You exit Little Hong Kong on foot along a series of suspended walkways, like rain forest bridges, swaying dubiously about eight inches above the petro-scum surface of Jamaica Bay. These catwalks have no handrails. They’re about as wide as a lawn mower. This constriction, however, does nothing to retard the bumper-to-bumper, two-way traffic of pushcarts, mopeds, deliverymen and -women using Chinese coolie carrying poles, tea and coffee hawkers with their dispenser tanks on their backs, not to mention hookers, skimmers, incense peddlers, acrobats, jugglers, three-card monte dealers, political orators, one-legged guys selling wild Siberian chaga, bhang, khosh, naswar, and half a hundred types of aphrodisiacs, psychedelics, soporifics, and herbal intoxicants that I’ve never heard of and neither have you. Canvas sheets overhead shield the floating city from the sun. Beneath these, shops founded on houseboats, moored water taxis, Asiatic junks, float-suspended freight containers, and Navy surplus Zodiacs peddle cures for baldness, impotence, incontinence, sleep apnea, herpes, and chronic bad breath. You can buy roasted duck, grilled yak, barbecued char. The only thing you can’t get is a hamburger.

Every fourth catwalk holds a directory, which invariably is so faded from diesel fumes and the acid effluence of the bay that you can’t read it. Besides, it’s in Chinese. The city itself is a maze. How Manning got in is a mystery; how he’s navigating out is equally incomprehensible. We pass shops selling phone cards, fake Rolexes, I NY T-shirts, WORLD’S GREATEST DAD coffee mugs, and plastic models of the Statue of Liberty.

My text window meanwhile keeps pinging with messages from Gleason’s tech sergeant:

WHERE THE HELL R U?

GET MANNING TO PICK UP!

HAUL UR ASSES BACK HERE ASAP!

One of the things I love about detective work is you get to see the Hidden World, the spawn and species that normal people spend every resource to avoid. You see the human condition with all the bullshit stripped away, the secret lives people live and the extremes they’ll go to to protect what they’ve got or to grab for some dream of pride or love or money, or just another twenty-four hours to keep drawing breath. You, the cop, tread in this hell without being part of it. Your shield protects you. At least you think it does. I tell myself, tramping out of Little Hong Kong, Look around you, Dewey. Every poor bastard in this place is fucked, and you, without your badge, could and probably would be one of them.

Back out finally into the blistering sun, I tap the Find Me app on my phone and Manning and I are reeled in digitally, across a fifty-acre parking lot, to our AV.

What have we learned from this morning’s expedition?