I shivered at the cold and glanced down at Kara.
"Little chilly outside today, huh?" I ask mockingly, snug in my track suit with my hoodie pulled over it.
Her little face scowled at me and she bent over to try and pull her socks up even higher, fussing with them as we made our way down the hall, past the decrepit elevator, and downstairs to the street.

I couldn't begin to understand why the nuns over at Guiding Light wouldn't let the girls where anything besides those awful plaid dresses. At least Kara wasn't old enough for the skirts yet I thought morosely, that would be a whole new delimma beyond the biting cold. If Kara walked out of Jupiter apartments with a Catholic schoolgirl uniform on people would think she was headed to the pole over at the Jaguar, not some pompous private school. I had talked to the nuns about that very thing when I first enrolled her there and hadn't been to suprised by the answer. The snotty principal nun had looked first at the stoogie nun that stood beside her and then passed on some bullshit about Gods trials and fighting temptation. Fighting temptation my ass, they better let her change at school or I suppose I'd have to find a new school.

All this assuming Tyrone came through with the money.

"It is freezing out here." Kara said through gritted teeth, hugging herself against the cold.
"It looks like it might snow though, maybe we could go sledding again." I added checking the dim, cloudy, sky.
"I dunno, I think its too early for that much snow, don't you?"
"You might be right." I conceded, "C'mon, lets get across the street."
I dragged her across the salted road, tiny collections of the mineral crunching beneath my shoes. If the roads were already salted in this neighborhood there might be enough snow for sledding. Its rare that the government would spend the money to salt the roads around here unless they were absolutely certain of a winter freeze.

"Why do we always have to cross over the road?" Kara wined beside me, "There's a tunnel right over there just so we don't have to do this."
"You know I don't like taking you through that tunnel, its dirty and full of nasty stuff." I replied. By nasty stuff I meant Felix, the degenerate that slept under there most nights. You can't trust a man that can't even keep a job. Hell, if a blind man can put a roof over his head by picking locks over at the coffee shop why can't this bum. I bet he's a drunk.

Me and Kara ride the bus in silence, we always have. She and I simply sit and watch the people as they get on and off, occasionally we nudge eachother when an especially interesting character presents himself but mostly we sit in silence. As we near he stop and lean over and whisper out of the side of my mouth. "Uncle Alex will pick you up today, that okay?"
"Yeah, sure." She whispers back, out of the side of her mouth, mimicing me. She's a real pro at it too.
"Which one are you looking at." I say, smiling.
"The old man in the leather jacket."
I glance about casually and catch the ex-biker thug in my periperal vision. He's a hulking man with tattoos crawling up his neck and out onto his hands from under his sleeves, a decade or two ago he probably would have had me with a hand on my berretta but now he seems like an old bull. Reading glasses perch crazily on the edge of his nose and in his massive meaty hands he clutches a warn copy of Stephen Kings "Kujo." Looking closer I see a tiny crack across the lense of his left eye glass.
"Its weird to think that bikers get old, huh."
"I'd like to meet him sometime." She says standing as the bus lurches to a stop in front of guiding light.
"I'll see at dinner, babydoll." I say, "Don't forget Uncle Alex is coming to get you."
"Okay, Dad, see ya."

In three more stops the old biker meets my eyes and gets off the bus. I follow him and in a dark alley as the snowflakes begin to increase in intensity and the wind blows in freezing gusts, I sell him 500 dollars worth of white powder.
He offers to do some of it with me and I humbly decline. A line from Scarface crosses my mind, "Don't get high on your own supply."
I'm no Scarface but those are words to live by.
As I leave the man to his poison and wait in the falling snow for the next bus I silently seeth at the world in which I live, the world in which I have become yet another mindless cog. I hate the cold gray buildings of this city, I hate the people that crawl about on the earth around them and I hate myself for the way I too crawl and cling to these monoliths of man.
I'd like to take Kara into the country, damned if I know how we'll live, but I want to take her there. I want my girl to run barefoot in open fields without worry of broken glass and hyperdermic needles. I want her to breath fresh air and feel the sun on her face.
I want her to grow up to be nothing like me.

Back at the apartment I splash water on my face and try to return to the real world. Its hard, the world is not my friend. I stare at myself in the mirror, examining my face. I've aged, of that much I'm certain. I've passed over the exhilarating peak of the late twenties and now as I age I no longer find it to my advantage, I no longer think I look better year to year, just older. Whittled down a little bit more by the grinding stone of time.
My short black hair has reached a length where its beginning to curl, something Kara's hair never does. My face was so startling nondescript, so... nobody. I was just another city dweller, another loss soul. I turned away from the mirror and left the bathroom confused.
"What am I supposed to do today?" I mutter casting about the kitchen, "I've got three sells happening after lunch over at the bus stop, and another over at Lu's Garage." Kara floats through my mind again, I wonder how she's doing. "
I shake her out of my head and come back to my senses, Tyrone. "Shit." I mutter morosely.
I look back at the door and try to summon him to the door, the place he should have appeared some hours before.
From inside a burned globe of the chandelier I pull several more small bags of cocaine and then traveled out into the biting cold and made my way over to the bus stop to wait for my buyers.
This was a part of the job I could really get used to, the sitting and waiting and just thinking about the world as people walked by. The job was only temporary, I needed a way to keep Kara in school while the construction business took the winter plunge. Nothing got built in the cold and I was desperate enough to sell for Tyrone and the this whole mess came up.
Thirty three thousand dollars, thats not spare change.
I shiver through my thoughts, happy in my daydreams. People file in and out as the buses come and go, three leave with wallets lighter and pockets heavier. The drug trade is slower in the winter, people just aren't willing to make the trip. As my last customer and I sit alone in the bus stop, dwelling in the awkward silence that follows a sell another offer to blow comes my way tentative and hopeful. I look over at the hollow eyed high school kid and for the first time, after weeks of taking his money and meet him in the eyes. He's alone in the world, alone in his own mind. In that look I could see the downward spiral of his life, how long would I continue to sell to him before he no longer had the money. A year, a month, the boy was a sinking ship.
"No thanks, bro." I say turning away again, "I got places to be."
"Yeah, 'course." The boy muttered back, standing quickly, "I'll find you sometime 'bout next week, aight?"
"Yeah, 's cool."
How much contact does that boy have, if he overdoses tonight will I be the only one to notice?
I could call him back and refund him right now, I could take him in, put him back on his feet.
I would take his cash next week.
I wait for the next bus to arrive and then get up and leave with the few that disembark. The snow picks up as I go down the street and its falling heavily by the time I turn the corner and head towards Lu's Garage. The sound of tires grinding on salty mush made me turn and look up, gazing mesmerized at the face in the rear window.
"Sometimes fate comes and gives you a winning hand." Tyrone had said, this dealer in Bolivia had called him personally and in broken English had given him the deal of a lifetime. Sometimes life comes along and pulls the rug out from under you. He didn't say that but I sure as hell would. Fate will not only pull the rug out from under your feet, it'll do it so you fall down a flight of stairs and then it'll leave you broken at the base until you starve.
Looking through the glass of the rear window of the police car I saw the wide eyes of Tyrone, peering out like a caged animal.
Damn.
This moment of recognition lasted a bare second. The world froze for for me and Tyrone, as movies do for two lovers, but the emotion passed between our eyes was not love in any form, it was the look of pure embarrassment and mistrust shared by partners in crime. As smoothly as our eyes were locked, with equal tact they became unlocked, mine turning forward again and his face falling deep into the shadows of the police car. By the time my stride ended, grinding and inch into the slush of the sidewalk, the moment was gone.
Or was it.
The blood drained from my face and suddenly the unlicensed, unregistered gun against my back felt slightly less comfortable. Suddenly the pillow of bags my hands had been resting on felt slightly less soft. Suddenly this city that I had called my home since the first time I learned the word seemed slightly less friendly.
Every person with their hood up was an undercover cop.
Tyrone had looked tired, had had bags under his eyes, had they been at him all night? Had he talked?
A car slowed down, its windows heavily tented, I tensed up, waiting for the undercover cops to pour out taking me away to a cold dark cell.
Who had sold Tyrone out? No dumbass cop could've found the coke on his own. Tyrone always has the stuff hidden in the front bumper and dash of the car, away from prying eyes. Someone must've talked and if someone had talked...they could still be out there.
I glanced behind me thinking of the three sells I had made today. Had anyone watched me do them? Some guy from the eighth floor had come out on his bike, he could've seen the first sell but was gone in a hurry. The noodle woman was up, no way she'd talk to the cops though.
Lu's garage loomed ahead, I was supposed to stop by here to make the a deal with one of the workers, the same guy that was supposed to cut into Tyrones car and take out the dope.
Would the cops know of this? Did the cops catch them doing this?
I froze at the gate to Lu's garage and stared around the street. It was startlingly empty. Honestly, it wasn't much of a surprise. The snow drove ever downwards making my hood damp. I turned in a slow circle looking for any of the homeless or degenerates that were the city's lice.
None.
There was something though. A black SUV with tented windows idled on the corner of Polaski, hidden halfway behind the Pawn Shop. As a stared the SUV began to creep forward and turn down Bentley, straight towards me.
I darted, sliding in the slush straight into Lu's car lot and heard the SUV's tires burn out as the uncover cops gave chase. I knew there was a hole in the fence that led to the park at the back of the lot, you had to dirty yourself all to hell crawling under an old van. Now was not a time to worry about my old track suit though.
Kara, all I could think was Kara. My feet pounded the new snow and I felt one of the bags of coke bounce out into the snow.
"Shit" I whispered. "Shit, Shit, SHIT, SHIT."
I kept running but reached in to draw everything out of my pockets. I didn't need to loose my supplier and my supply in the same day.
The snow was falling so heavily now that I didn't see the kid in front of me until we were barely ten feet apart. He was short, shorter then me at least and the bulletproof vest he wore looked bulky under his uniform. He stared at me down the barrel of his gun and before I knew it I was staring at him down the barrel of mine.
"D-Drop your weapon." He managed shouted, visibly nervous.
"Just get out of my way, man." I shot back, "I don't have to shot you but I can't get caught, I can't leave her." Through the falling snow behind him I could barely make out the van, not a dozen yards away. I was so close.
"Step aside, man. No one has to die." I said with finality. I couldn't beleive what I was considering. Running from the police was one thing, carrying a gun was another, but shooting a police officer? This kid couldn't be five years out of high school.
"I can't just step aside, sir." The cop said glancing behind me and gaining confidence. "You have to pay for what you've done."
They must be getting out of the SUV, probably four of them in there, shotguns probably, maybe a police dog.
Twelve yards away there was a hole in the fence.
Someone yelled something behind me, it was muffled by the snow.
I could see the individual flakes floating past the young cops face, his eyes closed in a blink and reopened looking beyond me. They were skyblue, soft like the sky over the interstate, completely untouched.
CRACK
The gun jumped in my hand and I was off. When I passed the cop I hit his shoulder and he spun, keeping those interstate-sky eyes on me the whole time. I heard the muffled thud as he hit the ground, falling onto the snowdrifts.
Such soft eyes didn't belong in this city. This city would forge those eyes into sharpened steel.
I slid under the van at full tilt and heard the popping sounds right above my head as tiny balls of buckshot perforated its rusted exterior.
Then I was gone and there was only the blood in my ears, the blood beating madly in my ears.
And her face.

Morning

It was something as quiet as the turning of a door handle that awoke me from my dozing state. The near silent workings of gears and springs twisting and clicking as they slid the bolt out of the jamb and allowed the door to swing free.
My eyes snapped open and I sat up in my chair, in my lap my right hand curled tight around the cold black pistol that rested their. Ignoring the stinging rays of sunlight cascading through the kitchen window and over the dining room table at which he sat, he focused, unblinking, at the unpainted front door. The plain brass handle was not turning and by the light that filtered in from the hallway I could be sure that no one was out there to turn it. My eyes darted away from the front door and back into the apartment to see Kara, my little angel, shuffle out of her room towards the bathroom still squinting and blinded by sleep. She looked so small and perfect, just as her mother had, but her features were all her own. The jet black of her hair matched her eyes perfectly and her tiny button nose was a remnant of a genetic strain that was not present in either of her parents.
She always managed to wake up on her own these days, I thought with a touch of sadness, soon she would be old enough to walk out to the bus stop on her own and would be gone by the time he came too.
Hastily he ran his hands over his face, rubbing away the shroud of sleep. Kara hated to see him when he didn't sleep in bed. She was old enough to worry now, old enough to begin to wonder why all those twitching addicts were always shaking hands with me, old enough to begin to put the pieces together.
I heard the toilet flush through the paper thin walls of second floor apartment and shook myself back to reality. I pushed my chair back, zipped the gray Adidas track suit up that I had fallen asleep in and shoved my small 9mm into my waistband. I handled the weapon so easily now. I silently moved about the kitchen doing the things normal parents do, pulling the box of Pops from the yellowing cupboard and placing a bowl and a carton of milk out for the little one in my life before starting on my own meal of fruit and frozen waffles. Not Eggo waffles, you couldn't find those at the Foodmart down the street. These were simply "Wacky Waffles", tasteless and freezerburned.

I didn't really consider these routine motions, dwelling instead on the firm metal feel of my pistol against the curve of my lower back. Carrying that gun had been the start of a whole new episode of my unguided life.Tyrone had said it was only for show. I could practically see him in front of me, pushing the cocaine into one hand and the 9 mm into the other as Kara played on the swings behind me.
"You take the coke an' you gonna need the gun, becha ass you will." He frowned, the most serious I had ever seen the normally jovial rotund man.
"Not for killin, I hope'" he said, his eyes flashed behind me to see that Kara was still preoccupied, "Probably not even for shootin', but folks will give you shit and when they do you gonna need ta flash dis. Just let 'em know you have it."
I had denied, I'd been selling powder for Tyrone since high school and I had never carried a gun before, hell I'd never held a gun before.
"This ain't high school and these folks you gonna be sellin' to ain't gonna be no cracked out high schoolers. This is the big leagues. We're talkin' kilos now and don't give me that shit, you need the money, Kara's private school doesn't pay for itself."

I had taken the gun and Tyrone had taken a plane to some godforsaken airstrip in the jungle of Bolivia with thirty-three thousand dollars.
Thirty-three thousand of my dollars.
I had trusted him with a years worth of construction wages, a year and a half's worth of rent, two semesters of Guiding Light, Christian School for Girls where my darling Kara went, where I sent her so that she could get away from here, from Jupiter Apartments for at least eight hours a day.

Shaking myself out of deep thought I glanced at the door again. That was exactly one week ago.

One week.

I hadn't been able to leave the gun at home, for some reason I carried it with me everywhere. I walked with it solidly shoved into the front, then the back of my pants. One especially cold day I had walked about selling the soft white powder of my trade with the metal hand cannon nestled in the large front pocket of my gray sports hoodie. I loved and hated the way whenever I reached into the pocket I felt both the soft plastic bags as well as the unyielding metal of the steel beretta.

"Is someone out there?"
I jumped a little and the apple I had been washing repeatedly in the basin sink slipped out of my hands a bounced around the dull metal clanging with the sound of a hammer wrapped in a towel. I grimaced at the thought of the multiple bruises I had just inadvertently inflicted on my breakfast.
"What'd you say, Babe?" I picking up the apple and pulling the cooling Wacky Waffles out of the toaster.
"The door," Kara replied feigning an uncaring attitude towards the question as she sat down and poured cereal into her bowl. "You were staring at it, is somebody out there?"
"No, no ones out there," I sighed, "I was kind of expecting Uncle Tyrone to come see me last night after you went to bed."
"To bring you more of that stuff?" Kara asked, casual as can be. She was growing up, she was starting to look and more importantly she was starting to see all that was going on between the hands over her head. I couldn't help but pause, choking on words and thoughts but as her eyes leveled with mine I could tell she didn't really know what was going on, not yet. She was clever enough to know how to find out though and by my momentary pause she had probably learned more than she could have hoped from her clever little probe.
"No, just to visit. He's been out of town and I was hoping he would stop by after he got back." What do you know about 'that stuff?' I wanted to ask, Who told you about 'that stuff?' but instead I said simply, "Its no big deal, I'll probably see him while your at school today."
"Are you gonna get a new job soon?" She asked, truly innocent this time, "or you going to just sit around here and watch t.v. all day."
I smiled, and though she hid hers by tipping he cereal bowl upwards and drinking the last of her milk I could tell she was smiling too. Clever, smart and, though she hadn't quite grown into it yet, I could tell that she would eventually have my own dry wit. Delivering Cunning remarks that would leave their targets smiling and her brown eyes twinkling.
"Oh really?" I said, "Is that what I do all day?"
"Well, not all day," She shot back, turning up her nose, "You probably go out to eat somewhere for lunch."
"Hey, I got a question for you," I said pushing my chair back and smiling mischievously over the table. "Are you going to get in the shower and go to school like a good little girl or am I going to have to take you outside and rinse you off with the hose."
"I don't need a shower!" She shouted back at me, "Your the one that smells like a stinky pig!"
I chased her around the apartment laughing. She was growing up but thank god she wasn't grown. Not today at least.

The air in the second floor hallway was freezing as it always was, I looked forlornly at the black trash bag that covered the window at the end of the hall as it buffeted in the wind. Some young romeo had broken it last summer to go harass an ex-girlfriend, he'd been tenacious, I'd give him that. The barred first floor windows were usually enough to dissuade burglars but he had just climbed the fire escape.
Ah, young love.