“Hand it to me,” I said. “With the tips of your fingers.”

He stretched his arm up and I took it from him gingerly, watching for any attempt to grab me. I knew that if I were him, I’d be desperate to try anything at this point. He was looking at a very long stay in prison. Arson, two counts of attempted murder. Being an asshole.

“Who’s he?” said a voice behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder for half a second to see Jeremy standing there. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I saw you drop him, figured it was okay,” he said. “Which was kind of awesome, by the way. But that’s not the person we met on the beach.”

“I know.”

“Who is he?”

I handed him the wallet. “You tell me.”

I kept my eyes on the man while Jeremy opened up the wallet and started looking through it. “Okay, I’ve got his driver’s license.” He tilted it toward the fire to get enough light to read it. “He’s Gregor . . . Hang on. Last name is spelled K-I-L-N.”

“Kiln,” I said, looking down at the man. “Did I say that right? Like the oven for pottery?”

The man grunted.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” To Jeremy, “What else can you tell us about Mr. Kiln here?’

Jeremy held up more cards to the flames. “He lives in Albany. He was born in, uh, 1973. He’s got some Visa cards and shit like that.”

“His phone’s over there.”

Jeremy spotted it, scooped it up off the ground. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Check emails, recent calls.”

“Listen,” Gregor Kiln said, “maybe we can work some kind of deal.”

I thought I heard conversation, looked down to the end of the driveway, where half a dozen people, some in what appeared to be pajamas, had gathered. A man was coming our way.

“I’ve called the fire department!” he shouted. “Ambulance, too! That man hurt?”

I said, “Please stay back, sir!”

“You need to come away from the—”

“I know! Please go back by the road!”

The man stopped, hesitated, clearly puzzled by my reluctance to accept assistance. But he did as I’d told him and retreated to the road, where he huddled with the others, undoubtedly speculating about what the hell was going on.

For the first time, I started hearing sirens.

“Did you hear me?” Kiln said. “A deal?”

“You’re not in what I’d call a good bargaining position,” I said.

“I give you a name, you let me go.”

“A name?” I said. “What do you mean, a name? Like, the name of a website? A person? What?”

“A website?” Kiln said.

I realized, at that moment, that this was not like the other incidents. This was not the outgrowth of some social-media outrage. This was something very different.

“Give me the name,” I said.

“We have a deal?”

“No.”