"Alright cunts, listen up, I'm only gonna say this once." Reiko Ichijo glared at the group surrounding her, still dressed in the coveralls from her occupation as an EMT. "Yeah faggots, I'm talking to you. You remember that soldier? The one they were going on about her being involved with Abu Ghraib in Iraq?"

"Private England?" one of them wondered.

"No not England you dumb fuck, Allen." Reiko wondered if the gangs could possibly have gotten dumber since she left. "Sergeant Nancy Rachel Allen. She was implicated as well." One of the gangsters, a big, black bastard, broke away from the crowd but Reiko paid him no mind. "Now I think you know as well as I do about how I feel about the army, how these retards run off to war at the drop of a hat..."

"How about you just bottom line your crap right now?" The other gangsters called out in agreement, wanting Reiko to get to the point.

"You know what? Fuck you." But she knew they didn't need to hear the backstory. "The army let her go, just washed their hands of her leaving Iraq and had her discharged from service." A few of the gangsters came in closer, being ex servicemen they knew what that was like. "She's kind of gone off the rails, started going out on her own to hit crackhouses, chop shops, shit you have your fingers in."

"We ain't do that shit," one of them protested.

"Sure you do. I used to bring cars in for ya after I stole them or won them on the streets." For a moment Reiko wondered what she was doing here, it wasn't her fight, she left the gang scene. Still, she reasoned, they helped me before.

"She's right." A hispanic stepped up and stood alongside Reiko. "Cops came after us for it, and that's one thing. But some soldier's another story."

"We're vets too don't forget. Desert Storm, Somalia, Kosovo..."

Reiko twisted her face up at the news. "Her son's doing what he can for her," Reiko continued, "distract her or something, but there's only so much the boy can do and has called Nancy's brother in to help her."

"Help her with what?" The black gangbanger, Smitherson, asked skeptically. "To quit being a vigilante?"

"That's why I called you here nigger," Reiko told him, "so you can watch your backs."

"You seem to know a lot of shit about her."

Reiko didn't react to the retort. "Why don't you fucking do something about it?"

"Who says I ain't?" Smitherson leaned in close.

"Me." Reiko grabbed him by the throat and pushed him back.

"Back off motherfucker, I didn't have to do this." A few of their gangsters reached for their guns, before Reiko squared off against Smitherson.

"You get one chance shit for brains, that's all." With one of their own in the way, as well as loyalty to Reiko to think about, they held off. "

Look, fuck this." Alverez stepped in between the two. "What you want us to do about this nigga?" he asked.

Reiko didn't feel it was her place to order them about, especially with Smitherson and whoever might side with him about. "Consider yourselves forwarned." Reiko began to head off. "Wagon's outside, don't count on me being there if you ain't prepared."

"That's it?" Leroy wondered. "That all you got to say? What happened to respect?"

Whatever loyalty Reiko might have felt towards the gangs it wasn't her fight. "I have a job to do."