Cargill’s truck turns onto Hollowell Parkway and I follow him, hanging back three, sometimes four cars. With the tracker I’m not afraid of losing him, although I don’t want to get too far behind and have to keep looking at my phone when I need to pay attention to the road. He stays on Hollowell, heading west out of the city. We pass a closed Family Dollar store, a package store, and a Bank of America drive-thru ATM in the middle of a bombed-out shopping center, the parking lot full of enormous concrete cylinders and dumpsters and dirt. Just past that is a police precinct, a stone building that looks like a church minus a cross. Have to put your faith in something, I guess. Cargill flies past the station, and I follow.

About five minutes later we come up on a bridge that crosses over 285, the sixty-four-mile-long interstate that rings the city. People in Atlanta call it the Perimeter. In Atlanta, you’re either ITP—you live inside the Perimeter—or OTP—outside the Perimeter. Right now Cargill is heading OTP. I’m not superstitious, generally, but crossing over the Perimeter tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised to find some hooded skeletal being on the other side of the bridge, a gatekeeper welcoming us to the other side with an eternal, bony grin.

All that greets us are a Chevron and a BP flanking the road. Cargill’s black truck passes both, and so do I. At Fulton Industrial, Cargill turns left, and before I can catch up the light turns red. While waiting for the light to change, I track Cargill’s progress on my phone. The beeping dot moves slowly southwest toward Fulton County Airport, a small county airport better known as Charlie Brown. No commercial flights or big planes here, but lots of charter jets and prop planes. If Cargill is meeting Bala about guns, maybe someone is flying the guns into Atlanta via Charlie Brown. Security at such small fields is a joke.

The light goes green and I turn left, following Cargill’s tracks. I glance down at my phone to see the beeping dot as it steadily passes the airport. So much for that theory. Soon enough the road rises slightly and I see rows of lights illuminating one of Charlie Brown’s two runways. A jet screams overhead, a dark shadow winging its way into the night.

I catch up to the truck before we drive underneath the ugly green I-20 overpass. We are rolling through a flat, industrial area between the Perimeter and the Chattahoochee River, and soon I see Cargill’s truck about a quarter mile ahead turn into a maze of warehouse buildings jumbled up against the eastern bank of the Chattahoochee.