And now he’s been assigned to a Detective Lopez, and he’s waiting, waiting to see him—for how many more minutes? Ten? Fifteen? A half hour?—while Joey stews in fury at Aldo’s and maybe figures out, somehow, what Emily’s last name is, where she lives, where she works.

But Zack had to do something. This is what the police are here for. Citizens in trouble. Protection from imminent threats. Precincts all over the city that the average citizen can walk into and the desk sergeant will look up and ask, “Can I help you?”

For a burglary, maybe. Or a theft, or even an assault. But for this?

He’s starting to worry that this is the second brilliantly dumb thing he’s done today. First, noticing the guy’s code and calling him. Now, thinking the police can act quickly and protect him.

Because when Lopez gets here, what’s Zack going to say exactly? Well, you see, I accidentally swapped phones with a guy in a GreenGirl but I also accidentally saw him entering his phone code earlier so I was able to call him but while I was waiting I looked at his phone, and the photos of all these dead bodies, taken from all angles, told me he was a professional killer, and now he’s called me from my own phone, which I gave him the code for, and he’s coming after me, and he’s planning to kill me, I can just tell.

Would a street-smart, street-weary detective believe it for a moment?

Two swapped identical phones? That both of them managed to get into? One of them belonging to an assassin? Hanging out at a GreenGirl Coffee before a hit? Leaving the phone inadvertently in a GreenGirl before a hit?

Really?

To Lopez, he would clearly be another crazy New Yorker. In the middle of some weird, crazy fantasy they couldn’t hope to attach to reality. Classic bipolar paranoia. Son, now calm down. You need to get back on your meds.

But here, Detective, just take a look at these pictures! He could cut to the chase. They’d presumably find them as shocking and disturbing as he had.

But would they? Or would they be disturbed for different reasons? With the cynical eyes of cops dealing with some out-of-breath kid walking in off the street.

Maybe they’d think the photos could have been downloaded from the Internet. Could have come from anywhere. Could be a pervert’s staging. Could be some weirdo student art project.

And here’s this disturbed kid now trying to make his paranoid fantasy into reality. Make it line up somehow with photographic evidence so the cops would finally believe him.