Long shots don't always pan out the way you hoped. Sometimes they catch fire. Sometimes they mug you.

Shauna McGarry, a TV writer who can't shake her mother's thrift-store instincts, talks herself into a $2,500 used hot tub from a shady Craigslist dealer named Dan. Things don’t turn out so great.

David Crabb waitered through the days after 9/11 at one of the only open restaurants in lower Manhattan, listening to strangers unburden themselves over candlelight. By the end of the week he'd saved $900 for a U-Haul, and on the walk home from his last shift, drunk and carrying a magnum of wine, he felt an arm clamp around his neck and something jab into his ribs.

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