[b]"Saloon City"
Central City[/b] 


"This makes four, Dan."

Danny Shea looked down at the dead woman's body. She was slashed across the throat and left for dead in the muddy back alley behind Uncle Ace's Brothel. Standing behind him was Bobby Coughlin, Danny's partner on the beat. Danny squatted down beside the body and touched the dead woman's cheek. Cold to the touch. He didn't expect anything less than that. It was a quarter past ten in the morning so it was likely she'd been dead for hours before she was found by someone who actually reported it to Bobby.

"You talk to Uncle Ace?" Danny asked as he stood back up.

"'I pay! I pay! I know no girl! I pay protection!'," Bobby replied in a mock of the old Chinaman. "That's all the fucker had to say."

Danny nodded and began to search for his notebook among the folds of his patrolman uniform. He found it and flipped to a page in the middle. Four dead women in the last two weeks. It wasn't unusual for Saloon City to have that many dead bodies in that short amount of time, but those were casualties from drunken fights and card games that went sideways. Four dead women had been found dumped in back alleys with their throats slashed by a blade that the coroner described as 'big as hell.' The woman at Danny's feet was the second Oriental, the other two dead women were Negro and Jewish respectively. The girl in the mud was dressed like a whore, just like the previous three. 

"I grabbed a kid and told him to run back to the station house and tell them we caught a dead body out on the beat," said Bobby. "Not like it's gonna do any fucking good. This girl is dead where it don't matter, Dan. Now if she were a white girl from the east side they'd have the fucking US Cavalry riding through--"

He kept talking about something, but Danny didn't hear him. His thoughts were on the dead girls he'd seen over the past few weeks. Bobby was spot on with his assessment. All four of the dead girls were whores, all four were ethnic, and all four of them were people nobody gave a shit about. Danny and Bobby gave report after report to Sergeant O'Riley and Captain Williams, but they would just shrug and file it away as an unsolved case. They never got the detectives from downtown involved and they couldn't really give a shit. Nobody would ever miss four dead whores.

But Danny wasn't the average person, and he sure as hell wasn't the average flatfoot. He was the rare beat cop that had political juice at his disposal if he wished. Captain Thomas Shea, commanding officer of the CCPD's Southern District, was his father. While Danny tried to stay as apolitical as possible, Tommy Shea was the very definition of a political animal. It was a testament to his ability to play the game that he was the highest ranking Irishman on the CCPD. There was very little doubt that by 1890, Danny's dad would be chief of police.  

"You gonna be alright if I leave?" Danny asked his partner.

Bobby shrugged and grinned. "Got a hot date?"

"Not exactly," Danny said as he tucked his notebook back into his pocket. "I'm going to see my old man. He might be interested in this, but I gotta hear his mouth as a trade off. The only thing he likes more than playing politics is giving me lectures."

Bobby laughed. "You sure you wouldn't rather trade places with mama-san down on the ground?"

Danny looked down at the dead girl one last time. Number four. If Danny couldn't get his father to help, they might be finding Number five in a back alley soon.

"I'll survive."