The deflated basketball rolled unevenly to Kip Stone’s feet as he stepped out of the sheriff’s car, a vehicle he’d hoped would make him look more like the law and less like the lowly bean-counter he was. But maybe that had been a tactical error. The ball, too old and soft for anyone to have been playing with, had been thrown at him on purpose. Was that because he had arrived with the sheriff? Or because he was a white man in a cheap gray suit? Or just because? He arranged a neutral expression on his face as he scanned the sidewalk on the other side of the street. A row of girls, all dark legs and arms, leaned against a chain link fence and stared back at him. He lifted the briefcase strap to his shoulder like adjusting a rifle to his back and he got that Duc Pho feeling again. It never ends. Forty years of ferreting out VC in the village of his mind. Even the air was the same, so thick with humidity that every breath had a desperate, drowning edge to it. In Duc Pho it had been a yellowed animal skull -- he’d hoped it was animal -- that had rolled anonymously out from the crowd, and the stares of the rice farmers was that of these girls. Wary and antagonistic. The quiet was so explosive that even the dust on the ground seemed ready to ignite. That day did not end well. But what day ever did?

Sheriff Jimenez came around to his side of the car and gave the ball a kick in the girls’ direction where it came to rest in the littered gutter in front of them. They did not look down at it, but at him, appraising his person from the steel-toed shoes on his feet to the thin metal shield over his heart. He was not a large man. Some of them were taller.

“Be careful with that thing,” Jimenez called to them, making a show of taking control, but that’s all it was. A show. His collar was so tight he looked like he might choke, and under his blue reflective sunglasses, Kip could see that Jimenez was submissively averting his eyes. At first, Kip had been been relieved that Jimenez was assigned to accompany him into this neighborhood to deliver the default notice, but now he was not so sure. Jimenez was as dark-skinned as any of these girls, but maybe uniform trumped color. Or maybe it was the other way around.

“Let’s move it, Stone,” Jimenez said quietly as he clicked the doors behind them.

Kip nodded, and his glasses slipped down a notch on his nose from sweat as he examined the address on his clipboard, pretending he was not quite sure where he was. But he was all too sure. This was his third foreclosure in a month on this street. His boss, Sunny Howard, with his smarmy troops of mortgage brokers, appraisers, and builders, had fixed his sights on the neighborhood last year, and the homes were now going down like a row of dominos. Kip had hoped he could get away with a desk job at his age, but things were moving so fast in real estate these days he’d been put out on the field with all the other foot soldiers. At the end of the block was Carla’s, a lively bodega, the windows decorated with newspapers from the Dominican Republic. In three years’ time there would be a Starbucks in its place. Sunny called it “regime change.” Heh, heh. Good one.

“112-B,” said Kip, looking around, hoping not to find it. “A duplex, pale green siding.”

Jimenez pointed at a structure two doors down, on their side of the street. Thank the lord for small favors. They would not have to walk past the gauntlet of girls. Kip was just about ready to move along and get this massacre over with, when a protective instinct told him to turn and check out the house next to him. A large-headed woman in a red dashiki stood on the cement steps with her arms folded, her hands pressing the fleshy parts of her upper arms as she stared him down. If she’d had a gun, he would already be dead. So much for instinct. When Jimenez touched him on the shoulder to get a move on, he began to walk, his hand clutching the strap of the briefcase for safety. It was the middle of the day, and the white sun overhead seemed to intensify the noise around him. He heard the irregular stumble of his own shoes scuffing the sidewalk. A dog began to bark, but he could not figure out where the sound came from. Three girls played jump-rope farther down the street, the rope smacking the pavement in perfect rhythm to their song. Who knew kids still did that sort of thing? Not that this was some Dick and Jane primer. To his right, a plastic floral wreath hung crookedly on a telephone pole marking a drive-by shooting, on his left, rusty chain-link fences surrounded every other home like dugouts, and in the street, cars sat stripped and abandoned by the curb. One had been recently torched, a charred tin shell of its former self. But bright curtains hung in some of the windows and between a couple of the houses strips of gray dirt had been planted with tomatoes. Branches heavy with dusty green fruit were tied to the fences with snippets of pantyhose. Good-bye tomatoes. Goodbye jump rope. Goodby red dashiki on the stoop. Kip the destroyer was here. As Sunny liked to say, shifting his soft body in his ergonomically correct chair, it was a neighborhood ready for a renaissance. “Just not with these neighbors.” Heh, heh.

Kip kept his eyes on the ground as they tromped forward, one behind the other like a forced march, the cracked sidewalk too narrow for them to be abreast. Kip led the way and Jimenez, he hoped, was watching his back. He sensed that Jimenez was impatient with his speed, but it was hot and he had trouble breathing. Trees lined the street, but they were feathery ghetto species that never cast shade. That extra thirty pounds he was carrying around didn’t help. Once he was on his feet again he’d take care of that, start exercising, eat vegetables, stop drinking. It had been a bad stretch of unemployment, long enough to force him into this miserable job, a job fit for a thug, not an accountant. He was sent to explain to Mr. Perkins why he was about to lose his house, not out of any misplaced compassion, not to help Mr. Perkins understand and deal with this stunning loss in his life, but to make sure he didn’t. Sunny had insisted that Kip was the right man for the assignment because he had “a gift for turning the most basic task into a complicated maneuver.” He was the first line of defense in the battle of foreclosures, sent ahead to confuse the enemy, a sorry sort of counterintelligence. He had to convince the homeowner that there was no way out, that there was no use in trying to get another mortgage or loan, claiming that there were no legal reprieves, when in fact there were plenty. There wasn’t anything he didn’t know about trying to save a house. He’d lost his own in the pullback of the 80’s and then, as if they were part of a matched set, he lost his family. He never owned another house, but he had his son back -- or his son had him, at any rate. Last year, when Kip was living in a shelter, Bennett invited him to come sleep on his couch until he was back on his feet. So there he was, almost sixty and living on mercy, the two of them in a single studio, watching bad TV and eating out of containers like feral animals. He was going to make this job work no matter how repulsive it got.

“There he is,” said Jimenez. "They always seem to know we’re coming.”

Kip groaned. Mr. Perkins stood on his porch, as solid and immovable as an old mountain, staring at them. The house seemed to fit itself around him, as if they’d been built together. Like Perkins, it was solid, a handsome American duplex, but it was worn down by poverty. The dirty green siding was chipped along the edges, the aluminum storm windows were buckled and cracked. Yet it had a certain dignity. From the files, Kip knew that Perkins had owned it for thirty years, bought with a down payment of $1500 in 1975. He had been able to buy because the area was so bad back then no one wanted it, not even the slumlords. The house was paid off in 1999, free and clear, until Sunny set his sites on the street. Now it seemed likely that Mr. Perkins would lose the house to him, and Perkins would get nothing from a lifetime of work but a bad credit rating. It was the American Dream, only backwards and upside down.

“Mr. Delray Perkins?” said Kip. It was a struggle to talk. No air was making headway to his lungs. His first asthma attack had been in Nam, and he always associated exerting his authority with suffocation.

"That’s me," Perkins said. His hands were at his side, sure, muscular hands, hands that had probably spent a lifetime being useful in the world.

“I’m here to deliver some papers,” said Kip, and he didn’t recognize his own voice. A mosquito buzzed his ear like a small plane but he did not want to appear weak by brushing it away. “I’d like you to sign for them, if you would.” Kip didn’t need a signature, but if there was any trouble down the road, it was sure nice to have one. Sometimes they signed out of shock. It was amazing what people did in the face of trauma.

The dry skinfolds around Mr. Perkins’ eyes wrinkled as he looked at Kip then Jimenez, and back again. Kip heard a low hum of chatter across the street. The girls had traveled the street with them, staying on their side like a parallel reality. A gray car with a smashed-in driver’s side rattled by. Bus brakes screeched over on the main drag, two blocks away. With Jimenez behind him, Kip opened the metal gate and inched up the walk, holding the foreclosure papers ahead of him. Perkins reached out and took them from him. His expression did not change as he shuffled them in his massive hands. He looked up at Kip, his jaw stiff. “What does this mean? In default? I’m two payments late. You going to take man’s home on two payments late?”

“Three,” said Kip. “You’re three payments late today. He felt Jimenez flick his finger on his back to go. It was an unpleasant touch, and Kip realized that Jimenez hated him, ashamed to be here with him. As if he had a choice. As if any of them did. You did what you had to do. It was a matter of survival.

“Mr. Perkins,” said Kip, ignoring Jimenez. “It’s what you agreed to when you signed the mortgage.”

“I was just fixing the house,” said Mr. Perkins, his voice losing some of its strength. “The man said I had to have a new roof or I’d lose the building.”

Kip shook his head in sympathy. Have a new roof and lose the building was more like it. He stepped back to look at the peaked roof, where a handful of thin asphalt shingles had been hammered over the old ones. The wooden steps in front of him were new, but the boards had been left unpainted and were beginning to pull away from their nails. It was the handiwork of Arnie and his crew, Sunny’s men who had worked the neighborhood last year, posing as repairmen. Kip knew the drill. Arnie was the thin wedge. In a beat up Toyota pick-up and a Carhartt jacket, he drove around a target neighborhood, chatting with homeowners, saying he was looking for work, going door to door, pointing out faults in the foundations, rotting stiles, missing shingles, crumbling chimneys, spinning tales of what they were losing, that their house was their investment and they had to take care of it. Letting it rot was letting their retirement rot. No money? You own your home? Arnie had a friend. We’ll fix up your home until it shines, and you’ll walk away with money in your pocket. No, not a loan from a stranger, a loan from yourself. Your house is your bank.

Arnie had many friends. A full battalion. Not just a loan officer from a flea-bag mortgage company, but an appraiser as well, who put a grossly exaggerated price on this modest home, pulling more money out of it than it was worth. When redlining was still legal this neighborhood would have been underscored twice. The answer to that, according to Sunny, was to buy the neighborhood, older folk first. Mr. Perkins, for example, was probably at or near retirement, with his earning days behind him. When the offer was made, he signed and gave the money over to Arnie for repairs. The rates were sub-prime, the fees criminal. Technically it was a legal loan but there was no way Perkins could have ever made those payments. The house was ready to fall. These people didn’t have a chance.

“Would you like me to go over the paperwork with you so you can understand?” Kip asked. It was time to convince him that there was no reprieve. One dog, then another, began to bark from inside the house. He stared at Mr. Perkins and tried very hard to hold his gaze, to not look away, to pretend not be another in a long line of white men selling a rotten set of goods.

“So I can understand why you’re stealing my house?” Mr. Perkins’ face was stretched so tight Kip could imagine bone pressing up against the skin.

Red dashiki left her position on the porch and was moving down the sidewalk towards them with a waddle that made her outfit sway like a flag. Her eyes were focussed on him. The girls began softly tapping their feet to some unsung song. “If you’ll let me, I can explain ...” Kip paused. If he started explaining there would be no stopping him. He’d tell Perkins the avenues to take right now to put this straight, if at all possible -- stays of execution, legal protection -- but if he did that he’d explain his way right out of a job. And it had been a long stretch of bad road. He had to do what he was sent to do, as always. “But at the end of the day, Mr. Perkins, I’ve got this court order. You have to vacate. The county has set a date for the auction.”

Kip was aware that as he’d been talking, a few more neighbors had moved from their stoops or away from their curtained windows and had begun to edge closer to them. Jimenez stepped up to Kip. “Let’s go, Stone,” he said, fingering his collar to free a bit of a neck. “You’ve done your job.”

“Hey,” called a teenage boy running down the sidewalk. “You. What you doing?”

The girls across the street started making sweet whistling sounds, like tropical birds, and whispered “Lanh, Lanh, Lanh.” Kip was startled. It was a Vietnamese name, and he stared at the boy as he came closer. He was dark, but his eyes were Asian. A mix. Too young to be one of the thousands of Amerasians left behind after the fall of Saigon. The child of an immigrant and a local? He was dressed in the uniform of his street, oversized pants, hooded sweatshirt, earring in lobe. The hood was down, exposing a perfectly round head with a paramilitary cut. He stared Kip up and down. “You bothering Mr. Perkins here?”

“This is a private business,” Kip said, summoning his little bit of dignity. But it was not private, and he knew it. It was a very public business, the taking of a man’s home and the destruction of a neighborhood. Kip began to force his clipboard into his thin leather briefcase and felt like a fool.

“Stone, you’re not following the plan,” said Jimenez quietly. “This usually just takes a minute. You hand them the paper, you go. Now we’re attracting too much notice.” He rested his hand on the gun in his belt, a none too subtle reminder of just who was in charge. The hum of the girls rose in excitement. Kip saw a crow pass overhead and land on the roof. It stared at them as if sizing up the situation. Beneath the bird, under the eaves, was a satellite dish. There might have been a few hundreds dollars left over from the refinancing and the repairs, and Arnie probably encouraged Perkins to buy himself a dish and maybe a big flat TV. He probably sold it to him. It was all so repulsive. Kip wondered if Sunny had gone so far as to commit fraud.

“Have you any family, Mr. Perkins?” Kip asked.

“Family? What you talking? You looking to evict them too? Get it all over with. One, two, three.”

And on the last word he slapped the palm of his hand with the papers, and the sound made Kip step back. For the first time he looked at the other side of the duplex and saw two old women peeking out the window at him. A calico cat was curled on the sill between them. When Sunny owned Mr. Perkins’ side of the house, he would make it worth their while to leave too, or make their lives a living hell. The three girls who had been playing jump-rope joined the crowd, one of them holding the loop of rope like an old-time lariat. “Round’em up,” she shouted, which sparked unfriendly laughter. Dogs seemed to be barking and pulling against their chains from all around him, and yet he didn’t see a single one.

“I’m going,” said Jimenez, openly irritated with Kip now, a strategy probably meant to endear him to the neighbors.

Kip knew enough not be left behind so when Jimenez made a move to the gate, he did too, but the group only shuffled without getting out of the way. Where was air when you needed it? Since he could not get out, he turned, ready to appease. “Maybe you can contact the borough president, Mr. Perkins, see if there’s some sort of help for people like you.”

“People like me don’t have no president wanting to help,” said Mr. Perkins. “Men, they keep coming by, asking if I need money, did I know I was heading for foreclosure? I got no official word, yet all these people know my business?”

Kip nodded in sympathy, as if they were all on the same side. It was just more of the same scam. Companies, probably part of Sunny’s empire, that “saved” you from foreclosure, but in fact, just had you transfer the house to them for “protection” and then it was theirs without all the bother of an auction. Once again, it was legal, if unethical. Really, anything was legal if you could convince someone to agree to it in writing. Maybe even murder. If you could get someone to agree to be killed, and have it notarized, would it still be a crime?

Lanh blocked the gate. Kip felt sweat run down his spine and wished he’d worn a hat. His chest hurt, and he could no longer talk. He wished they’d just mob him and be done with it. He looked at Lanh. “Is there,” he started, not sure where he was going. “Is there a Vietnamese community around here?”

Lanh paused and crossed his arms. “Why? You want to start stealing our houses too?”

“Beautiful,” said Kip softly. “It was the most beautiful country.”

Lanh’s mouth twisted and he looked away. “My mother cries,” he said. “She asks, why am I here?” He seemed lost for a moment, and Kip thought he could slip on by, but no. Lanh held him with a stare. “Why don’t you and your bodyguard go explain her life to her. Isn’t that your job?”

“Excuse us,” said Sheriff Jimenez taking a step forward to indicate that the crowd was to step back. He was not excused. Lanh raised his chin and did not move. It was not like the Vietnamese to fight openly, thought Kip, but he was far from his mother’s home. Red dashiki moved in closer. The girls crossed the street towards them in a phalanx. The neighbors tightened the circle. Kip couldn’t breathe and did not know where to put his eyes. Just when he thought Jimenez might have to shoot their way out -- and there was no guarantee he’d take him along -- a woman came trotting down the street holding brochures and papers over her head, like some hard-won prize. It was Mrs. Adams, the woman he gave a default order to last week. A few people moved back to let her get closer to Mr. Perkins. “The HUD people,” she said, panting as she slowed. “They say hold on. They say maybe it’s not too late.”

“HUD?” asked the red dashiki, folding her bare arms against her chest. “One suit’s going to fix the mistakes of another?”

As the crowd’s attention turned towards Mrs. Adams to hear what she had to say, Jimenez pushed Kip roughly out of the circle and onto the street towards their car.

“Government watchdogs,” Kip said under his struggling breath. “It’s too late.” Now that the houses were falling, now they come door to door to warn them about MH Mortgage Company, and any other company, financial or construction, that came offering money to fix their homes. They might help a few of these people escape but you can’t stall the inevitable. Once the process had gone this far things could be delayed, but there was no turning back. HUD would never be able to save these people, but they certainly saved him and Jimenez. They were good for something. He heard Lanh call out to him. “You run, you white coward,” said Lanh. “Hit and run. Run and hide.” The basketball struck Kip’s heel with a painless thud and Jimenez pushed him forward to the car, and neither looked back. All he could hear was barking and his breath. They were practically sprinting. Kip’s lungs were rocks in his chest and dust rose all around them. He felt the muscled fist of his heart fighting to keep up, and he told it to hold on, hold on, the car was just right here. He felt like he’d failed in his duty, but it was just a temporary retreat, because he knew the big guns were coming in. It was a neighborhood on the way up, and Sunny would crush the breath out of every living soul on the block if he had to to fulfill his vision. He would destroy the village in order to save it. They were coming. They were already on their way.