Every cat in Meowtown has a version of this story. Ask Whiskers and he'll give you the broad strokes — three sentences, eyes ahead, already walking away. Ask the crew and they'll each give you a different version, each one starring themselves in a slightly bigger role than the last. The truth, as always, lives somewhere in the gap.
What's not in dispute: on a Thursday night in the tail end of summer, someone relieved Warehouse 9 of its entire stock of Glowing Pipe contraband — forty-seven canisters, a sealed crate the size of a litter box palace, and a manifest that certain people very much wanted to stay lost. The dock crew reported nothing. The night watch reported nothing. Three city blocks of Meowtown surveillance reported nothing.
What the neighbourhood did report, in the hours that followed, was chaos.
It started on the rooftops on the east side — the corrugated tin runs above the Neon Dragon Fish Market where only the confident and the stupid move at speed, and where the wall behind the market carries Trixie's signature mural like an unsigned warning. Gizmo was seen there first, according to three separate witnesses who all claim they weren't watching. Then Trixie, moving the kind of route that doesn't make sense until you've already done it. Then something large, irritated, and very definitely Chubby Cheeks came through the skylight of the old postal sorting office, and after that the night sort of organised itself around the wreckage.
The double-cross is harder to document. What's known is that two rival operations — one with connections to the Dock Authority, one with connections to nobody will say who — both arrived at the secondary drop point at the same time, each expecting the other not to be there. The fact that the merchandise was also not there seems to have surprised everyone equally. The resulting confrontation was, by all accounts, thorough.
Meanwhile, somewhere across town, Whiskers McScruff had a very quiet evening. He was seen at the Rusty Tin social club at 9pm, at the corner stall on Canal Row at 11pm, and back at the social club at 12:30am. He had a drink. He said hello to people. He went home.
Forty-eight hours later, the crew had what they'd come for, the rivals had questions they couldn't ask without admitting they'd been there, and the Dock Authority had a paperwork problem that was going to take months to unravel.
The legend part came later — in the telling, in the retelling, in the way the story got passed around the alleys until it was bigger than the original, which was already considerable. That's how Meowtown works. The job is the job. The story of the job is what you trade afterward.
Nobody saw a thing. Nobody's talking.
The Glowing Pipes are somewhere. The crew knows where.
That's enough.
— The Alleyway Gazette, your independent dispatch from the streets of Meowtown