Colin Harrison - The Finder

Now she heard shoes on the steps. The Russian, coming back, as he'd promised! She pulled her most precious items into the small green suitcase, as well as the bag of apples, and darted out the fire door and up the stairs. Third floor, fourth floor, fifth.

"Chinese girl!" came the Russian's voice behind her, this time deeper, with more of a breathy, slurry growl in it. "I know you are there on stairs, heh, I can hear you."

Jin Li reached the top of the steps. He was coming up behind her, his footsteps heavy but determined, his rising cigarette smoke reaching her first.

I am not scared of him, she decided, not very much.

"Chinese girl," came the voice, clearly drunk, "I am going to give you very good excellent Russian fucking." His wheezy cackling echoed in the stairwell. "I am going to give you good old Soviet… going upstairs, heh? Okay. I go faster."

She pushed open the door to the fifth floor and hurried around and through the iron bathtubs and pedestal sinks. Thousands of white people had washed themselves in these tubs and sinks, all of them now no doubt long dead. A room of naked ghosts soaping their crotches. She was looking for the wooden ladder that led to the roof hatch, and she found it, climbing easily, suitcase in one hand.

"Chinese girl, now is time you will have very good sex with me, heh," came the boozy, excited voice, confident of its own intentions, eager for satisfaction. "I am excellent at good fucking, you like to fuck, I can see it in your eyes and the Chinese man say you like to fuck white men, so now I will-"

The roof hatch had a blue wooden door kept shut with a heavy steel padlock. But the lock was held by old screws in boards that had been rained and snowed upon for almost one hundred years. And anyway, Jin Li, honor graduate of Harbin Institute of Technology, had quite cleverly pulled out those screws the night before, using the hard edge of her nail clippers, while making her silent investigations through the building. Now she pushed against the blue boards with her fingertips and the door sailed open, caught by an evening wind that carved over the uneven flat tops of the connected buildings. In an instant she was out on the tar-papered roof, lifting her dress as she scampered past the old brick chimneys, many crookedly bent as if they'd melted ever so slowly over the many decades. The sky was not quite dark yet, and she could see where to quickly place her feet, where to avoid the angled black vent pipes that jutted up like elongated metallic mushrooms as well as the other rooftop clutter of telephone wires, satellite TV dishes, rusted cans of roof cement. By the time the Russian man lurched into the open doorway of his roof hatch, Jin Li was many buildings away, hiding behind a chimney with her little green suitcase and bag of apples. She breathed easily, even feeling a bit of defiant triumph, dark eyes flashing, but she knew that he would tell Chen about her now, which was also to say that she was in more danger than ever.

You do what you gotta do, and he was going to do it. Ray pulled his truck into the beach parking lot just as the sun went down. There was nothing special about the place except for the vista of water in front of it and a few red-hulled container ships out on the horizon. Trash and bottles. The kind of place teenagers used for drinking and screwing around, like he'd done when he was a teenager. Why would Jin Li be here with two Mexican girls in the wee hours of the night?

He parked in the far corner of the lot, away from the few cars there. He'd waited until dusk because he didn't want people to see him, and anyway, it was dark in the storm drains all the time. The lot was large enough that it had eight drains, and the question, he supposed, was where they went. Pete Blake had said they emptied into a gulley. Under most circumstances in New York City the drains would empty into the sewage system. But the elevation of the parking lot was four or five feet lower than the parkway fifty yards back and itself not much higher than the waterline, which meant that in a heavy fall storm when the tide was high, the waves probably flooded the parking lot. You couldn't have seawater draining into the New York City sewage system.

Each side of the lot had four drains, two on the corners and two centered in the middle. There was indeed a gulley of brackish water parallel to the lot, and Ray stepped through the high weeds and found a sizable pipe of corrugated aluminum. It was screened. He detected a thin whiff of excrement. He walked back to his truck and retrieved a pipe wrench and hacksaw from his toolbox. The pipe wrench was useless on the screen bolts, which had long ago rusted tight. He dropped into the grass. A sediment of rotted organic matter pressed against the screen. No one, including any New York City detectives, had opened that screen in a long time. But the screen mesh would be easy to cut. He sawed a large upside-down U and pulled down the flap. He peered in with the light. A long, dark, tight colon of a tunnel. The idea of crawling into it sickened him. But I'm just fucking crazy enough to do it, Ray thought. Plus my father was a great detective. He'd be doing this if he could. He left the tools on the grass, set out his flashlight ahead of him, and crawled in, the flap in the screen snapping back after he let it go.

Go, Ray, go, he chanted. The storm drain was a standard three-foot width that rose steadily as he crawled. The bottom of the drain was silted with sediment, as if he were crawling along a moist streambed. His pants were soon damp and then soaked through. The light revealed leaves, trash, and at least one dead squirrel. He came to a juncture where the large pipe split in two pipes, one going left, the other right. These, he assumed, drained from the two sides of the lot. Which one should he take? His nose told him the answer. The one on the left smelled of shit, plain and simple. He crawled into it and found the smell getting worse. He estimated that he was halfway to the parking lot. The firemen washing out the car would have run their hoses long enough to clean off the lot but not so long that they would driven the excrement all the way through the drains. The subsequent rainfall had been light, but even a few hours of it would have created a fair volume of runoff.

He crawled farther. If he switched off the light, the corrugated tunnel was completely dark. A wet, increasingly odorous dark. He switched his light on again and then began to find what he wanted to find. A tampon. A cigarette butt. He shined his light on the bed of the pipe and saw a toothpaste cap. What do people put in toilets besides waste? Damn near everything. He noticed a scrap of paper and picked it up. Too dark to see what it was. He stuffed it in his pocket. His coat would smell of shit when he was done, he knew. He crawled farther. Saw another scrap of something and put that in his pocket. The flashlight now revealed a long slick of rotting excrement, perhaps six inches deep, and at the far end, perhaps seventy feet away, a tiny square of pale night light where the drain opened to the world above. He would have to crawl seventy feet through shit. But guess what? he said to himself. This is nothing. You've seen much worse, pal. Just use some of the usual tricks. He pulled out two plugs made of tissue paper that he had dipped in mentholated jelly and put these into his nose. Then he unwrapped a wad of pepper gum and started to chew it. Last he pulled an air filter mask around his head. Just do it, Ray told himself. He shimmied forward on his belly, inspecting the detritus lodged in the shit. More tampons, then a baby's pacifier. People drop things in the toilet and think they magically disappear. He pulled a wiry thing and out came a woman's eyeliner brush. He dropped it and moved on. He came upon a slip of paper, a soggy colored napkin, and stuffed both into his pocket. Something else with numbers on it. Into the pocket. As he approached the tiny square of light, the shit became deeper, clogging the drain enough that he couldn't go farther. He reached out with his gloved hand and swept it across the shit. He felt three things. He pulled them to the flashlight. One was the end of a man's necktie. He discarded it. The second item was a dead mouse. A mercy he couldn't smell it. And the last item, he reminded himself. To the left. He swept his hand over the muddy shit until his finger found a child's sock. Useless. He stuck it in his pocket anyway.