"Boss! Boss! Something happened!" In a room on the top floor of Living Hell, a half-grown child hurriedly pushed open the door and said to Cobblepot, who was writing at his desk, "Something happened on the three streets covered by the first phase of the East District redevelopment plan!"
Without looking up, Cobblepot asked, "What happened? What's got you so worked up?"
"It's... it's..." The child seemed afraid of being blamed. After hesitating for a long while, he gritted his teeth and said, "The people in charge of it have been running around outside these past few days. While nobody was watching, five or six gang bosses over there died. And we don't know how they died..."
"Five or six died?" Cobblepot raised an eyebrow and looked at him. "There shouldn't be any major gangs on those three streets. There are only a few small gangs total. You mean all their bosses are dead?"
The child swallowed and said, "More or less. Not just them, either. Some of the smaller leaders died too..."
"How did they die?" Cobblepot asked again.
"The deaths were all pretty elaborate. Some were shot, some were strangled, and some drowned. Anyway, it doesn't look much like gang retaliation..." The child scratched his head, sounding confused.
When the person reporting this had passed the information to him, he had found it strange too. Normally, when a gang boss died, most of them were shot from the front. Even if it was an ambush, they usually just took a few bullets in the back.
But so many gang bosses dying in such a short time, and in such varied ways, was very strange.
"Anything unusual nearby?" Cobblepot asked.
"Unusual? Nothing major. But the Children's Gang there seems to have gotten much smaller. Maybe the gangs drove them