I don’t care that the cops chase us avidly. I don’t care that I am still strapped into my gurney and pinballing around the back of the ambulance in an injurious way as it careens dangerously around unknown streets. I don’t care when we ram something ahead of us and I pitchpole onto the diamond plating of the ambulance floor, my face grating away. After the collision, when the guy in the turban throws open the doors, cuts me out of the zip-strips, hoists me on his shoulder like a side of beef, runs me down several blocks, through one residential building, into another, out the back door, and, finally, into a cabbie garage, at which time he dumps me into the footwell of a cab and pulls leisurely into traffic past bewildered cops looking everywhere, I don’t care. Even ten blocks later, when I recognize on him the same scent of garam masala that was on Charlie’s bra and my heart spasms—still, I do not care.

Herkimer is Jimmy the Hat.

“I know,” says my driver-cum-rescuer-cum-cuckoldmaker.

“Who are you?” I say. “What do you want with me?”

“My name is Jagjeet Singh.”

“You stole Charlie from me.”

I punch the plastic divider. It doesn’t break. My hand might have.

“I did not.”

“Bullshit. Let me out.”

Even though we’re going thirty and surrounded by thronging cabs, I try to bail out. The doors won’t open.

“Special cab,” he says, almost apologetically.

“Pull over and let me out.”

“We have to get out of this neighborhood first.”

I slump back into the seat, defeated.

“Herkimer,” I say, still stunned. “It can’t be true. That would mean...all those dead pulses. The guy in Seattle. And . . . Pinkerton.”

“I know.”

“How do you know? Who the hell are you?”

“Let’s just say that I know what trouble you’re in. And that I’m here to help you.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?”

I grunt.

“So . . . Herk is the mang,” I mutter.

“Yes.”

“He isn’t fucking Taoist.”

“No.”

“He didn’t believe shit about receptors. Fucking Spam. Goddamn Golden Elixir of Life. He wasn’t spiritually opposed to someone seeing his naked arms. He was hiding his tattoo.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why he freaked at Alpha that night at the Snug. He almost revealed it.”

My body is still draped in severed rubber hoses. I look like a marionette who has been cut down and extinguished, a tortured Švankmajer puppet.

“And when we broke into Schermer’s. The K’plua...”

“Planted. To incriminate you.”

“He was wearing gloves.”

“Of course. No prints in the apartment.”

“And he didn’t get recorded by the traffic cam. There never was any Goldfish at the intersection, he just wanted my hat to cover his face. And the gun. He wanted me to kill Schermer.”

“If it worked out that way.”