Any other man might have set his box on a street corner and spent the next 30 years scraping out a living by licking the boots of every two-bit street hustler and working joe that tossed him a dime. Any other man might have seen how things were and knuckled under to Injustice and cried out "Why me?" But Harry Seltzer wasn't any other man. Harry Seltzer was the kind of man who saw the possibilities in how things could be and asked himself "Why not me?" Harry Seltzer was the kind of man who faced Injustice head-on and spit in its eye, then shoved it backwards down a flight of stairs and kicked the crap out of it all the way down.

 

But I mean, in a nice kind of way.

 

Maybe it was just Dumb Luck that made billionaire industrialist Johnny Romanov step off the street corner that day, and maybe it was just Dumb Luck that made that delivery truck's brakes give out at the end of the block....but it wasn't Dumb Luck that pulled him out of harm's way and spent the next three weeks in intensive care with massive internal hemorraging. That was Harry Seltzer's doing. That one good deed started his rise to the top, and there was no stopping Harry Seltzer.

 

That is, until two days ago.

 

I decided to start my search for Harry with a snitch I knew who worked the East Side Harbor as a button man for the Spaghettio crime family. He'd blown twelve in the circuit by the time he was fourteen years old, and made a name for himself dropping cubes for a slappy out of Hell Town before burning a point for old man Spaghettio two years ago on the coast.

 

I don't know what any of that means, either.

 

Anyway his name was Eddie. Eddie Perlucci.

 

I came upon him in the middle of a deal behind a fish warehouse on the harbor. He and his "client" were muttering to themselves when I appeared.

 

"Hello, Eddie," I said.

 

His head snapped up. "The Claw!"

 

His buddy tried to ditch a bright yellow box. With my energy claw I caught it. I'd seen these before. The success of methadone clinics across the country had inspired a great many imitation drugs recently. This was one of the more popular ones, "I Can't Believe It's Not Crack".

 

"What do you want?!" the stranger cried, "This ain't even illegal!"

 

"You're right," I said evenly, in a cold voice that seemed to unnerve him, "That's because the laws haven't been able to keep up with these imitation drugs. Now, beat it, punk. This don't concern you."

 

While he ran around the corner and disappeared, Eddie's eyes darted back and forth. I wondered if he was actually measuring his escape route. I wondered if he was actually that stupid.

 

"I need information, Eddie."

 

Shadows leapt and fell across his long, swarthy features, shadows cast by the unearthly energy pulsating from my eyes and the mutant energy claw that enveloped my hand.

 

"You know the deal, Claw. You don't harrass my clients, and I give you information."

 

"Justice doesn't make deals, Perlucci. You give me information and I don't drop you in the harbor."

 

Eddie gulped nervously and glanced toward the edge of the building again. He stood four feet from me, but we were in two different worlds. He was a two-bit thug with a chip on his shoulder trying to squeeze what he could from an unappreciative world; I was a simple man with an energy claw trying to make up for a past I could never forget.

 

"Word on the street is you're looking for Harry Seltzer."

 

"What do you know about it?"

 

A long pause. Eddie looked at his shoes. "No much," he said, finally, carefully, "I just know that..."

 

That was all I heard before my world exploded in crimson and faded to black...