“Give me the goddamn pills. We’re not a team, you and me.” He pulls the necklace from my neck—a cheap yellow Murano glass bauble on a five-dollar chain. Then he shouts, “Go.”

Diane lets Willie out of her grip. The door opens and closes within seconds. The room is plunged into almost complete darkness.

Willie and I hug each other. I cry a little. Willie doesn’t.

I say, “Are you okay?”

Then he says, “Are you okay?”

How can we possibly be okay, but of course we both tell each other that we’re fine.

I yank out my cell phone from my jeans pocket. I call Blumenthal.

“I think these people may have something to do with Orlov,” I tell him.

Of course he thinks I’m wrong. “Listen, Lucy. I’m not trying to play down the fact that you were in danger, and your son was in danger, and…but anyway, what happened to you has been going on for a few weeks at Penn and Grand Central and Port Authority. These muggings. They get a kid, and then they hijack the kid, and if the kid is traveling with a woman, they…you get it.”

Willie opens the door to the unlighted room, the room where he and I were just mugged. Three officers immediately crowd their way in. Two of them have their guns drawn.

I speak into the phone. “The cavalry is here,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Blumenthal. “I notified them about a minute ago.”

“Can I ask what you all are doing about these ‘Welcome to New York’ muggings?”

“All I can say is that we’re doing our best, Lucy,” Blumenthal says.

“Yeah,” I say. “And we all know how great that is.”

Chapter 52

Chapter 52

I REALIZE AS WE enter Midtown Precinct South of the NYPD, I’ve never been in a real New York City police station before. Oh, I’ve been in a few jailhouses back in West Virginia, always to bail out my brother, Cabot. But those places looked like the little marshal’s offices you see on old television westerns. This precinct looks like a smallish office building, and it is dull and ugly inside. Gray painted walls, cheap aluminum desks, dirty linoleum.

In a small room, we go over the recent events with the officers. One officer tells me that “yes, occasionally they use old storage rooms along the passageways to the subway.” She seems unconcerned.

I try not to seem concerned. But for me, the whole world is fast becoming a crime scene.

After Willie and I spend almost two hours flipping through about five hundred photos and sketches on a computer screen, men and women who’ve previously been involved in crimes, a very bored detective says we can leave. When I suggest that the NYPD might want to put up the cost of an Uber trip, they agree to take us home to Crown Heights in a police car.