Kong expresses his disbelief with a zagging gesture of his pincers but Jagjeet just shrugs companionably—he doesn’t seem to mind the prospect of death too much—and holsters a dart gun on each hip.

It’s a quiet ride. Kong pilots the van with his hooks. Jagjeet inspects his gear with the scrupulous intensity of a watch-maker. There is an uncanny precision to his movements, a kind of efficient gentleness. A delicateness, even. He has a sharklike attitude: slow, smooth, Zen-like, absolutely cool, interested in nothing, but always there is that suggestion of immense speed. It reminds me of Herk.

I keep staring out the window, my heart withering into something tiny and tuberous and dumb. It doesn’t understand anything. It never did.

Before long we’re in a part of Queens that I don’t know. The streetscape is blasted, postapocalyptic. It smells of diesel and rust and concrete powder and scrubgrass. Emanating from the street is the semivolcanic odor of hot, crumbling asphalt. We pass a scaffolding peeling away from an abandoned project, strip malls with busted-out windows, storefronts offering goods and services you would never want—the Wig-n-Watch, the U-Paint-It, Benny’s Stool Store. Everywhere you look there are the petrified chain-link-and-iron remains of industrial slag, the detritus of discontinued construction. It’s hard to imagine anything being built here in the first place. There are some people here and there but they don’t care about anything. Even the kids crowding around window AC units and licking the trickles of condensation aren’t putting much into it. They look inanimate and posed, like puppet children abandoned after a show.

Kong pulls the van into an alley.

“O.K.,” he says, pecking heronlike at the keyboard. “Here’s the schematic.” When no schematic appears despite further typing, he curses, kicks the tower and swats a bulbous ’80s-era screen. Amber light flares across the monitor and then we’re staring at a diagram of hallways and rooms. “All right. This facility is where Azar stores his stuff before resale. Anything of value, he keeps it here. You can bet Charlie is in there somewhere. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s heavily guarded, it’s got a solid security system, and Charlie isn’t tagged so we can’t be sure what room she’s in. We’ll enter from the north door here because best guess is Charlie is going to be in one of these rooms here.”

“What makes you think that?” I say.

“These are the rooms that have bolted-down chairs and sluice grates. If Jimmy is going to torture anyone he’ll do it in there,” he says. I nearly double over at this, but Kong doesn’t notice. “Now, I can blackout for you but I can’t piggyback.”

“Um, what?”