Colin Harrison - The Finder

In the living room, his father lay in his hospital bed, now a small body under the sheet, his eyes shut, chest rising and falling faster than was natural. It was his heart working hard at the dying. Ray nodded at the morning shift nurse, a young woman named Wendy, and she left the room.

"Hey, Dad," he said.

His father opened his eyes, blinked, shifted his gaze toward Ray.

"I'm sorry you suffered so much last night."

His father shrugged. "Not suffering now," he whispered. "Fine now."

"Were you asleep?"

No, his father mouthed, eyes falling closed.

"Thinking?"

Yes.

His father opened his eyes, picked at the morphine tube to be sure it was not pinched or bent. There flickered in his expression a serious intent, a flash of concentration that told Ray that his father was still mostly here.

"Thinking about what?" Ray asked.

"Worlds."

"Worlds?"

"Yes," his father whispered, "worlds within worlds."

Ray glanced at the automatic Dilaudid pump. He had a few minutes before it sent another bolus into his father's bloodstream, knocking him out.

"Dad, the reason that everything happened last night was I have a girlfriend who has disappeared. You haven't met her. She's Chinese. We broke up a few weeks ago. Her brother wants me to find her and what he did was his way of telling me how serious he was."

His father nodded calmly. "Threatening."

"Yeah."

"Studied you, I think."

"I think so."

"Figured out your vulnerability. Me."

Ray exhaled by way of agreement.

"I was hoping you might meet that nice lady who lives next door there." He cracked a slow-motion smile. "She needs a husband, fast."

"I did meet her."

"Oh, then-"

"I was talking to her when they grabbed me."

His father's mouth pulled at one side. "You had a long talk."

Ray ignored this. "These guys weren't messing around."

"You could call the cops," his father noted.

"Should I?"

A long pause. His father shook his head weakly. Licked his lips.

Ray handed him a cup of juice. "But they could maybe protect you."

"Not me I'm worried about."

"I think I should move you, Dad. Somewhere safe."

"Hospital?"

"I was thinking, yeah."

He sipped his juice. "People die in hospitals, son."

"Dad-"

"I want to die in my own house, in this room. And I don't really care how I die, Ray, or when, so long as it's in this room, in this bed."

This was a speech he'd heard before. "Yes, but these guys will come back, Dad."

"Let them. What's the worst they can do? Murder me? They'd be doing me a personal favor."

Ray hung his head. Six weeks earlier, when he could still walk a bit in the house, Ray's father had told him he wanted to end it sooner rather than later. Did Ray mind if he shot himself? "Why put you through what's coming?" his father had asked then. "Why put me through it?"

"Why? I want every minute with you, Dad."

His father had nodded silently.

But Ray hadn't been convinced, and so within an hour, he had gathered all of his father's guns and ammunition and taken them out to the shed in their small backyard and hidden them in a waterproof wrap beneath a couple of bags of peat moss. A shotgun, a rifle, two Glock 9 service pistols, always kept oiled and clean, plus the boxes of ammunition. Then he'd put a new lock on the shed and hidden one copy of the key inside the rotten birdhouse outside the kitchen window and put the other on his own key ring. If his father had somehow noticed the absence of the guns, he hadn't mentioned it. Of course it was possible his father had not only noticed the absence of the guns but had also discovered or deduced their new location. Ray had leaned a shovel up over the new lock so that it couldn't be seen from the house, but he knew that his father missed very little. The man had been a detective, after all.

But that was weeks ago, and his father had gone steadily downhill ever since. Now the Dilaudid pump clicked; the stuff was going into the tube in his father's wrist. Ray wouldn't have much more time to talk, so he returned to the topic of Jin Li's disappearance. "Her brother told me she was in a car with two Mexican girls who died a few nights ago, and I just spoke with Pete, who told me about it."

"So you did call the cops."

"Sort of. It's Pete."

"He's a detective second grade, with thirty years on the job. Method of homicide?"

"It was a car full of shit. Dumped it in the car, drowned them. Pete said his people hadn't gone into the drains yet, because of environmental issues, traffic-"

"Bunch of crap. They just don't want to go in. You have to have hazmat suits, dysentery shots. Case like that, you got to go into the drains."

"Why?" Ray asked.

"Think about what the cops found… two dead girls… aspirated human excrement… the bus takes them away. Then the FD hoses out the car for them."

"They found drug traces in the trunk and glove compartment."

His father shrugged. "Pete's gonna think it's drugs. Maybe. I think the shit is the best clue."

"How?"

"What you got to do is find out where the shit came from."

"I know where it came from, it came from human beings. Pete says there are something like nine hundred septic trucks in the area handling loads like this."

"No, no, listen to me, there'll be stuff in there, information. There'll be information in the shit."

Now Ray watched the synthetic morphine course through his father, softening the tension in his neck and forehead. His large fingers, bony and thin now, eased against the blanket.

"You did hear me, right?" croaked his father.

"I did."

"I don't want to be moved. I want to die in this bed in this room in this house. Then I will be with your mother."

"Dad, we could easily call the precinct and they'd put a car outside the house."

"Nah."

"Why?"

"I got all the advantages, son."

This made no sense. Mental clouding, the Dilaudid sheet had said, euphoria. "Like what?"

His father shrugged. "You, for one. Might be interesting. Plus there's another reason."

"What?"

"Might give me some satisfaction. I can still think, buddy-boy, when those angels of mercy don't pump too much of this stuff into me."

"It's so you don't suffer."

"There's lots of kinds of suffering. Your mother heard you were under that building, that was suffering. I never seen suffering like that."

"I have."

"When?"

"When she was dying, Dad. I saw you."

His father's eyes drifted upward in remembrance, and he munched his mouth a bit. "Funny how we forget some things."

"You want anything to eat?"

His father shook his head. "Not for me. I got a little applesauce." His eyes were closed now, but he smiled, gums yellow. "You know what this is, don't you?"

"No, what."

"My last case."

"This is serious, Dad."

"I know it's serious," he whispered. "My last case, and I get to do it with my son. Couldn't be better than that." His father pushed the pain button, getting an optional bolus to chase the one just delivered. Upping the dose, wanting more, addicted. "If I were you I would get down in there in those pipes today before the guys down at the precinct maybe decide to do it after all. They won't crawl around in pipes. They'll bring in a backhoe and tear those drainpipes right out of there and look at every inch. But you get in there first, might be just as good."

His father's head lolled a bit, fading fast, and Wendy reappeared in the doorway.

"I'm going to clean him now," she whispered. "So he doesn't feel me moving him around."

Ray nodded. "How's he doing?"

The nurse tore open some antiseptic pads. She moved down to the foot of the bed. Ray followed her.

"The kidneys are barely working… he's losing weight," she went on. "I think I know what you are asking."