Colin Harrison - The Finder

Was he finding life? Not exactly. Or yes, in the midst of a great deal of death. From time to time he saved someone again. Not that others would not have saved the same person, but it was Ray who happened to be there, with the rope, the oxygen bottle, the hand. He remembered these moments, tried to understand them but could not. Understood less and less, in fact. No continuity. He lived in a stream of moments. Smoked opium a few times, mostly drank beer to relax. He read the Bible, then the Koran. Then some of the Hindu texts. Most of the cities had a bookstore where you could buy books in English. He followed the news about the war in Iraq, the war in Somalia, the little wars everywhere. He saw UN workers selling pallets of tires to local middlemen. He saw a man holding a pair of pliers walking through a field of bodies, each thick with flies; the man searched for the bodies whose mouths were open wide enough to pull out teeth with gold fillings in them. In Somalia, after having his truck emptied, he was handed an AK-47 and told to keep watch for raiders seeking to steal more relief supplies. The gun felt strange in his hands, so light. Inevitably the crew's work intersected with war zones. They were held up at gunpoint a few times, their money taken. Sometimes local gangs needed to be paid off, warlords placated with gifts of medicine. It came to him that there was a certain futility to what he did. The more relief work you did, the more you saw how much there was to be done. Some of the aid workers got sick, or outright collapsed. Others just flaked, didn't make the flight, called in their resignations. But most of them kept going, not really knowing what else to do. No one in the rest of the world much cared.

I had some good times here, Ray thought, looking up at Jin Li's apartment, a walk-up in the East Nineties. He had with him a set of fireman's skeleton keys, which contained the master forms provided by the major key manufacturers as well as a variety of trial-and-error sets created by the fire department's research department. Using the keys was sometimes faster than breaking a door down, especially if it was metal and dead-bolted. You were supposed to turn them in if you left the FD, but no one ever did.

He put on his old fire department suspenders and boots, carried his bag of tools plus a water pressure gauge, and clipped his old ID to his shirt and figured this might help him. His father owned an old police radio that didn't work very well but crackled and popped convincingly, and he carried this in one hand, too.

At the front door he encountered a little old woman who had dyed her hair but forgotten to do the eyebrows.

"Ma'am, I'm going to follow you in."

She turned in alarm. "You are?"

"Yes."

"Who are you?"

"Fire department."

"Where's the fire?"

"No fire. Just checking something."

"What is it?" she demanded to know. "Why isn't the super letting you in?"

"Between you and me?" He leaned close. "I'm an inspector. We have a confidential tip regarding the building's automated sprinklers, and letting the super know I am coming would be potentially disadvantageous to the safety of the residents."

The woman nodded in keen understanding of such a stratagem and her eyes narrowed in conspirational pleasure. "I see. Just give me one detail so I can understand."

"Yes, ma'am. We require sprinkler systems to be on their own piping system so that a regulatory constant pounds-per-square-inch pressure may be maintained and so also that shut-down repairs to dwelling plumbing systems do not impair the readiness of the fire sprinklers. However, maintaining two water piping systems is more expensive, and-"

"Yes!" the woman exclaimed. "This building is so cheap you can't believe it!" She opened the door and pushed at him to go in, right past the mailboxes he was supposed to break into to find a telephone bill. "Come on, get in quietly," the woman insisted. "I won't tell anyone until it all comes out. We'll expect a full report to the tenants' association. What floor will you be on?"

Jin Li lived on the top floor, as he remembered. "The structure has five floors and we are required to start at the top to check the pressure there first."

"Yes, yes, hurry, please. I live on the third floor. I'll be waiting for you."

He followed her up the stairs, carrying a bag of groceries for her along the way. "How long will you be before you get to our floor?" she asked.

He showed her the water pressure gauge, as if that explained everything. She nodded eagerly. "Perhaps an hour, okay?"

"Yes, thank you."

He continued on to the fifth floor, the hallway of which corresponded to the L-shaped building, and followed it around to Jin Li's apartment, which lay at the end of the hall. He tried his fancy skeleton keys one by one. He found three that went in but none that worked. Which was why he was glad he'd brought the stubby and heavy gas-powered Saws-All. He would be making a lot of noise for fifteen seconds. Couldn't be helped. He started the saw, gouged the reciprocating blade into the door crack, and guided it downward, cutting two brass dead-bolt locks in about ten seconds. A hell of a skreeling racket, too, metal on metal, bright brass sawdust spewing onto the carpet. Wake the dead, for God's sake. He waited for a door to open along the hallway, a head to pop out, but nothing happened. People were at work, maybe that was it.

He turned the handle and pushed open the door. The apartment was dark, and he shut the door behind him before turning on the light.

"Let's remember a few things," his father had briefed him earlier. "People live different ways. Young people are often quite messy but have places where there is order. Their music collections, their spices, that kind of thing. A bed with the sheets on the floor means nothing. Women are not necessarily neater than men, although what will be neat and messy will usually be different. People say gay men are the neatest but not in my experience. Blind people living alone are. They have to be. Anyway, you are looking for three things, the way I see it. You are figuring out if she left in a hurry, you are seeing if the place has been tossed by someone else, and you are looking for information about what kind of trouble she's in. The faster she left, the more information is available."

He first checked the refrigerator, which was running. He opened the door. No mold on anything. Some Chinese vegetables in there. He sniffed the quart of skim milk-not sour. But that didn't tell him much. He needed a date stamp. She'd been gone at least five days. In the trash was a bill from the local supermarket, which included a quart of milk. The bill was marked the day before the murder of the Mexican girls.

He inspected the bedroom. The bed was unmade. What was missing? He saw no computer, no wallet, no cash. He checked the bathroom; her toothbrush and toothpaste were gone. He opened the cabinet; her birth control pills were there; this, as much as anything, suggested a hasty exit. She'd said she never missed a pill, ever. In the closet he saw her dresses hanging neatly, many with the dry cleaner's cellophane still on them. He recognized some of them, had run his hand over and inside them, too.

Had the place been tossed by someone else? Hard to say. The apartment was neither messy nor particularly orderly, just as he remembered. He checked the kitchen drawers, the living room table drawer, the dresser. He stared at the phone and then hit Play Messages. Nothing. That was in her nature. He tried scrolling through the numbers for incoming and outgoing calls; all had been erased. Come on, come on, Ray muttered. I'm not getting what I want. He went back to her dresser and opened up the underwear drawer. In a small silk box he found some jade earrings and a matching jade bracelet. He'd priced jade in Malaysia, and even to his unpracticed eye, this jewelry looked expensive.