Tobi Miller stood near a sourdough bread stand in Fisherman's Wharf, letting the crowd flow around him like water around a stone. He wasn't eating. Wasn't shopping. His eyes moved with mechanical patience, cataloging wallets, purses, distraction levels.
A family of four: mother wrestling a stroller, father checking his phone. Too complicated.
Two college girls taking selfies with the sea lions, purses clutched too tight. Not worth the hassle.
An older couple sharing clam chowder. Nothing visible, nothing accessible.
Then he saw him.
Mid-forties. Hawaiian shirt that screamed tourist louder than any souvenir flag. Cargo shorts with bulging pockets. The man stood with his back to the crowd, leaning against the railing, filming the sea lions with his phone held in both hands. His worn brown leather wallet sat in his right rear pocket. It poked out like an invitation. Like a handshake waiting to happen.
Tobi moved.
Three years of this had taught him the rhythm. Walk like you belong, don't rush. The crowd parted around him without noticing, because there was nothing to notice. Just another body in a sea of bodies. Just another tourist drawn toward the same attraction as everyone else.
The salt spray hit his face as he closed the distance. Seagulls shrieked overhead, fighting for scraps near the trash cans. A vendor shouted about fresh Dungeness crab, five dollars cheaper than the place next door. Somewhere a child was crying. All of it was texture. Background noise. His focus narrowed to a single point: the brown leather rectangle protruding from khaki fabric.
Eight feet. Six. Four.
He adjusted his trajectory, angling to pass the man's right side. His left shoulder would brush close. Just close enough for an excuse me, his usual mumbled apology. His right hand hung loose at his side, fingers relaxed, ready.
Two feet.
Contact.
"Sorry," Tobi murmured, his shoulder bumping the tourist's arm. The man shifted, still focused on his phone, barely acknowledging the intrusion. In that moment of contact, Tobi's fingers moved with the precision of a surgeon; his thumb and two fingers pinching the wallet's edge, a smooth upward pull, a transfer to his own pocket that happened faster than a blink. The motion was invisible.
He kept walking.
Ten steps. Twenty. The wallet sat against his thigh, a comfortable weight, a familiar weight. His heart rate held steady at sixty-five beats per minute, maybe seventy. Nothing that would show on his face, nothing that would register in his gait.
The take would be maybe two hundred dollars if he was lucky. Credit cards were useless, way too traceable. The cash was what mattered. Always the cash.
His mind was already running the calculations as he drifted toward the edge of the crowd. Rent was fourteen hundred, due in six days. He had eight hundred saved. Today's score would put him at a thousand, maybe a thousand fifty if he was lucky. That left three hundred and fifty to cover before Friday. Three more lifts, four if the marks were lean.
Food was secondary, rice and beans costing twelve dollars a week if he bought in bulk from the bodega on the corner. Ramen packets were cheaper but they made him sluggish, all that sodium bloating his fingers. He needed his fingers sharp; they were his primary asset.
The crowd thinned as he approached the western edge of the wharf. The smell of frying fish gave way to diesel fumes from the tour boats. A homeless man sat against a pillar, his cup extended and his eyes vacant. Tobi dropped a dollar in without breaking stride. A professional courtesy he liked to call it. They were in the same business, more or less.
Then the shout.
"My wallet! Someone took my—"
Tobi didn't look back. Looking back was how you got identified and remembered. He maintained his pace, maybe increased it by five percent, nothing that would stand out. Just a man heading somewhere with a purpose.
"Security! Someone call security!"
The crowd reacted like a living organism, heads turning toward the commotion, bodies shifting to see what was happening. Tobi used the distraction to angle left, toward the alley opening between the souvenir shop and the seafood restaurant. His mental map was already three steps ahead. Left down the alley, right at the dumpsters, through the gap in the chain-link fence, out onto Jefferson Street.
He caught movement in his peripheral vision. Two security guards in navy windbreakers, pushing through the crowd from the east. Their radios crackled with static and urgent voices. They hadn't spotted him yet. They were responding to the shout, not tracking a suspect.
He had maybe fifteen seconds.
The alley mouth swallowed him, brick walls rising on either side, the sudden shade a relief after the harsh noon sun. His footsteps quickened now that he was out of sight. The smell of rotting fish guts and old grease replacing the clean salt air.
Behind him, one of the guards was probably asking the tourist for a description. Hawaiian shirt would say something vague. Young man, dark hair, average height. That description fit half the people on the wharf.
The wallet was already warming against his thigh, the leather soft from years of use.
Now it was his.
The alley twisted left, then right, a concrete intestine winding between buildings that hadn't seen renovation since the seventies. Tobi's footsteps echoed off walls papered with peeling concert posters and spray-painted tags he didn't bother to read. He knew these passages better than most people knew their own apartments. Three years of running these routes had mapped every dumpster, every loose cobblestone, every gap in every fence.
He was the distance of two blocks clear when he heard it: the crackle of a radio way closer than it should be. Tobi slowed, cocked his head. Another crackle, sharper now, bouncing off brick. His stomach tightened. They'd split up.
The guards were behind him. He could hear their radios and clipped voices, coordination being relayed. They'd called for backup. That was unexpected. The Wharf security usually gave up after a block or two, not worth the paperwork for a wallet theft.
Not today apparently.
He cut right down a narrower passage, squeezing between a wall and an opened dumpster that smelled of week-old seafood. The stench hit his throat and he breathed through his mouth, pushing forward.
A memory surfaced uninvited.
The apartment. Three days after his mother stopped breathing. He'd sat in the dark because the power was already off, listening to the silence where her voice used to be. The fridge still hummed on its last reserves. Her bedroom door was closed and he hadn't opened it, hadn't looked, hadn't done anything except sit and count the hours until someone noticed.
Gone.
He shook the image away. Not now. Not here.
His lungs were starting to burn. The chase had covered more ground than he'd anticipated, and he'd been skipping meals again. Two days of nothing but black coffee and a gas station sandwich were taking it's toll. His body was running on fumes, his legs heavy, sweat stinging his eyes.
"He went this way!"
Close. Too close.
Tobi pushed harder, his sneakers slapping against cracked concrete. Another left turn. The passage opened into a small courtyard with fire escapes on three sides, trash cans clustered in the corner, a single flickering security light that nobody had bothered to replace. The building on the right had a roof access that connected to Jefferson Street.
He sprinted across the courtyard.
His foot caught something; a loose cobblestone jutting up from the ground like a broken tooth. His ankle twisted, his body pitching forward. For one awful instant he was airborne, arms pinwheeling, the ground rushing up to meet his face.
He caught himself against a dumpster. His palms slamming hard into rusted metal, pain lanced up his wrist. He tasted blood where he'd bitten his tongue. But he was upright and moving in seconds.
Another memory, this one older.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor of that same apartment, years later, counting coins by lamplight. The same ritual he performed every sunday night. Separating quarters from dimes from nickels from pennies, stacking them into towers, calculating how many days each stack represented.
His father had left when Tobi was seven. His mother had died when he was sixteen. The apartment remained, haunted by their absence, until the landlord finally threw him out at eighteen. It's been Nine years of counting coins. Nine years of never having enough.
The fire escape was there. Right where he remembered it.
Old iron, painted black decades ago, the paint now flaking off in scales like diseased skin. The bottom ladder was retracted, hanging about eight feet off the ground; a theft deterrent that had probably worked in the eighties.
Tobi jumped.
His fingers caught the lowest rung. The metal was cold and rough with rust. His arms and wrist screamed as he pulled himself up, feet scrambling for purchase against the brick wall. The ladder groaned under his weight, a low metallic complaint that echoed through the courtyard.
He got his feet on the first rung. Started climbing.
Behind him, voices. The guards had found the courtyard. Two of them, maybe three. Their flashlights swept across the space, beams cutting through the shadows.
"There! On the fire escape!"
Tobi climbed faster. The iron steps clanged under his feet, each impact sending vibrations through the entire structure. The building was old, built pre-war, probably, back when they built things to last. But nothing lasted forever.
Second floor. Third floor. His entire body protested the pace. The prized wallet was still in his pocket, maybe two hundred dollars of someone else's money that would buy him another week of existence.
Fourth floor.
The bolt gave way.
It happened without warning. One moment he was climbing, hand reaching for the next rung, feet solid on the platform. The next moment the world shifted. A screech of metal sounded; high and terrible like an animal dying. The fire escape lurched away from the wall, bolts tearing free from brick that had held them for a century.
Time did something strange.
It stretched. Elongated. He saw the rust flakes floating in the air around him, caught in the security light like orange snow. He saw his own hands, still reaching for a rung that was no longer there. He saw the courtyard below, the concrete, the trash cans, the guards frozen in the act of looking up.
Then time snapped back.
He fell hard.
The impact was catastrophic. His left leg hit first, the femur snapping with a sound like a dry branch. Then his hip. Then his shoulder. His skull bounced off concrete and the world exploded into absolute white, erasing everything.
Pain followed.
It wasn't pain like he'd ever known. It was pain that existed in colors, in sounds, in dimensions he couldn't name. For those few seconds he felt his entire body in terrible clarity. His spine was wrong. His ribs were wrong. Something inside him was leaking, hot and wet, spreading beneath his back.
He tried to breathe but he couldn't.
The wallet was still in his pocket. He could feel it pressing against his thigh, the leather warm from his body heat. Two hundred dollars. Minus the three-fifty he still needed for rent. The math didn't work. The math never worked.
His vision tunneled.
The security light above him became a pinpoint. The guards were shouting something. Calling for an ambulance, maybe, or just calling his name as if he had one worth knowing. Their voices stretched and warped, becoming sounds without meaning.
Darkness rushed in from all sides, filling the spaces where his thoughts used to be. No final revelation. No life flashing before his eyes. Just the slow collapse of everything, the gradual subtraction of sensation and memory and self.
The last thing he felt was the wallet.
Two hundred dollars.
Not enough.
Never enough.
Then nothing at all.