1979.

Hank Mills didn’t mean to kill his wife, and he wanted the Crimson Wraith to know that. Titan City’s Scarlet Stranger caught up with him about a block from the tenement building where he’d left Carla, appearing in an explosion of blinding light and sulfurous smoke. 

Among the rest of its graffiti, his building had been sprayed with the Crimson Wraith’s tag — a white skull in a red circle. The same could be found at various other points around the neighborhood, a sign this space was protected. Wherever you saw his tag, there would be no escaping the Crimson Wraith’s justice.

But still Hank had run, even if he didn’t think he could get away. It was something he did without thinking, a thoughtless act, just like the one that killed Carla.

They had fought out on the landing in front of their apartment. Hank hated when they did that. Fights were a thing couples just had, he knew, but not out there for everyone to hear. 

Carla had a lot of fight in her. That was something he liked about her when they first met. She was passionate and loud and exciting, and Hank needed excitement. 

So much of his life had always been just a grind, and as far as he knew, that was the only kind of life he could have. He had started slinging fish at Infantino’s in high school, same as all the men in his family. His dad, his uncles, his brothers all started at Infantino’s, and wherever else they happened to go after, they carried its lessons — work hard, break your back, take pride in what you do, and maybe someday, if you’re lucky, you can retire with grandchildren to bring you a beer as you sit on the couch watching the game. 

When he graduated high school, Hank started slinging for Infantino full time. Somehow other opportunities didn’t appear for him. He wasn’t the kind of guy who knew how to go about looking for them anyway. It was hard for Hank to imagine anything other than what was right before his face.

But he had saved his money and moved out of his folk’s place, into a ramshackle older house on the East Side with some other guys who also worked at the fishery. The heat didn’t work half the year, and there didn’t seem to be any getting rid of the mice in the walls, but his roommates had showed Hank how to live — how to go out and have a good time, drinking beers at places that catered to the working man and to the women who came from the same Titan City neighborhoods they did, women like Carla. 

Hank had liked the way she danced and the way her blue dress clung to her body, as her golden hoop earrings flashed in the dark. His roommates had noticed him noticing her, and they kept pushing him to walk up and say something when she and her friends stepped off the dance floor. 

There was no way. He was too shy and had no idea what he would say. Instead, he had gotten the bartender’s attention and ordered Carla and her friends another round. They had accepted and raised their drinks to him with smiles. But when his eyes had met Carla’s, he couldn’t hold her gaze.

His roommates had told him that was his “in,” that now he absolutely had to go talk with her. Hank couldn’t. But Carla could. She came over and let him feel her fire for the very first time. 

“What the hell? You some kind of creep or something?” she said. “Buy a lady a drink, and you won’t ever say hello?”

Hank had fallen in love right away. 

Their courtship had been brief. Carla did the talking for both of them. Hank worked hard to show her a good time. They married a year later, got an apartment together. He worked. She spent her days out with her friends. Children didn’t happen, but they had some fun nights out. 

Fun fades though. In their second year of marriage, Hank noticed that her smile for him when he got home from work wasn’t as bright as it used to be. When they went out, it started to seem like she would talk with everyone else around them more than him. 

Gifts of clothes and jewelry appeared to reignite her interest for brief periods, but after she had screamed about how much she hated their apartment and asked why they couldn’t get a house of their own, like her friends’ husbands bought for them, Hank started picking up night shifts as well, which meant Carla would go out without him.

This was when they had started fighting, and Carla didn’t just fight with words. Hank had let her hit him, because you don’t hit a woman. Anyway, Hank was a big guy. He could take it, and take it he did, first from her fists, then her shoes, thrown from across the room, then a saucepan to his arm. 

None of these hurt like tonight though, when he came home to find her suitcase packed. It probably would’ve been better for them both if she had already been gone when he got home, but instead of leaving him a letter, she let him know just how she was feeling right to his face. “I’ve had enough of this! Enough of this and enough of you!”

“The fuck are you going?” he said.

“You don’t need to know where I’m going. You don’t need to know because we are done. You hear me?”

“Goddamn it, Carla…”

“Don’t you ‘goddamn it, Carla,’ me!”

“You’re my wife!”

“And this is our divorce!”

“Where are you going?”

“I ain’t sayin’!”

“Where the fuck are you going?”

“I’m going to my new man!”

“Your… what?” He knew she had been restless, but he had never considered she would cheat on him. “Carla you haven’t… Have you?”

“Yes, I did! Oh, I sure did!” Her dark eyes blazed with furious glee. “I found myself a man. I found myself a real man.”

“Stop it,” said Hank.

“A man who knows what a woman needs, that’s what I found. A man who can treat me like I deserve.”

“I never done nothing wrong to you!”

“What have you done that’s right? You want to tell me that?”

“I work!” he shouted. “I work every damn day!”

“Like a mule!” she screamed. “Like a dumb fucking ox! You’re not a man! You’re not a man at all! Just some big stupid animal!”

She never said that to him before. No one had ever said something like that to Hank. That’s something you just don’t say. And for the first time, Hank felt like he wanted to put his hands on her.

“Shut up,” he said.

“You don’t tell me what to do!”

“I said, shut up.” 

“Fuck you!” 

“Get out!” he said. “Go on then.”

“Oh, I am gone,” she said. “I am already gone.”

“I said, get out!”

She picked up her suitcase. “And I ain’t never coming back!”

Hank broke, “You get the fuck outta here, bitch!”

That’s when he shoved her. It was stupid. He knew a man should never lay a hand on a woman in anger. But he did. And maybe because he had never been a violent guy, he didn’t know how much to put into that shove, how much to hold back.

She had never expected him to ever come at her that way, either. If she thought Hank capable of it, maybe she would have found him a little more interesting. But she didn’t see it coming, didn’t brace for the blow, and the force of it surprised them both. 

Carla went flying, twisting an ankle and breaking the heel of her shoe as she tumbled backward, down the stairs. Their eyes held each other in mutual amazement for a frozen moment, then she was a bundle of spinning hair and limbs until her body reached the landing, head first, with the heavy crack of breaking bone. 

“Carla?” He started down after her. “Carla? Oh, shit! Oh, fuck! Carla!” 

Heads aren’t supposed to twist at that angle. As he reached her, Carla’s eyes fluttered, then stopped all movement, lids still open. 

Hank wanted to touch her, to hold her, to put her body back the way it was supposed to be, but he was too afraid when he saw the blood expanding from the back of her skull, a dark puddle reflecting the flickering neon lights above and the shimmer of her golden hoop earrings.

“Please, no. No, Carla, please. I’m sorry! Please!”

From an open doorway there came a scream. “He killed her! Oh, my god, he killed her!” The neighbors who had begun looking out of their apartments to watch their fight had all seen him shove her. That’s when Hank ran.

And that’s why, when the Crimson Wraith caught him at the end of a blind alley, appearing suddenly like a demon from hell, Hank pleaded with him. “I didn’t mean to kill her! Swear to Christ I didn’t!”

In his otherworldly, echoing voice, he said, “You want to make this right?” 

Hank nodded.

“Then listen to me. You have just a few minutes before the police arrive.”

“No,” Hank moaned. “No, no, no…”

The Crimson Wraith raised a red-gauntleted hand. “If you want to make this right, I want you to hold onto that. It’s a good thing. You can’t do anything about what’s already happened. You can’t undo what’s been done. But you can do the best you can going forward. Do you understand? You can do that and keep doing it, no matter what. Will you promise me that?”

Hank looked deep into the dark, empty sockets of the skull mask, sharing a gaze with eyes he couldn’t see. “Promise you?”

“Yes,” said the Crimson Wraith. “Promise me you will live to make things right, whatever it takes.”

This wasn’t what Hank thought the Crimson Wraith was supposed to do, not to someone who had killed another person. Hank thought he was supposed to get his ass kicked, something to punish him, maybe even a life for a life. “You want me to promise…”

The Crimson Wraith nodded. “That you will live to make things right, whatever it takes.”

Hank wasn’t really sure what that meant, but he had faith in the Crimson Wraith. It didn’t matter what anyone else had said about him. It had been eight years since that book came out, and you can put anything in a book — doesn’t mean it’s true. And anyway, the Crimson Wraith seemed different than he did when Hank was just a kid, scarier. So, whatever he wanted, Hank figured it was a good idea to be on board. He nodded.

“I want to hear you say it.”

“Say it?”

“Say it.”

“What was it you want me to say again?”

“I want you to promise…”

“I promise.”

“That you will live…”

“That I will live.”

“And you will make things right.”

“And I will make things right.”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Whatever it takes.”