Under the rose-pink blush of neon tubes, Pavel’s worry cast crooked shadows across his forehead. He stepped down the three carmine velvet stairs and felt a whitecap of cool breath coast across his face. Distractedly shielding the fragile cherry of his cigarette with his palm, Pavel squinted, restless, into the shadows.

Across the street from the casino, three windows up from the dark, rotting crack where the brick wall met the pavement, a party was getting started. Everyone knew about it; no matter how dangerous they painted the scene through the telephone, the neighbors had never convinced the cops to interfere. Old and alone, with the heavy bass beat aching their frail insides, they just stopped dialing.

The police officers, the ones who didn’t help score the party’s blow and hookers, ran a dirty circuit, defending the block from rival gangs. Predominantly Irish and popular entrepreneurs, pairs of blue suits in black and white patrol cars prowled the scarlet streets.

Dropping his cigarette stub underfoot, Pavel walked. A bleak building away, he rapped his knuckles against a rusty alley-side door and stepped back.

With littered pavement and moldy bricks, this moment was like dozens of colorful others he could remember. His eyes had been open, then; he had desperately sought the miserable, exciting experiences of underworld deceit and larceny, tried to capture every sordid detail of the new angry world suddenly open to him. Now, or soon enough, he would begin to turn away from the once exhilarating criminal transgressions, reveling in ignorance, dreaming himself comfortable and somewhere else.

A lock unlatched and the door opened a little. Brown eyes and stubble strained to see Pavel, his black wool overcoat and the wad of bills clutched in his fist.

“What do you need?”

Pavel took deliberate steps toward the opening, extending his arm and cash into the crack. “It’s 400. I need some protection I can fit in my pocket.”

The door clicked shut just after the bills left his hand. After several minutes, the sizeable figure appeared again inside the door, this time leaning against the frame and in full view, saying, “I know you’re not a cop, mi'ijo. But you’re not a vato, either.” He passed a heavy paper lunch sack to Pavel’s palm. “You’re a spectator, homes. You’ve got to make sure you’re not caught in the crossfire, or worse,” the Chicano began to close the heavy steel door, “confused with a player.”

The venerable Glock 17 handgun is chambered to fire a nine-by-nineteen millimeter bullet, is commonly found with a fifteen-round magazine, and is standard issue to many local law enforcement agencies in the Northeast. It is finished in matte black, cool and rigid and menacing, and precisely what Pavel was looking for.

His eyes had been open too long. The cold air bit at the blue around his pupils. They had been open for twenty years, since he began to look for filth and play among the wretched parasites on these streets, and every step he took back toward the casino confirmed the righteous reversal he would soon undertake.

Closing in on the building opposite the casino, Pavel could hear yells and chatter amid the low, constant beat that rattled his neck and made his steps uncertain. Behind the apartments, he pulled back the slide of his handgun, pumping a bullet into the chamber, and put it back in the sack.

The beige interior was dimly lit by a swinging yellow bulb, casting silhouettes up and across the fragile staircase. The similar darkness and strong, sweaty atmosphere of the upstairs hallways did nothing to mask the ripe smell of lighter fuel and vomit. It wasn’t until he had passed several thugs, guerreros, and was upon the party apartment’s door that Pavel removed his pistol from the bag in his jacket.

Like Pavel, and with the pulse of hardcore music vibrating their backbones through the walls, tables, couches and beds, prostitutes closed their eyes to the depravity that was happening around, atop, and inside them. They uniformly rocked to the rhythm of a forsaken life, to later gather their little nothing skirts and messy stockings, stinking like Cuervo with condoms hanging stupid from their handbags.

The door’s latch just splintered the doorframe as it swung instantly inward. Pavel forced his body in, pistol outstretched, firing blinding flashes into a mass of hoodlums. The ones he didn’t kill immediately dove; large, shocked, half-naked men with tattoos of hands in prayer fell sideways over couches and knocked over tables to hide as Pavel lit up the room. No one who was left retaliated as he grabbed a girl’s hand, marching past the debris of the door and quickly down the unstable stairs.

He swiftly tossed the Glock into a crowded dumpster and ran past the casino, past the alley and the rusty metal door, past the filmy freeway signs and immaculate McDonald’s, jogging with a frantic hooker in tow. With sunken eye sockets and a tear in her skirt, she squeezed tight on her father’s hand as they approached his Buick.

It began to snow. In the driver’s seat, with the keys shaking fiercely in his fingers, Pavel looked over his daughter’s features. Her face, stained technicolor by heavy makeup and careless abuse, stretched anxiously over her cheekbones and stared back. The wrinkled worry in Pavel’s forehead disappeared. Shielded together from the city’s chill, looking into one another’s half-closed eyes, they suddenly began to cry. And as they started down the hostile highway, talking little, their rolling tears mimicked the severe, stained lament of the sky.

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