“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” the Rolling Stones intoned, but once in awhile, life’s got a funny way of giving you what you need.

“Hombre.”

The man was crouched just inside the tree line, motioning me frantically toward him, a young man in jeans and a black, oversized LA Kings hockey jersey. Perched on his forehead was a pair of night vision goggles. “Vámonos, rápido!”

My legs no longer worked. All I could do was look up at him. He and two others were on me in seconds, pulling me up the hill and into the trees, where four other men, older and heavier, hunkered on their bellies behind a large rock formation like troops sweating out a mortar barrage.

None dared breathe as Sheen approached. He paused not twenty feet away, breathing hard, listening.

One of the men lying beside me quietly picked up a rock and held it at the ready, but there was no need. We were invisible in the night.

Sheen moved on, deeper into the trees, as my new friends and I waited, scarcely willing to breathe. About ten minutes later, about a half-mile away, came a single gunshot. It sounded smaller than a .45, but I couldn’t be sure. I was too exhausted.

The man in the Kings jersey issued a series of hand commands as complex as any I’d seen in my service with Alpha. The other men rose in unison and began moving in well-disciplined silence, away from the echo of the gunshot.

Somehow, I found a second wind and fell in behind them.

They never asked why I was being chased or why somebody was shooting at me. They were being polite, I suppose, which made us even. I never learned what they were doing out there at night, in the middle of a California pine forest, just north of the U.S. — Mexico border, but it wasn’t hard to guess. Up in Oxnard, there were strawberries to pick and, out in Beverly Hills, pricey cars to wax. There were construction ditches to dig and buckets of scalding hot tar to be hauled onto rooftops. And somebody had to do all that spine-snapping work because no American ever would, not for the money his fellow citizens were willing to pay.

One of the men gave me a sip of lime Gatorade while two others gently bandaged my wrists by flashlight. The biggest of the bunch reached into his backpack and insisted I take from him a pair of Air Jordan knockoffs to replace the shoe I’d lost. He wouldn’t accept no for an answer.

“Gracias.”

He gave me a thumbs-up and a smile.

The “Air Jordans” were purple and black. They actually fit.

I shook their hands, one after the other, and watched them move off single file, silently, through the trees.

“Good luck, you guys.”

“Buena suerte, señor.”

Every inch of me hurt. My left thumb had swollen to nearly twice its normal size. I sat with my back against a boulder. The night was warm. An 18-wheeler let loose its air horn somewhere to the north. In the woods nearby, an owl hooted greetings to its mate, who hooted back. I found comfort in their dialogue. The birds, I knew, would go silent if Sheen were approaching. I lay down on a bed of pine needles and closed my eyes, too tired to think. When I opened them again, it was dawn.

I had no phone, no wristwatch, no food or drink, and not a clue as to my specific location. I did, however, have two matching Air Jordans, and for that, I reminded myself, I was grateful. I began walking downhill because downhill is how water flows, and it is always near water where people will be found.

The pines soon thinned, giving way to arid, rolling chaparral speckled by manzanita and chamise. Below me and to the east, a Jeep Wrangler negotiated a twisting dirt road at high speed, kicking up dust plumes in its wake.

Getting down to the road was easy. Not only because both of my feet were now uniformly and properly clad, but because, with the sun up, I could now see where I was walking.

Daylight. Another reason to be grateful.

I picked up my pace. After what I guessed to be about fifteen minutes, I stepped out onto the road just as a Chevy Tahoe with a throaty muffler rounded a blind curve and came barreling toward me.

The driver was a teenaged girl with long dark hair and big designer sunglasses. Her left hand was hanging out the window, a cigarette between her fingers. She rumbled past me without slowing, ignoring my waving. I couldn’t say I blamed her for not stopping, not after catching my reflection in one of those pole-mounted convex mirrors that help alert motorists to traffic converging from the opposite direction:

My face was a grotesque pastiche of cuts and abrasions. My hair was matted stiff with blood. I looked like an extra in a zombie movie.

I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.

I headed northbound along the road without a trace of civilization in sight, when I heard a car coming up from behind me. I turned to see a San Diego County sheriff’s cruiser approaching. The driver skidded to a stop, threw open his door and took up station behind it, leveling an AR-15 assault rifle at me. His partner was similarly positioned behind the black-and-white’s passenger door with a Glock pointed in my direction.

“Am I glad to see you guys.”

“Kiss the ground! Hands outstretched! Do it now!”

Odd questions can rumble through your head at such moments. Questions like, “Who kisses the ground anymore other than the Pope?” And, “What happens if I lie down in the road, another car comes by and I get run over? Do these guys really want to assume that kind of liability?” But I said nothing. They clearly meant business and I was in no shape to cross swords with them.

I got down. But I did not kiss the ground.

The deputy with the assault rifle covered me as his partner holstered his pistol, kneed me in the small of my back, and yanked my left wrist back to handcuff me.

“Don’t move.”

“My thumb’s broken.”

“Shut up.”

He hooked me up, smelling faintly of Old Spice, and hauled me brusquely to my feet. His partner read me my Miranda rights.

“Do you understand these rights I have just read to you?”

I said I did. He keyed a coiled radio mic clipped to the left epaulet of his uniform shirt.

“Eighty-four Robert, suspect in custody.”

“You’re under arrest,” Deputy Old Spice said as he led me back to the patrol car.

“Can I ask what for?”

“Does the name, ‘Raymond Sheen,’ ring a bell?”

“You mean the same individual who tried to kill me?”

“He said you tried to kill him.”

I was too beat to laugh.

My left thumb was fractured. Fortunately, an X-ray showed the break didn’t require surgery. After my hands were swabbed for gunshot residue, medical staff at the downtown San Diego Central Jail cleaned out my cuts and slapped on a cast that went midway up my left forearm. They gave me a thorough neurological exam to assess the severity of my concussion and an MRI for my leg, concluding it was merely sprained.

Then they tossed me in the slammer.

Aside from being in jail, I was convinced that I had hit upon a brilliant solution to affordable national health care: get busted for a crime you didn’t commit.

I had hoped I might be put in a cell with Bunny the Human Doberman and his cousin, Li’l Sinister. Granted, they were perverse and prone to violence, but they were entertaining, and I’ll take entertaining over dangerous anytime. Unfortunately for me, my cell mate turned out to be the very definition of dull. He was a husky African-American chap in his early thirties with some sort of tribal tattoo on the right side of his face, who sat on the concrete floor with his knees drawn up to his chest, staring catatonically into space. The steel door locked behind me as I entered. He pretended not to notice.

“Welcome to the Rock,” I said in my best Sean Connery, which is much worse that my best Humphrey Bogart, which some who’ve heard it have suggested should be banned as a crime against humanity.