Colin Harrison: The Finder

CorpServe is contracted for nine floors of the building: the sixteenth through nineteenth floors, commercial loan processing offices for a bank, and the twentieth through twenty-fourth floors, the national management offices of a small pharmaceutical company. Jin Li runs eight crews at different midtown Manhattan locations each night and floats among them. The office layouts are all roughly similar, with a service elevator that drops into a street-level truck bay where CorpServe's immense mobile shredding vehicle is parked. There an older man in a blue uniform matching theirs tosses the bags into a sucking orifice that shreds them into confetti. This man is Chinese, like Jin Li, and at times she comes down to the truck bay with certain piles of bags, issues specific instructions to him, then watches to see that he complies. The roar of the shredders drowns out their speech. They both know that they are always being watched by ceiling-mounted security cameras, some of them remote-swiveling, and they also both know how easy it is to work around them. You just have to know the angles. The cameras can see the CorpServe truck but not into the truck. You can set aside a few bags marked by hand with a special inch-high Chinese character and the camera doesn't know.

But that was hours past and now the night's work is done and the girls laugh and listen to the Latino radio station and feel the salty mist off the water. The beach parking lot is usually empty at this hour. Nobody bothers the girls, but if someone does-some cracked-out motherfucker, some drunk-ass wannabe punk-they have pepper spray in their purses. Tonight they drink a little cheap jug wine in plastic cups, dance in their seats to the radio. The Mexican girls ask MeezaJin about her white boyfriend. I liked him! So macho for a white guy! What happened? one of the girls asks, wriggling in a seat patched with duct tape. Oh, you know… Jin Li laughs but is quick to look toward the water. It wasn't going to work out. But she doesn't elaborate, barely admits the real reason to herself. She was forced to end it. Listened to his phone messages asking her to call. Hated herself for not calling him back. What he did to her in bed-thinking about not getting that will just upset her. She's had relationships with gweilos before-British, German, Italian. She likes them, much better than Chinese men, and this one was best of all. And maybe that's why she's here tonight, just to forget him.

Now Jin Li feels the wine in her bladder and slips out the passenger-side door to go pee in the sea grass. She has a bit of toilet paper folded in her purse with her and steps over the lip of the parking lot toward a dirt path that leads to a private spot. Private and disgusting. People hang out down there lighting up crack pipes or having sex, and so she is careful before she disappears into the grass. You have to watch out for broken bottles, used condoms, tampons, rotting chicken wings. The girls in the car can no longer see her, so she listens a moment-is anyone lurking down there in the grass? She hears nothing, though the wind is blowing now, rain in it. She braves the dark path and finds a place where she will squat down.

She is just pulling up her pink panties when she hears a low diesel vibration nearby. What is it? She walks halfway up the path and crouches in the grass below the parking lot. Two trucks are pulling into the lot, one a big pickup, tricked out with fog lights and custom chrome parts, and the other a huge commercial vehicle, big as a municipal garbage truck but shaped differently. It's too dark to know what colors they are. The trucks brake to a sudden stop next to the little Toyota. The pickup sits directly behind the car, pinning it against the curb of the parking lot, and the other truck has slipped up on the driver's side, an inch away, so tight the door can't be opened. What are they doing? What do they want to do? Two burly men get out, one from each truck, and rush around to the unblocked side of the little car.

Standing in the weeds, the rain making her blink now, Jin Li can see that the two Mexican girls have rolled up the windows and are screaming inside their little car.

One of the men shatters the sunroof of the Toyota with a hammer, then keeps his foot on the front passenger door, in case the girls try to push it open. Meanwhile the second man hooks something on the back bumper of the car-a chain, she thinks-then starts a motor on the bigger truck. Moving quickly, he pulls a huge hose off a spool on the truck and drags it around to the broken sunroof. He shoves the nozzle of the hose downward into the car, releases a lever, and holds the thick hose as it sends its gurgling contents inside onto the girls. The hose bucks and kicks, the flow inside sloshy and heavy.

Behind the windows the screaming intensifies.

What should she do? The car is filling quickly, a line of dark stuff rising against the windows. The only way out is across the parking lot, where Jin Li will be seen. Behind her is the sharp sea grass and sand. Her cell phone is sitting in her apartment in Manhattan, charging. She never takes it to work, on purpose: cell phones give law enforcement a perfect record of your movements. She has an untraceable walkie-talkie in her purse that she uses to call the other CorpServe crews. But its effective range is only about a mile, good enough for midtown Manhattan but no good in Brooklyn…

One of the girls is pushing on the driver's door now, banging it against the big truck pulled up tight against the car. But the door will open only a crack, no more. Then a hand shoots out of the passenger window, wildly firing pepper spray. The man holding shut that door slaps the hand and the spray can flies to the pavement.

"Richie!" the taller man calls through the rain. "That's enough!"

Jin Li fumbles in her purse for the walkie-talkie and clicks it on. Nothing but windy static. "Hello? Hello?" she tries in English. Nothing.

Now the lights of the car go on and the engine starts. The car lurches forward to the lip of the parking lot, jolting the truck behind it. But the chain on the bumper holds. The car's back wheels spin violently, burning rubber, the smelly smoke drifting over the sea grass. Then the engine slows, as if in capitulation. Inside the car the girl's foot is slack now. Something is oozing out of the passenger window, dripping down the glass.

"Richie, you fuck, let's go!" the man screams.

The man holding the hose doesn't move.

"Turn it off!"

The man named Richie pulls the lever and withdraws the nozzle. More stuff pours out lumpily from the broken sunroof. The car is full. He replaces the hose onto the truck, then unhooks the chain.

"Go faster!"

The little $125 car doesn't move against the lip of the parking lot, even though its lights are still on and the engine putters. The taller man removes his boot from the front passenger door, jumping back as it opens just enough to release a torrent of ooze. Then he does a strange thing. He reaches around to lock the door and uses all his weight to slam it shut. Then he waits as Richie moves the bigger truck and does the same thing with the driver's door.

He locked both doors, Jin Li thinks. Why?

"Get out of here!"

The bigger man hurries now to his pickup. The whole thing has taken perhaps six minutes. The big truck reverses in a half circle, then shoots forward out of the lot. The pickup truck backs more tightly, swings around, and follows the big truck. They drive without lights, fast.

In ten seconds they are gone.

Jin Li runs toward the car. The wet wind has shifted, and the smell has alerted her. She knows that smell from China, would know it anywhere. The public pit latrines in the smaller towns. The holes in the ground next to huge construction sites in Shanghai where the workers squat over cutout boards. The raw sewage spewing into the rivers. Yes, she knows this smell.

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