It was a week after his funeral and two days after Ma decided to move. She came to the decision after a cop showed up on our front step and told us that it was murder. A local gang locked him in a room after slicing his skin to shreds and left him there to either bleed or die from dehydration. This was during the week he was supposed to be on a business trip, confirming a deal and making nice-nice with the newly made business partners, so Ma and I thought nothing of his absence. But after he didn't come home when he said he would, after all the unanswered calls my mother sent him, we finally called the police. It took four days to find his corpse.
Apparently, it was neither blood loss nor dehydration that killed him. An infection, a small one easily taken care of with peroxide and Band-Aids, run rampant from the lack of treatment and filth about the room. The infection had spread like wild fire from its origin, on his hands, and slowly ate away at his immune system, wearing it down to nothing.
Horrified, Ma had simply nodded to the officer and, after he'd left, spun around and told me to start packing. When I asked why, she answered in a ghostly voice, "If they killed your father," I flinched; it was hard to give him a title so soon after his death, "so easily, they could come after us and do much worse things. We're moving so at least I feel a bit safer." I didn't argue with her words.
The next day, the cops called to give us more information on his case. The Golden Dragons; the gang that had killed my father was referred to as the Golden Dragons. According to the cops and their spies in the rivaling gangs, they weren't that popular or very high on the totem poll around the city. His death wasn't entirely deliberate, but nor was it an accident. The business he had gone away to set the deal with was apparently on the Dragons' "Hit List". They found it as their civil duty to kill off any possible associates, my father included.
Just before noon, Ma and I were on our way to a different part of the city. The slums, in truth, because the cops had an idea on how to insure our safety. We had to get on good terms with the surrounding people, and, as a result, get closer to the gangs that held a low opinion of the Golden Dragons. With my mother and I on the "Good List" of the Dragons' rival gangs, the cops figured that if something happened to us, the gangs on our side would go after the Dragons. It would end with a gang war, which the police weren't in total agreement with, obviously, but it would set the Dragons in their rightful place: at the bottom of the food chain, occasionally getting kicked around like a beaten dog.
Moving to the slums, on the other side of the city, Ma had to find a new job. She did, fairly quickly, too. She was going to be working at the nearby mental hospital as an orderly. She'd already told me that I was to go there after school instead of going home. Ma said it was because she didn't want anyone breaking in and stealing me away. What she meant was that she didn't want people breaking in and killing off the only close person she had left. I agreed easily enough; the extra time at the hospital would give me a chance to finish my schoolwork without too much of a distraction.
I also figured I'd have time to come up with ways to end the Golden Dragons in a rather "big bang" sort of way.