The way the sun set so early in November made Dianthea wary when she left the precinct alone at night, leaving the squad car with her partner. Silly though it felt to be police, with a badge, a peaked hat with a checkered band and a gun to prove it, and be afraid to walk home alone at night. But Dianthea wasn't a tough guy.

She had to cross the damn Fourth Street bridge to get the bus, a lonely quiet walk that made her feel like someone might snatch her off the street at any second, except she didn't know where anyone would come from; it was all empty parking lots, closed stores and the bay under the bridge.

The ten-minute drive made for a thirty-seven-minute bus ride and walk at this hour, and she was astonished as ever that every single bus in this city, no matter the hour or the route, was always without fail packed. Standing room only. A combination of fellow passengers including old Chinese ladies, Millennials heading to the bar, Millennials coming home from the bar, and people who looked like they might shank you, either because they were unsavory or just because they were mentally ill in a city unable to take care of its people.

Dianthea stood for twenty-four minutes on the bus, surfing the abrupt throes, starts, and stops, fighting to make room for herself with some semblance of personal space and some level of ability to see the people around her and keep tabs on those most likely to pull a knife. She moved out of the way every time someone needed to get off from the front of the bus out the middle doors, creating a great shuffle that put Dianthea back where she had been before but surrounded by a completely new and different crowd of potential shankers.

At 6:09, she got off the bus, safe and unharmed, without any stab wounds. She dispensed with the alert, over the shoulder glances and tabs on shadowy figures as she started the three-minute walk toward her beer fridge at the top of Leavenworth Street in the safe Russian Hill neighborhood. The mantra "Crime doesn't climb" played in her head with each step up the vertically slanted sidewalk. Maybe that only applied to the starving homeless criminals.

One block from her apartment, just two driveways past the brightly lit and pedestrian-filled intersection of Leavenworth and Filbert, two pairs of hands came out from a garage walkway behind her. One hand firmly covered her mouth, and the other three picked her up swiftly and pulled her back into the shadows.

Dianthea screamed into the muffling meaty hand over her mouth and kicked viciously with both of her legs. She aimed for shins or balls or anything she could get until one hand left its bruising hold on her upper arm and came up with a gun, which pressed, cold and metallic and hard, against the back of her neck. She stopped struggling.

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