Our woman may be an off-the-gridder, but she knows not only how to handle a wheel but also how to outsmart a pursuit. The single vulnerability of an integrated chase system is a vehicle that runs straight at it. Entering Sunset Park, our fugitive hangs a hard U and cannonballs past us in the opposite direction.

Manning, I’m beginning to realize, learned to drive on vehicles with steering wheels. He’s not worth shit on a tiller. Screaming out of Sunset Park, our AV sideswipes a garbage truck and nearly flips, bounding over a median into a double opposing lane.

ME

What the fuck!

Our girl takes us through Greenwood Heights, out under the Gowanus Expressway, and into Industry City, hard by the docks and the bay.

We still can’t see her.

She’s too far ahead.

Through my earbud and on the console terminal we’re receiving ID intel on the woman for the first time. No name. No FaceRec intersects. Neither Manning nor I possesses bandwidth at the moment to absorb any of this.

Where the hell is she going?

Forty blocks into the chase, the woman leaps a median, hangs a second one-eighty, followed by an immediate hard ninety, and highballs into a homeless encampment in an area known as “under the steel.”

The camp is a maze of parked and squatting vehicles covering thirty blocks beneath an abandoned section of the old Belt Parkway. It’s a chase nightmare. Every car, truck, and van radiates its own unique search signature, not to mention those of the human component of the habitat, whose combined facial contouring, body heat, sound, and physical motion meld to produce an overload of FaceRec, acoustic, thermal, and G&P input. Barrel fires and cooking pits are screwing up our search scans further. One of our drones has crashed into the collapsed overhead.

MANNING

We’re losing her!

The glowing speedo in front of Manning reads eighty-one. Our electric motor smells like a kitchen toaster. Suddenly . . .

There she is!

We’re under the steel now too. I’m peering down an unlit lane that looks like Main Street of a Tunisian souk. Directly overhead, blocking all light both natural and man-made, looms the girder-and-concrete vault of the half-collapsed Belt Parkway. Beneath our tires spreads a slick of seawater, urine, cheap wine, and thirty years of gutter waste and petroleum by-products. Both flanks of this unlikely speedway are choked with shell tents, campers, RVs, mini-Winnies, converted panel vans and school buses, camper-shell pickups, gypsy wagons, rejiggered tanker shells, and every other mobile sleeping rig the ingenious mind of man can think of. Hibachi blazes and barbecue pits stud the slumscape.

Our female flees up this midnight Broadway. We’re half a block behind when her left front tire blows. The Hi-Top nosedives to port, all four wheels spewing black smoke, bounces with unbelievable violence over a median, teeters, rights itself, and crashes head-on at fifty-plus into a ten-foot-wide, thirty-foot-high, graffiti-blackened concrete abutment.