Colin Harrison: The Finder

"Out!" said Chen.

He didn't bother fighting them. They lifted him up and carried him to the window, then threw him headfirst out of it, face up, his knees bent over the sill, with each man holding one of his feet. His baseball cap fell off. By instinct he grasped the edge of the window. One of the men smashed his hand with the butt of a gun.

"Don't break window!" yelled Chen from within the room.

The men lifted him and pushed him farther out, so that only the heels of his shoes touched the building. He felt their tight grip around his ankles. He weighed about 190 pounds. How long could they hold that? His hands fell below him, blood rushed to his head. His back touched the face of the building, the sheer clean line of windows, most lit, a few dark, dropping below him. I'm upside down, he thought stupidly. Some change in his pockets shook loose and he watched it tumble brightly toward the lighted streets below, taxis flowing around an upside-down Columbus Circle. The yellow pencil fell from his breast pocket. He closed his eyes to calm himself, slowed his breathing. Release your desire, he chanted, for desire causes you to struggle and be fearful. You desire not to die. He'd been in worse jams than this one. Far worse.

"Do you agree?" shouted an angry voice.

He said nothing and instead concentrated on his breathing. They wouldn't drop him. It was a matter of outwaiting them, not letting himself be terrorized.

"Mr. Ray! Listen to me. Listen now!"

Something touched his face. He kept his eyes closed. Don't break, he told himself, don't you break.

"You see, you look!"

His eyes stayed closed. He breathed through his nose to slow his heartbeat. It worked. He knew from experience that he could last five minutes upside down if necessary.

"You look!" they screamed. "You see this!"

The thing brushed his face again. He opened his eyes.

"Do you see what that is?" he heard Chen yelling from above.

At first he did not. A box with tubes, hard to focus on while hanging upside down, swinging back and forth in front of his eyes, the tip of one of the tubes attached to a bloody needle.

Then he understood.

His father's morphine pump.

They'd taken it, yanked it right out of the vein in his father's right arm. He needed a forty-milligram bolus of Dilaudid every hour, or the pain was "Yes, yes!" Ray screamed. "I'll do it! Yes, get me up!"

When the limousine returned Ray to his father's semidetached house in Brooklyn, two of the three men got out slowly, watching him, but as soon as he was free he bolted toward the front door, carrying the Dilaudid pump. His red truck was back in the driveway, he noticed. He flew in through the cluttered entrance, past all of his father's gardening equipment and landlord supplies, and into the living room, surprising the guard, who jumped to his feet and drew a. 45 pistol.

Ray froze, raising his hands. The other men arrived in the room and the guard lowered his gun. The nurse, Gloria, sat next to the hospital bed holding his father's head in both her old hands, bent close to him, lips on his forehead, whispering lovingly to him as he arced his back in pain, digging fitfully at the bed with his shrunken legs. His upper lip was drawn back, showing his old worn teeth, and the lids of his closed eyes fluttered in torment, the brows above raised in disbelief and wonder at the canyon of pain through which he traveled. Ray had seen his father suffer, but this was different; this was an old man on a steel hook.

"Oh!" cried Gloria, seeing that Ray held the drug pump. He handed it to her. "He's been so good, so brave. God has been helping him in this terrible hour."

She plugged in the machine, keyed in the restricted access code, checked the drug supply, and quickly inserted a new intravenous line into his father's arm. The two other Chinese men appeared in the doorway.

"You are the one who did this to my father?" Ray asked the guard.

"He is old," said the guard.

"Would you do this to your own father?" said Ray, smelling alcohol on the man.

"Father never get old."

"We are leaving now," said one of the others. He pointed at Ray and then at the front door. "You go first."

He felt the three men behind him as he walked to the front door. As he passed through the cluttered hallway, Ray let his right hand trail to the side and find a spray can of rust-preventative paint. The left hand grabbed a pair of hedge clippers he'd dropped into the umbrella stand the day before.

He popped the top off the paint, found the spray button with his finger, wheeled, and sprayed the first man behind him right in the eyes. The man screamed and clawed at his face. Ray clubbed him with the paint can and he went down.

As the second man reacted, Ray grabbed the clippers with both hands and clipped savagely at the man's face, taking off the tip of his nose-he cried out and instinctively covered his face with his hands. Ray clipped again, this time sinking the blades into the man's fingers. The man fell to his knees, blood streaming onto the floor.

The third man had his gun out now and fired wildly past Ray, shattering the light fixture. Ray clipped at the outstretched hand holding the gun, missed, then went low and tackled the man, pinning the gun with one hand. His other hand pulled down the hall table and he swept his fingers blindly through its contents. The man was punching Ray in the head with his free hand, grunting with the effort. Ray found a roll of cellophane tape. No good. Loose batteries, a box of tacks. Nothing he could use. He took several blows to the head. The guy was really hitting him. Then his fingers felt a narrow key used to open paint cans that the hardware store on Eighty-sixth Street gave away for free when you bought paint. Shaped like a curved screwdriver. This Ray jammed into the man's ear, the first time into the cartilage, the second time right into the auditory canal. He buried it to the hilt, pounded it with his palm. The pain of a burst eardrum was such that the man went slack, urinated, and began to weep. Ray pulled the gun from his hand, jumped up dizzily, and swept the gun at the three men, all of them balled up in pain.

"No kill! No kill!" the one with the missing nose tip begged.

Ray put the gun to the neck of the third guard. "You understand English?" he screamed.

The man nodded.

"Don't hurt my father! Do not ever hurt my father!"

"Okay, boss, okay," the man coughed.

Ray yanked the man to his feet, took the guns from the other two, and kicked them out the front door. The limo driver, a white man, no doubt hired with the car, stared ahead, studiously ignoring the injured men stumbling into it. Their wounds were not life-threatening, Ray knew. He'd seen nearly every kind of injury a human being could suffer, and these were not serious. A phone call would be made, a private doctor found, perhaps in Chinatown in Manhattan but just as likely in one of the enclaves of Chinese doctors in Queens or Brooklyn.

Ray quickly retreated into the living room and saw that the Dilaudid had pulled his father into a deep sleep. Gloria looked up from her book, noticed the guns in his hands, then found his eyes. "I gave him double. He's fine now."

"You?"

She pointed at her Bible. "I got my reading."

Ray checked the window. Two blocks away, the limo sped through a red light. Already the men would be calling Chen and Chen would be calculating his response, wondering if Ray's actions confirmed him for the task of finding Jin Li or whether such sudden violence suggested a reckless lack of judgment. In either case, Ray had revealed himself to Chen, and this in itself constituted Ray's first disadvantage, his first mistake.

Stupid, he berated himself, you can't be so stupid and expect to survive.

It was a good hiding place but she hadn't slept well. Every hour or so she woke as a siren flew by, or someone hollered murderously in the street below, and she found herself hotly disoriented all over again, not sure whether to hang her head out the window and look down or wait soundlessly where she lay. Who would know about the building? A few people. But who would know she knew about this building? No one. No one in the world should know, Jin Li told herself. So why am I so nervous?