It’s pissing down rain like the weather’s got a grudge against the city and Tits is in a foul mood. Too much blood lately, too much gunplay; her nose is numb with the sharp reek of sulfur. You’d think the rain would scrub all that away, but no: every wretched festering smell gets caught in the teeth of the fog and rots there. No joy in life, these days.

Still, it’s not without its uses, this feculent storm. Folks, honest as well as not, mostly stay indoors as much as they can, and the rivers and ditches boil and froth with the water they can’t choke down. A bad time for losing bodies, but a great one for finding them that’s been lost, and so tonight she’s out in this misery with a fishhook and a line trawling for whatever remains of Fjaler the Swede, which scuttlebutt has was ditched in the lake a month back.

Her line snags and she bends double against it, rain drumming on the rubber of her hood. He’s ugly and fishgnawed as you’d expect, when what remains of his face comes floating up under the leaden surface of the water, but still: Tits grins, all teeth and pupils. “Step back out of hell for a second,” she tells the corpse, “I’ve got work for you yet.”

She’s walking down the street like anybody else when some 17 year old donkey pulls a knife on her, on her, and nearly gets her in the back with it, too, except you don’t get to be the grim specter of death for three generations of idiot corpses without growing a sixth sense about these sorts of things. The street is empty by the time the screaming has stopped and she’s hotfooting it away with a pocketful of fingers rattling against her hip for souveniers before she has time to take a breath.

Tits isn’t big on thinking — planning, yes, she’s a downright genius at planning, and a legend of the age at nursing a grudge — but reflecting on her life, not so much. He’s not the first kid she’s dropped into the gutter, but the sheer pointless waste of it gets to her a bit. The lack of ceremony in particular she finds galling; usedtawas folks would at least shout your name before putting the pigsticker in your back at the bodega.

She’s out of sorts the entire time she’s hacking her way back up the chain to the sclerotic billionaire who put out the hit. “Bad for business,” he says, or would if she hadn’t kicked his chair over and gone to work on him with the kid’s own knife.

“We’ve both made some bad life choices, maybe,” she tells his meat when she’s done, but he doesn’t seem to find the chuckle in it; anyway he doesn’t laugh.

There’s them that blame it on all the lead in the gas thirty, forty years ago, which frankly Tits finds kind of offensive. She growls just thinking about it, and a column of air goes bubbling up past her mask in disdain. What did they know, anyway? Scientists. She was a fucking god of war emerged naked from the untouched rock, and that was all there was to it.

The water is killing cold but the wet suit does what it is goddamned supposed to do so she’s mostly aware of how cold Byron must be, assuming through some miracle the bottomfeeders have left him enough meat to feel anything with. Byron hated the cold; just the thought of how much he’d bitch warmed the very cockles of her heart.

There’s a ladder hanging off the back of the yacht like there ain’t any kind of worry to have. She lets the Sound take the belt and the tank and she swarms over the side like hell itself kicking down the door. None of Lefty Frizelle’s girls are sober enough to spot her until she’s harpooned Lefty off the roof of the conning tower, all teeth and blood and a giant fuckoff spear.

“Swim for it, you white-legs,” she tells what’s left, “I got what I came for.”

“Christ, Tits, have a heart,” says one, “that’s five fuckin’ miles.” It might have been Peaches Rodriguez before the second harpoon carries her out into the bay. The rest go piling into the water willingly enough; she only has to harpoon two more.

She lets the boat drift along beside them until the cold pulls them all down to keep Byron company, which is just perfect. He’d never cared much for women; just one more thing to bitch about.