“Come here.” I stepped to a mirror and pushed the woman in front of me so she was looking at herself. Then I put my hands on the sides of her face. She jumped at my touch. “He makes ladies look younger.” I pulled back her skin, a quick and dirty face-lift.
The proprietor was shaking her head against my hands. “Dr. Fang,” I told her.
She tensed, and I knew I’d managed to get through the cultural barrier. I took my hands away. “Where is Dr. Fang?”
“You no call police.”
“I won’t call the police if you tell me where he is.”
She was quivering now. “Down street,” she insisted, her voice cracking. “Pretty Hands. Dr. Fang there.” She gripped my jacket. “You no tell Dr. Fang,” she bargained, then switched back to a language I didn’t understand.
She was pleading with me now, her desperation turning her voice breathy and shrill. I removed her hands from my lapels, gave her my best disapproving gimlet-eyed stare. Odds were this place would be vacant by the end of the day and by tomorrow the girls in back would be turning tricks somewhere else.
I turned, walked past the rainbow hues of polish, through the gauntlet of manicure benches and pedicure chairs, a thousand watts of fluorescent light beating down on me from above, my reflection bouncing at me from a dozen mirrors.
87
THE CAR WAS STILL THERE, and Tim was still in it. But he wasn’t reading. He was in the driver’s seat, hunched up close to the window, watching me. As I walked nearer, he scrambled hastily into the passenger’s seat and grabbed his book.
“Trolls are the worst,” he said.
The kid was a rotten actor, but telling him that wouldn’t speed up the bonding process. “Just stay in the car, okay? You don’t have to read if you don’t want to.” I struggled to think of something that would occupy him. “You want a snack? Some candy?” Kids like candy, right?
“Is my mom in there?”
“No.”
“Who was in there?”
I didn’t intend to be the one to fill Tim in on the more commercial aspects of the birds and bees. That’s what the Internet is for. “You want some candy or not?”
“You’re not supposed to have candy until after dinner.”
“It’s break-the-rules day again.”
He watched me skeptically.
“Chocolate bar good?”
“I like licorice better.”
I stepped into a corner store, forked over the cash for a couple packs of licorice and a few Slim Jims. On the way to the car, I wolfed down two of the Slim Jims.
“Eat this stuff slowly, all right, Tim?” Like, slow enough that you don’t start getting curious about what I’m doing. “It’ll make you sick if you eat it too fast.”
“I won’t get sick.”
“I’m a doctor. You will get sick. Upchuck everywhere.”
He giggled. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh. “I won’t upchuck,” he said, savoring the word. Kids are weird.
“You will. I’m serious. Red, blue, green upchuck, all over the car.”
If his smile was any indication, Tim really seemed to like that image. I said, “Just stay in here—”
At that moment in the Dr. Nate/Tim bonding, a car stopped next to me. Someone said, “You’re under arrest, Dr. McCormick.”
My heart flipped, and I twisted around to see a late-model Acura with tinted windows. The passenger-side window was down. “I’m hauling you in!” the driver shouted at me.
“You’re blocking traffic, Dr. Singh,” I told him.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m going on a bust. I don’t have time to park.” I kept the smile, but began to wonder whether it was a good idea to have Ravi along after all. I’m going on a bust. The guy vacillated between the man in the gray flannel suit and Gunga Din.
“Who’s that?” Tim wanted to know.
“That’s Dr. Singh. Don’t…don’t learn anything from him, okay?”
“Okay.” Tim had dispatched with one of the Slim Jims and was halfway through the licorice.
“And slow down on that thing,” I said.
“I won’t upchuck.”
Little man just wouldn’t let the upchuck thing rest. “Read about viruses or bacteria or trolls or something, okay?”
Ravi parked, then strolled up. I made introductions.
“I’m trying not to upchuck,” Tim promptly informed him.
“You sick?” Ravi asked.
“No. He said I would upchuck if I ate this too—”
Time to put an end to this medical exchange. “Tim, I need to talk to Dr. Singh for a second.”
I filled Ravi in on the scanty details of the clinic, Beautiful Essence, on Dorothy Zhang and Paul Murphy and the botched exposé Dorothy had planned.
“All this for freaking Botox,” he said to no one in particular. “So what the hell are we going to find?”
“No clue. Let’s go. It’s down the block.”
“It’s right there.” Ravi pointed across to Spectacular Nails. Then, of course, I had to explain to him about my crack intervention there with a down-market house of ill repute.
This delighted him no end. “You get any play?”
“Yeah. Twenty girls, me, and five minutes.” Ha ha ha.
The laughter faded. “Yeah. So. What’s the plan?” Ravi asked.
“We’re just going to ask some questions. Act like we’re medical device salesmen—at least until we get to Fang.”
“I thought you wanted me along because I’m official.”
“Only be official if we need it. We want to scare them into talking to us, but not scare them scare them, you know what I mean?”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a plan.”
“You have a better idea?”
“Yeah. Call your friend the cop. Have him take care of this.”
“We don’t want the police.” Ravi’s sudden case of cold feet irritated me, mostly because it was giving me cold feet. “Stay in the car if you want. Talk to the kid about malaria.”
He scratched at his jaw. “Oh, man…” In the end, Ravi decided against trolls and malaria. “Okay, McCormick. Let’s do this.”
I smiled, clapped him on the shoulder, and we crossed the street. I swung around and gave the thumbs-up to Tim, who refused to give me a thumbs-up back. The kid wouldn’t recognize a hero if he bit him.
We walked in tandem: thin nervous white guy, thick nervous brown guy. Cue the music.
“What’s the doctor’s name again?” Ravi asked me.
“Wei-jan Fang,” I said. “Dr. Fang.”
Ravi smiled. “Awesome. Dr. Fang. Awesome.”
88
“I’M SORRY. WE’RE CLOSED TODAY.” The woman who greeted us from behind the reception desk looked as if she had just been yanked off the assembly line at a plastics factory—plucked eyebrows, heavy makeup, gargantuan smile.
“Wei-jan Fang,” Ravi said.
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
Behind her stretched a space remarkably similar to the brothel I’d invaded thirty minutes earlier: long narrow room, manicure tables and pedicure chairs lining the walls. I nudged Ravi, whose eyes were locked on the door—a peephole set into its middle—at the back. He nodded almost imperceptibly.
“We’re here to see Dr. Fang,” Ravi told the receptionist.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know that name.”
“We’re with the Sygistics Company,” I said. “Dr. Fang had ordered some hyfrecators and was having some difficulty—”
“Gentlemen, I apologize, but you must have the wrong establishment.”
“That’s odd,” I said, “we spoke with Dr. Fang this mor—”
Ravi pulled out his ID and waggled it an inch from the woman’s synthetic smile. “California Department of Health.”
I wanted to lop off his arm and staple shut his mouth. Too soon, too soon, I almost screamed.
The woman’s eyes flickered and I saw a hand slide under her desk. “I’m sorry, gentlemen—”
&n
bsp; By then, I was already halfway across the room, moving toward the door with the peephole. “She hit the alarm,” I yelled.
The door was locked, so I stepped back a few paces and rammed it with my shoulder. Unlike the piece of paper I’d burst through up the street, this damn thing was solid as granite. Pain blasted through my left side.
The woman shouted that the cops would be here any second.
“Move!” Ravi bellowed, and put his 220 pounds in motion. He thudded against the door, bounced off like a bag of flour, swore.
There was a fire extinguisher attached to the wall. I yanked it from its mooring, hauled it back, and drove it at the doorknob. It bent the metal, but did not loosen the lock. I hit it again. And again. Still the door held.
“Let me,” Ravi said, shouldering me aside. The receptionist was screaming now, calling Ravi a “hooligan.” He grabbed the extinguisher and began pounding it furiously against the knob.
The woman’s screaming stopped abruptly. I turned and saw she was gone.
I should have known they would be ready for us. I should have known they would have procedures in place. As the bang, bang of the extinguisher crashing into door filled the space, I could almost feel everyone slipping from the building.
Wood splintered, metal bent. Cursing, Ravi hit the door again. The knob popped off and clattered to the floor.
“Okay?” he huffed, dropping the extinguisher.
“Okay.”
His body slammed into the door. Wood ripped and the thing blew open like a shutter.
There was no one behind it.
I picked up the fire extinguisher—a dry-chemical type—and unhooked the nozzle. Not exactly a Smith & Wesson, but a face full of monoammonium phosphate would slow anyone down.
The door opened into a well-appointed waiting room. The walls were white, decorated with prints from museum exhibits. The carpet was gray. Glossy beauty magazines were arrayed on a dark wood coffee table surrounded by four empty chairs. A cutout in the wall yielded a view of a receptionist’s area. I crossed to it, stuck my head inside. A cup of pens and a phone sat on the desk. A laptop’s power cord stretched across it, attached to nothing.
Clearly, Wei-jan Fang had upgraded since camping out at his previous digs.
As I placed the extinguisher on the floor, I heard Ravi yell “Nate!”
There were six doors off the hallway, three to my right, two to the left, and one at the end, which was just then swinging shut. I darted through the door, kept my foot jammed behind it to keep it from closing and locking us out.
To my left, I could see Ravinder Singh running like a loaf of wet bread up the alley. He stopped at the end, and though I couldn’t hear him, I could read lips well enough to know a stream of blue language flowed from his mouth.
When Ravi got back to me, he was breathing heavily. “I saw…I saw two people running that way—” He pointed to where he’d come from. “They disappeared.” He leaned over his knees. “Shit.” He spat. “Shit!”
The first door I tried opened into a small canteen/storage area. A coffeepot, water cooler, sink, table, and a low green metal cabinet were the only accoutrements. No personal touches, as I’ve seen in countless other doctors’ offices across the world. No staff pictures, no birthday cards, no thank-yous from patients. It had all the personality of an unfinished shed.
“Charming,” Ravi said from the doorway.
I crossed to the green cabinet, opened it. Six plastic five-gallon cans with “flammable” emblazoned across the front. I uncapped one of the cans.
“Gasoline,” I said.
“Why the hell—?”
“Maybe a black market filling station is next on the list for these guys.” I recapped the can and closed the cabinet.
Ravi entered the room across the hall, while I continued to a door adjacent to the canteen, which revealed a space tiny enough to be a closet. A three-foot square freezer—temperature controlled at minus 85 degrees Centigrade—filled a corner of the room. On a table sat an open rack of ten-milliliter plastic tubes and a small, high-speed orbital shaker. An incubator the size of a microwave was tucked on the floor under the table. Between the freezer and the wall were a number of broken-down cardboard boxes. A trash can—stuffed with paper towels, other garbage—was pushed against the opposite wall. Next to it was a squat, insulated barrel. Liquid nitrogen. Maybe Wei-jan Fang had added wart removal to his Beautiful Essence treatments.
The freezer had a padlock on it. Locked.
I walked back into the hallway.
“Procedure room,” I heard Ravi say from across the corridor. And, indeed, it was. There was a pale green examination chair in the center of the space, under a jointed examination light. Two wheeled cabinets. Hand sanitizer, but no sink. Nothing was attached to the walls; again, not what you’d expect in a physician’s office. Except for the light, everything was temporary. Mobile. Upon closer inspection, even the exam light was jerry-rigged. It had been bolted to the ceiling, but its wiring ran externally to the wall and down to an outlet.
“Exam gloves, syringes, gauze, chucks, blah, blah, blah.” Ravi slammed a cabinet drawer. “Nothing.”
“I found a freezer in the other room, an incubator, some Falcon tubes. Liquid nitrogen.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “What was in the freezer?”
“Locked.”
“Then there’s gotta be a key.” Ravi began tearing through the drawers, casting all manner of medical accoutrements to the floor. “No key,” he grumped. “What the hell are they mixing up in there?”
“Beautiful Essence, I guess. The incubator, though…”
“They need it to warm something.”
“Yeah.”
I went back into the closet-like lab, checked the temperature setting on the incubator: 37 degrees Centigrade. Body temperature.
Across the hall, I heard another door open. Ravi called, “Whoa, they were getting ready to do it.” I followed his voice.
Yet another procedure room. Same cart, same furniture. In this room, however, an instrument table had been pulled up to the exam chair. An empty syringe and a vial of topical anesthetic lay neatly arranged on top, along with an opened packet of gauze. A couple pieces of blue, crumpled paper had been cast on the floor. Ravi was busy ripping the place apart, and I let him rip.
Even with the room’s innards exposed, it had a spartan feel. “Got to admire their efficiency,” I said. “All their records on a laptop, which they can take with them. Everything else stripped.”
“Except what’s in the locked freezer.”
“Yeah. The incubator was at 37 degrees.”
“So? They were warming something to inject it.”
“I know. But why not let it go to room temp? Why body temp?”
Ravi shrugged. He pulled one of the drawers from the cabinet and let it drop to the floor. He spread the contents with his foot. “No freezer key.”
Outside the procedure room, we split, Ravi to the receptionist’s alcove, me to the last of the closed doors. As the Sikh rolled like a tank down the hall, I tried the doorknob, expecting to see another exam chair, another exam light, another shotgun space for filling people with toxins.
And I wasn’t disappointed: exam chair, lights, rolling stack of plastic drawers. In every way identical to the two rooms we’d already seen. In every way identical, except for the man sitting in the examination chair, a small pistol in his hand.
“You must be Dr. McCormick,” he said.
89
THE MAN IN THE CHAIR was Asian, about forty years old. Dark crescents hung beneath his red-rimmed eyes; his hair fell in a limp, thin tangle over his brow. In general, he had the air of someone who’d just come off a three-day bender or was just emerging from heroin withdrawal. He wore a white coat—no name on it—and he hadn’t bothered to remove his latex gloves. Spots of blood dotted the gloves.
“Dr. Fang,” I said, as Ravi joined us.
The man with the gun nodded. “Who’s that?” he asked. He thr
ust his chin toward Ravi.
“Ravinder Singh,” I told him. “A doctor with the California Department of Health.”
“So the sleeping dragon of public health has finally woken up, huh?”
I didn’t much give a damn about dragons or public health at the moment. “Where’s everyone else?” I asked.
“Look around you. They’re gone, Dr. McCormick. Gone, gone, gone. You’re left with just me.” Wearily, Fang pushed himself out of the chair. Ravi and I stepped back. “Relax,” Dr. Fang said. He looked down at the gun in his hand. “This is what’s got you worried?” He dropped the gun into the pocket of his white coat. “There. All better. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a second, Doctors, I need to grab something. No need to worry: I’m not leaving. I could have done that when you were taking your time getting in here.”
He pushed by us, walked up the hall, and disappeared into the small canteen.
“We should call the cops,” Ravi said.
“We can’t.”
“Why? This is way beyond—”
“The kid’s mother, okay? They have her. Why do you think he’s so cocky?”
Fang reappeared. He held three small paper cups and a bottle of Scotch. He sat in the exam chair, neatly lined the three cups up on the instrument table. “You two miss me?” he asked. His lips spasmed into an insincere smile. Then he filled the cups to the brim with the liquor. “Drink up, gentlemen. A toast.” Fang held aloft one of the cups.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Me, too,” Ravi said.
“Pity.” Fang shook his head. “All right, then, I toast myself. To a brilliant yet unheralded scientist. And to a doctor who’s come to the end of the road.” He drained the small cup. “You guys sure? This stuff is a hundred and twenty bucks a bottle. No? Another toast, then.” He placed the empty cup on the table, took another. “To Yahlin Mao, my first patient.” He lifted the cup. “The beautiful Yahlin Mao. Down the hatch.” He drank.
“One more,” Fang insisted. “To all those who had faith in me from the beginning. To my mother!” He laughed softly, then drank.
“Oh, that is good,” he murmured. He held his hand in front of his face, looked at it. “Steady as a rock.” He said it proudly.
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