There are plenty of things that Jeffrey Marcus Pinkler is pretty darn sure of: America is the greatest country in the world, women are all whores who must be punished, and music today is trash put out by homosexual atheists and Jew-elite bankers and negro gang-bangers. Then there are the few things things that he's almost totally convinced of: kids today have no respect for education, no one understands anymore why WW2 had to be fought, and that Hitler was a great man manipulated by an evil cabal of Freemasons. And then there are the few things in this universe that he's is truly and absolutely certain of: the existence of Hell, the nature of the Damned, and the sanctity of his mission to commit back to the flames all those who traffic with demons. He has proof. Mathematical proof. Historical proof. Social-studies related proof.

See, the thing is that Mr. Pinkler (as his students at the Middle School call him, and as he prefers to be addressed while "in the field") has actually met Jesus Christ. Or, I guess, a reasonable facsimile there-of: the Son of God, Hosanna in the Highest, was hanging out in a drainage-ditch out behind the school near the closed-down water-treatment plant, where Mr. Pinkler was investigating to be certain that none of "his kids" were smoking marijuana cigarettes or reading pornography during lunch hour.

The storm-fencing had recently come down, you see.

The Prince of Peace stood there in the darkness inside the the runoff tunnel, with a crown of thorns warping His face into an obscene sunburst of flesh and with clotted blood pooling from His hands and feet, and He told Mr. Pinkler that the Lamb of God was trapped in Hell while the Damned roamed free.

He offered proof: the name and address of a powerful out-of state financial investor who had died two years ago. Track him down for me, said Christ, and you'll see that he's alive and well again. Consign him back to Hell for me, begged Christ, and I'll assure you a spot at my right hand at the coming of my glory in Heaven. Use a circular saw and a hot curling iron to kill him, suggested Christ, because he deserves to suffer for his sins.

For three years, now, Mr. Pinkler has been taking longer and more frequent sick-days and leaves-of-absence from the Middle School to fly out of state (not that anyone is particularly bothered: everyone really respects Jeff as an educator, but it's not like anyone considers him a close friend). He's invested more and more money in stun-guns, gas masks, knives, rope, bullet-proof vests, binoculars and duct tape. He even had his basement re-done with sound-proofing. He's gotten very good at circumventing both police scrutiny and highly-paid counter-intrusion security experts. And he's successfully 're-Damned' somewhere in the range of a dozen people, including one guy TWICE.

Mr. Pinkler used to be a buttoned-down little psycho, living a life of quiet desperation and softly going more and more mad with each passing day. Now his sanity is positively plummeting, and he couldn't be happier. When he gets the urge to go down to the tunnels and meet with Christ, the King of Kings provides a holy sacrament of divine flesh and divine blood, and these give Mr. Pinkler special powers to catch the Damned. Once he's choked down the spongy, rotten skin and stained his teeth with nearly-fermented ichor, Mr. Pinkler can read minds for a week. The sounds of surrounding thoughts wash over him, and he can "tune his heart" to catch snippets of sins and suspicions and avarice and dark desires and murderous intent.

With this power, Mr. Pinkler has even made some money in Vegas. All of it, of course, he's re-invested in the mission.

The scary thing for the community is that Mr. Pinkler is a Hatchetman who thinks like a crasher: he's not a homicidal, fearless loon. He's not a megalomaniacal amateur psychopath. And most importantly, he's not an aimless drifter like either of them: he has a base of operations, he has a tool-kit, he has a list of resources and notes on acceptable losses and he is doing this job because he loves it and because it feeds his soul in a way that nothing else does and because it's exciting as hell and because the pay is SO worth it.

In fact, the connection to "topside crashing" is further exemplified by the fact that Mr. Pinkler occasionally works with a "crew": he'll hire out local muscle if he thinks he's going after a target too big for one man alone. And since Mr. Pinkler is the man called in for the biggest of Hell-Pulls, that means he's sometimes the head of a six-man team in a black van. And, much like a crasher, the goal is to snag the target alive … and then to pull them apart slowly, in Mr. Pinkler's case. The other major thing to note is that Mr. Pinkler does not kill anyone except the un-Damned. Or, at least, he sure tries not to: his mission is a holy one, and his job is to send the escaped back to Hell, not harm the living. Sure, sometimes his job entails using a sniper rifle from a roof to pop someone, and then a window entry to a hotel room to stun a bodyguard and then an extraction from there, but most people who deal with Mr. Pinkler live.

Which is all part of his cover.