EPTTo Bill, this was yet another Friday. Fridays were like Mondays, like Sundays - they were all for forgetting yesterday, forgetting that even though Presidents and Mayors and the names of buildings had changed, he was still sitting on the same bench between the same two streetlamps on the same stretch of Lincoln Park.
Someone cast a shadow on his spot. Bill pretended not to notice. To anyone else walking through at this hour, he was just another hobo hogging on yet another spot, and they were just another mark with a dime to spare.
Even though it was late and he was tired, he put on his game face and sized her up. Not too tall, coltish gait, black evening dress a little rumpled, leopard print and tiger stripe stockings, barefoot and holding two high heels in a manicured left hand. Probably some DePaul coed making her way back from a party. Broke college kid, but still worth a shot. He took out a small plastic cup which he never drank from, jingled the coins in it around.
"Hey lady, I got a buck seventy five here, could you get me fifty cents so I can take the CTA?"
She stopped in the middle of the pool of light.
"Lady?"
"Get the fuck away from me."
Bill shrugged with the kind of practiced movement that came from thirteen years of panhandling.
The lady still stood there, ginger hair flashing under the tangerine glow of the sodium lamps, not moving a muscle.
Then, a single tear rolled down her cheeks.
"Why... why won't you get away..."
Then she started to move. Haltingly, she walked backwards, found the streetlamp, clutched it, and began to shake. It was at this point Bill noticed that both her stockings were leopard print, and the one that looked like a tiger stripe was actually torn.
Bill didn't say anything. For a moment, he thought of banshees, the kind that his grandfather used to imitate around the campfire. But she was crying, not screaming, and it wasn't as if he had any bereavement she could forewarn him about, since all his living relatives pretended he didn't exist.
Anyhow, she was probably drunk and crazy, Bill thought. Her friends would find her in the morning and that would be it. He closed his eyes, prepared to fall asleep, when he was suddenly awoken by actual screaming - but it was a man, not a woman.
"There you are, you little bitch!"
A man in a hideously-colored citrus blazer and jeans was wrestling with her; she was trying to push one of his arms away. Something flashed gold beneath the streetlight.
A gun. She was pushing it away from her face.
"Trying to hide, huh? You've been teasing me for months. Now I'm going to get what's mine."
Bill's legs moved of their own volition. The next few seconds popped by like minutes on a broken clock. His shoulder hit the man's ribs; they went sprawling, something clattered to the ground. Fists landed on Bill; he fishhooked a finger into a mouthful of perfect teeth. The man screamed for help.
Then the night sky broke like an instant sunrise and Bill found his ears ringing. His right arm was sticky all the way up to the elbow. He held it up in disbelief.
Then a set of manicured fingers pressed something into his outstretched palm. It was hard, cold, circular, and flat.
"There. You needed fifty cents, right?"
He turned to answer, but she was gone, running barefoot through the grass. He opened his fingers and looked down: a diamond ring, burning with the fire of a thousand streetlamps.
Sirens. His hearing returned. Then he looked down, saw the gun and the body on the grass, and realized he had the man's ring in his possession.
For the rest of the year, the bench was very lonely.
