Bouncer gazed at the scene around them, firefighters and paramedics doing their best to handle the small catastrophe which had befallen the people who worked here. People who would be out of work, lost and confused and desperate, and she wondered how many of them would become just another bunch of lowlifes the city’s “heroes” cleaned up off the street everyday when that desperation pushed them to keep their families afloat. She looked up at the empty sky fed by slow pillars of smoke, and wondered if these beacons of danger would have been ignored if they’d risen from a bank, or a corporate tower, or a luxury high rise. 

Then the fox mentioned police, and a short bark of laughter escaped Bouncer’s throat. The police. Certainly, a series of kidnappings by unknown thugs would make headline news… if the victims hadn’t all had just one thing in common. If they’d lived in different neighborhoods, kept better company, been more desirable, been richer. Been anyone other than the type damned by circumstance to disappear silently beneath an indifferent gaze that never looked down. Perhaps the disappearances would have never been noticed, if not for nosy sorts like that wolf woman or the pair of goths Bouncer had run into the night before. 

Or a woman who had choked herself with smoke to pull a pair of mobsters out of a structure fire.

“Nah, I think I’ll just tell you.”

“Probably worked here,” Bouncer switched lanes to answer the fox’s question, her hands finding their way into her pockets. You weren’t supposed to put your hands in the pockets of fitted suits like the one she wore, and she remembered this with the same speed at which the fabric of her slacks became vacuum sealed to her ass. “Pretty sure he talked like this was his place. I dunno, he was…” Bouncer trailed off, trying to remember what she could of the encounter. The whole mess felt like a blind haze of pain and smoke. “...Friendly,” she said finally. 

Her eyes squinted against a headache, trying to pull up what further details she could, but it felt like trying to grapple a bunch of eels. She never did have a head for remembering things; any time she’d been asked to help with something by the wolf woman, it was always one of her boys who remembered the important things and just told her what to do when they got there, like-

“Mateo!” the thought occurred to her so suddenly that Bouncer couldn’t help calling out. Of course, even if she didn’t remember much about the realtor guy, Mateo would. “Do you know what hospital they took those guys to?” she asked, spinning on the ball of her foot to face the fox woman directly.