She glared. “Vindicated? Even if everything you say is true, we didn't stop Carson! He and the other monsters are still on the loose! It didn’t matter how you played the game it mattered if you won or lost."
Her words shook him.
He continued. "Look, I know the law isn’t perfect. It’s an iterative process, but it’s the foundation of our country. The only choice we have is to work within our legal framework. To reshape it we need to go through the proper channels. We, the people, have to make the changes. We, the people, must perfect the process and trust that the legal structure is sound. Without it we'd have chaos."
Betty shouted. "Wake up! Step outside of your office and take a look around! It is chaos!"
He continued trying to comfort her. "That’s why we need good people in there to help shape it. I’m teaching a new generation of students. It starts with the youth. We train them to do the right thing, then as they grow…"
Betty pleaded. "I can’t wait for them to grow up. I need to stop Carson now!"
He scolded. "You can’t just take the law into your own hands. No man, or woman, has the right to be judge, jury, and executioner. We need to involve everyone and trust in the people to do what's best for all of us. We must trust in ourselves to do what's right. The system will prevail, in the long run. We must have faith in the law.”
Betty seethed. "The only thing I have faith in is me!"
She slammed the door as she left. The frosted window with his name and title shattered to the floor. Professor Leo Langley wouldn't allow himself to accept what Witness X clearly believed. If he did, everything he held as true would be gone. His life would be meaningless.
Later, a big black car rocketed through the streets of Citadel City. Betty was headed back to her country hideout at top speed. She thought, "They just took whatever they wanted and no one stopped them. Someone needed to start punishing them!"
“Apparently they can rape, and kill, and maim, and pillage, and plunder, and remain respectable. If no one knows what they really do, then their crimes will never go away. If they can play dirty and keep their deeds secret they will remain socially acceptable. Their crimes will always pay. I thought I could expose Carson, but it didn't work. I was tired of playing legal games.”
“The system was stacked against me, so why should I comply?”
“I made the mistake of challenging Carson’s institution, but I couldn't penetrate the corporate protections. The Citadel Bank was too well fortified.”
“I had to stay focused on single villains and get the monsters one by one.”
“As a banker, Carson may have been safe, but as a person, he was vulnerable like the rest of us. I needed to strike when he was weak. I could kill the monster when he was alone and in human form.”
“The monsters used our morality and sense of fair play against us. They expect the rest of us, the good people, to play by the rules. They needed our civil complicity in order to feed off us. What would happen if we started behaving unpredictably?”
“What if I operated just like them?”
“I could adopt their methods to use them against them. Then they would see just how dangerous a this little farm girl from the middle-west could be.”
“If it was class warfare they wanted, I would give it to them!”
The manager of Razzles was groggy Monday morning after a long weekend of work and play. He moved like a turtle. Occasionally he stopped to wait out the drum beating in his head. He wore a silky robe and slippers that only covered his toes. It was 10 AM, but to him it felt like the crack of dawn. He couldn’t quite calculate the amount of sleep he had, or hadn’t had.
Through bloodshot eyes he made his way down from his office apartment to the main bar area. Most of the lights were off and it was quiet and dark in the nightclub. Through the kitchen doors he could hear the cleaning crew preparing for a new week.
He poured himself a glass of vodka, then added some pepper and orange juice. He shuffled to a barstool and planted himself. As he sipped his liquid breakfast, the front door opened, blasting the room with blinding white sunlight. He crumbled and yelled, "Shut that God damn door."
A deep voice grumbled, but complied.
Through amorphous blobs in his eyes he saw a stout, man in a gray cap and gun belt enter. It was the armored car driver. He arrived to pick up the weekend cash like he had every Monday 52 times year. The manager didn't realize it was time for the pickup already. He squinted at the clock and said, "You're early."
The driver grumbled, "Sorry."