Starting from scratch, Batman crushed my dream of getting rich

Chapter 136 The Corpse Collector

Alex is a misdemeanor prisoner.

Before entering prison, he was a member of Falcone - although it sounds impressive, in fact, he was just the most insignificant minion in the super gang.

When Alex first arrived in Gotham, he wanted to find a legitimate job, but Gotham didn't give him many options. He suffered a whole year, but the money he earned was barely enough to support himself and his mother.

The expired oatmeal distributed by the relief station was hard to swallow, his mother's asthma medicine could only be bought on the black market, the extra rent collected by the landlord was protection money for the Oswald Gang, there were thugs stealing things in the subway cars, and robbers running out of the alleys at night. He heard that the Wayne Group was researching some clean energy plan, but it was too late for him because the exhaust gas from the chemical plant had been pervasive for who knows how many years. Otherwise, his originally healthy mother might not have developed asthma within a year.

My first contact with gangs was when I was trying to raise money for my mother's medical expenses. A colleague told me about a way to make extra money doing odd jobs that wasn't too dangerous and would earn a good amount of money, and asked me if I wanted to join.

Of course he wanted to participate.

Then he was dragged into a casino.

Fortunately, there was no one in the casino at the time, and his colleagues were not dragging him to gamble - they were taking him to do cleaning.

There were large pools of sticky blood, metal bullet casings scattered on the ground, traces of something being dragged out of the door through the blood, bloody footprints, a broken gambling table, broken glasses, spilled wine, and shattered pieces of bloodstained clothing - but there were no corpses or injured people.

"Brother, it's safe." A colleague patted his shoulder and laughed, "A scene without any living people is the safest. We don't even need to deal with the bodies. We have special scavengers for that. All you have to do is help clean up this place - just sweeping, wiping away the blood, sweeping up the bullet casings, burning the scraps of cloth, and moving the broken table to the garbage truck. These are all small tasks. Just do it quickly and you'll be fine."

"The most important thing is that the employer is generous enough, isn't that enough?"

So he became a black cleaner from that day on, and he began to be able to afford the rent; gradually, he began to help move corpses, and then began to be able to afford his family's food, clothing, housing and daily expenses; finally, he joined the Falcone gang, and then he was finally able to rent a house from the family's internal channels without having to pay protection fees, and thus he was able to afford his mother's medical expenses.

He did this dirty work day after day, hoping that one day he could take his mother to the hospital for treatment, until one day, he was stunned by a corpse.

It was the body of an old woman, hunched over and wearing simple gray clothes. It was obvious at a glance that it was a cheap sale item. Her expression did not show pain because the bullet hole was in her head.

Could an old lady like this also be a gangster?
"Alex, what are you doing?"

His companion came over to take a look and then understood why he suddenly stopped moving.

"Don't look at it, Alex. This is probably just an ordinary old lady who got caught in a gunfight. This kind of thing happens all the time in Gotham. Sometimes it's young people, but this time it's an old woman. She must have been unlucky and got hit in the head by a stray bullet. But if that bullet had been a little off, she might have died a very painful death."

"Are we just going to get rid of her like this?"

"Yeah, there's nothing else we can do, right?"

"What about her family?"

"Who knows? She could be alive, dead, or on either side of the shootout. Anyway, the boss's order is to clean up the scene. We can't keep her body. We have to throw it into Gotham Harbor like we did before." Alex was silent and motionless. He looked at the body. The gray clothes reminded him of his mother.

"I know this might be hard for you, Alex. It's hard for me too." The companion shook his head and began to move the body. "But we're a family, and the family's interests are most important. Besides, this kind of thing happens a lot. I'm used to it, and you will get used to it sooner or later."

Can you get used to it?

Alex didn't know it, but his numb mind did drive his body to move, helping his companions move the old woman to the car and helping his companions sink her into Gotham Harbor.

The next day, he passed that street again. Everything was back to normal. It was calm, and pedestrians were walking hurriedly, as if they were walking on any other street. There was no news about it on TV. Instead, it was broadcasting Bruce's gossip, the high-end banquets of the Romans, and the superheroes punishing evil in the metropolis as usual.

The city was as peaceful as any other day until a few days later, when a missing person notice for an elderly man was posted in the corner of a newspaper and flipped through by someone.

From then on, Alex began to pay attention to the bodies he moved. Some were in their forties and fifties, some in their twenties and thirties, and some in their teens. Some looked like him, and some did not.

He even checked the information of the bodies. Most of them were gang members who lived in the poor East End like him; a few were middle-level gang members who lived in the slightly more prosperous Audisburg; there was no one living in the most upscale Burnley or Diamond District.

Every night since then, he would wake up from his dream. He dreamed that there were corpses all over the ground crying to him, that his hands and body were covered in blood, and that the people lying on the ground also had his face.

Perhaps, most of them were indeed no different from Alex, but were just unlucky and did not survive.

It was also from that day that Alex began to resist using guns. He tried his best to avoid getting involved in gang fights, and because he did a good job collecting bodies, he avoided the fate of becoming a thug.

Of course, everything has a price. Alex, who stopped being a thug, lost the possibility of continuing to climb up the ladder and got his own code name in the family.

Coward, that's what others call him.

Then, the war between the two gangs in Gotham City suddenly began - at least in his eyes, it began suddenly.

The middle-level members of the family were thrown into prison like dumplings, followed by the upper-level members, and then the lower-level members - including him.

On the day he was arrested, he was somewhat glad that he was caught while cleaning up the scene. Otherwise, if his mother saw him being stuffed into the police car with her own eyes, she might be very sad.

"I know you're going to send me to prison, a private prison," he said. "So could you please let me call my mother and talk to her?"

The bearded sheriff looked himself over and nodded.

"Don't leave any last words, kid," he said. "The years in jail might be the most human years you ever live."

(End of this chapter)