Written for LiveJournal's fictionhaven June challenge. My first (and probably only) Sin City fic. I will include comprehensive notes at the end of the epilogue. I'm not going to explain about a certain OC who is not an OC, but a comic canon character because it would be an annoying spoiler. If you have to know, check the last chapter. Please, positive feedback is great, but if you have concrit on characterization or any input on flow or story, please, go for it. Each chapter starts with an exactly 100 word drabble to set a bit of tone.

Basin City might be in the desert, but even deserts get rain, and even deserts get cold. Basin City – Sin City to those who love it and who hate it – doesn't usually get both at the same time. Rain or shine, the Old Town girls do their business. Only in this place can the prostitutes police themselves with such deadly efficiency. Being a hooker in Old Town is a less dangerous occupation than taxi driver or convenience store clerk anywhere else in Sin City. The girls deserve it. They earn it every night and they will kill to keep it.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

Floyd Carson, Cricket to anyone who knew him, ran his hand through his lank black hair and pounded his fist against the steering wheel of the stolen t-bird. Robson was going to make Cricket take the dead skank's place if he didn't find a replacement and Cricket did not want to be the special guest star in one of his boss's cinematic productions.

He'd checked on his passenger when he stopped for gas and nearly pissed himself when he saw that the girl tied and gagged in the trunk wasn't breathing. When he pulled the gag out of her mouth, he realized she'd vomited and must have aspirated it. Probably so scared, she puked.

Fuck!

Robson was expecting Cricket in twenty minutes. Cricket was going to die, very slowly and have every last scream and gasp recorded for posterity.

Fuck no!

He didn't have time to turn around and head back into the city to the area around the bus station where the runaways were easy pickings. His only chance was Old Town and that was risky. Better the girls than Robson; if the Old Town girls got hold of him, at least he'd die fast. He'd seen what their Miho had done to a couple of his buddies who'd thought that working for the mob meant they could get some free lovin'.

"You can do this. You don't have to die tonight." Cricket was talking to himself, a nervous habit that nobody knew about because he only did it when he was alone. "You'll just drive on in to Old Town, flash some green at a pretty hooker, let her hop in your car and floor this stolen monster on out of Old Town before anyone's the wiser."

Floyd "Cricket" Carson was a two-bit minion with a record of grand theft auto and assault and battery. He'd gotten the name Cricket because of his penchant for wearing corduroy pants. His buddies said he made noise when he rubbed his legs together, like a cricket. Cricket said that nobody expected a guy wearing clothes this noisy to be dangerous.

It worked for him most of the time. Cricket looked like a college professor in his corduroys, turtleneck sweaters and tweedy jacket. Runaways thought he was the daddy they hadn't had at home and got into his succession of stolen Thunderbirds without looking back. They never looked back at anything after Cricket delivered them to his boss, Byron Robson.

Cricket rolled through the alley, eyes flicking between the roads under the wheels and the rooftops where Old Town's guardian angel was most likely watching over her friends. What he needed was a break. Something good. He was due for another streak of good luck after things had gone to shit on him tonight. He turned on the radio and grinned, "Stray Cat Strut" drifted out of the speakers. His favorite tune, maybe things were looking up.

"Hey." Rose turned smiled at the geek in the t-bird and strutted over to the open window of his car.

"Hey baby. Looking for some company tonight?" Guy inside the car looked okay. Some geek from the university out to blow off a little steam. Sometimes they tipped well and they knew better than to get rough.

Cricket grinned and looked the whore over. Dark curly hair, gorgeous eyes, nice tits, good cheekbones that came from some ambiguously mixed ancestry. She was just what Robson liked. Another good sign. "Yeah gorgeous, my girl dumped me and I want to forget the pain. Can you do an all nighter?"

"How much you got, sugar?" Rose leaned in to his window and gave him a close up view of the breasts threatening to spill out of the top of the corset she wore. She wore a coat in concession to the weather, but what was under the open coat was barely concealed.

Both of them were distracted from their negotiations when the sound of shouts and gunfire came from a few blocks over. Cricket's heart pounded. There was the distraction he needed to keep from having Miho cut his heart out before he had a chance to even feel it. Good luck comes in threes, after all.

Cricket swallowed, reminding himself she wasn't for him, but for Robson, and opened a wallet filled with crisp green bills. "You think this will buy me a little forgetfulness?"

Rose smiled, "Looks like you got enough for a whole night of forgetting." Her smile broadened when Cricket pulled a hundred dollar bill out of his wallet and tucked it in the valley created by her cleavage.

"Well come on, beautiful, I want to get started forgetting as soon as I can."

Rose ran around to the other side of the car and slid in on the passenger side. "Nice car."

Cricket's genial, collegial smile didn't falter for an instant as he hit Rose with a balled fist right on the tip of her delicately pointed chin and watched her slump. "I only steal the best, only t-birds." He pushed her down into the roomy footwell and tossed his jacket over her face before driving unhurriedly out of Old Town. "We got plans for you, girly-girl."

•••

"Not bad at all, Cricket. Nice recovery."

Rose heard the rumbling voice, heard the words coming from somewhere behind her, but what she really heard was the pounding in her head. It seemed to spread out from the joints of her jaw, next to both ears. It dug into her skull like skewers being sadistically shoved through the bone. What had happened? Some John had roughed her up?

She kept her eyes closed and took inventory of aches, pains and what she heard going on around her. Rose realized that she was held upright in a straight-backed wooden chair by the tension from her arms, which were restrained behind her. She twisted her wrists slightly. Handcuffs wrapped through the slats on the back of the chair.

Handcuffs were actually good news. Rose had recently spent some time with Gail learning how to get out of these things. Survival skills were freely shared among Old Town girls and if you wanted to know about handcuffs, ropes or just about any other kind of restraint, Gail was your woman.

"Oh look, our star is awake." A rough hand pulled her head up from its slumped position by her hair. Rose opened her eyes and looked into the muddy brown eyes of one of the uglier men she'd seen in her life. It wasn't that his face was exactly ugly, but the features all seemed mismatched. Nothing went together, nose, cheekbones, eyes, mouth – they all seemed to come from different people. He was a Frankenstein's monster without the stitches.

"Don't touch that please, your primitive intellect wouldn't understand things with alloys and compositions and things with... molecular structures." Rose didn't recognize that voice, either. She looked up over the shoulder of the man in front of her and goggled at the scarecrow of a man who had spoken.

Cricket looked up from the loose-leaf binder filled with DVD storage sleeves he'd been flipping through and snorted. "They're just DVDs, Zeke. I think I know what they're for."

The man addressed as Zeke strode past Rose and the man who was scrutinizing her and snatched the book out of Cricket's hands. "No, you don't. These are special. These are what this," he waved at the studio "pays for."

Zeke Fellowes worked for Byron Robson on his special projects because it was the only way he could get the money it took to do his solo research on replacing the DVD medium with one of his own devising. He could go to a big corporation like Sony and they'd give him the funding, but then they'd own most of his soul and all of the profits. Zeke was going to be the sole benefactor when his LDs took over the market. Limitless Discs. He was going to make worrying about megabytes and gigabytes a thing of the past.

"Cricket, leave Zeke's shit alone before I tear your legs off." Rose's attention was forcibly brought back to the monster in front of her when he used his grip on her hair to turn her face back to him. He grinned, showing perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth, "Zeke, get ready to roll."

"You got it, boss." Zeke began running through a check of his camera equipment and the lighting on their little stage. "Oh hey, the DVD from the last session is waiting by the door with your coat."

"Good job. You got the edits the way I told you?"

"Yeah. The cuts are Oscar quality." Zeke's voice moved around behind Rose and she wanted to see what it was that he was doing, but the man in front of her had a grip on her hair that didn't let her move at all now. Rose shivered at his next words, "The ones in the film and the ones on the girl. You surpassed yourself with her. What are you going to do with this one?"

Byron Robson, second in command of Sin City's mafia, smiled down at the girl who was really nothing more than another easily replaceable whore. "I'm going to go back to basics with this one." He reached behind himself and pulled out a gleaming bowie knife and held it where Rose could see it. "There's nothing quite like the way skin parts for a well-sharpened bowie."

Rose was shaking when Robson opened her cuffs and pulled her off the chair and over to the stage. She barely registered the low platform bed covered in a single gleaming white sheet. "You can scream and try to get away, if you want to," he told her in an intimate bass rumble.