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The streetlights of Santiago Heights flickered to life as dusk settled over Dallas, casting long shadows across cracked sidewalks.

He walked with purposeful anonymity, his stride neither hurried nor hesitant—just another resident returning home after a long day.

The voice modulator device sat heavy in his jacket pocket, alongside the specialized silencer he'd crafted himself.

Both had served him well these past weeks.

No one glanced twice at him as he moved through the neighborhood.

Average height. Average build. Forgettable features that witnesses would struggle to describe if ever asked.

He'd perfected the art of invisibility long before he'd taken up his mission.

Decades of sitting in courtrooms, being overlooked, being nothing more than furniture to the judges, lawyers, and criminals who passed before him—it had taught him how to disappear in plain sight.

He knew every inch of these streets. Had mapped them meticulously in his mind over the twenty-seven years he'd lived here, watching as the neighborhood transformed from working-class to something darker, more desperate.

Each alley, each fire escape, each blind corner committed to memory.

Not from official records or maps, but from patient observation.

From walking these same routes night after night, year after year, building a mental database more comprehensive than any police file.

The memory of Marcus Rodriguez's final moments surfaced unbidden.

The drug dealer's eyes widening in recognition—not of his face, which Rodriguez had never truly seen despite their paths crossing hundreds of times over the years, but of what he represented.

Justice, finally catching up. The trembling of Rodriguez's hand as he'd pressed the pen into it, forcing him to document his crimes.

The whimpered pleas about a daughter he'd never bothered to visit or support.

And before that, Anthony Rivera. The perverted smile slid from his face when he realized what was happening. The pathetic attempts at bargaining, offering money, offering to stop, offering anything to save his worthless life. As if promises from such a man held any value.

He touched his pocket, feeling the outline of the small notebook hidden there.

His docket. Names, addresses, observed crimes, potential targets—all carefully noted in a precise, meticulous hand that had once recorded testimony and legal arguments for the record.

Twenty-three years as a courthouse stenographer had given him not just skill with rapid documentation, but a front-row seat to the theater of failed justice.

He'd watched them walk free, one after another.

Guilty men and women smirking as technicalities, procedural errors, or plea deals mockeries of their victims' suffering reduced their sentences to nothing.

He'd transcribed the words of defense attorneys who knew their clients were guilty but smugly manipulated the system anyway.

Recorded the reluctant dismissals from judges bound by legal constraints rather than moral truth.

Captured it all for the official record while the unofficial truth—that justice had failed—went unacknowledged.

No more.

The thought solidified in his mind as he nodded politely to Mrs. Garza, who was watering the stubborn geraniums that somehow survived in the small patch of dirt outside her building.

She smiled back, never suspecting that the quiet man who had lived down the block for decades was anything other than what he appeared to be—a solitary, unremarkable resident who kept to himself.

The Santiago Heights Police Substation came into view at the end of the block—understaffed, underfunded, and overwhelmed.

Even now, at dusk, when street activity increased, only two patrol cars sat in the small parking lot.

He knew the officers inside by name, knew their schedules, their habits, their limitations.

Good men and women, most of them, but bound by a system designed to process crime rather than prevent it.

They couldn't protect these streets. They barely maintained a presence.

And the courts were worse. Cases from Santiago Heights were rushed through, plea-bargained away, dismissed for lack of resources or evidence. The neighborhood's victims rarely saw true justice served. The system wasn't just broken—it had abandoned places like this entirely.

Someone had to stand in the gap.