He leaped off the curb and landed ankle deep in cold rainwater. His foot squelched with each running step, but he was catching up. He called again and saw her stop. She waved him on impatiently, then turned to the oncoming traffic and held up a hand for a cab.

Any yellow cabs in Queens were heading for the airport or Manhattan. They weren’t going to stop for a sodden woman with mascara running down her cheeks. Ted waved and called again, but she was staring into the oncoming lights and did not respond. He kept running.

Kenzie was speaking to him, one hand cupped next to her mouth, projecting words that failed to carry over the noise of the traffic and the rain. He read urgency but also a sense of the absurdity of it all—her bedraggled Don Quixote to his rain-soaked Sancho Panza racing on foot to keep up with a low-level politician rapidly escaping in the dry comfort of a limousine.

Afterward he remembered quite clearly the sound of the approaching automobile. It was a distinctive sound—deep, throaty, and revved much too high. But if it had stood out so blatantly, why hadn’t he reacted quicker?

Kenzie’s expression changed in an instant to one of pure horror. Sometime in their thousands of years of evolutionary survival, his people had developed the fast-track neural response to immediate danger. He did not consciously connect the sound of the approaching automobile with the look on Kenzie’s face, but his body reacted anyway: tuck the chin, roll on the shoulder, push down with both hands, spring upright.

The movement, drilled in to him by wrestling coaches decades earlier and forgotten by all but muscle memory, saved his life.

The car was a blur as it flew past him, so close that he staggered backward two steps before finding his balance.

He didn’t know cars. Didn’t all sedans look alike these days? Later that night, the detectives said it was a BMW 6 Series. Ted didn’t know what that meant. Like most native New Yorkers, his automobile knowledge began and ended with the difference between taxis and everything else. Jill had owned an old Saab, which he had sometimes driven on weekends, but if he had ever had to leave it parked in a crowded outdoor lot, he never would have been able to find it again.

Kenzie had had a beat more time in which to react. Unfortunately, she had wasted it in frozen fear. At the last possible second, she threw her body to the right, making a lopsided swimmer’s racing dive onto the pavement. Though it saved her life, it wasn’t enough.