Chapter Text
The worst thing about finding the body is that it’s all she finds. She has no killer’s face to carry in her mind’s eye, no names to put on a hit list. He is alone.
And she is alone. Later, she’s grateful for that, because she kneels beside him and stupidly tells him to stop it, she knows he’s just trying to get back at her for something.
She knows he wasn’t killed where she found him. He was dragged here; Diamonds Droog would never let himself die half in a drainage ditch with a tea-colored stain spreading slowly up his immaculate white tie. The bastards snapped his neck and left him in the water. His deck is scattered over and around him, nothing but paper cards getting soggy. His eyes stare up emptily, and his face is smooth, untwisted by pain or rage or fear. His mouth is a little open, and he looks a little lost.
She takes his picture before she brings him home. Evidence is evidence, but she’s not letting the police department’s flatfooted vultures pick him over, even if it means leaving him here for a while to drop a sudden and ludicrous wad of cash on a camera.
The next step is quicker. She can’t teleport with a person, but a corpse isn’t a person. She has him home within seconds of dragging him up into her arms.
The first thing Slick does is accuse her of killing him. She smiles bitterly and hands him the camera.
Boxcars is predictable. He slams his door off its hinges and reduces his room to splinters. He comes out white with plaster dust, and Deuce takes his hand and pulls him off to curl up tight on a bed that is far too small, but he keeps reappearing. He won’t touch or look at the body, and he doesn’t want anyone else to touch it or look at it either. He fills the doorway to snarl them away again and again, until Slick snaps, “just go the fuck to sleep, you fat fuck!” and Boxcars inexplicably obeys.