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high-rises was called Co-op City. From what he’d read, it was the largest single residential development in the United States. Built on a swampy landfill in the 1960s, it was supposed to be the progressive answer to New York City’s middle-class housing problem. Instead, like most unfortunate progressive solutions, it had quickly become the problem.
    Berger wondered what the urban wasteland had looked like in December of 1975. Worse, he decided with a shake of his head.
    Enough nonsense, he thought as he drained his cup. He closed his eyes and cleared his mind of everything but the job at hand. He took several slow, deep breaths like an actor waiting backstage.
    He was still sitting there doing his breathing exercises when the kitted-out pearl gray Denali SUV that he was waiting for passed and pulled over a couple of hundred feet ahead.
    “What have we here?” Berger said to himself as a young Hispanic woman got out of the truck. Berger lifted a pair of binoculars off the seat beside him and quickly focused. She was about fifteen or sixteen. She was wearing oversize Nicole Richie glasses, a lot of makeup, a scandalously slight yellow bikini top, and denim shorts that were definitely not mother-approved.
    Berger flipped open the manila folder that the binocshad been sitting on. He glanced at the photograph of the girl whose name was Aida Morales. It was her, Berger decided. Target confirmed.
    The Denali pulled away from the curb, and the girl started walking down the sidewalk toward where Berger sat in the parked car. Berger held back a smile. He couldn’t have set up his blind better in a dream.
    He quickly checked himself in the rearview mirror. He was already wearing the clothes, baggy brown polyester slacks and an even baggier white shirt, butterfly collar buttoned to the neck. He’d padded the shirt with a wadded-up laundry bag to make himself look heavier.
    When she arrived at the turn for her building’s back entrance, he took out the curly black wig from the paper bag beside him and put it on. He checked himself in the mirror, adjusting the shaggy wig until he was satisfied.
    She was halfway down the back alley of her building with her all-but-naked back to him when he started running and yelling.
    “Excuse me, miss. Excuse me. Excuse me!” he cried.
    She stopped. She did a double take when she saw the wig. But by then he was too close, and it was too late.
    Berger pulled the knife from the sheath at his back. It was a shining machete-like military survival knife with a nine-inch blade. Rambo would have been proud.
    “Yell and I’ll carve your fucking eyes out of your skull,” he said as he bunched her bathing suit top at her back like puppet strings. He hauled her the quick twenty steps tothe loading dock by the building’s rear even faster than he had visualized. He dragged her into the space between the dock’s truck-size garbage compacter and the wall. A little plastic chair sat in the space next to the dock. It was probably where the building’s janitor fucked off, he thought.
    “Here, have a seat. Get comfy,” Berger said, sitting her down on it hard.
    Instead of taping her mouth as he had planned, he decided to go ahead and start stabbing her. The garbage stench and the buzzing of the flies were too much for him.
    The first quick thrust was to her right shoulder. She screamed behind his cupped hand and looked up at the windows and back terraces of her twenty-story building for help. But there were just humming, dripping air conditioners and blank, empty panes of glass. They were all alone.
    She screamed two more times as Berger removed the knife with a slight tug and then thrust it forward into her left shoulder. She started to weep silently as her blood dripped to the nasty, stained cement.
    “There, see?” he said, patting her on the cheek with his free bloody hand. “It’s not so bad, right? Almost done, baby. In a minute, we’ll both be out of this stinking hole. You’re doing so