The business block was all by dead at four in the morning. Emirene moved past gated party stores and hair salons to the only light emanating from the stretch of inner-city shops. The hours sign in the window for Ventimiglia Meats read 'closed' but a light could clearly be seen glowing from the backroom of the store. The early morning shift was well on its way.

Emirene put her hand on the front door and paused. She looked up as her crow landed on a trash can to her right. She thought back to when she had first seen the creature, having thought it dead. Now it was hopping about the tin lip of the can in happy excitement. It seemed more energetic with each passing moment and she had notice a huge leap in its health after Biondo had his accident. She could have stopped to think on the mystery of this dark creature but somehow knew it was beyond her. She didn't have time to waste trying to figure out something that she was never meant to understand. She only had a few hours before the regular morning shift arrived.

She made short business of the door lock with the help of some well appreciated unnatural strength. She made no attempt to hide her break-in and was not disappointed by the lack of response from the Broken Windows neighborhood. She moved silently through the dark butcher shop toward the glow of the back room door. Pausing to listen, she heard cheerful whistling. Fucking morning people.

She nudged the two-way door open an inch with her boot and surveyed the scene. Thick concrete walls whitewashed. Stain-proof linoleum floor. Large stainless steel butchers tables through the middle of the room. She noticed a large metal door leading to the meat locker. Her whistler was standing at the industrial sinks lining the back wall, sharpening knives. Early morning duties. He probably loved sharpening those knives.

Her quick surveillance assured her that Victor Ventimiglia was the only employee on the red eye shift. It was a wonderful fact that made her happy down to her toes.

The vigilante moved into the room, a dark stain against all the white paint and stainless steel. She ran her hand along one of the tables as she walked beside it, her eyes locked on the back of Victor's head. When she reached the end of the table, she pivoted back around and retraced her steps, running her other hand along the table. She paced like a tiger in a cage and watched him from less then ten feet away.He didn't notice her.

She stalked behind him for nearly ten minutes, enjoying his utter ignorance, before he began to finish up and she made her move. He didn't know he had a massive problem until he put his last knife aside and felt a gun pressed solidly to the back of his head. His wiry form froze instantly.

"Put the sharpener down, please."

Victor slowly put the long metal rod to the side. His eye twitched over to the rack of newly sharpened knives but before he could get up the guts to grab for one, everything went black.

He woke up on a cold surface, hard and smooth beneath him. He blinked up at the overhead light and tried to move. It only took a moment of struggling to realize that he was being held down by chains across his shins, thighs, hips, shoulders and neck. He recognized the thickness and smoothness of his store's meat hook chains.

"Hey! What the fuck! Hey!" he yelled and struggled for a while before he tired and tried to look around. No one stood in his line of vision.

"15011 Whittier. Apartment C."

When the voice came from over his forehead, he strained to look above him. Nothing, but he knew she was there, just beyond his sight. "Lifted my wallet already?" he growled, yanking at the chains holding his arms out to the sides.

"Yes, But I only wanted your home address. I'll put it back in your pocket to make IDing you easier."

Victor fell into a moody silence, panic beginning to tingle up and down his back. He hated threats. Such a cheap way of demanding control over a compromised situation.

"Do you live there alone?"

He didn't answer.

"Fine. I'll just figure that out by myself, right?"

The dark humor in her voice made his skin crawl. Who was this bitch anyway? He didn't know any families in the city that sent women hitmen to do the dirty work. It was beneath low.

"If you're going to kill me, that's a bad idea. My father is close friends with the head of the Biondo family."

"Oh, you mean Vincent Biondo? Didn't you hear? He died peacefully in his sleep earlier tonight."

"Bullshit!" Victor spat. "That's all bullshit!"

"It doesn't matter if you believe me or not. By the time his death hits the media, you'll be beyond caring."

He growled and cursed, starting to struggle against the chains again. He felt the metal table beneath him absorbing the warmth of his body. He heard the squeak of rubber soled boots and felt her moving closer. There was a sudden glint above him that exploded into his eyes and forced him to flinch away. A moment later, his brain recognized light reflecting off the blade of a knife. It was one of his knives, the kind that cut fat away from meat so easily.

"So I hear you like knives."

Victor was no longer struggling but putting all his attention on the knife hoovering above his face. "It's a job."

"It's two jobs," the woman corrected him.

The smile that touched his mouth was a bit brittle. "Yeah, two jobs. So what? You're mad at me because I did my job? That's fucking hypocritical."

"You have no idea what my job is, Mr. Ventimiglia," she said softly as the knife disappeared from his sight. He watched her walk along beside him and noted her camo and the impressive muscle of her arms. What the hell kind of a hit was this? When she turned back to him with a piece of paper and a pencil, her face only looked vaguely familiar. "I have something here I'd like you to sign, Victor."

She had a paper for him to sign? Ah Fuck. Geez. Thank god. He thought this shit was for real. Fuck. Whoever pulled this on him was gonna get a boot in the ass when he tracked him down though. Probably Nico. That prick always thought he was so smart. "What am I suppose to sign?"

"It's a confession," the soldier-lady said, holding it up so he could easily read it. His eyes narrowed as he did so.

"That's not funny."

"I never said there was anything funny about this. Are you going to cooperate?"

"No. Fuck no. Biondo's trying to find a fall-guy and it's sure as hell is not going to be me. Go tell him he can suck my dick."

"No thanks," the woman simply put the paper and pen aside. "You can tell him yourself."She reached up to his neck and he glared at her as she began to unbutton his shirt.

"What are you going to do now? Molest me? You can take the chains off, darling. I promise I'll hold still." He flicked his tongue at her as she pulled the ends of his shirt from his pants and finished the unbuttoning. She spread the shirt wide off the edges of the table so his torso was completely exposed.

"I'm going to give you some trade secrets. I use to be pretty handy with a knife myself when I was in the service. I always appreciated learning about how different people used knives. Have you ever seen an autopsy, Mr. Ventimiglia?"

"An autopsy? What the hell are you--"

"I know that some coroner offices are closed to the public, but others will let you in if you call ahead of time and schedule a day and a time. I've seen a few autopsies in my day. They're quite fascinating, really."

Suddenly the knife reappeared and he started to wonder if this really was a joke or not. It certainly wasn't looking like one.

"One of the first things they do is take a big ole syringe and stick into your eyeball to draw out the liquid. They can use that liquid to determine if you've had any drug abuse since the eyeball fluid tends to retain traces of drugs longer than any other part of the body. That shit can stay in there for months." She leaned over him and spoke into his face and again he got the strange feeling that he'd met this lady before. He still couldn't place her though. "Then they take a saw to your skull to check for brain damage. That's pretty cool because they peel your scalp forward and it hangs over your face like a piece of hairy fabric.

"But the most interesting part is always the torso examination," she smiled before leaning back from his face. He watched as she lowered the thin blade to his chest, just below his right collar bone. "They start here and draw to the center of the chest. Same thing from beneath the other collar bone." He felt her draw the blade very lightly across his skin and it sent his flesh into goosebumps. "Then from there, the cut goes down down down to your naval. That's called the Y-incision. H-incisions are used as well, but I'm personally fond of the Y-incision."

"This isn't funny . . ."

"No humor was suggested," she smiled before moving out of his line of sight once more. He struggled now more than ever but the chains were merciless. Her voice seemed flat and dead from a distance. "They use a knife to scrape the fat and muscle away from the bones of the rib cage. To open the rib cage they use, of all things, a gardening sheer. Crazy huh? Works like a charm though. . ." Back into view she came with a bone saw in her hand. She smiled a bit sheepishly. "Next best thing to garden sheers, I'm afraid."

" . . .What . . . what are you going to do?"

"I'm just returning a favor, Victor. Did you know that, as long as you don't cut the connective tissue between organs, you can pull out everything in a long line? Yup. From tongue to anus, one big long line. Hold on, I need to find a bucket."

Victor had begun to shake. The chains rattled against the sides of the table as he convulsed. This wasn't a joke. This bitch was crazy. He watched her put the bone saw aside. Clearly she didn't need it quite yet. She stood above him now with that knife. Her dark eyes glittered against her pale face. "After they weigh all your organs and do whatever tests, they stick all that in a trash bag and they toss it back inside your empty body cavity and sew you back up. They don't try very hard to make it look nice. You're not about to complain. They usually use a thick plastic thread just to make sure everything stays together so they can pull a suit on you and toss you in an open coffin for your family to cry over. It's very crude work. Sometimes I wonder if they don't just make the least experienced guy do the sewing, since it's the least important part and all."

With that, she caught the bottom of her tanktop with a hand and yanked the shirt upwards. "Not much artistry to it, I'm afraid."

Victor stared at the black plastic thread pushed through her dead skin to hold her very own Y-incision closed. The thick threads crossed haphazardly over each other, holding together skin but holding in nothing. Looking at her, he knew nothing remained within her chest cavity or torso.

The dry knife wounds scattered about her torso gaped open at him like dark, toothless mouths. In his shock, he recognized the unique stab pattern as his own.

Victor began to scream.

In moments, his screams of terror turned to screams of agony as Emirene dropped her shirt and, leaning forward, sliced his chest open in a V from collarbones to sternum. She sliced down through fat and muscles, being sure she could feel the knife bump over the bones of his rib cage. From there she dug in deep and dragged the knife straight down, slicing his naval neatly in half and stopping when she hit the top of his pelvis. "Hm, that's the difference between live and dead autopsies," she said to herself beneath his screams. "Lots of blood this way."

He was completely covered in blood now and he was spattering it quite a bit as he shook and convulsed and screamed. She felt it splash warm across her arms and face and felt a few drops touch her tongue. She turned her head a moment to spit the taste of him out and then turned back, pushing her hand into the cut and pulling one side of the incision back. The man had little fat on him so her job was mostly cutting the muscle away from the bone, which wasn't too difficult. It was done in moments with a few long sweeping slices. She yanked the flesh and muscle a side, tearing the ends of her incisions a bit, and put her knife down, reaching for the bone saw.

Victors screams were perishing in his throat, more blood bubbling out than sound. He was still with her though and staring at her with eyes so wide that he might have lost his eyelids somewhere behind them. What part of his face that wasn't splashed with blood was now as pale white as her own. His shaking had become so violent that it seemed to slow and was locking his body in place, his back slightly arched, pushing his dissected chest toward the lights above.

She looked up into those eyes, her face splashed with his blood, and asked softly, "you recognize me now, correct?"

His face twitched and his head shuddered in what could have been a nod.

She nodded herself and turned back to her work. He could hear the sound of the saw and feel the vibrations as it ground its way through his ribs, one after another.

By the time Emirene lifted the front of his rib cage away form his heart and lungs, the heart had stopped beating and the body had settled to the table, loose and relaxed. The face was still constricted in the memory of pain, frozen in such a way that insured Emirene that the funeral director would insist on a closed casket.

She stepped away and grabbed a hose from the sink. She rolled it over and turned it on, spraying blood out of the body cavity so she could more easily see what she was working with. Bloody water poured off the sides of the table and swirled around a floor drain, pushed into a depression in the linoleum. She gave herself a quick spray as well until most of his blood was gone. She couldn't tell if the water was ice cold or boiling hot, only that it was wet. She tossed the hose aside once her obscured view was cleared and continued her work.

Trying to pull all the organs out in a line wasn't as easy as she had described. Oh well, it was only her first autopsy. As the organs came out, she hefted them in her hand, examined them, cut some open. Once her curiosity disappeared, the organs were tossed into the waste bucket she had dragged beside the table, forgotten.

Once she decided she was finished, she tossed the knife and bone saw into the empty chest cavity and pulled out the xeroxed confession again. She unfolded and carefully set it just inside the body, on top of the murder weapons. No one could miss that.

Stepping over to the sink she washed her hands a final time and swished some water in her mouth, spitting it into the metal tub. Remembering at the last moment, she fished Victor Ventimiglia's wallet out of her own pocket, checked his home address again, and then placed it back into the pocket of his jeans.

Outside, the morning was beginning to lighten. Emirene decided to find a place to lay low until night fell once again and started off down the street. High above her head, the crow flittered and danced on an air current and its cawing sounded of laugher.

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Sorry about the criminalistics reference (Broken Windows). Since Emirene would be approaching her situations with a mind trained in criminological/sociological evaluation, it was too tempting not to put it in. For those curious, Broken Windows refers to a theory on neighborhood disintegration. The more broken windows in a neighborhood, the more windows will end up being broken, since it's obvious that the neighborhood does not care enough about itself to try to rectify any problems. While up kept neighborhoods tend to lead to the displacement and relocation of crime, Broken Window neighborhoods tend to attract crime. --Lore