AN UNMARKED BLACK Impala was gassed and waiting in the cold rain around the corner on Central Park West. In the front seat, I handed Parker one of the Kevlar vests draped across the dashboard and slipped into the other.

We would be the lead car, with Schultz and Ramirez loosely tailing us. Aviation had been called, and a Bell 206 was en route from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn for high-altitude covert surveillance.

“What was that about the wings?” I said to Parker as we sat there waiting for the kidnapper to call back.

“I think it was a poem. It’s on the tip of my tongue. My college English professor would kill me.”

“Where’d you go to school?” I said.

“UVA.”

“ Virginia. So that explains the down-home accent.”

“Accent?” Emily drawled. “Y’all Yankees are the ones with the accent.”

An FBI agent with a sense of humor, I thought, listening to the drumroll of rain on the roof. What were the odds?

I put my phone on speaker and was adjusting the no-hands microphone when it rang. It was yet a different number, I noticed, a Long Island 516 area code, the third number so far. Maybe our kidnapper owned a cell phone store, I thought as I folded it open.

“Listen to my instructions. Go exactly where I say,” the kidnapper told me. “Take the Central Park traverse to the East Side.”

I took a breath as we pulled out. It started to rain harder. Against the gray sky, the bare trees atop the park’s stone walls looked black in the rain.

A few minutes later, I said, “I’m coming up on Fifth Avenue now.”

“Keep going to Park Avenue and make an uptown left.”

I sped out of the park down two tony East Side blocks and screeched through the red light.

“I’m on Park Avenue,” I said.

“Welcome to the silk-stocking district, Mike,” the kidnapper said. “Holy one-zero-zero-two-one. Did you know you’re now driving through the highest concentration of wealth in the richest country on earth? In the salons above you, more money is paid over to both of our sham political parties than in any other place.”