It was dusk, the sun low behind a tramp steamer on the river. The light filtered through the pollution, pinks and blood-red smeared over the sky.
Tobias walked silently past the stationary traffic. Exhaust fumes choked the air; music blared from open windows. A bored blonde woman hurled a soda can from her car; it missed the bin and fell to the floor.
Tobias stopped; she gazed at him, and then returned her attention to her phone. He looked from the can back to the woman. There wasn’t time for this. A hysterical scream had raised the alarm twenty minutes ago.
Twenty minutes is a long time for a crime scene to go to hell.
A single officer was on duty. The witnesses were gone. The docks were immune to death. It had to be something special to draw a crowd.
‘Down there.’ The officer gestured towards a low building.
Tobias read the signs. The drag marks in the dirt. Blood smeared the dust, as life drained from the body. He followed the trail. Here they had paused; a dark pool soaked the earth. They had rested and then crawled on.
To what? Tobias had seen it many times. As they died, they crawled to the nearest shade, to the womb. It was the desire not to die in the open, exposed to the harsh light of day.
They had made it to the doorway and then it had ended. The body was a pathetic bundle, half lost to the shadows. Rat footprints marked the earth. Tobias sensed them hidden out of sight.
It was obvious what had happened. Three arrows had hit the victim. Two pierced the side, one stuck from the top of the leg. The blue and yellow fins bright in the grey light. Someone had killed for sport.
How much sport would you have been?
The victim was old. To be so near to death and for it to end like this. Tobias stood for a moment. Should he say some words that he no longer believed in?
The phrases dried in his throat. He took one last look at the body, skewered and half devoured by rats. He had seen enough. The filth sickened him, the waste sickened him; the cruelty sickened him; the stupidity sickened him. There was no crime here. It was another death in the meaningless tally of killing.
The cars had hardly moved. The blonde woman finished some snack and dropped the wrapper from her car window. The breeze snatched it, fluttered it down the street and swirled it into the alley.
The boredom of the traffic jam stupefied her. She gestured for Tobias to come close; her arm flopped out of the window like a half-dead fish. The woman screamed as Tobias raked his claws down her hand.
‘That cat! Did you see what the freaking cat did?’
