At Dawn They Sleep

A Pound of Flesh

Late October

Tatána's Condo

The kids had been non-stop all evening-one roving band of costumed Halloween tricker-treaters after another. As soon as dusk hit, Fiona's doorbell had been ringing incessantly ever since, but that's what she got for swapping her apartment for a home in the suburbs. It came down to space; she needed it for her real job with Gram, not her cover job at the University's IT Department. Besides supplying the thieves' guild with all-manner of tactical intel, she also operated a paramilitary security team that watched over some of Gram's most valuable cadre of clerics posing as professors at Princeton. Say that five times fast. She could have turned the lights off and played dead, but did she want to ingratiate herself into her new suburban community as that douche neighbor? So, when the doorbell rang for the umpteenth time, she grabbed the champagne bucket with mini Snickers and happily went to answer the door.

Fiona was surprised to find this band of pre-teens trembling in fear and not shouting the standard 'trick-or-treat' query in a sing-song voice.

A frantic, freckled-faced boy dressed as a Jedi quickly blurted out: "We went to a house up the block, and some crazy woman came out with a gun and fired a shot in the air. She's right behind us!"

Another shot rang out down the block to further punctuate the boy's exclamation. The children quickly ran into Fiona's house; a few stood still, too petrified to move. "Come in," she shouted. The reluctant ones hurried in, and she quickly shut and locked the door behind them. Fiona had guns stashed throughout the house. One was in a cookie jar in the kitchen right next to her cell phone, but when she turned around to console the children, they were already hurriedly fleeing out the backdoor. A teen girl dressed as Little Orphan Annie was the only kid not running.

Early October

Roland's log

I got back to Uncle Roy's place a little after midnight. As he made a PB&J in the kitchen, he reminded me that I only had two days left to find my own place. "You know, back after the war, there wasn't much opportunity for those of us that fought. No one would hire us, and if they found out you fought over there, they'd just as soon spit on you than open a door or help you with a bag of groceries. I went cop, and your dad went crook. I didn't condemn him for what he had to do to put food on the table for his family. That's just the way it was back then."

I looked at the bread on my plate and my clean knife. "Are you almost done with the peanut butter, Uncle Roy?"

"Are you listening to me, Ro?"

"Yeah, it was difficult after the war, got it."

"I'm saying today you got all kinds of opportunity we couldn't even dream of back then. A junior senator from Illinois could very well be the first black president in American history in a month from now. Times are changing, Ro."

"And that changes what exactly for me?"

Uncle Roy slid the plate to me with his PB&J. "You eat it. I suddenly lost my appetite."

I sat there for a few minutes, watching peanut butter and grape jelly slowly ooze out of the sides of the sandwich. It was messy, and I was hungry. Then I remembered that landlord in the village that Efraim had told me about, and I called them to see if I could get an apartment. By the end of the day, I had a studio apartment down in the East Village with a one-year lease sans renter's insurance.

The trippy lucid dream (if that's what you could call it) with Betty was still stuck in my head as I showered and changed clothes before heading to City for that lecture course. I texted Fiona about it on the subway, and her response was cut and dry: "Par for the course. We'll talk later." She then sent me a picture of her neck tattoo.