For the first time Ric realized the truth of what he was dealing with. These hoodlums weren’t simply a gang of eighteen-year-olds with nothing more to do than play the bad guy, they were died-in-the-wool street gangsters that had rap sheets a mile long. They had nothing of their own, so they spent their whole life taking what belonged to others, and made money any way they could. Drug trafficking, prostitution, gambling, and robbing and stealing. That wasn’t kid stuff, and they weren’t kids, they were smelly sewer rats that hung out in the street looking for their next victim while they crawled over the city like slime. And when it came time to go home, they crawled into their rat-infested holes, alleyways, and crumbling apartment houses. Sewer rats. That’s what he’d called them in his art
