Chapter Two
On that same day, on 9th Avenue in New York City, Rigger Entime left an office building and tried to remember where he had parked his car.
He was ten paces beyond the little girl before the image of her eyes registered on his foggy perception of that cold December afternoon—the end of his longest day. His doctor had put him through the stress and strain of a raw recruit. He was exhausted, and he wanted it finished; all of it.
When he turned back toward the girl, an enormous baldheaded man with a cane in one hand and the Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm, bumped into him. Rigger stumbled but kept his grip on the gray slips of paper in his hand.
“Drunken fool,” mumbled the bald man as he straightened his overcoat and trudged on.
From a distance, the girl’s eyes looked
