Notes: Dedicated to Judo Creature, and to Aithilin who let me bounce ideas off her very experienced sounding board until I finally had something I was happy with.
"What?"
Shilo looked up from the simmering soup, certain that she must have heard wrong. The Graverobber was leaning in the kitchen doorway, the keys to her house still dangling idly from his fingers. He looked unhappy, a frown creased his forehead - she would almost call what his lips were doing a pout.
"I have a permit," Graverobber repeated in utter disgust.
"A permit to rob graves?" Shilo prompted, ignoring the greenish chicken-soup-from-a-can in favour of staring.
"In a technical sense, yes." Graverobber dug in his coat for a moment before producing a very shiny rectangular sliver of plastic. "In the strictest of senses grave robbing is still illegal. Selling zydrate, however, is not. How the fuck she pulled that off..." he trailed off into a scowl.
Shilo stared at the Graverobber long enough that the soup started boiling over. She squeaked and turned off the stove top, slamming the lid down onto the soup pot. "That's what she wanted?" Shilo asked, a frown of her own now gracing her delicate features. "To give you a permit to sell zydrate on the street?"
"For a fee... Fuck!" The sudden curse was accompanied by a fist slamming into the wall. "You know what this means? Permits to sell fucking zydrate? It means any god-damned lousy little punk can just waltz up to Geneco, grab himself a fucking permit and go wild! Amateurs, Shilo! We're going to be inundated by fucking amateurs!"
Shilo was silent for a moment, contemplating the dent in the wall. She wouldn't even bother trying to get him to fix it, it might even be easier to frame the spot and add the caption 'Graverobber has a temper'. "Well," she said finally. "It might mean a price hike. That's good..."
"It's compensation."
He grumbled about it all through the soup. And after dinner. And in bed. Shilo finally had to threaten to kick him out before he'd shut up long enough to let her go to sleep.
-
The news got out fast. For a small initial fee and an ongoing percentage of sales, one could wrangle a permit to sell zydrate. An infestation of amateur grave robbers began to creep into the edges of the cemetery, just as The Graverobber had feared. Shilo barely noticed, except when genecop patrols caught the inexperienced newbies or when someone who thought they were tough enough to stick needles in corpses found themselves panicking or throwing up.
Graverobber handled the intruders first by trying to ignore them... He snapped after all of five minutes.
-
Television was a relatively new addition to Shilo's household appliances. She'd watched tv before, of course, when her father was still alive, but her viewing options had been just a few channels that Nathan had deemed appropriate. Now Shilo was free to watch whatever she wanted, and she had taken to watching the evening news before making dinner. It was mostly the same old things, propaganda, a feel good story now and then, news about the price of stocks and the global organs market, but every so often there was something interesting.
Tonight, Shilo stared at the tv open mouthed. Then she looked up at the ceiling where the sound of running water had stopped only five minutes ago.
Shilo leaped up from the couch and dashed up the stairs without turning the tv off. She hesitated at the last second before peeking into the bathroom. "Did you lock some guy in a mausoleum?"
Graverobber, wet, nude, and soapy, looked at her from where he sat in the bathtub, surrounded by bubbles. "Why would I do that?" he asked, rhetorically, then grinned in a manner that was in no way innocent.
"It's on the news," Shilo informed him, determined not to be distracted by the bizarre cuteness of seeing the Graverobber in a bubble bath. "They say that someone who called himself 'The Graverobber' locked a nineteen year old man in a mausoleum and then tear gassed him."
"But where would I have gotten the tear gas?"
"They also said you molested him."
"That part is a complete fabrication."
"But the rest is true?" Shilo demanded, crossing her arms.
"Aren't you in the least bit impressed that I managed to get my hands on tear gas?"
"No."
He gave her a look.
"Ok, yes. Where did you get it?"
Graverobber leaned back against the side of the bathtub. "Come in and maybe I'll tell you."
-
He failed to tell her about the one they hadn't found. The one that was still shut into an above-ground concrete tomb, slowly suffocating, the smell of fresh rotting corpses in his nose. He might go back there a week or two after the idiot was dead. At least then he might be of use, and certainly more interesting than he had been when alive.