If this works at all, either he gets me or I get him, he said. He zipped open the bag. If I get him, it’s over. If he gets me . . . He took out a GPS receiver and placed it on the hood. If he gets me, you’re my backup. He showed me a few dazzling teeth. Think how good that makes me feel. He took out a cell phone and placed it next to the GPS unit. This is my insurance.

I looked at the two small items on the hood of my car. They did not seem particularly menacing to me, but perhaps I could throw one and then hit someone on the head with the other. No bazooka? I asked.

Don’t need it. Just this, he said. He reached into the gym bag one more time. And this, he said, holding out a small steno notebook, flipped open to the first page. It seemed to have a string of numbers and letters on it and a cheap ballpoint was shoved through the spiral.

The pen is mightier than the sword, I said.

This one is, he said. Top line is a phone number. Second line is an access code.

What am I accessing?

You don’t need to know, he said. You just call it, punch in the code, and give ’em my cell phone number. They give you a GPS fix on my phone. You come get me.

It sounds simple, I said, wondering if it really was.

Even for you, he said.

Who will I be talking to?

Doakes just shook his head. Somebody owes me a favor, he said, and pulled a handheld police radio out of the bag. Now the easy part, he said. He handed me the radio and got back into his car.

Now that we had clearly laid out the bait for Dr. Danco, step two was to get him to a specific place at the right time, and the happy coincidence of Vince Masuoka’s party was too perfect to ignore. For the next few hours we drove around the city in our separate cars and repeated the same message back and forth a couple of times with subtle variations, just to be sure. We had also enlisted a couple of patrol units Doakes said just possibly might not fuck it up. I took that to be his understated wit, but the cops in question did not seem to get the joke and, although they did not actually tremble, they did seem to go a little overboard in anxiously assuring Sergeant Doakes that they would not, in fact, fuck it up. It was wonderful to be working with a man who could inspire such loyalty.