The drive was uneventful, but I pulled up in front of my house warily scouting the street around me. Satisfied that I could safely make it to the front door, I grabbed the package from under my seat and the bag of food, locked my car—not that it would do much good with a missing window—opened my front door, and stepped into the safety of my house.

I lived on the third floor of an old triple-decker, in a neighborhood that seemed to be slowly getting its act together. Surveys indicated that crime had been declining there for a couple of years. All well and good, but if I was being targeted specifically, I think that fell outside the parameters of any surveys. I decided that I should warn my neighbors not to blindly buzz anyone in. Not that I had to worry. For completely different reasons, neither one of them would be likely to do so.

Mo—short for Molly—lived in the first floor apartment. I wasn't concerned about her. A radical lesbian in her mid-thirties, she was a third– or fourth-degree black belt something-or-other—in some martial art I had never heard of—who worked out constantly and could probably snap me in half in a millisecond. Rumor had it that she had suffered some traumatic abuse at the hands of a guy many years before. That didn't cause her to become a lesbian, just a radical one. For some reason though, she liked me—much to my relief.

Seymour lived on the second floor and was a recluse. He left his apartment as little as possible. He wasn't agoraphobic. He just didn't like people. He was six-foot-four and couldn't have weighed more than 160 pounds. He was older—probably hovering around fifty—and was a general sourpuss. But again, somehow I made it on his short-list of people he could tolerate. He ate pizza for almost every meal. No exaggeration. And he wasn't fussy. He switched off between deliveries and frozen pizza, and quite often made it from scratch. I would have hated to see what his insides looked like.

Seymour ran an eBay business from home. He had some sort of knack for buying items on eBay and then reselling them at an enormous profit. I once asked him how he did it, and he replied that it all had to do with the description. He looked for items that were described poorly, and as such, didn't sell for much. When he was done writing his own listing of the same item, it sounded like he was selling the Queen's jewels. He didn't write anything that was untrue or misleading, he just had a way with words. He would never indiscriminately unlock the front door if the buzzer went off, but since he was always getting deliveries from UPS, the mail carrier, or from countless pizza delivery guys, I would definitely have to warn him.

It was late, so I would call them both from work in the morning. I climbed the three flights and inspected the outside of my door before unlocking it. It looked fine. I also had a fire escape off my kitchen, but I really wasn't too worried since, as with my father's house, I had an alarm system in place. Since I hadn't heard from the alarm company, I could be reasonably sure everything was fine.