"I'm telling you, it really was the mayor. I'm not lying to you."
The man in the floral short-sleeved shirt kept walking through the secluded alley. He reached up and touched the Bone Conduction Headphones hanging over his ear. "Absolutely true. I compared them more than a dozen times—my God, he looked exactly like the mayor! No, he was the mayor!"
"My stupid little brother, wake up. Look where you are."
A voice full of exasperation came from the earpiece.
"You're in the Southern District, Ilan City's most chaotic, most disgusting sewer—a stinking ditch ruled by gangs that kill without blinking and bloodthirsty banks. Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation wouldn't dare send just two or three people in here on a case.
"And then you tell me you met this city's mayor on a broken bus in the Southern District? He even squeezed onto the bus with you? My brother, have you watched so many of those political stunts about 'being one with the people' that you've lost your mind?
"Don't you know that when those politicians line up with hired actors to buy a hamburger, they have to surround the burger joint ten times over, then set up three machine-gun positions and seven sniper points?
"What makes you think you can sit on the same broken bus as the mayor? And not just any bus—a secondhand bus that got shot to pieces during a conflict, then bought back by a gang to make do with!?"
"All right, all right."
The person on the phone softened his tone slightly and sighed.
"I know you still have expectations for those politicians who learned to lie before they learned to walk. You still have fantasies about that Municipal Government, which is even worse than the Southern District—a cotton candy shaped shit.