The bullet struck the dumpster and ricotched wildly, striking sparks from a fire escape before lifting a teaspoon full of red brick dust from the alley wall. Sophia De La Fuente stuck her glock blindly around the side of her stinking metal refuge and fired blindly down the alley, more or less to keep her attackers honest.

“Don’t be holding out on us Soph! We know you know something!” Martinez yelled, several more gunshots slamming into the dumpster to emphasize the point. The gang bangers were not individually brave, nor competent, but there were a half dozen of them and numbers counted for something. When six people were shooting at you in a blind alley, probability could be a bitch.

“Do I look like a fucking alderman?” she demanded, thumbing the catch and dropping her empty magazine to the ground. Briefly she considered retrieving it, but at this point she was going to have to ditch the gun anyway, so destroying the other evidence was probably pointless.

“Now Sophia,” Martinez said in Spanish, “Everyone knows the Mayor’s wife is involved in this and she is a brujah. You are a brujah so just tell me what you know and I’ll let you live.”

Sophia risked a glance over the dumpster. The thugs hadn’t advanced down the alley, but they sure were covering it. She glanced upwards towards the fire escape and judged her chances of climbing to the rooftop. Close to zero, even if these idiots insisted on holding their pistols sideways like this was a bad rap video.

“What, you think its a fucking book club or something?” The Campleone family was rumored to contain magical adepts, but they weren’t exactly on her side of the tracks and she had done her best to stay off their radar.

“Well if you don’t know anything it probably make good sense to kill you, you know, just so you don’t put a curse on me or something…” Martinez called with the playful tone of a cat tormenting a mouse. Sophia considered a magical solution. While several things came to mind, dropping six bodies where someone had been shouting her name wasn’t the sort of thing that would keep her off the radar.

“Are you open to a suggestion?” she called, firing another few blind rounds down the alley.

“I’m listening,” Martinez replied.

“Like I said, I don’t know anything, but I can ask around and let you know,” she shouted back at him, working her jaw to try to dispel the ringing that gunfire in a tight space had induced.

“Sounds risky,” Martinez said dubiously but she could tell he was interested. Even in this part of town the distant wail of sirens meant that the police were not far off. He had to either make a deal or finish her off.

“No more so than seeing how many of your boys I can kill before you still get exactly zero information,” she called back. There was a long considerate pause.

“24 hours pendeha, after that… well I know where you live.” There was the sound of running feet punctuated by a long silence. Sophia risked another look but the mouth of the alley was empty. Still no point in taking chances. Bunchng herself she leaped the few feet up to catch the lowest rung of the fire escape and began to pull herself up hand over hand. She could get off the roof without being seen. In the mean time she had to see if she could track down an oracle she knew and ask about this missing big wig. Whether she told Martinez or not, if he came calling others might have the same idea.

[Move: Hitting the Streets - Looking for the Forecaster, a crazy Ron Burgundy figure who appears mysteriously to dispense cryptic predictions and inaccurate weather reports.]