“We have to get you to a hospital,” I said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t even feel it.” He sniffed, took a couple of breaths, tried to compose himself. “I came over to say hi to Angie, and then this truck, this SUV pulls up.”

“Did you notice what kind it was?”

He blinked, tried to think. “One of those army kinds of ones. An Annihilator, I think.”

“Tinted windows?”

“Uh, I, I guess. I think so.”

“Okay, go on.”

“So it stops behind Angie’s car, they’ve got her blocked in, and they tell her to get out of the car, and she starts fighting with them.”

“Go on.”

For a moment, I thought maybe this wasn’t happening, that it was a dream. That I wasn’t here, in the middle of the night, on a street I rarely traveled, prying information out of some teenage stalker, whose motives I was still unsure of, about the whereabouts of my daughter. It simply couldn’t be happening.

“And one of them, he gets in the car, but he can’t get it to start, and he starts going nuts, banging on the steering wheel and swearing and everything. By now, there are people coming out, up there, on their balconies, and one of the other guys says they have to get out of there, they’re attracting too much attention.”

“Okay.”

“So another one says, he says, ‘Grab the girl, we’ll trade her for the car,’ and they drag Angie, right into the truck.”

Another flash. Angie, five years old, first day of kindergarten.

“But the one guy, I think the one who’d been driving, he comes up to me, he says, ‘You know the man owns this car?’ And I said yes, and he says, ‘Is this his daughter?’ and I said yes, and he says to tell you, he says, if you want your daughter back, get this car running and bring it to him, and he’ll give you Angie back.”

“Take it to him? Where am I supposed to take it?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He didn’t say?” Now I had my hands on him again, ready to shake him until his head fell off. “You didn’t ask him where I’m supposed to fucking take the car?”

“He said he’d be in touch! Jesus!” Trevor pushed me away. “He’d be in touch soon. And then he told me not to call the cops, to tell you not to call the cops, that they’ve got people in the force, that if you call the cops they’ll know. And then”—he put his hand back to his blood-soaked hair, touched it tentatively—“I guess, I think he hit me.”

“Why did they want the car?” I asked him. “Why do they want this car?”

“I don’t know!”