“I can’t explain it, but it’s this way. I’m going left.”

As Kong monopolizes my sense of hearing, Jagjeet and I proceed down the left hallway and, within another fifty feet, I understand the source of my intuition. I drop to my hands and knees and sniff the floor.

“That’s it,” I say. “Bread crumbs.”

“What, Otto?” Jagjeet says.

“What, asshole?” Kong says.

“Covet. On her shoes. Charlie had Covet on her shoes. It’s faint but it’s there. On the floor. She knew she might not make it so she left a trail. In case we came for her. It’s this way.”

I pull like a narcotics dog through the halls until the odor leads me to a locked door. I put my hand to it, tenderly, as if searching for a heartbeat. Although Kong is still occupied mainly with aspersing my character, my IQ, my worthiness to suck the same oxygen that is sucked by cockroaches, he pauses long enough to communicate which wires to cut. I cut them. Nothing happens.

“Did I do that right?” I say. “Did you tell me the right wires?”

Kong execrates me at such volume for questioning his expertise that I have to pry out the earpiece and shove it into my pocket. As I do this there is a mechanical whine, an aerosol sound of hydraulics, and the door retracts into the wall.

There she is: the woman I love, the thief I hate.

I churn with mysterious feeling. My senses revolt as if I’ve lunched on a salad of Salvia divinorum and kokosing root. What’s real? It’s hard to tell. I waver on my feet, stunned and Gullivered, but when I shake my head clean and focus, the details become intelligible. With the exception of being duct-taped to a chair, clad in her underwear with various body parts spreading in the purple-black plumage of bruising—and, of course, with the hole I made in her shoulder, which now unaccountably has an angry red-black sfumato—all other sensory cues tell me she is the same Charlie as ever. Her black hair, rich with the kind of gloss you see only in the surface of certain concert pianos, is still curly and glistening; it sprays around her head when she jolts upright at my entrance. Her eyes when they see me go wide and soft and voracious. Her expression is one of breakneck joy.66 Standing there in the cool, moteless air of the doorway, I let my eyes soak it up. There are strange odors in the room—something incongruously like ham and cooked beef—but I can’t focus on anything but the fragrances of Charlie: Covet and sweat and her essential female self.

My heart suffocates with it.

“Otto!” she cries. Her body flexes toward mine as if she wants to hug me, but all this accomplishes is a poltergeist-like rattling of her chair.