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from the look on his face as we pull away from the curb. “You guys doing OK today?”
    The guy riding shotgun mumbles yeah. The driver just glances back at me in the rearview mirror. There are no formal introductions.
    We drive silently through dilapidated blocks of closed Jersey City businesses, many of which are marked by rusty signs and tagged with gang graffiti, illustrating the final gasps of what appears to be a long socioeconomic lament. Sprigs of economic life appear here and there, but for the most part it’s a wasteland, replete with beggars representing all the nations of the Earth. It’s new to us, and interesting in a depressing way, so we peer out the windows and take in the scenery.
    The silence seems to be to everyone’s liking, particularly Michael’s, who is annoyed by what he describes as my penchant for trying to engage everyone we meet. These guys don’t really need to know why we’re here and likely wouldn’t care if they did, and it doesn’t seem prudent to ask why or how two cops came to be chauffeuring us around. I’d actually like to know, but everyone seems to agree that the less said the better. It’s one of those moments where you realize the oppo could easily be turned on you. I imagine a judge or a reporter asking, “Did you not think there was anything unusual about using a police cruiser for your personal taxicab? Did you consider the illegality of this arrangement you’d entered into?”
    â€œYou need anything before we get there?” one of the cops asks.
    After ten minutes of driving in silence, during which I’d tried to memorize the turns we were making as we passed through the rundown city, the question catches me off guard. I point to Michael in the rearview mirror and say, “Yeah, actually, my friend could probably use a bottle of water. He’s been a little dehydrated since the plane trip yesterday.” Michael responds to this thoughtful request by shooting me one of his “what the hell?” looks. Though he knows it’s true, I might as well have said, “My little buddy here is thirsty.”
    The driver whips in front of a bodega, double parks, his partner darts inside and then returns with the precious liquid. He won’t take Michael’s money. We pull away, round a corner and come to a stop at our final destination, a row of warehouses on the waterfront.
    At the tinted glass door that leads inside we’re met by a guy dressed in an actual pinstripe suit. With bushy eyebrows and a prominent mole on his cheek, he looks like he’s come straight from wardrobe. He introduces himself and ushers us down a long hallway and into an actual smoke-filled room where several other men sit around a small conference table. To my relief, they do not look particularly menacing. On the contrary, they look like they’ve all just been rejected at a casting call for The Sopranos and aren’t at all happy about it. The fellow who brought us in, whom Michael and I later secretly nickname Mo on account of the mole, tells them we’re the guys who are going to find out what they want to know. They appear unimpressed.
    The scene in the meeting room is stereotypical of how many people envision the backrooms of politics, but it’s actually a departure, even for us. Our work is routinely strange, and takes us places we’d otherwise never go. Whether it’s in a smoke-filled room on the Jersey waterfront or someone’s cozy den in rural Kansas, we approach each situation the same way: We listen to what the campaign people have to say, and we look for signs of trouble. Still, we like to start with a genial parlay, something that apparently is going to be denied us in this case. It feels like we’re being hired to take someone out, literally, and the bosses have no interest in knowing any more than they have to about us.
    In a sense we are being hired to take someone out, which is