The streets were quiet, like a tangle of sleeping snakes. The hiss of steam from pipe columns mixed with the splash of drainage water from rooftops. Overhead, the hum of passing flyers broke the rhythm with a rumbling deep bass that shook the air.

This far into LowDowns the buildings were very tall, some fifty stories, others near a hundred. Billboards lit the empty space between the tallest high rises, glowing like beacons to electronic moths. Below that, everything retained its bare natural architecture. The buildings were too close, almost window to window, for advertising down there.

Apartments and tenement buildings, swaths of office buildings and low-end financial and law firms, private investigators, and Tomiro Corp offices stretched from base to rooftop; a hodgepodge of industry and residential mixed together like synthetic scrambled eggs. Streetside, the roads were compact, fitting only one vehicle at a time, if any, in some places.

By now, we were miles away from the bank. The cops were easy to lose, as I'd predicted. Swiping, shooting, and slicing through alleys, traffic and side streets, the police couldn’t even keep their eyes on me. A part of me feared I’d lost the edge after all this time, but I still had it. They never stood a chance. Now, we slid safely through the underbelly of Central LowDowns, hidden in its embracing chaos.

A slight break in the claustrophobic architecture left a widened gap between highrises. There, a set of raised train tracks led between them and blared with a steely roar as an ancient train passed overhead. Mackie and I pulled up to a dumpster beneath it stacked high with trash that bled over onto the street.

The roads were empty... for now. Mackie dragged Razor's oozing body from the backseat and hoisted it into the dumpster.

"This is for my finger, puta," he said before hopping back into the car.

Following the train tracks, we slunk through the understreets of LowDowns. Steam rose from deep below, from underground, releasing in thick hot pillars from gratings in alleys. Streetlights, old and amber, buzzed, casting sharp black shadows over soil-colored architecture, and the highrises rose beyond sight.

A couple drifters cautiously walked the streets, there were no sidewalks here, their heads covered in robes or masks; the poor creature’s postures cruelly slumped forward as if great weights hung around their necks. Poor bastards.

These were the working joes. Waste management, building upkeep, street cleaners, clothes washers, you name it. They were the laborers, watching over everything MidTowners didn't want to bother with. And this was their commute, a shadowy street under a noisy train where shadows hid dark secrets.

Announcements played irregularly over loudspeakers overhead. Safety notices and weather reports echoed through alleys and over low rooftops every few minutes.

Weather advisory: Rain expected. Stay inside if possible. Use rain boots, ponchos, and masks if traveling outside. Flooding is expected for ground levels. Under levels, prepare for excessive drainage.

Pollution levels are at an all-time high. Masks are advised…

Feeling safe, I backed the car into an alleyway closed at one end. There we got out. Mackie knew a place near there where we could stash the money. He showed me then we returned to the car to clean it up.

Though I didn’t want to, the Charger had to be ditched somewhere, in some chopshop or WarZone backstreet, but with all of the chaos spread over the back window, the risk was too high to drive it as is. Some serious clean up was needed.

I found some dirty rags in the trunk and threw one to Mackie. He looked back at me, confused.

“For the back window,” I said, opening the back passenger door. The thick smell of iron wafted out. “Jesus.” What a mess.

“What? You want me to wipe up all that blood… and with this?” He held up the limp rag like it was frail tissue paper. I eyed him, annoyed. What did he think we were going to do?

“What was your plan Mackie? Go to a corner store. Ask what gets blood out of upholstery?”

“When you said clean, I thought you meant grab our shit out of the car. I didn’t know we were gonna detail the inside and give it back. Why don’t we just ditch it here?” Gritting my teeth I spat my next words, trying to hold back.

“You mean ditch a blood covered car in an alley with our goddamn fingerprints all over it?” Without another word I ducked my head into the car and started cleaning. Mackie opened the door and took one look inside. He was repulsed.

“Goddamn, Sleeper. Are you sure we have to clean this up?”

“Mackie, I don’t know any chopshops in this part of the city, at least none that will take a car with blood all over the backseat. We’ll have to ditch it in WarZone and let the Scrappers have at it. That means crossing the city and we can’t drive that far with brains all over the back window. Cops tend to frown on that kind of thing.” Mackie was even more repulsed when I pulled the rag back and it was soaked to the core with Razor’s dripping life.

“Aw fuck,” he said, finally coming to terms with what he was about to do.

"This is some sick shit," Mackie whined while wiping the back window. His cloth squeaked against the glass and blood. The rear window was visible with one stroke, but the blood was more smeared than soaked up.

I aggressively swiped at the rear windshield, making more of a mess than less of one.

"I can't believe we made it out of that in one fucking piece. I can't believe it. I'll never forgive you for dragging me into this shit,” I angrily muttered. Mackie sighed through his nose.

"Shit, amigo. Here we are. We did make it out," he said without too much emphasis as if I was just whining again. Cleaning blood was not helping his mood either.

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"Motherfucker, we almost didn’t. I’m not letting you make light of this. That job was fucked from the start. Goddamn, Mackie. Gangers? You've fucking fallen off. I swear, man, you're fucking losing it."

"Oh come on. You’re exaggerating hermano,” he said, annoyed, “It’s not like that. Life’s like… When a take like this comes along, you take the extra risk. That’s it. Otherwise, you stay in the same spot your whole life. Jobs go south sometimes. That’s the nature of our work. Okay, you say working with gangers was a dumb mistake. I can be a big boy and admit that. I’m sorry. But we got the money, didn’t we? That’s the trade off.’

“You can’t pretend there’s a way to ‘play it safe’ on a dangerous job. There’s all in, or there’s all out. Besides, you needed that money too. That’s why you took the job. I didn't twist your arm to come along," he finished. I was perplexed. With both his philosophical capability and the stones he had saying what he did to me.

"Excuse me? What did you just say? Didn't twist my arm? Are you nuts? Are you retarded?" I asked, so mad I stopped wiping up brains. He kept going with a flicker of a smile on his lips.

"No, I mean it. You must have some kind of fucking learning disability if you think that’s true. You practically begged me to come along. If you hadn't climbed your sad ass all the way up to me, I would never have been in this business in the first place. I only did it cus you are so fucking friendless it made me too depressed to tell your sorry ass no." I went back to wiping. Mackie didn't say anything to that. "The old you would never have pulled that shit. I know that for damn sure."

"You're getting close to pissing me off. I said sorry. Just leave it at that, comprende?" Mackie was serious, but I was too pissed to back down.

"Don't ever ask me to do this shit again, you hear me?"

"Oh, believe me, I won't. Like I need some pussy bitching my ear off the whole time. Motherfucker makes a bag and still has something to complain about." I stared daggers at him while he mumbled to himself. Afterward, there was a quiet moment between us where we cleaned in awkward silence. The anger sat in the car like stale cigarette smoke.

After a while, a few rings of our rags, and a few more exasperating moments of angry wiping, the physical labor exhausted the tension between us. Mackie finally spoke as if admitting to something without admitting to it.

"That got dicey, didn't it?" He said. I stopped wiping the glass, annoyed.

"Dicey? Shit. That bitch put a gun to my head. And I can’t believe I’m cleaning someone’s insides out of the backseat. You understand how fucked this is, don’t you?" Mackie tried scrubbing a blood stain out of the back headrest.

"You ain’t gotta tell me. This is filthy. But, hey, you gotta look at it like this, amigo. We made it out. And set off with more than we wanted. We’re good at this shit. We knew what we were doing, kept our heads, knew all the angles. The universe rewarded us for that. This is our payment for being good at what we do: making out with more than we planned. Karma."

"Yeah. Look at it like that if you want to. I see it as we got extremely lucky. You keep taking risks like that, one day it's bound to get you back. Ain't nothing free."

"You gotta turn that negative energy into something positive, bro. Not everything is so complicated."

"You need to stop hanging out with that Buddhist Confucious 'life is balance' crowd. They're confusing your brain. Or at least stop preaching that stuff to me. I want more out of life than wiping brains out the back seat. How do you balance this shit?" I wiped in circles, trying to remove a stubborn brain stain from the back window. It only half worked.

"With a million and a half in old bills," he replied simply.

"Shit," I coughed. That helps for sure.

"We made it out with all four bags. I'll clean up some brains for that."

"Speak for yourself," I replied, "This is nasty. Even that stinking bitch doesn't deserve this shit."

"I bet she deserved worse than this." Though I could agree, something about wiping another human's blood off of glass with a dirty rag seemed… too unfeeling.

"Well, it ain't over yet. We gotta get rid of this car. I'm grateful we weren't pulled over already with all this blood in the window. I don't even know where we get rid of this thing that doesn't wind up on the news somewhere. Man, what a nightmare. A dead security guard. Gangers are gonna put a hit on us. And the fuckin car's got brains all over it."

"Hey, fuck it," Mackie said without a worry. I stopped cleaning again and shot him the eye. He just didn't get it. "I think I know someone who can take care of this car for us. Pay is fifty thousand, but that's nothing now."

"Oh yeah? Can he make this thing disappear?"

"Yeah, no problem… if we can get a hold of him." I wiped up the last little bit of blood my patience afforded me. The window was still smudged to hell in red, but at least I could see out of it.

"Alright. That's enough. We ain't winning any awards anyway." Just then, a flyer coasted over the alley, its spotlight illuminating us and the car. Startled, I poked my head out just to see it fly away. Might've been a cop, but was probably nothing.

Mackie dialed a number on the car's onboard computer. This thing even had a satellite line, a dual reason to keep it and ditch it as fast as possible. The number dialed over the speaker and rang twice before someone picked up.

"Hello?" A man's voice. Gruff and uninterested.

"Hey. Name’s Mackie. Your boy said you can take care of a car for me."

"Yeah? And who's my boy?"

"Milius." There was silence on the other line. Mackie looked at me, waiting for a response. He expected that if this didn't work, I would chew him out some more.

"Alright, yeah. I can help with that. What's wrong with it?"

"How much you want us to say over the phone?"

"Everything. Nobody's listening."

"We hijacked a car for a job. Had a little trouble. The short of it is, it's hot, and there's a mess in the back seat."

"What kind of mess?"

"A bloody one."

"And the state of the car?"

"What do you mean?" Cooly, the man answered.

"I mean, does it run?"

"Yeah. Nothing's wrong with it except it's hot. Lifted tonight." The man was silent again for a minute.

"Alright," he finally broke in, "we can take care of that," Mackie was visibly relieved, miming the word "yes!". I slapped his hand, not as exhilarated.

"I'm going to give you the address of a parking building,” the voice continued, “I want you to drop it off there. Give me until five a.m. Then go in, drop it, and walk away. We'll take care of the rest. It's twenty five thou for the drop off and another twenty five after a cleanup. If it’s a hassle we’re walking away from it, no questions asked. If it turns out to be a pain in the ass, we’ll charge you more after the job’s done. Got it?”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Now, give me all of the details: model, make, description, license plate, registration, the whole nine yards. Don't skimp on the details. I need to know how much gas is in the tank and the state of the back seat…”

Once we gave him the details, he promptly hung up.

"Fuck yea," Mackie remarked, hanging up the phone. I was relieved too, admittedly. The car was the last of my worries. Now, the money was starting to feel earned. This take was the largest of my career, not counting expensive cars. But I never got market price for those anyway.

“I told you shit would work out. I can’t believe that worked. They never answer.” I gave him an annoyed stink eye.

"Well, what now?" I asked. We had a couple hours to kill.

"Let's get something to eat. I'm starving." Looking down at my red stained hands, I wasn't sure I was hungry.