Her visitor was an old man, elegantly dressed, his face merry—the perfect grandfather, obviously rich and good-natured. It had to be one of the other tenants; she hadn’t buzzed anyone into the building. She’d never seen him before. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Miss, ah, Gabriela Donohue?”

“That’s right.” She waited patiently; no need to unlock the door, no matter how innocuous he looked, until he satisfied her that she had a reason to.

“Thank you,” he said. Then he stepped away from the door, out of sight.

Someone moved in to take his place. It was a man in a dark overcoat, so tall that she could not see above the knot of his gray necktie, so wide that he seemed to match the door in breadth. Gaby took an involuntary step back.

There was a sharp bang! and the door crashed down, its locks and hinges shattered; it fell against Gaby and staggered her. Beyond, the huge man was striding ­forward, and the old man and another intruder came close ­behind. . . .

Gaby felt icy terror grip her stomach. She turned and ran. She had to reach her bedroom, the fire escape outside her window—

The huge man caught up to her before she reached the door to her room. He hit her like someone might swat a puppy. The blow took her on the hip and spun her to the floor, sent her rolling into the corner with her TV.

She stared up at him and got a good look at what served him as a face.

The sight froze the breath in her lungs. She sat ­unmoving as he came at her.

Harris dropped the last piece of the last article and watched it float off into the darkness.

There. A paper trail led from his apartment to Gaby’s Greenwich Village brownstone. She could find her way back to him now.

From the corner, he looked up at her fourth-story window, saw that it was still lit. She was awake, obviously waiting for him.

The main entrance’s outer door was unlocked. Not so with the inner door. He stood there fiddling with his keychain for a couple of minutes before he remembered that she’d taken his key.

Dammit. He’d have to climb the fire escape. On the other hand, she used to like that.

Would that make him a stalker? He frowned over that one. Maybe he’d follow her around until she got scared and got a restraining order and he did something stupid and they made a TV-movie about him. The thought bothered him.

He went around to the 11th Street side of the ­building and looked up at the fire escape. It seemed higher than usual. There was a car, actually a stretch limo, illegally parked near it, and he debated trying a jump from its roof, but decided that was impolite.

It took him three jumps to catch the bottom of the fire escape, and a greater effort than usual to haul himself up onto its bottom level. He must have gained weight, too, because his exertion set this whole part of the world rocking just like his apartment. He lay there resting while he waited for the world to steady itself.

Below him, three men in dressy long coats came around the corner and headed for the limo. One was an old man, but the second was big like a football player. The third one, the one with the hat worn low and the big, lumpy duffel bag over his shoulder, was so tall that Harris could have reached down and plucked his hat off, so broad that bodybuilders could have bitten small pieces off him for a steroid fix. It was probably a good thing that Harris hadn’t left footprints all over their limo.

The old man was saying, “—plenty of time to get to the great lawn, but there’s no sense in dilly-dallying.” Then they were climbing into the limo, slamming doors, driving off.

Leaving Harris alone.

Resting was nice, but Gaby was still two stories up. He reluctantly rose and began climbing the narrow, shaky metal steps of the fire escape.

Gaby floated up into wakefulness. The side of her face still hurt where he—

She veered away from thinking about him. This wasn’t hard. There was plenty to occupy her attention.

She was folded up in fetal position, wrapped in what felt like heavy linen. The air was so close and warm she found it hard to breathe. She was being jolted up and down, but was up against a hard surface: muscle over bone, someone’s back, a very broad back.

His back. She was being carried.

She groped around as much as she could—not easy, as she was tightly pinned—and reached over her head. There was a small hole above her, drawn nearly closed by cords; she twisted and looked up through it, seeing nighttime clouds.

She was in a bag. They’d stuffed her into a duffel bag and were carrying her around like so much laundry.

Laundry. Fully awake and furious, she shoved up against the hole and shouted, “Hey! Call the police! I’m being kidnapped! Can anyone hear me?”

He didn’t slacken his pace, but Gaby felt a sharp knock against the side of her head. It hurt. She stopped shoving; she rubbed where the blow had landed. “Hey!”

It was the old man’s voice: “If you make any more noise, Miss Donohue, I’m going to have Adonis here let you out of the bag and punish you. It wants to punish you. It will enjoy doing so.”

And she felt a rumbling from the back of the thing carrying her. It sounded like deep, quiet laughter.

Her stomach went cold. Adonis’ face—God, what was he? She didn’t want to look at that face again. She didn’t want to see it turn angry. And she understood, with crystal certainty, that the moves she’d once learned in self-­defense class were not going to impress him.

She sat still.

After another minute of walking, Adonis swung her down. She didn’t hit the ground hard, but she landed on a sharp rock hard enough to bruise her rear.

The old man spoke again. “Just relax here for a few minutes and everything will be fine. We don’t want to hurt you.” His accent sounded strange—as though it were part German, part English.

She said, “Can I ask you something?”

“No. Be silent.”

Fuming, she did as she was told.

Harris trotted along the tree-lined footpath and prayed to God he’d heard right. Prayed that Mr. Crenshaw had done as Harris had asked. But Harris had completed ­almost an entire circuit around Central Park’s Great Lawn and had seen nothing but a pair of tough-looking kids who’d eyed him speculatively as he ran past.

When he’d reached Gaby’s window on the fire escape, he’d looked in and seen a man in a bathrobe—thin, balding Mr. Crenshaw, Gaby’s neighbor—talking on the phone in Gaby’s bedroom. Crenshaw looked alarmed as he talked, and hung up almost as soon as Harris spotted him.

Harris knocked on the window, and Crenshaw went from his usual sunless color to nearly true white. Then the man recognized Harris. He threw open the window and started babbling.

“Someone took her, a really huge son of a bitch. Her door’s all over the living room. Thank God they didn’t see me. I’ve called the police . . . ”

Something like an electrical current jolted Harris. All of a sudden he had a hard time breathing. On the other hand, he didn’t feel drunk anymore.

He told Mr. Crenshaw what he’d heard the old man say. “Call the police again, tell them what I saw.” Then he ran back down the fire escape.

Now, as he reached the footpath opposite the Met, the point where he’d started his circuit of the Great Lawn, he had no illusions that he wasn’t drunk. Keeping his balance while he ran was an interesting effort, and whenever he stood still, his surroundings spun slowly counterclockwise. At least he was alert.

No sign of the three guys or Gaby. Maybe the old man was talking about the really great lawn he had in front of his house in Queens or something. Harris cursed and turned off the footpath, crossing through a fringe of trees onto the grass of the Great Lawn itself. It spread out before him, a featureless plain of darkness.

Please, God, let him find Gaby. And if he couldn’t find her right away, please give him a mugger. Someone he could beat and beat in order to release the howling fear and rage he felt building inside him.