From the Legend of Iron Man: The Destructors.

 

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We were steady moving product.  

Whole crew, salty dogs: perpetrators.  "Destructors." I had got popped for running girls, and other girls were talking about, they were 1099 contractors, and such.  I was convenient, I guess, the available sort that they could point their finger at, not fearing as much reprisal from me as them other boys.

People can be wrong about things, and not just wrong, but like 180 degrees off, a whole world off, and when they least suspect otherwise.

I had heard from Williams late in the doldrum of the year, and he said he had a crop seeded for sometime in September, and at last word, before he went silent, it was a good report.  Always is the way, a good word, then its kaput.

McCandless was roiling around doing C.I. work, and all, his candy bar money coming from the government, taking the odd donut from the cops sometimes, but generally working both sides of the streets, and then, just like Williams, his little supernova went silent, too.

That one boy, he had got caught up in a car bombing, but lived, and undeterred, kept on his life of crime, however sporadically, health permitting and all.  When he got out of the burn unit at the Research Triangle, he absconded to Florida, to be a "sole proprietor", a fish in another pond, luckily someone else's problem.  He was a "just add water" type, a kind to talk a good game, but get kind of floppish about the guttyworks when the chips were down.

They had come up on us one time, me and Williams, that McCandless and Adams coming up, bull-jiving amongst themselves, and Williams commented that those boys were good for a joke.

I told Williams those two were funny like a sh*tty pair of drawers.

But I had a few little moments of verbage, like giving the Easter story in a packed room, to a captive audience, but such was better than a hostile audience; catch them bored I says and nourish a little glimmer of interest.

I mean, really, we couldn't always and forever be "the ones that got away with it", but we could do our time graciously, gracefully, and generally, on the balance on the universe, not make more problems than we could ever hope to address.