Sometimes Batiste, a narcotics man, wondered if there was just less of a sense of urgency for a homicide guy like Scott. His clientele couldn’t get any more dead after all. Still, their new partnership worked well enough even if, on paper, they were apples and oranges: Scott was white, middle class, and middle America. Batiste was Black, local—born and bred. What they shared was the challenge of working for a gravely underfunded police department in a city that had crapped on all its creditors.

As Batiste yelled at the troopers to get an ambulance, Scott spotted Zeb’s bag, now in the car’s footwell. He slipped on a pair of latex gloves and looked inside.

“There’s got to be at least twenty grand in there, maybe thirty,” he said. “The guy downstairs—the courier, he’s got nearly forty.”

“I wonder what Mister McGrath had to do,” said Batiste, “that was so much more important than being here.”

McGrath laughed. It wasn’t often he was exhilarated, but this was certainly doing it. Over a hundred and they’d just swooped around four lanes of traffic when it had seemed like a truck was going to box them in.

“Nice, but that was your right of way.”

“‘That was my right of way’ sounds like an epitaph.” Spencer’s tone had changed as their speed had increased, becoming more monotone, detached, as if the part of his brain operating the machine in which they were darting among all the other machines on the ninety-four was placing greater demands on it, leaving less capacity for social niceties like conversation. His eyes flicked from road to mirror to blind spots and back to the road. His right hand danced between steering wheel and gearshift in a controlled blur.

No one honked at them. No one had time to honk at them.

McGrath had a fast mind. He’d driven cars fast too. When he was nineteen, he’d fired a gun at a dealer on Warren Street from a car moving at seventy and hit the guy in the arm. But this was speed of thought and events on another level. It had been a while since he’d felt his adrenal glands so productive.

“All this seem slower to you?” he asked.

“I wish. We just calculate more things at once than other drivers. Like some people can count cards, I guess. Gaps closing, relative speeds, power bands, minimizing TEDs.”

“TEDs?”

Spencer moved onto the hard shoulder to make an undertake.

“Time exposed to danger.”

A Hellcat closed a gap to their side, but Spencer had seen it coming and gone to another farther ahead. “There are certain cars chosen by people who’ll be less inclined to yield.”