They say it's lonely in New York City. Millions of strangers rub alongside, jostle on the subway, oblivious to the travails of their neighbour. Hope, quiet despair, joy and devastation patter the skyscraper windows and form puddles along the streets. Commuters in their raincoats shake the splash from their shoes and ankles, irritated. In Manhattan there's every type of person, from the unlucky scraping an existence - they don't think about tomorrow - to CEOs operating global corporate giants that keep the religion of the twentieth century, Capitalism, and its twin sister Consumerism, chugging and choking along.
Now someone is looking at this through a lens with a bullet and deciding who no longer gets to continue.
It's not safe to be outside but no one has a choice.
The sniper's victims are random, unconnected. They had futures. They had families. Could it be me, some ask themselves. Am I next?
Many panic. They arrive at work flustered and stressed: relieved that they made it, frightened that they have to go home at the end of the day and face the risk again. They talk about it in the office. They look outside, up, up, up, to the highest windows; they assess the surrounding buildings. Where could it be coming from?
Others roll their eyes. Some tell their colleagues to stop being so dramatic. Life is risk, they say, cold. Just two people in a city of eight million have been killed. You're probably more likely to be hit by lightning, they say.
In bars, before midday, some mutter under their breath that they wish they could sniper several people they know.
The cops will catch him, some declare confident while others breathe it in hope. They all have faith. They must have faith.
Most make it through the day.
Let us move away from the streets, the offices, the bars. Let us see one of these cops, the crusaders appointed to keep them safe.
It is night. Inside her unlit apartment, the outside invades like a sonic tornado. Car horns blare. Tyres screech. A funeral bell tolls.
A gunshot cracks.
She yelps as she ducks, falling from the couch and knocking over the coffee table. A glass smashes.
Blood gushes as a blade slices. A hand reaches into her heart. A monitor flatlines.
She crashes to the blinds to close them and scrabbles, oblivious, through the glass for her gun. She retreats to a corner, her back to the wall. Thick blood runs down her arm.
Sweat pours down her back. She pants. The hard heel of her palm presses to her chest, to the bullet scar. She thumps it, over and over. It's not real. It's over. The sniper is not here. She's alone.
Her head pounds.
A wave of bourbon breezes past her nostrils and recalls the burn at the back of her throat. She needs more of it.
Detective Kate Beckett crawls on shaking hands and knees back to the near-empty bottle, sprawled amongst the mess on the hardwood floor.
A sting makes her hiss and pull up onto her haunches. Through blurred eyes she stares at her hand. A small square piece of glass presses lightly on the soft pad beneath her thumb. Numb and curious, she lifts it away and draws her hand close to her face. The glass has left a dappled imprint but no cut.
Beckett sees the rivulets of deep red now. A clean cut carved along her arm just above her wrist. Strange, she can't feel it. Whilst her head sways gently on her neck, she puts together that a cut like that on the other side of the wrist, by her artery, could have been fatal.
With effort, through the mess of her hair she refocuses past her hand. There is glass everywhere.
Using only the muscles in her thighs and the spring from her ankles she manages to rock herself to standing. Her feet are bare. She cranes her neck left and right. The room spins. Beckett reaches out to an imaginary wall to steady herself. She will have to tiptoe across the floor.
She makes it unscathed to the couch. She flops back and throws the uninjured arm across her eyes.
She will deal with the mess in the morning. Tomorrow she will go back out there, and she will make this city safe again. She is Detective Kate Beckett and however frightened she is nothing will stop her.