There were a couple key instincts you developed when you had to survive in the Docks.
The first was being able to smell danger. The college kids who volunteered at the shelters thought it was a metaphor, thought that Tim was joking when he said could tell if someone was trustworthy from a whiff of their stank from downwind. Dead serious. Bad drugs fucked you up inside while good ones lingered for a while, and if you sniffed hard enough the difference was obvious. Plus, the dealers who knew what they were doing also knew how to buy a goddamn stick of deodorant. BO meant that they were either too lazy to go to the drug store in nice clothes or just didn't care, both of which drove up the odds that the dealer didn't check their product before selling it. If Tim didn't like the smell of a guy, he didn't buy from them. That was just good sense.
Another trick was making a rock-solid map of the territory, stapling it to the inside of your skull, and updating it constantly. No one talked like drifters, and rumors of a change from the ABB to the Empire could be the difference between being getting kicked in the ribs and getting your throat cut. It was also developing because shortcuts opened and closed all the time, and knowing which ones lead where could save your skin. Maybe an alleyway was warm and dry enough to sleep in, with a dumpster right next to a soup kitchen that usually had something halfway edible, maybe it had become part of a nastier-than-normal pimp's strip. Brockton changed weekly, and the homeless who forgot that tended not to last long.
The final must-have know-how was when to to take a risk. A college kid had explained the fallacy to him, where people opened themselves up to the worst possible outcomes in hopes of losing nothing and closed themselves off from the best because they were afraid of losing everything. Quit while you were ahead, commit while you were behind, an always losing strategy. He said that it didn't matter whether you were risk-seeking or risk-adverse, whatever that meant, so long as you chose consistently.
Mind, the kid also assumed that people's fail states left them ahead, and he said it with a straight face.
Tim just smiled, took his bag of toiletries, and decided not to pop him in the mouth for telling someone with a gimp leg to go out on a limb.
The kid had been on to something though. Ever since that fateful day, Tim had started playing the odds. Nothing stupid, nothing that could get him killed, but he stuck his neck out, looked into the lower-yield and lower-population territory, slept in less-safe locations, and mostly wasn't punished for it. The exploration gave him new secrets, new pathways between sleeping places, and he started putting on weight. That, in turn, attracted more attention from other hungry eyes, and to keep them from eating him Tim took another risk: he started talking.
Information was currency. Safe sleeping spots could be used by a finite number of people, supply outstripped demand, and the price rose in blood. Good trash cans, if over-harvested, didn't feed anyone. Businesses were okay with one person using their bathroom, not okay with five. If you had a place for something, you kept your damn mouth shut about it except when the secret could cost you your life. Tim, however, had accidentally picked up more secrets than he knew what to do with, and found a customer base that had unlimited want.
At first, Tim traded secrets on a one-to-one basis. Then he asked for a little more when a lot of the 'secrets' started overlapping with one another, then he started getting discerning. The secrets changed from places to people to ideas to structures, his clients from fellow street bums to kids looking for a high to gang members to capes to all of the above. With the diversification of capital came wealth, real wealth, and with wealth came permanent residence. Still not out of the Docks, still nothing that required a Social Security Number, but stable in a way that he didn't have before.
Tim never forgot just how good the grapevine was though, nor just how desperate a junkie could get for their next high. His back door was always open for people who had juicy gossip, and shit he was out-of-the-know on was a meal and a few bucks to anyone who made him in-the-know on it. Nine times out of ten the info was old, out of date, or useless, and Tim traded his time and a granola bar for jack shit, but that one time out of ten tended to really pay off.
After handing the ragged lady a small roll of bills and a bag of food, Tim closed the door and mulled over the news. Little girl climbs out of a sewer pipe ranting and raving, smacks around a pimp looking for girls, then sprints towards the nice part of town. It sounded like someone on a bad first trip, but bad first trips in the Docks were rare. New users were the minority by a lot, and the few that did come down for their hits tended to stay in the crack houses when they were high. It took a special sort of skill to not get mugged when wandering around high, and the dealers wanted repeat customers more than they wanted quick hits of cash. Something had gone fucky, and things that went fucky needed to be investigated.
Tim had two safes. The first one had a few thousand dollars in loose cash, some weed, and a small bag of heroin in it. That one hid under the sink, the first place to check in event of a break-in, big and heavy with an honest-to-god combination on the lock. More than one smash-and-grabber had been distracted by it for long enough to let Tim crack 'em on the back of the head with a pipe, and it was also impressive as hell.
The second one was a thin steel box, installed into a wall and hidden behind a bookshelf too heavy to move quickly or quietly. After spending ten minutes moving the damn thing out of the way, Tim hammered in a twelve-digit string of numbers, waited four heartbeats, and plugged in four more. The combination hissed, disarming the failsafes, and swung open.
Stacks of hundreds, bank-fresh, sat next to a trio of binders, two rolled-up maps, and no fewer than six cheapo phones. Tim grabbed the back-most one, replaced it with an identical model, then closed the safe and spent another ten minutes pushing the bookshelf back into place.
"Paranoid motherfucker," Tim muttered, flopping down on a second-hand couch that was more patch than original fabric, speed dialing the first and only number.
It picked up on the second ring.
"Whaddya want, cuntmunching sneakshit?" The voice on the other end was rough and high, undeniably masculine and harsh as sandpaper across Tim's balls.
"A little girl threw around a pair of toughs and sprinted out of the Docks. Pretty sure she's not a client, no idea about trajectory." Short and to the point, and as brutally honest as he could get. Skids didn't hold himself to the same standards he held Tim, but Skids was also the one paying Tim's retainer. That, and Tim liked Skids more than the Empire and Bad Boyz thugs who occasionally stopped by. For that alone Tim would've given Skids first crack at new info.
"Ass-bagging elephant dicks." The oath was practically solemn, and Tim could hear withered teeth chewing on cracked lips. "Get people looking for her, sneakshit."
The line cut out. Tim broke the phone in half, dug the SIM card and battery out, then broke the chip in half as well. Thinkers were a constant worry for any halfway competent spy ring, but a halfway competent spy ring also didn't get noticed by Thinkers if they could at all help it. They did that by passively gathering information through deniable sources that had no idea they were a part of anything and not making big moves.
Skids knew that. He also knew that asking after something specifically was about as big as you could get, and it was going to cost Tim people. That was a fact, straight-up.
Tim took a deep breath, then went to the fridge to get a beer.
Tomorrow, he'd be taking risks.