LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Six

      A crowd of wrong people is still wrong; numbers do not make Right.

      —The Book of Truth, Veraxis Article 1549

      She’d never been this close to the docks before. Terrible had refused to take her—not that she was desperate to see them or anything.

      But it was still … interesting.

      She’d seen a neighborhood like it once before, out by the Nightsedge Market on Lex’s side of town, up near the Crematorium. A neighborhood where the few remaining intact buildings almost seemed ashamed of themselves for being so, where crumbling walls and roofless rooms open to the sky were the norm.

      And it smelled, the dank rotten scent of the bay mixed with oil and human waste and filth, a horrible fugue that made her wish she had a surgical mask or something to put on. All those germs in the air, bacteria dancing on dust motes and searching for a nice warm body to invade and set up home in.

      Terrible noticed her shudder. “Can wait in the car, if you’re wanting.”

      “No.” Whatever the reason she wanted—needed—to see the body, she still did.

      “Told you were shitty here.”

      “Yeah, but—look, the water is kind of pretty.”

      He followed her gaze across the pitted cement to the water, which gleamed with the sunset’s reflection between the looming hulks of boats. Under that glow, she knew, lurked filth and muck and death, but the surface … the surface was beautiful. Just as with so many things.

      He shrugged and took the few steps that brought him to the small circle of people in the middle of the intersection. They moved aside for him without speaking; Chess wondered if a few of them were able to speak. They looked barely human, like evolutionary throwbacks to the period when tiny dark creatures discovered fire. Masses of dirty hair tangled from the tops of their heads to midway down their backs; what appeared to be burlap sacks covered their bodies, and their feet were bare. Even Chess had never seen anything like it. Downside was poor, yes, but these people weren’t poor, they had nothing. And people who had nothing developed their own world to compensate, and now she’d walked into it.

      They knew Terrible, though, backing away from him without looking into his face.

      “Who find him?” he asked, and when he stepped to the side Chess saw the body.

      Greenback lay on his stomach in a pool of blood on the tar-streaked concrete, his pale face staring at the street beyond. It took Chess a second to realize what had happened, how that was possible; he should have been facedown, but his neck had been cut with so much force it had almost been severed, and his chin rested on the concrete.

      Terrible crouched beside the body. Chess tried not to see his boots making dents in the sticky blood puddle. “Who find him?” he asked again.

      Someone stepped forward, a dirty, skinny wraith of a woman with long thin scratches on the outsides of her arms and track marks on the insides. “Were me. Seen it, I done. I done seen it.”

      Mutters ran through the crowd at this; a few people edged away from her. She didn’t appear to notice. “Were two mens. Jumped outen a car an cut he. Lay he out like so an drive off.”

      “What kinda car, you knowing?”

      The nest of hair on her head—it had once been blond—shook, like a leafy branch moving with the breeze. “Black one. All I know.”

      “You seen the men, them faces or aught you could know iffen you see em again?”

      Another shake. “Black car. Black clothes.”

      “You touch he? Got him wallet?”

      Yet another shake, faster, so fast Chess knew—even if she hadn’t already—that it was a lie.

      Terrible glanced at the body, then back at the woman. “Any lashers in it you keep, dig? Drugs, too. Ain’t give a fuck on it. But needing to see he wallet, iffen you got it.”

      She didn’t respond.

      Terrible stood up slowly. Chess never could figure out how he managed to make himself look even bigger when he wanted to—a particular furrow of his brow, a slight hunch to his shoulders, his arms held just an inch or so farther out from his body—but he did it then, staring at the woman with a calm intensity Chess felt even from a few feet away.

      The woman hiked up her dress in the back and produced a leather wallet. Shit, had she been keeping that thing in her underwear?

      Yes, she had. Chess hoped to see some sort of thigh holster or garter, but lifting the excuse for a dress showed the woman’s spindly bruise-covered legs, and they were bare.

      Terrible wasn’t coming anywhere near touching Chess with those hands again until they’d been washed. Twice. At least.

      He didn’t look any happier about where the wallet had been kept, but he opened it anyway. “Got any else? Needing to see all it, dig?”

      Greenback had apparently also had a watch, several small bags of pills and powders, an earring, and a few scraps of paper. That was a lot to keep in a pair of underwear; Chess had to hand it to the woman for that.

      Terrible set the items on the ground at his feet and kept digging through the wallet.

      He glanced at Chess. “No lashers taken, dig, still all in here. Adds up, too, for what bags there is missing.”

      “They didn’t steal anything, then.”

      “Naw, ain’t lookin like.” He turned to the woman. “You see him before the car come? Were he standin here?”

      The woman licked her lips, her gaze flicking from the wallet in Terrible’s hands to the drugs on the ground and back again in constant restless motion. “Were in the car.”

      “What? Greenback were?”

      “Greenback dead one?”

      “Aye.”

      She nodded. “Him get outen car. Other two followed. Killed he.”

      Terrible’s expression didn’t change, but Chess could imagine what he was thinking. Probably it was the same as what she was thinking, which was: What was Greenback doing in the car? If those were Lex’s men, why was he in the car with them, and why hadn’t they stolen his money and drugs?

      “He look like him wantin get out the car, you see?” Terrible pulled a couple of things out of the wallet—papers, she thought—and tucked them in his pocket before handing the wallet back. “Or like them pushed he out?”

      “Said I keep the lashers, you did.”

      He shrugged. “An you keeping em. Weren’t lashers I took. Papers, an you don’t need em, dig?”

      The woman glared at him. He stared back at her, with that same deadly patience.

      The woman gave up. “Look like him got pushed. Them follow right on he, cut him throat. Lay him out. Drive on off.”

      Terrible nodded, then scooped up the bags at his feet. “Any else seen? Heard aught? Got any knowledge?”

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