The dealer’s choppers clatter onto the grimy steel floor. We’re in a phone seller’s kiosk, a converted shipping container on Jamaica Bay, in the floating mall the locals call Little Hong Kong.

The dealer is some kind of Bahamian or Trinidadian. He’s got dreads and that charming Calypso accent. Not now, of course, as he spits and attempts to lunge past Manning to retrieve his lowers.

With a sweep of his leg, so fast I don’t even see it, Manning takes the dealer’s legs out from under him. The poor guy face-plants, full weight, into the deck. I hear a scream. The dealer’s wife appears from a living section at the stern of the container. A boy and a girl, no older than four, cling to her skirts.

With one hand Manning hauls the dealer upright.

MANNING

I asked you nicely, didn’t I?

Manning lifts the guy six inches off the floor. “No, no!” the dealer is bawling. “Not the merch!”

Manning flings him into the display case. Clearly this artifact is the man’s pride and joy. It shatters into a million shards. The dealer crashes among splintered glass and featured sale items—counterfeit bags from Hermes, Kate Spade, and Bottega Veneta, a set of knockoff Craftsman socket wrenches, and, displayed impeccably on the now-demolished top shelf, throwaway iPhones and Galaxies.

CONTRABAND DEALER

Have a heart, man! I spill who bought the burner and who will buy another from me?

Manning is getting a migraine. I can see it in his eyes. He reaches down with both hands and seizes the dealer. From the echo-chamber rear, wife and kids pump up the volume of wailing and squealing.

Manning takes aim on a second display of breakable merchandise.

CONTRABAND DEALER

Okay, okay! Stop!

Human faces, at least a dozen, all Asian, Arab, or African, have appeared on the walkway outside the container door. Other merchants and shoppers. Manning shoots a glance to me. I raise my shield and advance menacingly.

The lookie-loos vaporize.

Manning has retrieved the dreadlocked dealer’s lower denture from the container floor. He wipes the appliance with a tissue from a box that had been on top of the display case. He hands it back to its owner.

The dealer accepts the device tentatively, examining it for fractures.

CONTRABAND DEALER

She was white. Thirty, maybe. Dressed like shit. She paid in reds.

Reds is local scrip. Good in South Brooklyn and nowhere else.

Manning has me cue up on my phone the fuzzy video I shot of the woman outside the Georgetown townhouse.

He takes the phone and shows it to the dealer.

CONTRABAND DEALER

Why the fuck didn’t you show me this before you wrecked my place?