A man slowly poked his head out the door of an unmarked specialty porn establishment. He looked up and down the street and, seeing no one, quickly exited the shop and walked, firmly and purposefully in his blue blazer and tan slacks, to his nearby car. Firmly and purposefully. He'd heard somewhere that people would leave you alone if you walked firmly and purposefully, like you knew where you were going.

Reaching his car, he fished the keys out of his pocket, and he could hear a kind of mewling noise in a nearby alley, as if a small kitten were hurt.

Then a voice, in a loud whisper: "Billy, damn it! You've gotta cry softer."

Another voice: "But it hurts, Cal. It hurts so much."

"I'm sorry Billy. I'll get you some pills soon. But you gotta shut up."

The man in the blue blazer wanted no part of whatever was going on in that alley. He fumbled for the right key, and jammed it straight into the lock.

Sirens blared. He had forgotten to turn the alarm off. Frantically, he found the appropriate button on his keychain and poked it several times. The sirens stopped.

And then it was like a brick wall fell on him from behind. He was slammed against his car, his head bouncing off the roof, his chest pressed into the driver-side window.

"Give me your fucking keys." It was the voice from the alley. The mean one.

He slid his hand - the one holding the keys - very slowly out from where it was jammed between his stomach and the car door. The keys scratched his belly as he dragged them out. He stretched his arm backward, and dropped the keys on the sidewalk.

His attacker pulled away slightly to pick up the keys, and as soon as the main bulk of the weight shifted off of his back, the man in the blue blazer tried to run.

He didn't get very far. A big hand clamped his shoulder, and he was thrown to the ground. He wriggled around, instinctively, and saw that his attacker was a huge, square-jawed man with spiked blonde hair. This guy was built like a professional wrestler, smelled like sewage, and had fresh blood smeared across the front of his filthy grey t-shirt.

He barely heard the guy say: "Where you goin', bitch?"

The fear was a pounding in his head that wouldn't let him think of anything except that his wife thought he was working late tonight, and how was he going to explain the dirt on his clothes?

He didn't even have time to consider the possibility of impending death before something very strange happened. Someone attacked his attacker.

A white hand wrapped in black cloth seemed to materialize right out of the night air, slapping the dirty blonde man hard alongside the head from behind.

"Just so you know," said a soft voice in the dark, "that's NOT how we treat people in this neighborhood, darling."

The owner of the white hand was covered entirely in heavy, dark fabric. The man in the blue blazer thought it looked kind of like those robes the Arab women wore on TV . . . burpas or whatever they were called.

The blonde carjacker cocked a fist, but paused when a single finger, white as bone, emerged from the robes and rocked back and forth in the air like an upside-down pendulum.

"Uh uh uh," said the voice. "Don't even try it. My last nerve has already been worked today. Mary Mae has SPENT her twenty-four hour store of patience, child, let me TELL you, and all she's got left to offer a big, pushy stranger like you is two truck-loads of extra-strength bulk-rate whoop-ass, let God be my witness. So mind your manners or meet your maker. Your choice, Blondie."

The carjacker cocked his fist again, but another figure came out of the night, a skinny boy of about sixteen or seventeen, and threw himself on the blonde bruiser's arm.

"Don't Cal. Please don't. Don't do this. Look at her."

"God dammit, Billy . . ." But the blonde man looked again, as did the man on the ground in the now-rumpled blue blazer.

Two white hands emerged to re-arrange the dark veil so that the face underneath could be seen. A white face . . . either albino or heavily made-up. A white starched band encompassed the face. The veil, it was now clear, was meant to fall smoothly to either side of the head.

The hands came to rest before the figure's chest, clasped lightly together in a gesture of prayer.

Cal was about to punch a nun.

A nun with clown-white skin . . . and a beautifully manicured, rust-colored beard and moustache.