A simple plan, really. Inspector Khawar and his men would take a shackled prisoner to an abandoned uranium mine in the hills, shoot him, and call it an "encounter" - that handy Pakistani police euphemism for an extrajudicial killing that sounds like a romantic blind date. But somehow, the universe decided that today was not the day for tidy paperwork and a cricket-highlights-filled evening.

Khawar, a newly promoted inspector overseeing his first encounter, found himself second-guessing everything. The original plan to shoot the man near the police station was scrapped because too many day laborers knew the victim - Usmaan, a mid-40s farmer who looked a decade older - and that would create "complications." So instead, they dragged him to the hills near the uranium mines, where yellow sludge slides down the hills and locals complain about mysterious illnesses in their children and livestock.

Usmaan's crime? He'd been dumping dead animals - cows, buffalo, goats - on Sakhi Sarwar Road, the main route to a popular shrine, to protest the environmental damage from the mines. "No one cared," he said, "so I had to make people see." Unfortunately, his blockades forced pilgrims onto back roads where a new gang of dacoits robbed them. When Khawar couldn't find the actual gang leaders, he decided that killing Usmaan would be "good enough" to restore the district's reputation.

But the execution went off the rails. The constables couldn't get the chains off. Khawar couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger. Usmaan gave a passionate speech about loving his animals, his son's breathing problems, and the buried barrels of poison. Then, astonishingly, he agreed to run so they could shoot him in the back - standard encounter protocol - and he sprinted off into the hills. The constables fired and fired. He kept running. They chased him over a ridge. And then… nothing. He vanished. No ditch, no body, no explanation. After an hour and a half of searching, they drove back to DG Khan in silence, with Pervaiz asleep and Musa chewing his fingernails.

Inspector Salim Mirza of Karachi, legendary for his hundreds of encounters, would not have tolerated this nonsense. But Khawar is left with a dead man's ghost, a missing corpse, and the sinking feeling that the universe has a sense of humor - just not the kind that helps you file your paperwork.