The alleyway emptied out onto an empty street with broken streetlights-and a stop light blinking yellow at this time of night. Very little moved, certainly not the stifling still night air, but there were sounds. His heightened hearing picked up a cat in a trash can, its claws dragging along the inside like nails on a chalkboard, but with a tinny sound. A drunk slept his troubles away at the back end of the alley, next to where a whore was turning her next trick. Her john made noise as he used her. She made none.
Some nights it was easy for him to forget where he was. There might be kids playing late on a front door stoop, or boys from the YMCA singing on the corner, or playing those plastic containers like they were drums. Stickball was actually alive and well before dark too in this neighborhood. It was almost nice. Almost. But, the later the night got, the more the other side took over.
His thoughts raced, raising his blood pressure a bit. Why didn't he just leave, go back, shit, go back anywhere? The farm. The job working on the dam. Riding the rails like he did so many years he couldn't even remember when he started doing it. Weren't ANY of those things better than this? Well, yeah, of course they were, but he was HERE now, and this was where he was supposed to be, this was where he was needed. Certainly needed as much as he had ever been needed, you know?
A smell snapped him back to the moment, erasing the images of goats on the farm and the grating of a railroad car door as it strained shut. The smell of piss and shit and the alley followed him-on his boots. The good thing was, his senses were sharpened now, and he could tell that something was wrong.
A glance down the left hand side of the street revealed nothing, and the right hand side was lined with trash cans for the morning pick up. But his gut said that the air was just too still, too quiet. It was hot, but not hot enough to turn his cheeks red, like they were. No, this was not "normal". This street had trouble brewing somewhere. The trick was finding out where, before it found him. He'd been sluggish lately, and that meant only being able to react, never to act first. And that would eventually get him killed unless he stepped it up.
A rinse of the boots in the gutter at least cleared off most of the stench. That would suck--"So, how they find you?" and he'd have to say "They smelled the shit on my shoes". If he was alive to relate any story of course.
After stepping back onto the curb, he heard a muffled sound-he couldn't tell what it was. It didn't sound like trouble, and it stopped. A small screech and a padding sound of feet broke the silence for a moment, and he turned-that was probably the cat extricating himself from his trash can haven. The turning of his body towards the sound was the only thing that allowed him at his age to sidestep the battered trash can that came clattering down the alley way, seemingly sans cat.
The cat came next. Well, cat parts came next. Shit, he said. Hopping over the twitching bloody heap, he began to run back up the alley way, hoping the whore and the john and the wino weren't still up there. This is what he was here for, he was sure, and they would not be pleased with what they saw if they hadn't already moved on or gotten the fuck out of there. A woman's scream, cut short by a dull gouging and gurgling sound proved that, in fact, at least one person had still been in the alley.
He was at a full run now, and had pulled out both the brass knuckles as well as the night stick as he moved. He hoped those would be enough-lots of times they were, when the perp was small time or just literally small. He hadn't used anything else in weeks, but sometimes he regretted his inclination to avoid guns. The others thought he was crazy. But lighting up an alley with lead was not the way to keep a low profile, and that is what he preferred.
Since the streetlights were out, he couldn't see very well, but he could smell blood and bile and guts. Shit-this can't be good. One thing he didn't have was the sharp eyesight some of the others had been blessed with. He would have traded his sense of smell for it now, that's for sure. The nasty, fresh, human smells were getting to him as he ran. He stumbled over something. The sleeping wino? Except he wasn't sleeping. Brannock felt part of a body give way, and then something wet slap against his shin. When he reached down, his hand hit sharp pieces of something-god, it couldn't be bone could it? As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he saw what he had stumbled over.
The drunk's body was almost in two, mostly severed somehow along the rib cage in a horizontal fashion and ribs jutted out in all sorts of screwed up directions. Some part of some organ leaked out from the bottom half of the body, and it looked like the head was crushed. What the hell could have done this?
