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length of the house, faced a row of rapidly aging brownstones, each building containing its own unique mix of humanity. Crow could sit in his wicker chair for hours, watching his neighbors live their lives.
    He looked again at the brochure from Bobick Realty. In the north woods, sitting outside his cabin, he would be watching the birds and the squirrels. He would see a deer, or a fox. Or maybe he would be on the dock, watching a red-and-white bobber dance on the afternoon chop.
    Was that what he wanted? The idea of isolation was seductive. If he could be alone with himself, away from all the crazy people, maybe he would find out what he wanted from life. If he could capture that long quiet moment, all would become clear. Here, in the city, the distractions ruled.
    People like Dickie Wicky were everywhere.
    What did Dickie want?
    Sipping his coffee, wishing he had quoted a five-hundred-dollar consultation fee, Crow watched four kids from the building directly across the street holding the corners of a blanket, moving up and down the sidewalk, their faces tilted skyward. He watched them for several minutes, his mind drifting from Dickie Wicky to the north woods, before he started to wonder what they were doing. At first he couldn’t see it; he was looking too high. The four blanket holders, three blond girls and a little Hmong boy with a purple Batman cape, were shouting something at the sky, but Crow could not understand their words over the steady stream of cars and buses roaring down the avenue. Finally he spotted the object of their attentions, a calico kitten on a ledge between the second and third stories. As the kitten moved along the ledge in one direction, the blanket crew would follow, trying to remain in rescue position. Now that he had a context, Crow could hear what they were shouting:
Jump, kitty, jump!
    He sighed and let a smile melt across his face. “Jump, kitty, jump,” he said. Milo, sitting on the porch rail, twitched his tail. Crow watched until the kitten, the first to become bored with the game, followed the ledge around the corner of the building to the fire escape and descended to safety. Crow drained the last of his coffee, let his head hang over the back of the wicker chair, felt the muscles in his scalp and face loosen. He closed his eyes and willed his body to go slack, hazily remembering an afternoon, thirty years before, spent trying to rescue a cat from its comfortable perch twenty feet up a shaggy walnut tree. Had the rescue succeeded? He couldn’t remember, but he suspected it hadn’t. Perhaps the cat had found his antics entertaining, a good way to pass a summer afternoon.
    â€œSo how you doing on these comic book guys?”
    Freddy went blank.
    â€œThe comic guys! The comic guys!” Joey Cadillac shouted. He was having a bad day. His best customer, one Bubby Sharp, had been pulled over while test driving one of the new Cadillac Allantes, a slick little cherry-red two-seater with the Italian body and a sixty-thousand-dollar invoice. He’d lost his best car and his best customer, just like that.
    And now Freddy Wisnesky, mind like a fucking color crayon, needed something to do. Joey picked up a pencil and broke it into two pieces, then broke the halves into quarters. He could not break the quarters, so he crushed them between his desktop and a brass paperweight shaped like a 1959 Cadillac.
    â€œI dunno, Mister C.” Freddy shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “The guy I talked to a few weeks back, he said they went to Minneapolis.” He didn’t like it when his boss was disturbed, which was most of the time. “You want me to go up there?”
    â€œMinneapolis?” Joey couldn’t get his mind off Bubby Sharp, the dumb shit taking the red Allante, two days off the truck, less than a hundred miles on the speedometer, taking it out and running it up to a hundred miles per on the Kennedy, getting his ass stopped by the cops.