We drove on. The only sound in the car was the windshield wipers. I didn’t see any salons. All the buildings outside were just gray smudges.

The last high-profile kidnapping Major Case had handled involved a garment factory owner who was kidnapped back in ’93. They’d pulled him, filthy and starving but, thankfully, still alive, out of a hole in the ground along the West Side Highway. I wondered what kind of hole Jacob was in now. Most of all, I hoped the eighteen-year-old was still alive when we pulled him out of it.

“Where are you?” the kidnapper said.

“I’m at One Hundred and Tenth and Park.”

“Spanish Harlem,” he said. “See how quickly it all turns to shit? When Park Avenue ends, head over the Madison Avenue Bridge into the Bronx.”

The tires slipped for a gut-wrenching second as we sped over the wet, rusting bridge. The Harlem River beneath was brownish green and looked almost solid, as if you could walk across it.

“I’m in the Bronx now,” I announced when I reached the other side of the river.

“Take the Grand Concourse north.”

We slid past project after project. We were passing alongside a lot the size of a city block, filled with stacks of old tires, when the kidnapper started in with more commentary.

“Did you know that the Grand Concourse was supposed to be the Park Avenue of the Bronx?” he said. “Look at it now. At the burned-out, marble-trimmed windows. At the granite facades painted over with graffiti memorials for slain drug dealers. How did we let this happen, Mike? Have you ever asked yourself that? How did we let the world become what it is?”

Soon the area became wall-to-wall decayed tenements. We were in the Forty-sixth Precinct now, I knew. “The Alamo,” they called it. It was the smallest, but the most drug-infested, precinct in the city.