The Finder

by Colin Harrison

  "Which one?"

  She pointed to a green folder on the table. "This one."

  Ray took the folder. But he had already found the notes his father had written down in his now spidery handwriting: prison place/shit man building/name means winner. He glanced through the file. Victorious Sewerage in Marine Park. With a hand-drawn diagram of the building in the back of the lot.

  "He was in such a good mood, too, after the visit from your friend."

  "Friend, what friend?"

  "That drop-dead gorgeous Chinese girl. You do know who she is, don't you?"

  "Yes-"

  "Well, she was here, hoping to see you, and she ended up seeing him."

  "When did she leave?"

  "That was hours ago! She said she might go out, then come back, I could be wrong about that. She came to see you and I said you were out."

  But Ray was already running toward the truck, police file in hand.

  Only later, when he was almost to Marine Park, did he realize that he'd forgotten about the guns hidden under the fertilizer bags in his father's shed. Too late to go back now.

  43

  A visitor? Victor was standing in his lot trying one clonephone after the next and getting no answer when he saw a car pull in. Those fuckers had turned off their phones-he'd make them pay for that. But now he watched the car. He shouldn't have left the gate open. The driver slowed and looked around. Vic stepped back behind one of his trucks. The car drove up to the trailer, then made a slow, investigatory circle around it. It parked, and an old man, tall and lanky, unfolded himself from the driver's door and walked up the trailer steps and knocked. There'd be no answer; the business was closed today, everyone gone.

  The man knocked again. Nothing. He pulled something out of his sleeve and slipped it into the door. Ha, thought Vic, that won't work; it's also chained from the inside. The man was able to get the door open just enough to poke his head in for a quick look before he turned and descended the steps. He walked around the huge sewage trucks, stopping to write each license number on a pad of paper. The kind of thing a cop might do, Vic decided, but then again, there were ways to look up license information if you were not in law enforcement; you just had to have a friend who was.

  After a few minutes, the man headed toward the warehouse. Vic hurried to the door and unlocked it, and even opened it an inch, not only to entice the man, if he was a cop, but also to help him get past any anxiety about making an unlawful search. If the door was un locked and open, then the guy would not be able to resist entering; he'd just cautiously push through the door and look around.

  And that is what the man did, though now with his gun drawn. Fine, thought Vic. I can do that, too. I wasted a lot of bullets scaring the Chinese girl, but I have two left. Nobody is going to hear anything back here anyway.

  44

  I need to visit Ray Sr. one more time, thought Peter Blake. I'll swing by the house after I'm done poking around this shithole. If he found nothing, he'd go back and arrest Carlos Montoya.

  The warehouse door, he saw, had been left open. Was someone inside? Blake slipped out his service revolver and kept it at his thigh. The sewage trucks and the trailer had been unoccupied. If anyone is here, then they are inside, figured Blake. He pushed the door open with his toe. Peeked inside.

  Musty and gloomy in that big space. Truck parts, old junk, hoses, stacks of tires. Tough to see in the dark.

  Jin Li heard the shot. A quick pop. Then a pause. Then one more. It took a moment for her to understand what she'd just heard.

  Then she did. Oh, Ray, she cried.

  45

  The gate was open. Next to the trailer was what looked like an unmarked police car. He drove past all the parked trucks and straight to the large warehouse behind it. He got out and tried the door. Locked. He tried the big garage-bay doors. Locked. He walked around the entire outside of the building. No windows at all on the ground floor, and a door on the far side that was locked. The building was a fortress, when you thought about it. He could try to crowbar his way in, but the doors looked heavy. And there might be an easier way. Ray tied a rope to the end of his crowbar. The rope was one hundred feet long. He took the crowbar by the straight end and flung it tomahawk-style at the windows. The crowbar crashed into the cement block below the windows and fell harmlessly to the ground, the yellow nylon rope looping downward after it. Ray retrieved the crowbar and threw it again. And again, trying to get it high enough to break a window and go inside the building. On his fifth try, the spinning crowbar reached high enough, broke the window glass, and fell through. The yellow rope whizzed out of its pile, jumping upward.

  The trick was getting the hook of the crowbar to catch on something secure. Ray tugged the rope experimentally. He let the rope back down, then tugged again. Nothing. This time he slowly pulled the rope hand over hand, hoping it would catch on something inside. It didn't. He pulled and tugged, and finally it caught on something-a light fixture, a piece of electrical tubing, a pipe, something like that. How secure it was, he didn't know. He tested it with his weight. Pretty good, maybe.

  In a moment he was up the wall and standing in the busted-out window frame. He'd performed this exact same maneuver in a building destroyed by the tsunami. With one hand holding the frame, he released the upward tension on the nylon rope until its crowbar hook dropped free. Then he pulled the rope and hook up to where he was balanced, untied the crowbar, slipped it into his belt loop, then tied the rope itself onto the window framing, being sure to knot it to several frames, not just one. Unlikely they would all fail at the same moment. With the rope secured this way, he could perform a standard free belay down the inside face of the warehouse.

  Which he did, landing on the floor of the second story. He frantically searched the open area, pushing over boxes and poking through debris. Where are you, Jin Li? he thought. In a minute he had satisfied himself that she was not there. That left the first story, which was reached by a set of concrete stairs. Ray searched each area. Loaded with tires, truck parts, old cans of chemicals and solvents. A terrible fire hazard.

  "Jin Li!" he called.

  Nothing. It was a big building; studying every square foot of the floor would take hours.

  He looked at the floor for openings, trapdoors. Maybe there wasn't a secret room like the one in his father's drawing. Or maybe he wasn't looking for it the right way. The electric wire was trenched from the avenue and no doubt arrived in an electrical panel somewhere on the side of the building facing the street. And there it was, in the far corner. But any idiot could follow wiring from a service box. If you wanted to hide wiring to a secret room, you'd run it off an existing branch, not home run it back to the main box. Even sneakier would simply be to run any power in that room off a regular socket with an extension cord. In that case there would be no permanent wiring leading to the hidden space. The same could be done with water. You simply attached a regular garden hose to a hose bib and ran the water wherever you wanted. But this would have to be inside, at least during cold-weather months.

  He ran up the cement stairs to the second floor and scanned the open rafters for clues. You'd have to vent a secret room because sooner or later the air would go bad. The basic vent stack rose up the north wall. This would be the exhaust for the heating system. The venting was old, wrapped in asbestos plaster. But it seemed that the elbow of a four-inch PVC pipe met it right before it pushed up through the roofline. Painted the same color as the old plaster wrapping, it was easy to miss. He traced the pipe back into the wall from which it came. It came right out of the exterior wall. How strange was that? The wall was concrete block and he saw no indication that the vent pipe had been buried within it. There would be a scar in the cement blocks going straight up to the roofline. But maybe the vent went through the wall. He rushed to the window, broke it with an elbow, and peered out.

  The vent pipe disappeared into a regular aluminum downspout that was presumably draining water off the roof. Very ingenious.

&nbs
p; Downstairs he climbed atop a pile of tires and broke the window directly below the one he'd just looked out of upstairs, and then, using his crowbar, hooked the downspout and yanked on it. The pipe bent toward him, and at the now exposed joint between sections he saw a green garden hose and an orange-colored, heavy-duty extension wire.

  Now it was a matter of following the spout down the building with his eye. Five feet from the ground, it veered sharply toward the northeast corner of the building.

  He knew where that was. He jumped down from the tires and threaded his way through the junk and along an unlit hallway until he found the building's northeast corner. A battered old van was parked inside. He looked around for any service tools, oil cans. Nothing. This wasn't a place where vehicles were serviced. Why was the van in here? Hidden?

  He looked below the truck's underbody, the wheels. Then he saw the door in the floor, right under the left front wheel of the van.

  "Jin Li?" he screamed. He rapped the door with his crowbar.

  Did he hear her? He heard something.

  The van's door was open. He checked the dash, under the seat, the glove box. No keys. He glanced through the rear window of the cab into the back of the van. A body lay there. Jin Li? He jumped out and slid open the side door.

  Pete Blake, half his head blasted away. He got here before I did, thought Ray. How did he find out about Victor?

  Now he returned to the trapdoor, banged on it hard again. This time he definitely heard her.

  "I'm coming!" he yelled.

  He needed to get the wheel off the door. That was easy enough. He found three six-by-six pieces of lumber and slid them under the van, right beneath the engine block, one atop the other. Then Ray took his knife and cut out the air valve of the right rear tire. The valveless tube shot a jet of stale, rubber-smelling air, the weight of the van driving down on the compromised tire. The tube sang as the air escaped and the van settled downward on the piece of lumber, which served as a fulcrum to lift the front wheels. He repeated the process with the left rear wheel, sinking it six or eight inches. Ray heard the body of Pete Blake roll to the back of the van. Now the front wheels were more than a foot in the air-just high enough for him to open the hatch door.

  "Jin Li?" he called.

  "Ray! Here!"

  He was furious to get inside and opened the hatch to reveal a crudely built wooden ladder that descended into a dark space. He swung down the ladder, shined his flashlight around. Some kind of dripping tub that smelled terrible. That accounted for the need to vent the room.

  On a mattress thrown in the corner lay Jin Li, trussed by tape and rope.

  "Okay," he said, pulling on a lightbulb string, "you're okay."

  With the light on, he could see better. She'd been hit in the face many times. She began to cry. He held her, kissed her head, felt her shaking in his arms. He used his knife on the ropes and had to work at the tape for a few moments.

  She convulsed and he held her again.

  "Oh, Ray," she cried.

  "Let's get out of here."

  "There's a chain," she said.

  Yes. The lock and chain links were too strong to break, so he set upon the anchoring ring, making short work of it with the crowbar, and slid the last link off it.

  "You're going to have to carry the chain until I can cut it off."

  "Okay."

  He lifted her to her feet; she could barely stand.

  He caressed her cheek. "Are you thirsty?"

  "No."

  "Hungry?"

  "Just weak, I guess."

  Too weak to stand for long. He squatted down and had her lean softly over his shoulder, her head dropped over his back.

  "This is called the fireman's carry."

  "That makes sense."

  "Why?"

  "Because you're a fireman, even though you never told me."

  He carried her straight up the ladder, and when his head poked up through the opening, Victor hit him in the temple with a shovel and he collapsed down the ladder, falling heavily, Jin Li dropping hard on top of him.

  "Ray!" she screamed, seeing the huge gash in his head.

  Victor jumped down, landing squarely on top of Ray, his boots on his chest. Ray groaned. The front of Victor's shirt was spattered with blood. He had the detective's gun if he needed it but wanted to have a little excitement first.

  The Chinese girl screamed.

  Victor swung the shovel at her to keep back. Then he lifted the shovel blade like a guillotine over Ray's neck, about to chop downward, but Ray spun to the side and the blow hit the cement floor.

  Ray scrambled over toward Jin Li. She backed away and picked up the bucket of foul chemical jelly, handing it to Ray.

  "Make it go on fire!" she screamed. She stepped in front of Ray just as Victor swung the shovel, and took the next blow on her shoulder. She fell to the floor.

  Ray understood. He thrust the bucket up to the hot lightbulb, pressing the bulb deep into the mixture, and instantly it burst into flames. Victor was reaching into his pocket. Ray swung the bucket at Victor, its burning liquid contents leaping across the intervening space and splattering across his eyes and nose and mouth, adhering to him and burning blackly. Victor howled and lunged blindly at Ray, his hands grabbing him by the throat, and the two men stumbled backward toward the tub-which is where Ray tripped, and as he fell he twisted sideways and Victor sprawled awkwardly across the tub, sinking heavily into the lumpy mixture and simultaneously setting its contents on fire. The big man writhed beneath the burning jellied surface, his hands grabbing weakly at the edges of the tub, his feet kicking to make him stand, and for a moment he lifted the black shape of his head but then his movements ceased and he slumped into the flames, his clothes and skin charring rapidly.

  The little room filled with black smoke. Ray took a breath at floor level, where the air was better, again hoisted Jin Li over his shoulder in the fireman's carry, and staggered his way up the ladder and out of the room, pushing her past the underside of the van and scrambling after her. He kicked the hatch door shut behind him, knowing that whatever was left of Victor would soon be a carbonized, heat-eaten, faceless husk.

  He carried Jin Li outside, and as she panted heavily, he reflected that he, a fireman, had just set another human being afire. I never wanted that, he thought, feeling the blood on his forehead. He was dizzy but okay. And how strange that he had tripped and Victor had gone over him. You can't be luckier than that, Ray thought-as lucky, but not more so.

  46

  All pleasure ends. Thirty stories above Central Park, a man worth $1.2 billion pisses into his bathtub. His prostate-removal surgery is scheduled for the next morning. It's a bloody operation with a long recovery time. I can get you another ten years, the surgeon has said to him, and that's good enough. But it will be weeks on the comeback, and he suspects-knows-that he will never be the same again. He's going to be tired, cautious, weakened. Older. What a good thing that the Good Pharma problem is gone now, resolved, the stock restored to its rightful former price, his block of shares sold off, the $89 million in proceeds booked into the Martz New Century Partners Fund, where he is going to let the money sit safely. Yes, there was a little unpleasantness involving the Chinese speculator, but in the face of his coming operation, he doesn't quite wish to recall the particulars. And as for Tom Reilly, the guy came through in the end, and that's who you want as your captain. Lands on his feet! Wall Street likes the guy. Reilly's future looks very good indeed. Heard he was getting divorced, though. But a guy like that, getting remarried will be easy.

  In the kitchen his wife scrambles some eggs, sprinkles in dried peppers, and realizes, as if for the first time, that she will never have children if she stays married to this man. I have been very stupid, she tells herself, rich but stupid.

  A wave of grief passes through her.

  A moment later she is thinking about how to redecorate the yoga room of their villa in Palm Beach.

  In Shanghai a young man tells his fell
ow investors that he was late in his return from New York because he had important business meetings. They nod politely; they know he drinks too much and has a weakness for expensive prostitutes. And, after all, what happens in America stays in America. They are more interested in hearing about his new CorpServe manager, another Chinese woman. For his part, the young man has reflected on his experience in New York and suspects that he will never see his sister again. She had called him and said she was safe. And that she was done working for him. Where will you live, he had asked his little sister. Don't worry about me, she'd said, forget about me. Americans are more aggressive than I realized, he thinks. It seems certain that China and the United States, which is weakening every day, will someday be at war, and like many of his fellow investors, he looks forward to this moment in global history.

  In her midtown law office a woman in her thirties remembers her afternoon tryst with the man who had an old red pickup truck. She has thought of him too often, and wonders, still, what happened to him after the men in the white limo took him away. She turns her attention to New York magazine, some article in there about the sex lives of women in wheelchairs. She reads a page then flips the mag aside. Enough already, she thinks. Tonight she is going to hit a bar or two.

  In the Mexican pueblo of San Jacinto, five hundred miles south of the Texas line, a woman in her fifties, dressed in black, shuffles across the cool stone floor of the church and lights a candle to the memory of her daughter. Her sweet girl is buried safely now in the churchyard, the cost of bringing her coffin home paid by a Mexican man in New York named Montoya. The other girl was buried in her town, too. The woman reminds herself that she must buy corn flour. Also, her youngest daughter needs shoes today. She has made the decision to go to El Norte. Despite what happened. America is rich, mami, she says, and no one can argue with that.

  In Brooklyn, the obese owner of a check-cashing operation sighs, not yet able to gather the courage to claim the body of Victor. She's been told what is left of him. I'm the only one who will do it, she realizes. She has been thinking about the two Mexican girls and their families and has arranged, at a most reasonable price, for the sale of Victorious Sewerage-land, building, trucks, client list-to a very enterprising young man from New Delhi, and when the check arrives to her care, she is going to send every goddamned blood-soaked penny to the families of the Mexican girls. This act will not bring anyone back, but she feels it is the least that she can do. Karmic restitution, she calls it, if not for Vic then perhaps for herself, since she loved him. A terrible, heartless, paranoid killer. But she loved him, yes, she did. There is still an inch or two in the bottle of Drambuie that he brought her not long ago, and she reaches out for it, drains it off. The heavy sweet liquid settles in her, warms her, and she decides to phone another man, a deep-voiced Nigerian she has come to favor.