “And call me Blair. You came very highly recommended. And we find you interesting for several reasons.”
Well, that wasn't ominous at all.
Foggy sighed and opened the file. Then he stiffened, leafed through the file, pulled out a chunk of paperwork and passed the rest to Matt. It proved to be printed in Braille. Nice-quality paper, the kind that Matt dreamed of buying someday in bulk, if they ever made that kind of money. It would be almost a pleasure to run his fingers over this.
“Thank you very much, Dr. Sandburg,” he said. “It was very thoughtful of you to bring this in a format I can read immediately.”
“Please, call me Blair,” their guest begged. “I will admit, the fact that one of the partners needs special accommodations but can achieve a high level of quality in his work is the main reason Jim—my partner—felt comfortable with your firm. You see, the part of the contract that the State of New York violated had to do with the special accommodations my partner needs in order to be able to do his work. We don't know if there are sufficient grounds to sue for discrimination—this isn't the kind of the thing the ADA seems to cover. We thought we'd leave that to our lawyers.” The man finally sat back and still for all of five seconds.
“Well, Blair, we'd certainly have to know more about the circumstances, here,” Matt said. “Why don't you tell us what happened?”
“Blair” sighed and fidgeted at this, then finally said, “All right, but it's a long story. And despite the fact that my job seems to consist of telling stories, I'm still not used to telling this one.
“You know about all the information that was released in order to smoke out Hydra?” he asked, and his listeners nodded, which Foggy supplemented with a verbal “Uh-huh” for Matt's benefit. “Well, some of that was highly classified information about my partner, and as a P.R. move, that information has now been declassified. It comes at a good time for us, fortunately; my partner retired from the police force about five years ago and entered into official partnership with me. Before then we were police partners for over a decade. We've been traveling around quite a bit since then: a month here on one job, a couple of days there on another, although our home base is still, of course, Cascade.”
“Cascade, Washington?” Foggy asked.
“Yes, that Cascade. Anyhow, nobody's really made much of a big deal about the declassification, which is nice, because about fifteen years ago I got in a lot of trouble over that information. It took a whole long series of lawsuits and contract rewritings, which is when my partner learned that lawyers can actually be good for something, but we finally got everything classified and me a Ph.D. and all it cost was signing a few NDAs that don't apply any more and Jim's getting a kind of right of first refusal on a series of jobs from S.H.I.E.L.D. It was good training for his retirement, actually; if his conscience couldn't let him turn a job down, he'd get paid pretty well, which is always nice. It allowed me to do some private research on the side and try to discover more people like Jim. And S.H.I.E.L.D. always dealt squarely with us. Then again, they'd have to.” Here, Dr. Sandburg snorted at some private joke.
“See, my partner is what Richard Burton, the explorer, not the actor, called a 'Sentinel.' A sentinel is a person with hyperactive senses who uses those senses to protect the tribe he lives in. Trust me,” the man continued with an audible grin in his voice, “I've spent a loooot of time hammering out that definition.
“Sentinels are very, very rare. See, many of us don't pay much attention to what's going on with our normal senses. As I'm sure Mr. Murdock could tell us, people who lose one sense early enough in life, or never had it at all, are often far more aware of a wider range of information from their remaining senses than the rest of us are. They've learned to use their remaining senses much better. I'm sure you two have a million anecdotes you could tell me to confirm this.”
“I just nodded,” Foggy said, and added, “yeah, Matty here has the ears of a bat.” It might have been a little bitter, but Matt just shrugged and waited for the explanation to move on. This little lecture was getting very interesting.
“On top of paying better attention, some people also have more acute senses than others. Some of them manage to leverage this into a job, like a perfume tester with a good nose, or a mechanic who can hear your engine trouble immediately. Some have so much trouble processing the information that it impacts their quality of life, such as some of those who fall on the autism spectrum, and make it harder to have any kind of job. And some just have it, like that guy who can taste every ingredient in your Aunt Martha's 'special sauce' but has a job as an accountant.
“What sets apart a sentinel is that he or she has more than one heightened sense, and is able to process them far above the normal human threshhold. I used to say all five, but then we ran across a woman in New Orleans who didn't have heightened smell or taste, and she was definitely a sentinel. So the exact number of heightened senses you need is up for grabs, I guess.”
“That seems like a waste,” Foggy interlocuted, "lacking those senses in New Orleans."
“Yeah, that's what I say! Then again, maybe it means she can enjoy her food more, right? Not knowing every ingredient and where it comes from, and just enjoying the gestalt of gumbo. Yeah, so: hyperactive senses, and the ability to use them. That's only half the equation. The other half is more of a spiritual one: they feel the obligation to protect whoever they consider their tribe—and it's definitely people based, although a certain territory usually corresponds to that, because people are territorial—using their senses. That woman in New Orleans, she was there for Katrina and its aftermath, and she was still letting people know which buildings were losing stability due to it two years afterward, which is when we visited. We found what might be considered her sensory opposite in Chicago—he seems to have both smell and taste, and has been known to use them in his job with the Chicago P.D. Is he a sentinel? We haven't quite figured that out yet.
“Could I have a drink?” Dr. Sandburg suddenly asked, and Karen, who had been listening to all of this with rapt attention from the hallway, suddenly squeaked.
Foggy got up immediately, moving to the door and asking Karen, once he'd opened it, to get a bottle of water for their guest. After another introduction and the exchange of the water, Dr. Sandburg resumed his lecture. And that's what it was, clearly: a lecture that was still in the making, from what must be a very gifted speaker. Matt wondered why, according to the brief history they had compiled on their potential client, Dr. Sandburg had never actually taken up a professorship.
“In order to do his job as a sentinel,” Dr. Sandburg said, “which, I will remind you, is to protect the tribe in some way, the sentinel needs control over his senses. Part of that is special accommodations for his downtime: clothing and sheets that won't irritate him, food that is bland or at least very, very familiar, a removal of known irritants from his setting, etc. The other part of that is having what Burton referred to as a 'guide,' which is what I am. Somebody familiar to the sentinel who can help him and come up with solutions when something in his environment either irritates him or proves a little too interesting. He's kind of the human 'special accommodation' for the sentinel. Jim calls me his thinking-brain dog, sometimes.
“Make no mistake, becoming a sentinel has certain drawbacks. One is that a sentinel can become lost in focusing on the details of something using one sense. When that happens to Jim, I figure out a way to get one of his other senses to report into him, to break him out of what we call a 'zone.' The other is when one or all of his senses decide to report too much even for him all at once, which is incredibly painful. Jim can get rashes from his clothing, be unable to eat, get headaches from the sounds and migraines from the light—we call those spikes, and the only real solution we've found in extreme cases is to retreat to Jim's apartment and let me control his environment for a while.
“Both zones and spikes are much reduced when I'm around, but the State of New York decided that that didn't matter. Whatever they wanted Jim for, it was too classified for me to know anything about it. That's fine; Jim can stand to be separated from me for up to two weeks, with only twice daily check-ins by phone. I think that last part actually has more to do with me being his tribe than being his guide; I don't mind, I worry about him, too. And this job only took eleven days, so we should have been dandy. Jim came back a wreck, though.
“See, when I'm not around, all of the other accommodations—the special sheets, the white noise machine, the careful diet—become more important, so that Jim can get firmer control over his senses without my help. These people decided to just throw all that out the window. During the day, Jim was having a blast—I think he was doing something in the woods, to be honest, and Jim loves the woods—but he wasn't able to get any sleep at night, let alone allow his senses to settle down in some place they found soothing. We almost had one of those horrible spikes I told you about, but fortunately, the New York Hilton Midtown is a lot more willing to listen to me than the State of New York. Jim spent three days recovering there before he was any good again, and I decided to start looking for lawyers.
“I just refuse to let these people get away with thinking, 'Oh, he was an Army Ranger once, he can take whatever we throw at him!' Jim's not a pansy, in the slightest, but he refuses to admit his own limitations enough; he doesn't need people who've signed a whole contract about them ignoring them, too.”
Dr. Sandburg was puffing a little in his vehemence, as if words weren't enough to express how indignant he was, and Matt gave a half-hearted grin at the thought. Foggy, meanwhile, was verging on hyperventilation. It had been too much to hope that none of that speech had rung a bell with the man that had roomed with him for years, but this was not the time or place to discuss it. Matt quickly elbowed Foggy and turned to Dr. Sandburg.
“Why don't you show us which clauses were violated?” he asked, hoping that his voice was normal despite the fact that he felt like he'd been dragged around by Nobu's blades again, all of his innards spilled out for the world to see. “And when can we talk to Mr. Ellison directly, to confirm all of this?”
“Oh, I'll be happy to show you those clauses. They're already highlighted, on your copy—”
“He just nodded at me,” Foggy added.
“—and your copy should have little plastic flags at the relevant section. I hope. It's not like I'm fluent in Braille.” Dr. Sandburg seemed a little ashamed at this admission.
“As for Jim... This is the part of the story you're going to find a lot harder to believe. Let's just say that Jim has religious objections to coming to your office, but would be happy to meet you at any of the conference rooms at the New York Hilton Midtown.”
“Is it too hard on his senses here?” Foggy asked. “But wait, religious objections—just because this is called Hell's Kitchen doesn't really mean it has anything to do with hell. He does know that, right?”
“Man, I wish I'd thought of the senses excuse. And yes, Jim knows that. It's just—like I said, there's a spiritual aspect to being a sentinel. And sometimes, sentinels can sort of laterally communicate with each other.”
“He's intertwining his fingers all crooked and twisting his arms,” Foggy added to Matt. “Like he's trying to demonstrate that this thing is about as far from actual communication as you can get.”
“That's exactly it!” Sandburg said. “It's not something we've been able to test and improve on, either, because it really is a spiritual thing.
“Anyhow, we were coming down 53rd Street hours early for our meeting, because Jim really likes to scout ahead, and he had to make the cab driver pull over early. I figure, hey, Jim doesn't like taxis and wants to walk, that's great, I'm so glad he's better, we've got loads of time. So I pay the guy and get out, too. And that's when Jim tells me, 'I can't go another street, Sandburg, there's another sentinel here.' 'So?' I ask, because it's not like we haven't met other sentinels before. That first one was a doozy, but it's all been uphill from there. 'So,' Jim says, 'he's warded off past this street'—Eighth, it was Eighth Avenue—'something fierce.' 'Wow,' I said, 'I didn't know one of you could do that.' 'I'm pretty sure I did it to Cascade, after Alex,' Jim said, because that first sentinel really was a doozy. I think her entire tribe consisted only of her. Which is why she was spiritually punished and ended up catatonic until she died.
“Anyhow, Jim and I decided we'd go around this warding and still try to get to you guys. We were walking for forever, all the way down Eighth to Thirty-Fourth, across Thirty-Fourth to the Hudson, up the Hudson to Fifty-Seventh...”
“That's Hell's Kitchen,” Foggy said, and Matt was close enough to feel him rub his arms. Goosebumps? “You've just delimited Hell's Kitchen.”
“Yeah,” Dr. Sandburg agreed, “we figured that out, too. Apparently, Hell's Kitchen has its very own sentinel. One that doesn't like other sentinels around. We think we may know why, too; Jim had to walk very close to the Hudson in order to stay out of what this guy feels is his territory, and in doing so, he caught traces of somebody else. Somebody we've run across before, although we don't even know his real name. He goes by Peter James, alias Craig Jefferson, alias Midas Smith, and on and on. A man who's, like, definite bad news on the sentinel front. He's wanted by about ten states, by the FBI, by Interpol and other countries' organizations, even. Jim's contacting all those people right now, passing along the information he got so we can try to trace where he was coming from and where he was going.”
“Wow,” said Foggy. “Who is this guy? International jewel thief? Assassin for hire? Dream thief?”
“No,” said Dr. Sandburg, “he's worse. Oh, he's done assassinations and stealing, albeit not Inception-style, but he sidelines by endangering minors. I call him the Pied Piper, actually. This guy grabs on to vulnerable kids, brainwashes them, kidnaps them, abuses them, and then uses them. Usually he uses them up. And he often gets paid for it. I'd love to say he's just an abusive jerkwad of a conman, but I'm fairly certain he's a sentinel, or at least he still has the gifts, by some of what we've heard about him.
“What's worse, Jim and I've run across him by way of three different kids we're pretty sure had sentinel abilities, all of whom have had horrible fates that I hold him responsible for. One's dead—I told you he uses these kids up. Another's also dead; having being dumped for being useless, he committed suicide, probably because he couldn't face the things he'd done under the Pied Piper's instructions any more. The third apparently left the Pied Piper all on his own; he's in residential care in Sweden, because he can't stop zoning and has so far been incapable of trusting anyone enough to improve past that.
“He's the one who's given us most of the information we have: according to him, the Pied Piper is blind; he's fairly good at teaching certain kinds of skills; and he's convinced he's fighting some ongoing war, and each kid is a recruit for it. We aren't able to get much more information than that, because they figured out that the less the kid thought about the Pied Piper, the more his situation improved, and I'm definitely all for that. His life has been made miserable enough already, let's move on to the healing, right?
“It just makes me sick, y'know? Here's this guy who claims to be fighting some mysterious war, but he does so by leaving behind a string of dead and maimed teenagers. He's still got his senses, with the exception of sight, and apparently uses them to find out who's vulnerable and might be 'useful' enough for him to mold into a soldier. Along with using the senses for the random assassination or theft along the way, of course. Some day, karma's gonna bite him just like it did Alex, and I hope I'm there to kick him afterwards, just to add insult to injury.
“Meanwhile, Jim really was a soldier, although only because he kind of turned his senses off after a traumatic experience as a teenager. Anyhow, he'll be the first to tell you that real soldiering requires trusting the guy next to you to have your back. But the Pied Piper, who tells the kids he's turning them into soldiers, he wants the only connection they have to be to him, or at least his cause, whatever that is. Anything else—anything that would make life worthwhile, any meaningful connection to another person—falls by the wayside. That kind of focus would be fine if he were only doing it to himself. But he's not.
“So, yeah, Jim and I aren't at all displeased by whatever sentinel you guys in Hell's Kitchen have got. We think he recognized the Pied Piper for what he is and set up the spiritual equivalent of barbed wire and police tape. Or moats and a closed drawbridge, if your tastes run that way. He's doing his best to keep the Pied Piper out, and I say, more power to him!” Dr. Sandburg—by this time, Matt felt more comfortable mentally calling him Blair, actually—sat back in the chair he had abandoned halfway through his impassioned denunciation of “the Pied Piper.”
When he spoke again, his words were strangely muffled and came from lower than before—had he put his head in his hands?—and Matt could almost taste his chagrin. “...and I just took forever telling you stuff you really didn't need to know for the case at all. If you're anything like me, it'll give you nightmares, too. I am so sorry, guys. Oh, wait!” Blair said, his voice a little clearer, “I just got a text! I hope Jim has good news.”
He checked his phone, then said, “Well, it's not from Jim, but it's almost as good. His wife wants to know if this case is going to take a while, and if we'll need to stay in New York for it. She's hoping we have to stay here long enough that she can join us. Often she's able to travel with us for our jobs, but this time she decided to stay home. Not that I blame her. Now that Jim's no longer exiled in classification-land, she wants to join us, particularly if she can do what she calls 'real shopping' in New York City. So please, please tell me you'll need us in town for a while longer. This could actually be a nice vacation.”
“Well, Blair,” Foggy said, “we'll read up on this contract and see what we can do. If this does go to court, you'll have to come back for that, anyhow.”
“Besides,” Matt added, “Mr. Ellison is likely to have to stay a while dealing with whatever organizations he's able to contact today, right? They'll all need his help tracking down 'the Pied Piper.' Maybe he'll get paid enough for it to make up for his wife's trip. Try to make them live up to their contracts, this time. Although we certainly wouldn't mind your repeat business.”
Foggy waited until their client had left before letting out a whoop of joy. “A real, paying client, Karen!” he explained to their secretary, who undoubtedly already knew it. “And Matt doesn't even have any objections to this guy. You don't, right, Matt?” he suddenly asked, apparently unwilling to believe their good fortune.
“No, Foggy,” Matt said. “My only objection is that this really isn't our area of expertise. Then again, we did so much of it at Landman and Zack, we should be able to represent our clients well enough.”
“And we can finally make good use of that time at Landman and Zack!” Foggy pointed out. Matt had to agree; this was going to be a case that would be a pleasure to sink his teeth into.
That night, Matt Murdock sat in his apartment, his hand frozen in its grip on his phone. He could hear sirens, a domestic dispute that could turn ugly, and two—no, make that three—punch-outs within five blocks of his apartment. Even as he listened, a store alarm sent up a momentary screech at a security system being disabled by what must be professional thieves. Despite all of that, he was still, clearly, Matt Murdock; he would have put the uniform on if it would help, but it wouldn't. The only way he could help stop the crimes he had become aware of, the cries into the night that, once again, only he could hear, was as Matt Murdock, spilling his secrets to a stranger. The thought felt more painful than any of Fisk's hits ever had. “Murdocks always get up,” he reminded himself. Still, he couldn't seem to make himself move.
Finally, at long last, he told the phone to send a call to the number he'd been careful to get from Karen.
“Hello, Dr. Sandburg,” Matt replied in response to the cautious greeting from the man he'd called. “This is Matthew Murdock, one of the attorneys you spoke to today. Is there any way I could reach Mr. Ellison?” he asked, speaking over the expected admonition to call his listener by his first name.
“Oh, sure, he's right here,” Blair said, not at all annoyed by the interruption. “We were just deciding where to go for dinner. Last night as unencumbered men, and all that. Jim's wife is flying in tomorrow.” There were some noises as the phone was transferred, and then a new voice spoke up.
“Ellison here,” it said. In stark contrast to his partner, this man's speech seemed clipped and distancing. “What do you want, Mr. Murdock?”
“His name is Stick,” Matt said, not letting himself postpone this one minute longer, "or at least, that's what he always went by with me. He was hired by the nuns at St. Agnes to help me with the heightened senses I gained after losing my sight, since I lost any control of them following the death of my father. He began training me, but abandoned me when I disappointed him...” The reactions on the other side of the phone were reassuring enough to keep him talking, long past the point where private inclination or even professional advice would have stopped him.
This was important, even if it put Daredevil in danger of discovery. There were at least three other people out there (was the third male? female? Blair hadn't specified) who had had gifts like his, and probably the inclination to use them, and had been wasted by Stick instead. They would never have the chance to find a spouse or a Blair, like Jim Ellison had, or even a Foggy or Karen, like he had. And all the people whom they could have protected had one less shield against the evils of the world. If Stick weren't stopped somehow, he would just keep doing what he did, Matt knew. He was done with that old blind man, once and for all; it was long past time to kick him out of his head, not just Hell's Kitchen. And if he couldn't think of a way to do it that Stick would find more painful than this, if he ever found out? Well, his grandmother always did say that Murdock men had the devil in them.