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The tall man set his surveillance camera up in an area of the city that had suffered the most vandalism. This job would be more diffucult that the last few had been, but it also paid more. Running a con on some hayseed country boys was easy; people in the country tended to have respect for the law. If a uniformed police officer told them to do something they tended to comply out of fear that the long arm of the law would come down on them.
Here in the city it was a different game. Vandals here were in gangs, and had no respect for the law, mostly because the police and court systems were a joke. The real power here belonged to the people, not the police. He knew he had to hit hard and get out of town fast. Three kids in a pickup truck in the middle of nowhere were relatively harmless, even when armed with a small pistol. The gangbangers in this town were heavily armed with both guns and knives and they had no reservations about committing acts of extreme violence in defense of their territory and in acts of retribution towards their enemies. He finally decided on a plan of attack. A visit to a sympathetic trucking company, which had suffered vandalism, secured the use of a furniture van. Late evening found the van parked, apparently unattended, with the door open enough to reveal a valuable cargo. The tall man observed six perpetrators emerge from the shadows and deface the van with spray paint. All wore bandanas on their arms to indentify their gang affiliation and the baggy cargo pants common to their generation. Eventually they discovered the open door and took the bait. The elecrically actuated door slammed shut and locked, and the van was moved to a uninhabited location. Nitrous Oxide gas quieted the profanity that emnated from the van, so the tall man dressed for the occasion in rubber boots, rain pants, and a gas mask and set to work. The miscreants regained consciousness to find themselves naked and secured hand and foot to the van's cargo sidewall tiedown anchors. Facing them was an apparition that appeared to be a man with a Cyclops head, but was really only a skydiver helmet camera. The finished video was not a masterpiece of filmmaking nor would it win any prestigious awards, but it would do its' intended job when distributed throughout the city in large quantities. The start of the production showed the vandalism and the gang's entry to the van, and then the helmet cam documented the action. Gloved hands were shown attaching a rubber tourniquet to the victim's scrotum. The video did not include sound, but a skilled lipreader could decipher the threats and warning about touching a member of the Vagos, and later his cries of anguish. The camera then focused on the man's hand seizing the testicles of the other before shifting to his face. The look of defiance first, then fear dissolved in contusions of pain as the camera dropped to show the knife and severed manhood, which was thrown to the floor and crushed under the heel of the tall man like a dicarded cigarette butt or annoying bug. This sequence was repeated four more times with slightly different camera angles. The last victim, a slim lad with downy crotch hair who had just entered puberty, was allowed to retain one testicle. The tall man heard the sirens of the approaching ambulances as he left the city. Castration, or the threat of it, was a primal fear that all normal males shared. The gang members feared no punishment that law could administer, nor any injury from which they would heal. This was the one thing that would stop most gang activity and vandalism for quite some time. His quest started after his wife and son had been killed at an intersection with a missing stop sign. He soon learned that vengeance had a monetary value, and now he applied it on a contract basis with his fee determined by the reduction of property damage within the area. In two more years he could retire very comfortably. He pobably wouldn't, though.
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