You play out a hundred scenarios in your head. Your intellect having been in limbo the prior nine minutes, unable to process anything other than the raw escape—your mind now roars to life, reactivating so that every permutation of the three-letter word was laid out in front of you: C-o-p. Cop. Cop. Cop. All my synapses went to work, flashing a giant decision tree with a thousand different realities growing from one lone, gnarled trunk. I stabbed a cop? Whether he was lying or not, if making me hesitate was his goal, he’d done well. That single word might as well have been a guillotine. He’d said it to someone who grew up on the wrong sides of the tracks with a wrong shade of skin. Cops were never a simple noun in my vocabulary. I stopped struggling, stopped pulling, stopped resisting, stopped everything—salvage what you can because life as you know it is over, Adam—my brain switching to the urgency of what to do with a bombshell like this.
“Don’t move!” he said.
You can still mitigate the damage, man. Just do what he says.
“Don’t move!”
Do whatever he says.
“Y-yeah,” I said.
But my central nervous system refused to concede right now: my muscles twitched, my body surged, my legs flexed to shove downward as hard as they could, twice as hard as before, and rip me from the grip of both the guy and the fence—my jacket coming clean off in the process—scooting me back until I was clear of him. For a fraction of a second, I stayed there on the ground, transfixed by the spectacle of it all—a guy gazing at me, a guy who was a cop—and then I got up and ran. How could this end in anything but jail? I was already sprinting toward the intersection where I’d come from on a route that’d take me through the heart of the third arrondissement. I didn’t know the city well but I knew I had to head away from the river, away from what would be a wide swath of open space that offered zero cover, so I ran north, several blocks north without blinking—dodging traffic, dodging people, carts, bikes, dogs, running north, along a path that emerged onto a quaint street corner at the base of a giant cathedral called Saint-Eustache. North. Which led me to—to—to—I had to search for a street sign. Where the hell’s this? Rue Coquillière. A smaller street, sparsely populated. Which meant I could hurry. All out. Wishing I were in any kind of decent shape. Pushing myself beyond exhaustion. I honestly thought I’d end up falling to the pavement, knees buckling, desperately in need of a next move. Somewhere in front of me was the optimum choice for getting out of this. Would it be a fromagerie with a storage room? A dry cleaner? A park? Some timid kid in a bookstore guiding me to the bookshelves in the back? No, you couldn’t afford to stop. The guy had already out-mapped you once. What if the problem was that I was easy to follow? “He fucking has my wallet,” I said out loud. My wallet was in my jacket pocket, ripped clean from my upper body. Now he had my credit cards and ID. “No, no, no, he already knows who you are, idiot. He was in your room.” I stopped running. One way or another, I now had to operate under the assumption that this man had my home address, my credit cards, my personal info, and my itinerary. I told the sex-shop lady I had a flight at four o’clock but, realistically, there was no way my company was letting me travel with them. I stopped altogether. I did a three-sixty in place, gradually recognizing the inevitable. I only had one place to go. One port in this storm. Cash, info, embassy access, corroboration, credit. Jenn. I had to risk everything and meet Jenn at the restaurant as originally planned.