Synopsis / Summary / Plot
This is another issue I'll try to unscramble and tell in chronological order.
Last issue (#18) Kate Bishop in LA discovered that her enemy Madame Masque was part of a gang coming after the other Hawkeye (Clint Barton) in NY. And then Masque had the beach trailer she was living in burnt down.
We see lots of Kate PI's loser clients. She seems to be using the coffee shop as an office now. Then she tells her friend Marcus that she's found a car to get her back to New York to save Clint from the bad guys. But she asks for a loan of 2 grand. Then MM rings her up in the middle of the night just to annoy her. She seems to be sleeping on Marcus and Finch's couch. Then the police come to arrest her.
She's taken in to Det Caudle where she's told that she's under arrest for the murder of Harold H Harold (#18) because 1 of her arrows was found in his chest. She asks for her phone call and is given it. But she uses it talk privately to Caudle at his desk to remind him that she has an alibi. Traffic cams have her (with Marcus and Finch in their car) chasing the bad guys who abducted Harold at the airport, and then driving to the police station where they were until Caudle got the call about Harold's body. The someone posts her bail so he has to let her go.
Marcus and Finch are waiting for her outside with the man who paid her bail. It's Harold alive and well. He explains that Masque has a racket provide new bodies for rich folk. It's based on pirated SHIELD Life Model Decoy tech, but presumably with an extra bit about transferring your consciousness into the LMD. Masque has given *him* a new body so she can kill him all over again (as apparently she's been doing for the 20 years he claims to have been trapped in LA).
Marcus and Finch take Kate to see Gary the florist (from #14). It seems that he sells exotic plants now to a wealthy client Whitney Frost. She uses them in weird parties where men dine of the body of a naked girl. But Kate knows that Frost is Madame Masque and she's the power behind Flynt Ward who burned Gary's shop down (#14). So now he agrees to help her bring Frost's empire down.
Kate is the next naked girl covered in edibles. Masque is there but gets called away urgently because Harold wants to talk to her. Kate then leaves the disappointed diners as she changes into her Hawkeye costume complete with bow and arrows and goes looking for incriminating evidence. She downloads lots of stuff from a terminal into a USB arrow (1 of Clint's ideas). And 1 of the things she notices is that her father Derek Bishop is 1 of Frost's clients.
Then MM's squad of 'bellhops' find her. She initiates her prepared escape plan, firing an arrow line through a window. But the goons are too many and too fast for her and she takes lots of knocks before managing to slide down the escape line with her bow. Outside she uses a fire arrow to set the building alight. But the bellhops come after her even though *their* LMD bodies are melting, and they beat her up some more. Masque is about to shoot her when SHIELD troops abseil down from a helicarrier.
Heavily beaten up Kate is being processed and asking for her phone call (again). But she gets interrogated by Maria Hill and Phil Coulson of SHIELD and tells them (and us) all about her involvement with Madame Masque (all the way back to #4). She suggests that Masque has provided LMD bodies for *herself* after her several apparent deaths. They take her evidence away and she asks to call her father. Derek Bishop, on his yacht with his new wife Heather, gets a call from his daughter Kate to say that she's in jail but she knows what he did and she's coming to get him.
Afterwards Kate meets Harold in their usual supermarket venue. He admits that he manipulated her into bringing Masque down so he could escape from her and LA. Kate is angry that SHIELD is hushing it all up and they're probably going to let Masque and her father (Count Nefaria) go free. Then she says goodbye Marcus and Finch (who've obviously lent her the money to buy the car). She moans that her whole LA PI stint was a waste of time. But they remind her that she saved their wedding and tell her to now go save her friend. And she drives away with Lucky the Pizza Dog.