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until the next day. Or until I could make sense of it. Sink her teeth into puzzle pie like that and we’d be up all night working it over. Remember the
Times
crossword? Can’t put it down until it’s done. So occasionally I have to try to steer her away from such things, if nothing else so I can get some sleep.
    “Just tired, I guess. Shall we split?”
    “Yeah, I have stuff to do tomorrow.” There are a lot of weddings in June, and Angie had to fill an order of eighty diamond solitaires and some pavé work. She does some of her own design, but her bread is buttered by piecework for art jewelers and the stray factory job.
    Normally, we would have done the twenty-minute walk home, but since it was her birthday, we grabbed a cab and were home in five minutes. The front shop door is sealed and we always enter via the adjoining apartment lobby through two locking vestibule doors. There’s a side entrance into our apartment tucked back under the stairwell opposite the basement door. When we arrived home that night we displayed our usual wariness of dark corners and potential lurking muggers. New York isn’t so openly dangerous anymore, but you still have to have your Spidey Sense about you at night. Make out someone tracking you, either from behind or from across the street, and you have to take evasive maneuvers: Walk in the street between parked cars and moving traffic, where the tracking mugger will be shy of being exposed in the headlights. Or sometimes, if you just stop and stare him down, he’ll realize the element of surprise is no longer on his side and go looking for less-suspecting prey. If I’m walking with Angie, the thing to do is for us to drift farther apart so the hunter can’t corner us together, thus frustrating his decision about which of us to target. His window of opportunity is usually pretty small, less than thirty seconds before the quarry is back in the safety of the pedestrian herd at a well-lit intersection.
    We instinctively drifted apart, checking the perimeter as we approached the door. They sometimes like to pounce while you’re preoccupied unlocking the door and collecting the mail. But the coast was clear. We entered the vestibule and stepped into the hall.
    Safe at home.
    “Hold it, hold it!” A husky, masked figure emerged from the basement door, which is usually locked. He was pointing a pistol at me, and my first thought was that it had to be fake. Then it occurred to me that a toy gun in New York is almost harder to come by than a real one.
    Angie slid behind me, and I just stammered, my heart sinking like a gazelle surrounded by lions.
    “I’ll kill you, I’ll friggin’ kill you.” Husky started waving the gun, I guess in response to the stupid grin on my face. I snorted, still grasping at the notion that this wasn’t really happening. I wonder if a cornered gazelle ever experiences denial. Then I turned and saw two more masked men. All of them wore jeans, black pea coats, and ski masks—must’ve been a sale at the army surplus store.
    All I could think to say was “What are you, nuts?”
    A hand grabbed me by my shirt collar from behind, and I hissed from the sting of fingernails scratching my neck.
    “What’s that, pardner?” The voice behind me was raspy, vicious and yet mischievous, like a desperado robbing a stagecoach.
    “You’re crazy, we don’t . . .”
    I turned, straining against the grip on my shirt. The whites of his eyes turned red, and he smacked me in the head with a gun. Take it from me, don’t try this at home, kids—getting gun-whipped hurts like sin.
    Angie yelped louder than I did. I was bent over with blood running off my scalp and down my arm, the vision of warm red fluid dripping from my elbow making me a little woozy. Nice mouth, Garth.
    Next I got a kick in the ribs, my hair was pulled, and I fell over on the floor. There was arguing among the attackers. Even with the imp of agony dancing on my skull, I was reminded of the stagecoach