Night had fallen and it was almost quitting time, but Rorschach was feeling distinctly uncomfortable.
It was not because the day's work had worn him out, nor because he was worried Gus was scheming something against him in the dark.
"What the hell are you up to?"
After parking the squad car, Rorschach's patience finally ran out. He turned to Ginny in the passenger seat and asked in a low voice.
Ever since they had left Hyde Park, the rookie had been acting strangely all day.
She kept sneaking glances at him, her eyes full of some thoughtful, probing look, as if she were trying to peer into his soul.
Rorschach could not put his finger on it, but that gaze made him feel completely on edge.
Ginny snapped out of her thoughts at his question, but this time she neither answered timidly like before nor rolled her eyes and ignored him. Instead, she squeezed out a forced smile, opened the door, and got out without a word.
Rorschach watched her through the window as she walked away, turning back every few steps. He felt puzzled, but could not be bothered to dig into it.
He had plenty of other things to worry about. A rebellious, well‑connected brat from D.C. was not worth that much of his attention.
"Um…"
Just as he was thinking this, Ginny suddenly came back. She bent down and tapped on the window, putting on a sugary smile. "What do you want for breakfast tomorrow? I can cook—uh, buy it and bring it for you."
"What?" Rorschach stared at her, thinking he must have misheard. "You're saying you're bringing me breakfast tomorrow?"
"Yeah." Ginny nodded, a little embarrassed. "I'm not very good at cooking, so I'll just buy something for you."
Rorschach gave her a long, suspicious once‑over, then shrugged. "Don't waste your time trying to butter me up. If you really want top marks on your evaluation, memorize those lessons I've been drilling into your head. Otherwise, no amount of extra effort will matter."
"Who said I'm trying to butter you up?!" Ginny almost jumped in frustration. She glared at him through gritted teeth and turned to leave, but Rorschach's voice stopped her again.
"Bring dumplings. They have to be from a Chinese place in Chinatown."
"No! Chinatown's too far!"
"Then donuts. Remember, extra‑large with rainbow sprinkles."
"I am not. That much sugar isn't good for you. I'll bring you some cereal. You can eat it with milk."
"Cereal with milk?"
Rorschach's lips twisted like he had just swallowed a fly. Starting a shift with a bowl of oatmeal and milk would make him feel like his whole life was over.
Still, her attitude shift was something. After chasing the squad car for two days, instead of hating his guts, she actually wanted to bring him breakfast?
Wait a second…
Rorschach froze, frowning slightly as he watched her hop away in her uniform, still looking more like a kid than a cop.
Was the girl planning to poison him?
——————————
Night.
It was past eight. In the streets of the South Side, police sirens mingled with Black rap blasting from car speakers, with the occasional gunshot popping off in the distance, all merging into a symphony called Freedom, U.S.A.
Rorschach was driving his second‑hand pickup, bought at a discount auction inside the department, with a heavy rock track blaring from the speakers.
It was just as loud, but unlike the rap outside, it was not all about bitches, money, gold chains, and fancy cars.
As for the random gunshots out there?
He was off duty. Why the hell should he care?
"Oh, Mama, just killed a man…"
Humming along to "Bohemian Rhapsody," Rorschach pulled up beside a two‑story wooden house.
Even by South Side standards, the place was run‑down.
White paint had peeled off in huge chunks, exposing the mottled, moldy wood beneath. Some damaged spots had just been slapped over with boards and nailed in place. The yard was littered with all kinds of junk.
This was the home of Frank Gallagher, the man he had run into at the park that morning.
As he pushed open the still‑holding‑together front door, the smell of alcohol hit him in the face like a punch.
The sofa was jammed with people. With just a glance, Rorschach spotted several of Frank's kids and their friends.
As soon as they saw him, the whole group threw their hands up theatrically and shouted over each other:
"Holy shit! Hide the gun and the weed, the f*cking cop's here!"
"F*cking cop!"
"Don't arrest me, I'm unarmed!"
"…"
Rorschach was long used to this family's brand of crazy. He went over, traded high fives all around, and asked, "It's barely evening and the place already reeks of booze like this? And you—put the whiskey down. You're not old enough to drink."
He snatched the bottles from the hands of a few obvious teenagers on the couch and wagged a warning finger at them.
Frank's eldest son, Lip, tossed him a cigarette and explained, "Frank scored a bunch of money from who‑knows‑where and bought several cases of whiskey and vodka. The bastard tried to hide them, but Carl dug them all out."
As he spoke, he slapped the buzz‑cut kid beside him who looked like a middle schooler—Frank's youngest son, Carl.
Rorschach just shrugged with a grin. He was not surprised Frank had come into money again.
The old man might be selfish, irresponsible, and completely devoid of any sense of duty, and he would not know the meaning of shame if it smacked him in the face. But his silver tongue and scamming skills were probably top‑tier even in Chicago.
Looked like some idiot had gotten taken for a ride again.
"So where is he…"
Mid‑sentence, Rorschach suddenly had a bad feeling. He darted around the room in a hurry.
Sure enough, under a table he found Frank, dead drunk and wrapped around a table leg, snoring away, having completely forgotten their agreement.
"F*ck."
Rorschach gave him an annoyed kick in the ass. He knew the old bastard could not be relied on.
"Rorschach!"
Just as he was about to beat Frank awake, a delighted cry rang out behind him.
A tall, pretty woman came flying down the stairs, arms wide, and launched herself straight at him.
This over‑enthusiastic woman was Frank's eldest daughter, Fiona—and Rorschach's first "girlfriend" back in high school.
Calling her a girlfriend was not exactly accurate, since Rorschach had never liked her.
Back in school, with his looks and build, he had been classic American heartthrob material, and thanks to Gus, even the local gangbangers steered clear of him.
With that kind of status, why would a campus legend give up the whole forest for one tree?
The problem was that Fiona was wild as hell. At a party once, she had gotten him plastered and dragged him into her room…
And the next day, she strutted around telling everyone Rorschach was her boyfriend.
Honestly, if she had not been a virgin at the time, he might really have put a bullet in her.
"Ease up, OK?" Rorschach planted a hand on her forehead and forced her to the ground, even with her legs wrapped around his waist and grinding forward.
Feeling the heat from his body just now, Fiona licked her lips, savoring it. "Ever since you became a cop, we haven't done it in forever. Let's go upstairs to my room. Don't tell me you don't want to."
"I don't want shit. I'm here to see Frank." Rorschach shoved the crazy woman away.
Maybe back in the day he might have been a little tempted, but as far as he knew, Fiona cycled through boyfriends faster than she changed underwear. He had no interest in riding something half the city had already been on.
"You're here for Frank? Did he do something?" Fiona tensed up at once.
She was not worried about Frank's life, just scared he might drag her and her siblings down with him.
Rorschach shook his head. "Nothing like that. Just tell him to call me when he wakes up. Oh, and the bathroom free? I'm taking a piss and then I'm heading home."
He ignored the look on Fiona's face, grabbed an unopened bottle of whiskey off the table, bit off the cap, and took a swig as he walked toward the upstairs bathroom.
Meanwhile, a blonde girl curled up in Lip's arms watched Rorschach's back and could not help biting her lip.
She muttered some excuse to Lip, unbuttoned two buttons of her top, and quietly followed Rorschach upstairs.
In the bathroom, Rorschach eyed the yellow‑stained toilet with distaste. He had not even unbuckled his belt when the door creaked open.
Karen slipped inside carefully, giving him a sweet smile. "Hi, Rorschach. Remember me? I'm—"
"Karen. Lip's girlfriend. And one of the South Side's most famous stamp‑collecting bitches."
Rorschach shot her a sideways look, unimpressed. "If you've got something to say, spit it out. If not, get the hell out. Can't you see I'm busy?"
Cut off like that, Karen choked on the words she had planned. But when she thought of his nickname—"Pride of the South Side," "Chicago's best detective"—she could not smother the collector's itch in her heart.
She pursed her lips, then beamed. "I just wanted to tell you there's something a lot cleaner than the Gallagher toilet you could use."
As she spoke, her hand reached for him. Rorschach frowned. "Maybe you should wash your hands first. There's enough bacteria on that doorknob to fill a petri dish."
Karen slid his belt out of his grasp and smiled. "Don't worry. I won't use my hands."
With that, she slowly sank to her knees.
Chapter 9: The Salamanca Family
"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."