The job went like clockwork for the most part, except the guards at the switchyard started to get lippy and Budd had to shoot one of them to prove they were serious. Wasn’t always the way it went, but it happened often enough that Tits Akimbo wasn’t any too worked up about it. Casualties to a minimum, she’d told them, but situation like that you either shoot one idiot early or all of them later. His own damn fault: it’s one of god’s own fools who acts big at a woman holding a semiautomatic on him.

It’s a new town, so no one knows her. Normally she’s happy to keep close to home, but every so often Tits misses the old days when she had more to prove, where she couldn’t put the fear of god into anyone just by showing up. So she gets a crew together and they go knock some place over, clear it out soup to nuts. Company towns, usually; private equity means private security instead of the cops, means workers who are happy to see the company getting fucked instead of doing the fucking for a change, means more loose money and more cowards.

She tags the walkie talkie. “You into that safe yet?”

“Just about,” says Jemisin, standing guard. There’s a whump she can feel even six blocks away, and Russo is cackling in the background when the walkie talkie squawks again.

“Alright,” she tells the remaining guards, “you all stay calm and you’ll come out of this alive yet.”

She hadn’t meant to kill the old man, had Tits Akimbo, but she hadn’t noticed the inhaler that fell out of his pocket while she was stuffing the gag in his mouth, either. “You damn fuckwit,” she says, and kicks the corpse in annoyance. Not that it matters much; she hadn’t left a trace on the fourteenth floor office overlooking the lake, but normally she gets paid in one form or another, and this one’s gratis.

It’s a good view but the window doesn’t open, so Tits pulls out her little glass cutter and carves her way through both panes of glass, large circle on the inner one, smaller one on the exterior. She leaves them on the corpse’s chest with his cooling hands wrapped around them; it’ll send some kind of message to whoever find him, but good luck figuring it out. Might as well stick ’em somewhere useful.

When the Don’s motorcade comes rolling past the cathedral she’s set up proper. The rifle bucks in her hands and she doesn’t wait to see what happens. The car’s windows are bulletproof and odds are good that someone spotted the flash, but the point wasn’t to hit anything. Tits isn’t one for causes, but she’s no monarchist; let the rich dream of blood and fire while they may.

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.