Two hands pushing me out, one hand grabbing the shoulder of my shirt, trying to drag me back. The mother protested, bewildered. I wasn’t the guy who had attacked her, barged into her house, tried to talk to her child. I was let go, pushed down the hall, trying to listen to her words over the snaps and barks of the cops manhandling me.

“… some big Middle Eastern guys…” the mother said.

I planted my feet, straining to listen.

“… just grabbed him and hauled him out. I don’t know where they went…”

“Oh god,” I whispered. I recalled the look that Linda and Sharon had exchanged as I stood outside the car, when I had spoken Kevin Driscoll’s name. They’d been waiting to hear it. A name was all they needed. They’d got here before me, before the cops, right on Kevin’s tail. Khalid Farah was a powerful man. Far more powerful than the police. Within seconds of knowing Kevin’s full name, Khalid probably had some dodgy contact or other punch the name into a system, track his phone. Khalid could find people. No one escaped him. He made a living from it.

That’s why they had left me. Linda and Sharon. They’d abandoned me at the roadside because they knew, as Khalid knew, that I’d never sanction it, never allow them to abduct Kevin Driscoll right off the street the way the young man had done to Claire Bingley. That’s why Khalid had put his men onto me. For my protection, yes. But because they knew—knew in their bones—that I’d find him. That I was always going to find him. And Khalid wanted Kevin. He’d told me himself at the airport that first day. He wanted that man. He wanted to be the one responsible for putting him down, for taking another predator off the streets.

The moment I mentioned Kevin’s full name, Linda and Sharon had what they’d been waiting for. And now Khalid and his men had beaten me to my quarry.

“Get the fuck out, pervert piece of shit!” The cop behind me shoved me hard in the shoulders. I staggered out of the house, stood on the lawn as they berated me. My whole body was cold. I still had my phone in my hand, gripped in my fist like a weapon. The cops wanted to know where I had come from. Why I was here. How I knew the child and her mother. I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t speak. I wandered away from them, ignoring their threats, a big crow avoiding swooping myna birds. The neighbors were staring, murmuring to one another. A woman leaned over her front fence and asked me what was going on, no idea, it seemed, who I was. I looked at her like she was an alien thing, incapable of putting it all into words.