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was during an ice storm, in the middle of the night, and the defroster had gone out on my old Camaro as I drove through a crime-ridden neighborhood in my hometown. Eventually a solid sheet of ice formed on my windshield and I was forced to abandon ship and make my way through the bitterly cold streets of the hood, underdressed and shivering, hoping the criminals were hovering around space heaters inside their lairs. When a police car swooped to a stop beside me, I rushed to open the back door and get in, which seemed to surprise the cops. They turned on the inside light and stared at me.
    â€œIt’s warm in here!” I said, relieved to be in from the cold. They exchanged a glance. The driver proceeded to report to the dispatcher on his radio, and the other cop told me they’d stopped to pick me up for questioning, because I matched the description of a man who’d just robbed the Green Derby Lounge. They were pretty sure now that it wasn’t me, on account of how I was so eager to get in the car. There was a lesson in that, I figured.
    I’m not sure what the lesson will be this time around, but I know that unless you’re a beat reporter on assignment or a refugee from an ice storm, it’s a safe bet that something’s wrong any time you find yourself in the backseat of a cop car. If you haven’t broken the law, well . . . actually, you probably have broken the law. Cops are supposed to arrest criminals, not squire political operatives around.
    The guy who summoned us to Jersey City had said over the phone that someone would meet Michael and me at the PATH station, but I hadn’t anticipated this. It’s early in the campaign season—March, when we start meeting with the people to whom we propose our oppo projects. There’s usually an air of excitement because we’re at the front end of a potentially enlightening and important project. Something is almost certainly going to happen, and you have no idea what. The campaigns are nascent. Few of the key positions have been filled.
    During the first meeting, which may take place in person or by phone, we listen to someone (typically a recently arrived campaign manager) recite what he knows about the candidate and the opponent, after which we explain what, specifically, we propose looking into, along with our fee. Then we wait for them to decide whether they want to proceed, which can sometimes take months.
    We’d expected this meeting to be a familiar brainstorming session, but from the look of things, it’s going to go a little differently. We had already noted that there didn’t seem to be a campaign manager, and it wasn’t clear if there’s even a campaign organization. Yet they—whoever they are—were champing at the bit to get started. The guy on the phone had said that they wanted to go after this one elected official, and his reasons for doing so were vague. Now that we’re here, I don’t really like the idea of being chauffeured by two plainclothes cops to an unknown destination, to meet with someone we don’t know and whose agenda is unclear. I’m sure everything will turn out fine, but I can’t help feeling a little uncomfortable.
    On some level, Michael and I are always kind of waiting for something to go wrong. There’s serious stuff beneath the surface of politics, and some of these people, they’re not only irascible, they’re dangerous. Added to that, our nerves are already on edge after being subjected to three aborted plane landings at the Newark airport in a terrific thunderstorm the night before. Michael says he’s feeling a bit dehydrated—a condition he falls prey to more than most—and now we both feel the strange sensation that we’ve entered a deleted scene from On the Waterfront and we aren’t sure how it’s going to play out.
    â€œThanks for the lift,” I say, far too cheerily for Michael’s taste, judging