independent piece 5

Cobblestones. They can get awful slick when they’re wet. And it had been raining for days before the two men showed up. Funny how that works isn’t it. Like the good lord just knows when something bad is about to happen. Both men walked steady though. The two of them were nothing more than black silhouettes and than they were gone. The day they left was unprecedented in the files of the Philadelphia Police Department. Once the weather broke people started heading outside to enjoy the sun. It seemed that not an hour went by without someone turning up a corpse. At the end of the day, exactly seventeen bodies had turned up. Some dead from injury, some from exposure, but all had been savagely mauled. But that was how the two men worked. For them, this was a warning.
Misters Blakeney and Click were brutes of the worst kind, the lowest sort of muck a gutter has ever spawned. Mr. Blakeney was a short man of shorter wit, with an infinite capacity for violence and a penchant for what he took to be the finer things in life. Mr. Click was possibly the only man Mr. Blakeney could honestly call an inferior and definitely the only man he could call a friend. Mr. Click was large, even by strong-arm standards, and had a peculiar peccadillo for frail blondes and straight razors, though only rarely both at once. Between the two of them they had committed crimes innumerable, but they liked to boast that they were together responsible for just over a thousand victims, be they murders, beatings, or "defilements" (a word Mr. Blakeney liked to use in reference to the trick Mr. Click performed with his straight razor, among other things.)