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in the city.
    As I stared out at the inner-city blight, flashes of Jacob’s room came to mind. The cross-country-running trophies he kept in the back of his closet, the Dave Matthews Band ticket stubs on his dresser, the shiny Les Paul guitar that hung on his wall. Despite his age, he was a kid, really. I gritted my teeth. This was no place for any kid.
    “I’m coming up to One Hundred and Ninety-sixth,” I said.
    “Good work,” the kidnapper said. “You’re almost there, Mike. Go right onto One Hundred Ninety-sixth. You’re really close now. Make a left onto Briggs Avenue.”
    I cupped the phone mic.
    “What are you packing?” I said over to Parker.
    “Glock forty-caliber,” she said.
    “Unsnap your holster,” I said.

Chapter 11
    A HARD-LOOKING BLACK kid in a new North Face jacket twirled a Gucci umbrella on the corner. Behind him down the block at regular intervals, more menacing figures in dark hoodies stood on the thresholds of the rundown brick buildings. Apparently even the rain couldn’t put a damper on Briggs Avenue’s open-air drug market.
    “Whoop, whoop,” came the warning cry as I turned the car onto the avenue, and my unmarked was immediately made. “Five-oh,” one teen spotter hollered down the block helpfully to his coworkers through cupped hands. “Yo, Five-oh!”
    I scanned the gloomy block uncertainly. The narrow cutout of the avenue extended for at least another two blocks without a cross street.
    Where the hell were Schultz and Ramirez? I thought, glancing into my rearview. I felt like a sheriff who’d made a wrong turn into the wrong mountain pass.
    “Stop at two-five-oh Briggs,” the kidnapper said.
    Emily tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at a building up the block. I didn’t have time to look for a parking spot. I spun the wheel and bumped the Impala up onto the sidewalk in front of it.
    With swirling architectural embellishments around its entrance, 250 Briggs Avenue, like a lot of old Bronx buildings, had once been a stately residence. Since then, one of the entrance’s Doric columns had been shattered, and there were smoke stains on the brick above most of the boarded-up windows of the third story.
    I got soaked to the bone while I retrieved flashlights from the trunk of the detective car. So did Emily as we walked across the cracked sidewalk and pulled open the building’s broken front door.
    “I’m here. I’m in the lobby of two-fifty now,” I said into the phone. My words echoed eerily back at me as I played the beam over the dim lobby. The walls were marble, but the low ceiling was bloated, pregnant with water stains and mold. A feeling as desolate as my surroundings enveloped me. I had the sudden desperate feeling that time was running out.
    Where are you, Jacob? I thought.
    “Did you know that people actually live here?” the kidnapper said in my ear. “Rats run through the halls. Some of the tenants on the third floor don’t even have doors after a recent fire. Is it any wonder at all that this area has the highest incidence of childhood asthma in the country?
    “The slumlord who bought it last year, along with eighty percent of this block, has let it get like this because he’s trying to force out the rent-controlled tenants. He bought it at a HUD auction, despite his company’s history of thirteen hundred housing-code violations. This is happening here in the richest country on earth, Mike. This is happening right here, right now in America.”
    “Where is Jacob?” I yelled, ignoring his grating litany. “I’m here. I’ve done exactly what you said. Where do I go?”
    “Out back through the courtyard, go through the laundry room door on your left.”
    We found a door at the end of the lobby and went back out into the rain. A cracked toilet lid floated beside half a dozen faded phone books in the courtyard’s standing water. I scanned the surrounding windows for movement. I wasn’t convinced yet that this wasn’t a trap.
    I handed Emily my