It was a simple plan, but somehow, as he and his men followed the shackled man through the hills, Khawar wondered if it should have been simpler still. If they had been able to shoot him close to the police station earlier in the day, a story about a thwarted escape might have played out quite nicely. But his skinny constable, Javed, had noted that at that hour, there were too many day laborers passing by who knew the man, which could have created “complications.” Now he wasn’t sure why they had come here—to the mines, of all places. Who had decided that? Only he could have given the order, but he couldn’t recall it; he was even having trouble remembering the drive over. The adrenaline was disorienting him, which he didn’t like to admit but was perhaps natural, given that this was his first encounter.

The prisoner, Usmaan, a man in his mid-40s who looked a decade older, was handcuffed. Ankles bound in bar fetters, he shuffled through the grass. He was tall, and his head hung down, his eyes on the ground as he tried not to trip, and Khawar was struck by the man’s caution, his care. Then he sniffed, and Khawar wondered if he might be crying. For God’s sake, how would that help now? Then again, Usmaan wasn’t the usual fit for an encounter, a protocol reserved for the worst of criminals—rapists, dacoits, or gangsters of renown. Sometimes it was the only option the police had for delivering justice to men who were either impossible to jail or capable of easily buying their way out of it. An encounter was an act on behalf of the decent in the face of an indecent world, really; that’s what he’d been telling himself these past few days. Only here, they were trailing an anonymous, shabby-looking man with little to his name, a man whom they could all hear murmuring—prayers, insults?—under his breath.

Up ahead were the abandoned barracks, glum and battered, behind a wire fence. The uranium mines had once brought the army, with its engineers and trucks, here. Khawar hadn’t come out this way in years; no one did, other than the villagers who grazed their animals on the hillside. The locals liked to complain about the mines, about the yellow sludge sliding down the hills. They talked incessantly of the dangerous waste they’d heard was buried in the mines, the damage it was doing to their animals and their children. And it was this that had brought Usmaan to their attention.

Two weeks ago, he’d dumped the bloated body of a cow on Sakhi Sarwar Road, the main route to the area’s most visited shrine. A single act of protest might have been ignored, but day after day, he’d dragged corpses—buffalo, goats, their tongues lolling from their mouths, their hooves strangely swollen—to the middle of the busy thoroughfare in his tiny Suzuki van. When they’d asked him why he’d done it, he’d said that no one cared, and so he’d had no choice but to make people see what was happening here by the mines.

This was true: No one did care. But Usmaan’s blockades had forced pilgrims to get to the shrine by the smaller back roads, where a group of newly assembled dacoits had taken the opportunity to lie in wait and rob them, often violently. Even if Usmaan claimed he had nothing to do with the criminals, he’d made it possible for the gang to operate. So when Khawar and his men couldn’t find any higher-ups from the actual gang to arrest, their patience with the man’s theatrics wore thin, and they decided that dealing with Usmaan would be good enough. It would reduce the recent criminal activity and restore both the flow of tourists and the reputation of the district’s police. So here they were, trailing this stooping man on a hillside caked in sandy effluent from the mines.

Something snapped; they all stopped to look around. But before they could start up again, Usmaan turned to face them, as if he’d decided this was as far as he’d go. Khawar stiffened, alert to trouble. He’d brought three constables with him— excessive, perhaps, but he’d felt the more bodies, the better, and now he wondered if his instincts had been right.

Usmaan cleared his throat. If he had been crying before, no trace of it remained now. The wind was blowing in long, hot gusts, and Usmaan’s kameez flapped up. He was balding, and the tufts of hair on either side of his head flew up too. He grimaced as the wind lashed his face. But Khawar could detect no tension in the man’s body, no indication that he was waiting for a moment to charge at them or run; he looked determined.

Khawar had thought about this moment a great deal the past few days; he’d pictured exactly how it ought to unfold. But as the man stared at each of them, unblinking, he realized that although he’d thought about the mechanics, he hadn’t fully confronted the business of killing a man. He’d known that it might come one day, particularly after his promotion to inspector, but he had expected that he’d function on autopilot, as he did most of the time: overseeing the logistics, getting the job done, filing the paperwork, fastidious as ever. And yet here he was—thinking!

He nodded at his men to indicate that they should unshackle the prisoner. They crouched around his ankles and leaned over his hands, and Khawar felt embarrassed, as if he were watching something untoward, something private. He turned to look at the hills. With the smell of dirt hanging in the air and the grass lying in sheets of dull gold around his ankles, he had the urge to take off his boots and socks and feel the earth under his feet, God’s name hovering somewhere around him.

The prisoner’s chains clanked. This wasn’t the time or the place. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps this was exactly what a man supervising the death of another should be thinking about: God.

Had Inspector Salim Mirza of Karachi, legendary for his record of encounters, felt the same during each of his? How many had Mirza overseen? The number was said to be in the hundreds—it had transformed him into a folk hero of law enforcement. Perhaps the … protocols were different in a city like Karachi. Not that Khawar had ever been there, but it couldn’t be like this: like shooting a man from a neighboring village whom you’d likely wandered past countless times on your way to buy cigarettes. Khawar suspected it must get easier. But surely everyone remembered their first—the first time must feel different.