The man stopped directly in front of Beth. He didn’t say a word. Instead he slowly raised the pistol and pointed it at her forehead. Beth closed her eyes…

Jack exited the subway at 103rd Street and jogged north. The weather was fine and the temperature reasonable. He expected a big turnout at the playground, and he wasn’t disappointed. Warren saw him through the chain-link fence and told him to get his ass in gear and get over there.

Jack jogged the rest of the way home. As he approached his building, thoughts of Friday night and his uninvited visitors unwelcomely entered his mind. Having been at the General that day and having been discovered, Jack thought it was very possible that the Black Kings would be back. If they were, Jack wanted to know about it.

Instead of going in the front door, Jack descended a few steps and walked down a dank tunnel that connected the front and the back of his building. It reeked of urine. He emerged in the backyard, which looked like a junkyard. In the half-light he could make out the twisted remains of discarded bedsprings, broken baby carriages, bald car tires, and other unwanted trash.

Against the back of the building was a fire escape. It didn’t descend all the way to the ground. The last segment was a metal ladder with a cement counterweight. By turning over a garbage can and standing on its base, Jack was able to reach up and grab the lowest rung. As soon as he put his weight on it, it came down with a clatter.

Jack climbed up the ladder. When he stepped off onto the grate of the first landing, the ladder retracted to its original position with equal clamor. Jack stood still for a few minutes to be sure that the din didn’t disturb anyone. When no one stuck their head out of a window to complain, Jack continued climbing.

On each floor Jack had ample opportunity to glance in at the various domestic scenes, but he assiduously avoided doing so. It wasn’t pretty. When he saw it close-up, Jack found true poverty enervating. Jack also kept his eyes elevated to avoid looking down. He’d always been afraid of heights, and climbing the fire escape was a test of his fortitude.

As Jack approached his own floor he slowed down. The fire escape serviced both his kitchen window and his bedroom window, both of which were ablaze with light. When he’d left that morning, he’d left all the lights on.

Jack sidled up to the kitchen window first and peered in. The room was empty. A grouping of fruit he’d left on the table was undisturbed. From where he was standing he could also see through to his door to the common hall. His repair was still in place. The door had not been forced open.

Moving to the second window, Jack made sure that the bedroom was as he’d left it. Satisfied, he opened the window and climbed in. He knew he’d been taking a chance leaving the bedroom window unlocked, but he thought it worth the risk. Once inside his apartment, he made a rapid final check. It was empty with no sign of any unexpected visitors having been there.

Jack quickly changed into his basketball gear and exited the same way he’d entered. Given his acrophobia, descent was more difficult than ascent, but Jack forced himself to do it. Under the circumstances, he wasn’t wild about stepping out of his front door unprotected.

When Jack got to the street end of the tunnel, he paused in the shadows to view the area immediately in front of his building. He was particularly concerned about seeing any groups of men sitting in cars. When he was reasonably confident there were no hostile gang members waiting for him, he jogged down to the playground.

Unfortunately, during the time he’d taken to climb up and down the fire escape and change clothes the crowd at the playground had swelled. It took Jack even longer than usual to get into the game, and when he did, he ended up on a comparatively poor team.

Although Jack’s shot was on, particularly his long jumper, his teammates’ weren’t. The game was a rout, to Warren’s delight; his team had been winning all night.

Disgusted with his luck, Jack went to the sidelines and picked up his sweatshirt. Pulling it over his head, he started for the gate.

“Hey, man, you leaving already?” Warren called out. “Come on, stick around. We’ll let you win one of these days.” Warren guffawed. He wasn’t being a bad sport; ridiculing the defeated was part of the accepted playground behavior. Everybody did it and everybody expected it.

“I don’t mind getting whipped if it’s by a decent team,” Jack shot back. “But losing to a bunch of pansies is embarrassing.”

“Ohhhh,” Warren’s teammates crooned. Jack’s retort had been a good one.

Warren strutted over to Jack and stuck his index finger into Jack’s chest. “Pansies, huh?” he said. “I tell you what. My five would devastate any five you could put together right now! You pick, we play.”

Jack’s eyes swept around the court. Everybody was looking in their direction. Jack considered the challenge and weighed the pluses and the minuses. First of all, he wanted more exercise so he did want to play, and he knew that Warren could make it happen.

At the same time, Jack understood that picking four people out of the crowd would irritate the ones he didn’t pick. These were people Jack had been painstakingly cultivating over the past months to accept him. Beyond that, the people who were supposed to have winners would be especially vexed, not at Warren, who was insulated from such emotion, but at Jack. Considering all the angles, Jack decided it wasn’t worth it.

“I’m going running in the park,” Jack said.

Having bested Jack’s retort and willing to accept Jack’s refusal to meet his challenge as another victory, Warren bowed in recognition of his team’s cheering. He high-fived with one of them and then swaggered back onto the court. “Let’s run!” he yelled.

Jack smiled to himself, thinking how much the dynamics of the playground basketball court revealed about current intra-city society. Vaguely he wondered if any psychologist had ever thought about studying it from an academic point of view. He thought it would be fruitful indeed.

Jack stepped through the chain-link gate onto the sidewalk and started jogging. He ran due east. Ahead, at the end of the block he could see the dark silhouettes of jagged rocks and leafless trees. He knew that in a few minutes he’d leave behind the bustle of the city and enter the placid interior of Central Park. It was his favorite place to run.

Reginald had been stymied. There was no way he could have walked out into a playground in a hostile neighborhood. Having found the doc playing b-ball, he’d resigned himself to waiting in his Camaro. His hope was that Jack would separate himself from the crowd, perhaps by heading for one of the nearby delis for a drink.

When he’d seen Jack quit the game and pull on his sweater, he’d been encouraged enough to reach under the newspaper and snap the safety off the Tec. But then he heard Warren’s challenge and was sure he’d be sitting through at least another game.

He was wrong. To his delight, a few minutes later Jack came out of the playground. But he didn’t head west in the direction of the shops as Reginald had anticipated. Instead he headed east!

Cursing under his breath, Reginald had to make a U-turn right in the middle of all the traffic. A cabdriver complained bitterly by leaning on his horn. It was all Reginald could do to keep from reaching for the Tec. The cabdriver was one of those guys from the Far East whom Reginald would have loved to surprise with a couple of bursts.

Reginald’s disappointment turned back to delight when he became aware of Jack’s destination. As Jack sprinted across Central Park West, Reginald quickly parked. Leaping from the car, he grabbed the Tec along with the newspaper. Cradling the package in his hands, he, too, dashed across Central Park West, dodging the traffic.