Jackson sits in his home, a wall of newspaper clippings in front of him, every last one torn from the obituary section of one of Arcadia’s newspapers. He runs his hand across them, shaking his head. “I read these every day. I wake up in the morning and I find myself instantly combing through the recently deceased. You hope that most of them are natural causes, you know. Yet, these pages are stained in blood.”
“See,” he says, pointing at one of the articles, “while some of these unlucky few were killed in crimes of passion or in retaliation for misdeeds against their attacker, many more are what we might call collateral damage.” He sighs, “unintended casualties. Be it a stray bullet catching a good man in the skull or an explosion decimating a target’s family, it’s all the same.”
Cade walks past the wall, grabbing a newspaper and ripping out a section. “The man who fires the gun and misses doesn’t care for the consequences. All he hopes is to see the demise of his intended target and refuses to acknowledge the damage he caused. To him, it’s just another name in the papers, isn’t it?”
He pins the torn page to the wall, another page in his collection. “You used to write these pages, right Colt? You had to scrawl the names of the deceased across the front page of Arcadia plenty of times when it was deemed big enough. From the decimation of the Red Light to now you were the man who chronicled their demise. I’m sure you grew numb to it though, didn’t you? They were just names, letters and words put to paper. You didn’t care about who they were in life, you only cared that it looked good on the front page. Always a one track mind, the same mind when you attacked Narcissa like any common thug, uncaring of anyone else who was in your way.”
“But Narcissa isn’t free of the hypocrisy,” he says a she violently tears pages from two more papers, grabbing tacks from a box as he does so. “She wishes to cause an Uprising in Arcadia yet clearly doesn’t care who perishes along the way. Joey has been corrupted into one of her hounds, and the rest are nothing more than murderers and savages wishing to satiate their bloodlust. Neither of you care about the lives you end.”
“They’re all just names you never care to learn.”
“I was nothing more than collateral damage in the war between you two,” Cade spits the words as he looks at his wall. “But I’m still standing. I’m not a name you can forget, nor a body you can bury. I haven’t joined my memorial wall and, soon, you’ll wish I had. At Attitude I’m going to teach you that actions of consequences. I’m going to be the voice of the lifeless, the retribution of the helpless. Kick after kick, blow after blow, you’ll both fall. No one is above the Law.”
He pins both pictures to the wall, one of Colt, one of Narcissa.
“And I am the Law.”