Bertie had been robbed. She was quite certain of it this time—this wasn’t just a weird lapse in memory. Her purse was sitting open on the car seat beside her and all of her cash was missing. Further, ribs were aching. That was it: she’d been beaten and robbed. It was the only rational explanation.
She looked outside the car and saw she was in parking lot in a rough neighborhood. That made sense; people got robbed in neighborhoods like this. It was out past Red Hook, in the part of the city constables rarely patrolled. To the side of the parking lot was a shop with a blinking neon sign that read Tattoos under a banner of a scantily clad woman in a sailor’s outfit. She felt a sharp stab of pain across her ribs, so she pulled up her shirt to see how badly she’d been beaten.
Instead of bruises, she found a word, scrawled across her ribs in black ink. It was raw to the touch and bleeding in spots. She read the word over and over, but she couldn’t keep it in her mind, no matter how many times she tried.