“Get dressed.” I throw her clothes at her roughly. She doesn’t catch them; they fall around her feet like birds falling dead out of the sky. When she finally takes her injured eyes off me she picks them up, dully, and puts them on. I scoop up the keys from the floor and let Jagjeet out of the cuffs. He gets to his feet slowly, his body moving with a kind of confusion, as if it only partially remembers how to stand. When he gets steady on his feet, Charlie hugs him. I’ve seen that embrace before. Now it’s clear that it’s innocent, has always been innocent. I should be relieved but instead I still feel betrayal, and I take the moment—Charlie’s eyes locked shut in affection, Jagjeet’s beard snugging her—to slip the handcuffs into my back pocket. I have a feeling I’ll need them.

“Broken ribs?” Charlie asks Jagjeet.

He shrugs and smiles. For him this is just a worse-than-average day at the office. It gets worse, rapidly, however: when we try to exit the room, the door won’t open.

“Can you get it?” I say.

“Sure,” Charlie says. “Easy. Just let me see those tools.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” I inform her. “I was talking to Kong.”

“Jimmy locked it from the outside,” Kong says. “Let Charlie do it.”

“No. She’s not doing anything. She can’t be trusted.”

“Otto,” Charlie says, “you don’t understand. I only—”

Kong interrupts. “Give her the tools, Otto. There isn’t time.”

Defensively I clasp the tools to my chest. “Then you better tell me what to do.”

In the interstices of outraged profanity, Kong tells me what to do with the wires. During his instruction, Charlie leans over my shoulder, whispering assurances.

“Do you mind?” I say to her. She backs away but her fragrance—a greenhouse odor fighting down the slaughterhouse smell of the room—still distracts me. I try to blow it out of my nostrils but it’s no good. There’s nothing I can do about it. If I want to breathe, I’m going to breathe in the odors of Charlie.

After several successful operations, Kong says, “You got two wires left, correct?”

“Yep.”

“Black and green?”

“Right.”

“O.K. Good. Now just cut the green wire and you’re done.”

“What?”

“Hurry up.”

“Did you say the green wire?”

“Yes!” he yells. “Jesus!”

“What are you up to?”

Charlie says, “Nothing, Otto. Trust him. He’s—”

“Cut it, cocksuck!”

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

“Everyone who’s ever met you thinks you’re stupid,” Kong says. “Now cut it.”

“It’s never the green wire,” I tell him. “Everybody knows that.”

“The building isn’t exactly to code, nimrod. Cut the fucking green wire.”