“I don’t know. It still wiggles.” I demonstrate this for Herk.

“It wiggles. Fantastic. I’m so relieved. Now grab that gun and let’s get out of here.”

“The K’plua,” I say, pointing.

“I see it. The cops will see it, too. I’d rather they don’t see us. Let’s go.”

“We were right!” I say joyously. “Schermer’s the mang!”

“Congratulations us. Now let’s go.”

We sprint down the hall and into the stairway, two frightened figures in rancid clothing, one covered in blood and skin-toned dildo dust, the other in a matching set of mauve bra and panties, but by the time we get to the street, which is soon swarming with cruisers and awash in red and blue lights, everything is stuffed into the burlap bag and we, more or less, are once again the same people we were two hours ago.

Except that I now have a chance.

I High-Beam the Dream

Given the considerable guilt I have charbroiling inside me over my night of breaking and entering / assault and battery / attempted murder, combined with the superelectric thrill that things might be working out for me, I don’t have a prayer of getting any rest tonight, so I do the only thing I can think of.

I go down to the boatyard to ogle my boat and wait for the news to break.

Amid the city’s hungover stillness, the East River streamering between the gritty tumbleweed litter of Queens and the smutty glitter of nighttime Manhattan, I sit there and high-beam my sailboat. I have never laid eyes on it before. Since I still owe Deke—and since he still has the title—I never felt like I deserved to see it. Until today, the prospect of looking at it seemed like a heartbreaking reminder of failure and loss, like uttering the name of a stillborn child. I just couldn’t bear it. But today is different. Today I’ve been staring at it for hours now—the sun is finally starting to turn the horizon a polluted iodine color and the heat is beginning to smother the gravel-filled lot of the boatyard—and so far I feel nothing but joy.

For about the five hundredth time I crack my Web phone and check to see if anything on Schermer has come over the net and, for the five hundredth time, it hasn’t, so I just kick back and stare through the chain link at my boat. I’m having a haptic fit; I desperately want to touch it, but—last night notwithstanding—I am an obeyer of laws, an upholder of laws, and I still feel a crippling taboo about off-limit areas, so I force myself to be content with a visual.

In the brochure’s digital workup the boat looked plenty cool but in person it is even sleeker and more hydrodynamic. The lines are graceful but masculine, the keel has a natural, porpoiselike curve, and the mast looks impossibly high, as if it would never clear the Verrazano. There are other boats in the yard, all buttressed by metal stilts—it looks like a hospital full of patients in extreme traction—but the numbers don’t make my boat seem ordinary.