Evelyn, Evelyn Dressed in black, From the shoes on her feet To the coat on her back. There's a gun in her coat, And a knife in her boot, And the blood doesn't show Against the black.
Evelyn grew up in the ghetto. Her father died when she was 14 and her sister Amy was six, and her mother didn't make enough money to support them on her own. So Evelyn got into the drug business. She never used, but she had good business sense and made a killing at selling. She refused to sell to children, though - even the thought of it brought to mind nightmarish images of her kid sister Amy, coked out of her skull, lying on the street, blood puddling around her cooling body. She kept her sister as secluded as possible, hoping that her recurring nightmare would never come to pass.
She was a smart woman, and within two years Evelyn had one of the most lucrative businesses in her part of New York, with a good handful of people working under her. Once in a while, one or another of them would sell to a child, but she always found out - and when she did, she'd kill the pusher who'd done it. "You know the rules," she'd say, just before the knife flashed. She gained a reputation for being twice as deadly as any male runner; in her business, she had to be.
Of course, not all of her decisions were good ones. For example, there was the decision to hire Andre as a courier. Andre was a whiz at math, and he juggled the numbers to see how much more the operation could make if it sold to kids. The numbers that came back were big, but he knew he would never see them working for Evelyn. So he did the sensible thing.
He killed her.
This wasn't enough to bring Evelyn back from the grave. Almost, but not quite. It was the sight of her sister doing lines in a school bathroom, her sister standing on the top of a building, her sister half-in and half-out of a car seven stories below, that brought her back. She watched helplessly as Amy stood on the gravel of the roof with her arms spread wide, moving them almost like wings. She screamed her denial as Amy smiled and stepped forward almost gently, her foot passing the ledge and continuing downward - and downward, and downward, on until the roof of Andre's Mercedes got in the way. Evelyn ripped out of the ground with a rage that brooked no interference. She killed three pushers on her way to her old headquarters, leaving their bodies cold and broken on the streets. The policewoman who found what was left of them had nightmares for weeks.
Evelyn tore Andre apart limb from limb and nailed the parts to the wall as a warning, blood dripping slowly down the boards as though the building itself were bleeding. The sleek, black rat that was her companion - probably somebody's pet, once — drank the blood like it was water. Then they both went after the others, the ones who'd sold to her sister. Some of them are still running. Others aren't going to be running much longer.
