She chews on this, but not for too long. “What’s the second thing?”

“The Rat Burglar doesn’t go in the mainline,” I say, swallowing down the wet sobs in my throat. “I want protective custody for the whole sentence. Nowhere near any of Azar’s people. Not at any time.”

“The Rat Burglar burned you. Why help him?”

“It doesn’t matter. Do we have a deal? Yes or no?”

“Don’t get fancy, Starks. You’re not smart enough for tricks.”

“No tricks. That’s what I want.”

“Whatever you’re trying to pull, it won’t work.”

“In ten seconds I’m hanging up. You’ll never hear from me again.”

Thieves belong in jail, I keep telling myself. Pulses don’t. I’m not evil. I’m not betraying love.

And anyway: you can’t betray a love that never existed.

Right?

“Starks,” she says, mystified, “are you . . . crying?”

“Five seconds,” I say. “Yes or no?”

There is another long, portentous silence. In the background I can hear the tumult and whine of the precinct, the sounds of importunity and denial, all the voices wretched, enraged, agonized, stuporous. How many lives are being unalterably ruined in that room right now? My lungs produce a wet, bronchospastic wheezing song of grief.

“O.K., Starks. I’ll talk to the judge.”

“Good.”

“But dead doesn’t do me any good. I want them alive—all of them—or the deal’s off.”

“Fine. I’ve got a Sankt-Moeller with GPS. SoL signal 1176.441 megahertz. Write it down: 1176.441 megahertz.”

“Got it,” she says. “When?”

“Soon. Be ready. And I’d bring a lot of backup.”

“So you’ll just . . .”

“The GPS on the button is good to within three feet. I’ll click it when I have her.”

“Her?”

I clap the cell shut and let my tear-cyclone blow into the toilet water.

Good Start

Good Start

The interior of Kong’s van is like the command center of a space-ship from a 1970s-era sci-fi flick—all screens and lights and intermittent beepings—and it is handsomely equipped with gear and guns. Kong outfits Jagjeet and me with minerlike head-mountedcameras, earpieces, and an array of thief tools that look like unpatentable surgical implements. There are various cutters, clamps, tubes, something that I assume is a probe of some sort.

“I told you,” I say when Jagjeet opens a gun case. “No one’s killing anybody.”

“The guys inside Azar’s are going to have guns,” Kong points out.

I pull a dart gun off the rack. “Then we’ll use these.”

“You have to load a new dart every time you want to shoot,” Kong says. “You’ll have ten rounds in you before you get to fire a second shot.”

“Then we’d better not miss.”

“What if there are more than two guys?”

“Then we’d better not get caught.”

“There are only five darts.”

“This is what we’re using.”