Fugitive #1 is Yoo-hoo. I see him plainly now, his bald dome reflecting as he dashes beneath a streetlamp. One of the ESU men trips and sprawls, hydroplaning on his chest like a boogie boarder. The other is starting to wobble with exhaustion.

Suddenly Manning turns on the jets.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing. The dude is a handshake away from retirement. Suddenly he turns into a rocket ship.

Manning pulls ahead of me by ten feet, twenty, thirty. We’re on the seawall now. This formation is nothing grander than a jumble of gigantic boulders, slick as snot in the gale and the downpour.

Ahead, Yoo-hoo is clambering hand-over-hand.

Waves higher than a man’s head are crashing against this barricade of stone. The breakers booming up between the rocks have the force of an explosion. One hits me. Over I go. I’m thrashing for my life in a down-sucking maelstrom. I catch the lip of a boulder and barely keep from getting washed out to sea.

Where is Manning?

He has caught up to Yoo-hoo. The first ESU operator races up behind him. ESU #1 commences whaling on Yoo-hoo’s shins with his D-cell Maglite. Down they both go, between the rocks. Blasting surf obscures everything. Suddenly Yoo-hoo emerges. I’m on the rocks now too. I feel like I’m in an end-of-the-world movie.

Yoo-hoo starts running toward me.

Fuck.

He’s twenty feet away.

Suddenly a form tackles him from one side. It’s Manning. I can barely see with the sea spray, the deluge, and the dark, but it looks to me like he’s got Yoo-hoo in a wrestling hold. I slip-and-slide closer. The ESU man recovers; he’s closing too. I hear a dog barking behind me.

Yoo-hoo goes down, flailing wildly.

Manning has him pinned.

The ESU guy flex-cuffs Yoo-hoo.

Manning, exhausted, releases the assassin.

A German shepherd, soaked black, bounds up onto the boulder, dragging behind him by his lead his K-9 handler, who’s even more drenched, and bleeding from various scrapes and cuts sustained on the rocks of the seawall.

I dash up, shouting to Manning, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” My mentor sprawls upright, wedged between two giant boulders, with a vortex of storm surge swirling around him. I shine my light into his face. I can see from his eyes he’s got another migraine.

Eight hours later, 0745 the next morning, I’m sitting at my workstation at DivSix, still on zero Z’s but after a hot shower at Brooklyn South and an hour at home to change (Manning himself has crashed like the dead on the couch in his office, with a shot of Imitrex in his bloodstream and a cold towel over his eyes), sneaking a peek on my terminal at hacked video (by me) of the interrogation of Alemany “You-hoo” Petracek.