Nativity

She wasn’t always named Tits, obviously. Her parents weren’t monsters. When she first started legging for Brick, he’d pegged her as Tits right from the get-go. Whenever he sent her out on a job, he’d tell Byron or the Jink or whoever, “Take the tits with you.” He never spoke to her directly.

When she popped him, she held on to the name. Not out of pride, or defiance or anything, but because she knew it didn’t matter what they called her. She was going to put her boot on the throat of the rackets, and anybody who can do that can be called any damn thing at all, Tits or Greasepit or Satan himself.

That first year she had trouble from the loud voices and broad shoulders in Brick’s old gang. She put them down hard, sliced ’em up and down and bathed in their blood. There were no second chances, and after a while there weren’t many first chances. She killed 37 people that first year, left them ripped nearly in half in the street in front of the copshops, and after that she was a ghost. A demon. A trigger and a knife with no hand behind it. She gave her orders and followed along behind them like the tenth plague of Egypt. In ten years, she was the unholy god of the city. Widows and orphans prayed to her, and the leggers burned incense and fat in her name in barrels in every alley in town.

Tits Akimbo

It’s time to show them who’s boss, she says to herself, and takes a bead on the lead palooka’s head with her rifle. She shouts, “Welcome to hell, boys!” and drops three of them quick as thinking. Pow. “When they ask you who sent you, you tell ’em Tits Akimbo!”

“Tits, we didn’t know it was your boat, honest we didn’t,” one of them screams from behind a panel truck. “We’ll put it all back! We’ll do it right now!”

“Sure thing, son. All nice and friendly, yeah? Bygones are bygones. You just move out where I can see you. Nice and slow.”

Six of ’em stand up, hands raised and stupidly hopeful. She had a dog once with the same dumb look whenever she opened the fridge. She pretends not to see little number seven, shaking down next to a pile of pallets. “Thanks, Tits, really,” says the loudmouth, fat sweaty hog that he is with a face like a pile of puke. “We’ll let everyone know this is your operation, all the right guys, I mean, not to mess with it. You won’t have any more problems with us, I swear to you!”

“Damn right,” she growls, and drops them one by one, right through the melons, bam bam pow. The loudmouth jerks away and she pegs him through the thigh. She pulls the Webley out as she stalks through the carnage. He’s trying to crawl away, so she puts her foot on his neck and grinds his face into a puddle of brains.

“When you get to hell,” she says, playing it up for the lump pissing himself next to the pallets, “you tell ’em Tits Akimbo sent you.” Pow.