Chapter Text
The goons had been skinned and hung from the beams. They were all well-known in the underworld. Lowlifes and leg-breakers, mostly. The big fish, their boss still had his skin, but was missing his head. Rorschach stood in the dark warehouse and watched the bodies sway gently, casting dim shadows like groping hands over the headless body. He processed the scene with only a distant, numb horror.
The killer had entered through the skylight, taken out the guards at the top of the stairs and then killed the other four with some sort of projectile weapon judging by the blood spray. Then, he (Rorschach was sure it was a man. He had never even heard of a woman with feet as big as the tracks through the blood at the base of the stairs.) had taken on Jimmy Splatter and removed his head.
This was not the work of a garden-variety cutthroat. That much was certain. Even that fake voodoo gang he and Nite Owl had broken up years ago hadn’t had horrors like this in its basement. The average psychopath wouldn’t be this efficient. The word he kept rolling over in his head was ‘professional’. But what hitman would take the time to make such a mess unless it was to make an example? A rival organization? Some government secret police? It made him think of the Comedian.
“Hunh,“ he said. Maybe he could track down the Comedian and get his take on it. The Comedian could’ve done this, he mused, remembering the stories of soldier who fell to mutilating their fallen foes. He would definitely find something funny about it.
Rorschach didn’t feel like laughing. He wished he had a partner to help him with this one. He didn’t know if he could stomach wishy-washiness either, but he hunched his shoulders against the light rain and started off towards 79th.
His shape flared orange and red against the indigo spectrum of the cold street and a faint, wet chitter was lost in the sound of the drizzle. As Rorschach’s warm silhouette disappeared around a corner, the echo of the sound he had made was replayed from the broken skylight.
“Hunh.”