"Whooosh—"
Warm water poured down from the showerhead overhead as Rorschach scrubbed furiously at a certain part of his body with a washcloth.
Maybe when facing danger, Rorschach could always stay hard‑edged. But sometimes, when faced with a girl's enthusiasm, even knowing full well she did not mean well, he would still unconsciously let his guard down.
Just like he had said earlier in the Gallaghers' bathroom—Karen was a stamp‑collecting slut who loved adding "entries" to her collection. Plenty of people even called her "the must‑play attraction of the South Side," and yet he had still relaxed his vigilance.
Motherf*cker, who knew how many germs were hiding in that woman's mouth!
"Shit!"
Rorschach shut off the water in frustration. After drying off, he pulled on a pair of loose lounge shorts.
He grabbed a beer from the fridge, cracked it open, downed it in one go, then crushed the empty can and tossed it neatly into the trash.
The ceiling light was a little dim and yellow, giving the whole place a layer of nostalgic haze.
It was a small, two‑bedroom single‑story house, with obvious signs of recent renovation. Off‑white wallpaper covered the fine cracks in the walls, and a thick carpet on the floor muffled the creaks of the old boards underneath.
Everything bore the marks of time. As far back as Rorschach could remember, this house had been with him for over twenty years.
But starting in middle school, he had been the only one living here.
He walked over to the fireplace and carefully wiped the picture frame resting on the mantel with a handkerchief. In the photo was a middle‑aged woman with fine lines at the corners of her eyes and a warm, gentle smile that made anyone who saw her feel at ease.
There were very few things in this world Rorschach truly cherished, and the photo before him was without a doubt one of the most important.
"Good evening, Mary."
He gave the woman in the picture the first genuine smile he had worn in days.
She was his mother in this world, who had died in an accident more than ten years earlier.
As for his father?
Rorschach had no real memory of him. From the moment he'd opened his eyes as a baby, carrying over his memories from a previous life, his world had contained only one family member—his mother.
"Father" was a foreign word to him, and one for which he felt no particular longing.
If anything, although he loathed Black people, at a glance he actually shared one faint similarity with the Black guys hustling on South Side streets.
After cleaning the frame, Rorschach sat down on the sofa and turned on the TV. The Cubs were playing the Boston Red Sox tonight.
He had just pulled another six‑pack from the fridge, ready to drink and watch, when the doorbell rang at exactly the wrong time, followed by the low voices of the Irish brothers calling his name.
Rorschach raised an eyebrow. If the brothers had come to his place this late at night, odds were high they had found something on the job he had given them.
And sure enough, that was exactly the case.
Connor walked in and nodded at him excitedly, hand raised for a high five. Right behind him, Murphy followed with both arms wrapped around a tightly closed cardboard box.
"Ha, Boss, you'll never believe how well this went!"
Connor plopped down on the sofa like he owned the place, resting one arm along the back as he launched in. "The two of us spent the last couple days hitting every bar and homeless hangout in the South Side, then pieced together everything we heard. And guess what we found out, Rorschach?"
He deliberately dropped his voice and let his expression turn serious. "Seventy‑eight kids. In the last six months, seventy‑eight children have gone missing in the South Side. The oldest is only thirteen. The youngest can't even walk yet."
Rorschach's pupils contracted hard. The number stunned him.
Still, he looked to Murphy to confirm. Compared to his big brother's tendency to exaggerate, Murphy was the steadier one.
But under Rorschach's sharp gaze, Murphy merely nodded, face grim, like he still had not fully processed the reality of what they had uncovered.
"F*ck!" Rorschach could not help cursing.
He had spent the past half year at HQ, buried in homicide work, with barely any attention left for the South Side. Now, demoted back to patrol, he was only just realizing how many innocent children Gus had already hurt.
"Most of them are girls, but about a third are boys," Murphy said quietly. "In most cases, their parents are either in prison or junkies—people completely incapable of raising a child. Under normal circumstances, those kids should've been sent to a welfare center to wait for adoption, but for some reason they all disappeared instead."
"Motherf*cker, what's there to guess?" Connor snapped. "Someone in the welfare center definitely got bought off by Gus. Not just the welfare center—the cops too. Every goddamn South Side cop's a dirty cop!"
He fumed, "These days, going to the police is like playing Russian roulette. You never know whose side the one you find is really on."
Rorschach sat in silence and did not refute him. The kid was not wrong. A lot of officers who had been rooted in the South Side for years had already sold out to various cartels and gangs. Around here, it was hard to find any cop who was not on the take.
But… seventy‑eight children?
Even if some of those missing kids had nothing to do with Gus, that number was still staggering.
What the hell was he doing with that many children?
Running drugs? Organ harvesting? Selling them to powerful scumbags?
"Oh, right, Rorschach, take a look at this." Connor pointed to the box Murphy had set down on the coffee table.
The cardboard box was about half a cubic meter, battered on the outside, and heavy where it sat in front of Rorschach.
"Mm…"
Between the look of the box and what the brothers had just told him, a bad feeling rose in his gut. A line from "Se7en" popped into his head on its own.
What's in the box… what's in the f*cking box?!
Rorschach wrinkled his nose and pointed at the two of them. "Let me just say this: if there are any innocent kids' bodies in there, I'm going to beat the shit out of both of you to blow off steam."
"B‑bodies?" Connor blinked, then shook his head quickly and flipped the box open himself.
Rorschach glanced inside and let out a quiet breath. It was full of stuffed animals and children's clothes covered in stains.
Murphy explained at the right moment. "We found this when we were tailing one of Gus's men, out at a dry‑cleaning plant in the suburbs. We didn't dare go in, but we pulled this stuff out of the dumpsters nearby."
"Think about it, Rorschach," Connor added. "Dirty clothes at a dry‑cleaning factory is nothing special. But this many dolls? That place has to be the secret site where Gus keeps the kids locked up. He rounds them up in one location, then moves them somewhere else by other means. Motherf*cker, if Murphy hadn't held me back, and if I'd had a piece on me, I would've gone in there and blown every last bastard's head off on the spot."
Rorschach tuned out the bragging at the end and studied the brothers with genuine surprise.
When he had first handed them the job of gathering information on the missing kids, he had done it with a "worth a shot" mentality, with almost zero real expectations.
Yet in just two days they had not only mapped out every missing child, they had likely found the plant where Gus was holding them.
The sheer efficiency made Rorschach see them in a completely new light.
"You two did damn well."
He got up from the sofa and walked over to a cabinet. Opening a drawer, he pulled a wad of cash out from a hidden compartment.
"This is your fee. Don't turn it down. You've put yourselves in danger digging this stuff up. You've earned this money. Just think of it as informant pay."
Hearing that, Connor and Murphy, who had been about to refuse, exchanged a look, then both gave sheepish grins and slipped the bills into their pockets.
"So, what's the plan, Boss Rorschach?" Connor asked eagerly the moment the money was away. "You going in solo this time, or calling some of your buddies from the department? Whatever you do, don't forget about us."
"Yeah, taking out child traffickers is the kind of gig you can't leave us out of," Murphy added, thumping his chest in anger.
Rorschach chuckled and tossed each of them a cigarette. Once all three were lit, he spoke plainly. "Knowing how cautious Gus is, there are probably at least a couple dozen gunmen posted in that plant. I could hit it alone, sure, but there are an unknown number of kids inside. The chances of collateral damage are way too high."
"As for the department? With the number of dirty cops we've got, the second I report this up the chain, Gus will get a heads‑up within the hour and move everyone out."
"We need a way to tie Gus up so badly he has no time for anything else. Ideally, something that forces him to pull at least half the gunmen out of that plant. Then things get a lot easier."
The Irish brothers looked at each other, then asked in unison, "What way?"
Rorschach exhaled a long stream of smoke, his eyes narrowing. "The Salamanca family."