The thing that scared Andy Frost most that day was the parking.

The crime rate didn't bother him. Everyone he knew had been mugged at one time or another.

Among New Yorkers, it was sort of a twisted badge of honor. In fact, it wasn't uncommon for people to invent stories of violence for the daily water-cooler competition.

The people themselves didn't frighten him, though the Christmas crowds had a tendency to get on his nerves. Everyone had a touch of agoraphobia at one time or another, but not Gothamites. When you were raised in a ten-story walk-up like a nest of rabbits in a squalid hutch with a hundred other human dregs screaming and pounding through the walls and ceiling and floor all hours of the day and night, you learned to live with overcrowding. You complained about it, sure.

Constantly. But you lived with it.

Yes, the murder rate was high. So what? Everyone died in his or her time. Here people were killed over stuff as trivial as a pair of sneakers or a leather jacket. What, they didn't have murders in Wiscon-sin? Facing down the business end of a gun didn't worry Andy. And it was a trade—a high per capita murder rate in exchange for all-night drugstores, fresh bagels on demand and the chance to see Cats or Evita or a dozen other shows seven nights a week.

The other fearful things of everyday life in the city were too numerous to mention. You had to deal with Con Edison, rabid rats, cockroaches the size of ashtrays, greedy landlords if you weren't lucky enough to benefit from rent control and about a million foreign cabbies who seemed to have learned their driving skills behind the wheel of a Kuwaiti bumper car.