Part One
Hell’s Kitchen – a part of New York where you go to be forgotten or fucked.
For me, it’s more of the first one. Who am I? Name’s Phil Philips. I’m a P.I. (“Private Investigator” for you slow-thinking types) and my home is on the streets, looking out for the felt because sure as shit no one else is. My office is located right in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, among the drunks, muggers, rapists, murderers, gang members, and other lowlifes that wallow in this shithole town.
Truth is the world’s gotten even crazier since “The Incident” – that’s what we call the day that all hell literally rained down on New York. A bunch of fugly aliens attacked and the city is saved by some superheroes no one even knew about until they saved all our sorry asses.
So, now it’s not just a world of puppets, it’s also a world of superheroes.
And, if you ask me (and I don’t give a flyin’ fuck if you did or not), we’re worst off with them than we were before. Ya see, in Hell’s Kitchen, puppets aren’t treated the same way they are everywhere else in this damned city, like a certain banjo-playing green fuck that went from a thing that grew out of a swamp to a big shot that got his break in Hollywood, only to slum it with a 9-to-5 job like the rest of us.
Every now and then, you get some idiot tourist who wouldn’t last a day in Hell’s Kitchen, who’d find a guy like me and ask, “Can I get your autograph?”
Such was the case earlier today when this mother and her 7-year-old son approached me – pen and autograph book in hand – and made that very request. She would follow it with, “My son is a huge fan. He has all your toys and dolls.”
“Lady, hold up, hold up,” I calmly interjected. “Which one do you think I am?”
“Aren’t you Gonzo the Great?” I almost couldn’t believe she asked me that.
Now, I was already having a lousy morning – woke up with a bad hangover, received a summons in the mail, and my car damn-near broke down on the way to the office. So, you can only imagine how aggravated I was when I told this woman, “Lady, do I look like I have a blue dildo stickin’ out of my face?”
And, as you would expect, the kid started crying and the mother got rightfully pissed. “There is no need for that kind of language, sir!” she scolded me (as if “dildo” was even the worst word she ever heard).
Not gonna lie though, I did feel bad for making the kid cry like that, but his mother already got back in their taxicab and rode off before I could’ve apologized.
Jesus, what a morning it was turning out to be.
And, believe it or not, it only got worse when I stepped in my office. My secretary, Bubbles, told me that I had a visitor waiting there. “It’s Jessica Jones, Mr. P.,” Bubbles said. My ears burned like someone stuck an ice pick into them when she uttered that name.
“Fuck me,” I huffed as I walked into my office. Sure enough, Jones was there right on my desk – lotus style – creeping at me as I walked in. “Jessica Jones. To what do I owe the pleasure of having your ass sitting firmly planted on my desk? Listen, you do that shit in that shithole you call an office at Atlas Investigations or whatever the hell you call it. I don’t need the smell of your asshole and whatever dick went into it on my desk!”
“Believe me, it’ll be a change from the scent of jizz and fabric softener I keep whiffing in this place,” Jones quipped. “What? Was there another hooker that you porked in here recently?”
“What the hell do you want, Jones?” I asked, my patience wearing thin.
She removed herself from off my desk, not as kindly as I would’ve wanted (some of my desktop items cluttered to the floor), and she cut to the chase. “I got a missing person case the other day that I think you’d be interested in,” she said, presenting me with a photograph of some guy in his early forties with short brown hair with a receding hairline and bushy eyebrows. He had a gap between his two upper front teeth that would make even Michael Strahan blush.
“Who’s this asshole?” I asked Jones.
“Our missing person,” she told me.
“What do you mean our missing person? I hadn’t agreed to whatever bullshit you’re roping me into yet.”
“You will once you hear this juicy detail: the husband’s been found – except he’s not a human anymore…he’s a puppet.”
I had to admit that I was intrigued when Jones threw that in.
It was enough to have me say, “What the fuck?”
Jones took me to see the wife and her now-puppet husband, who lived in a dandy little apartment halfway across town. The husband’s name was Ralph Adams, and I gotta say that the puppet version of him was a dead ringer to his former human self. He had the same brown hair with the receding hairline and the same bushy eyebrows and gap in his teeth. The only difference being that his once perfectly tanned flesh was now made of felt, and he was a whole few feet shorter.
“I had to shop at the toy store just to find him new clothes,” Janice (his wife) recalled as she held back tears.
“You don’t have to tell them that, honey,” Ralph said, visibly ashamed.
“Were you naked when you showed up here, Mr. Adams?” I asked.
I couldn’t tell outright with the lack of expression on his face, but Adams sounded very angry by my inquiry when he retorted, “Are you laughing at my situation, Mr. Philips?”
“No, sir, I’m merely trying to understand the details of what happened,” I said.
After taking a breath to collect himself, Adams recounted to me and Jessica, “Well, it happened around six o’clock Wednesday night. I just left home for work and took the bus. As I was getting off at my stop in Harlem, a bunch of guys come out of nowhere and jump me. One of them injects me with something that knocks me out cold. When I woke up…” His voice was very shaky as he fought the courage to finish his statement. “…in this damn puppet body!”
Jessica felt deep sympathy for Mr. Adams. I could hear it in her voice as she told him, “We’re very sorry for what happened to you.”
Ralph looked right at Jones, seeming to have recognized her. “You’re the one who snapped that mind control guy’s neck, aren’t you?” I noticed Jessica squirm as he mentioned that. “I want you to do the same to the guys that did this to me! I want you to snap every single one of their fuckin’ necks! Ya hear me? Kill every single one of those freaks for taking away my manhood!”
“Ralph, please!” Mrs. Adams pleaded to her frantic husband.
Jessica was already out of their apartment before I followed soon after.
To explain the fucked-up shit that just occurred in this scene, basically Jones had some history with this British guy named Killgrave (yeah, sounds like I made the name up, but it’s actually what the sick fuck called himself). Anyways, Killgrave messed with Jones’s head some years before she became a private investigator, but she managed to break out of it after he made her kill a woman. He returned sometime later, causing mayhem all over Hell’s Kitchen, until Jones one night broke his neck, ending the whole nightmare permanently.
Needless to say, it got a lot of public attention.
Some hailed Jones a hero, others branded her a murderer.
Me, personally? I think she’s still the same asshole she’s always been. But I gotta admit it took some balls to do what she did to that sick bastard. And, just between you and me, I respect the hell out of her for it.
Anyway, that concludes our trip down memory lane.
Let’s get back to our current depressing story.
We looked into the bus stop in Harlem where Mr. Adams was attacked. It was right across the street from a barber shop where Luke Cage – an old flame of Jones’s – worked. Cage waltzed into our business at the moment I was combing the asphalt for clues like some bloodhound.
“Jessica,” he addressed his boozy booty call. “Not often I see you around these parts. What brings you?”
Jones nodded to me and told Cage, “Workin’ a case that requires some unusual expertise.” I groaned from her subtle reference. She then proceeded to flirt with the indestructible man. “You look good, Luke.”
“So do you,” he said.
I couldn’t take much more of it. “Would you two get on with it already and fuck? ‘Cause I’m actually tryin’ to do some work over here.”
“Is that what you call it?” Jones snapped. “’Cause it seems to me like you’re just looking at the sidewalk and eavesdropping like an asshole!”
Ironically, just as she made that accusation, I found a clue: hair follicles.
It was hard to determine if they were from the vic or the perp, so I brought them to the only cop in Hell’s Kitchen I knew I could trust: my ex-partner on the force, Connie Edwards. I had her run it through the CSI department and send me the results as soon as they came in.
The following day, Connie paid a visit to my office.
“Got the results for ya, Phil.” She sounded rather pessimistic about it.
“Judgin’ from your tone, I assume it’s shtty news,” I presumed.
“You have no idea,” Connie said. “The hair follicles you found in Harlem? The DNA matches for Danny Rand.”
A chill went through my foamy spine column.
The Co-CEO of Rand Enterprises? What the hell was he doin’ in the slums of Harlem? And how does he connect with Ralph Adams’ human-to-puppet conversion?
