Colin Harrison: The Finder

Martz stared ferociously at Chen. "Deal," he said.

They gave Chen his phone back. He dialed.

"Who're you calling?" Martz said, but Chen, intent on getting the digits correct, wasn't listening.

Where was the nurse? The phone was ringing. Raymond Sr. listened to it. He flung out his hand and found the phone.

"Yes?" he breathed.

"Mr. Ray Grant?"

A strange voice he'd never heard before. "Yes."

"Jin Li is in prison room. In shit man building. I do not have the language. Name is English word means winner. Very much danger. Do you understand?"

"No."

"Prison room. Shit man big building. His name means winner."

The phone went dead.

This time he was ready with a pad of paper and pen. He wrote: prison place/shit man building/name means winner.

Winner. Champion. Victor. Conqueror. He stared at the paper. There was a boy…

The Dilaudid machine clicked. The nurse had recently increased the dose, he knew. He stared at the piece of paper. Winner. The winner was the victor. Victorious. He knew what that meant. Yes. But his eyes went heavy and he was gone. There was a boy named Victor, he thought he told the nurse. But was he talking? He wasn't sure. Not much older than my son. He and a friend of his from his baseball team got jumped by some Russian guys. The other boy got it worse, got his head beat in. I talked to Victor in the hospital. He was pretty beat up. We didn't have quite enough for an arrest. We'd started to question the Russian guys, one by one. Then one morning they find the biggest of them under the boardwalk in Coney Island. Shot. The killer had used a homemade silencer, a Clorox bottle wrapped with electrician's tape. Then had some fun with the corpse. Had put his balls in his eye sockets and his eyeballs in his hands. Vicious. The other Russian guys just disappeared. I didn't think it could be Victor. He was so young, sixteen, seventeen. Big handsome kid with dark hair. Eyes wild. But well spoken, intelligent. I watched him for a few months. I thought about bringing him in, and finally I did. I had nothing on him and I got nothing off of him. Father owned some kind of huge sewerage service in Marine Park. The night the Russian guy got killed, Victor was with his girlfriend, the sister of the friend who'd gotten the terrible beating. So she said. I talked to her by herself. She said that she and Victor had been having sex in some kind of secret basement room at his father's business. They had sex and then got drunk. Or maybe the other way around. That was his alibi. Her parents weren't around much, out of the picture. The girl's old man was depressed about his son. I didn't see Victor as the killer. He wasn't hardened yet. You don't usually have a drunk seventeen-year-old killing and mutilating a twenty-four-year-old Russian guy who weighs about 230. Didn't add up. I couldn't figure it. You getting all this? Am I making sense?

The nurse came into his room, heard Mr. Grant making his funny gobbling noises, talking in his sleep. She pulled up his covers and went back to the television room, enjoying the peaceful evening.

He'd left her there. After all the shooting and screaming into the phones. Maybe he'd been talking to Chen; it wasn't clear. Why did he leave, was he expecting someone? Meanwhile, something-an idea, a panicked fantasy-was eating at her, even as she felt despair about her circumstances. She found herself staring at the fuming tub filled with the brown liquid. All the canisters of chemicals. She'd remembered the smell and then she'd remembered something from an applied chemistry course at Harbin Institute of Technology. She needed to increase the density of the jellied liquid. Could she reach? She wriggled into a crouch, grasped her waste bucket, stood awkwardly, shuffled to the tub, and scooped up a bucket load of the scummy mixture. Take your time, she cautioned herself. She knelt and set the bucket on the floor then sat down.

She watched the liquid settle and ever so subtly separate, the water rising to the top. She took off her shoe and stirred the stuff with it. The shoe started to smoke, but the water was brought to the surface. She tipped the bucket and poured off the brownish water, and it trickled across the cement floor toward the drain. By the time the shoe was too floppy and eroded to wear anymore, she had refined the mixture enough that the bucket was one quarter empty. And much more odorous. Her eyes watered. Yes, when the mixture was drained of water, it seemed to evaporate more easily. Evaporation, she recalled, was the achievement of the gaseous state. I know what to do, she told herself. She took the heel of her shoe and dipped it into the mixture. Then she flicked the heel at the lightbulb. A perfect shot. One of the flying globules spattered against the bulb, stuck, heated, and then, just as it dropped away, burst into flame, landing on the floor and producing a horrible black smoke until it burned into nothing but a carbon smudge.

Jin Li coughed a moment, then remembered to slide the bucket around the edge of the mattress, where he would be less likely to see it and discover what she had done.

I'm going to sell this guy, thought Tom, as Martz looked on. He sat next to Chen on the table. "Okay, what I have here is a document that reports on the effectiveness of Good Pharma's new synthetic skin program. This is legitimate." He paused to let the translator catch up. "It shows that the skin has proved viable in extreme burn cases, and increasingly effective in geriatric patients. As you know, everybody in the developed countries of the world is getting old, fast, and we feel this product will find ready acceptance."

Chen said something to the translator, who then turned to Tom. "He says his earlier information showed that this product did not work. Early trials showed it was a failure. He says he will be asked about this."

Tom nodded. "That's smart, that makes a lot of sense. Those early trials suffered from methodology problems, not product failure. We were applying the synthetic skin to patients on blood thinners and in keloid scar areas. Both of those issues were resolved and our success rates shot up."

The translator relayed this.

Chen nodded his understanding.

Tom pushed on. "In approximately one hour, a leak of this positive information about our synthetic skin product is going to occur in a website chat room given over to the care of nursing patients. It's not an investors' site. But the site content is syndicated to a number of other websites for nursing patients and their families. From experience we know that an embedded nugget like this will be noticed by investment bloggers and the like, soon creating a viral rumor that Good Pharma has something hot in the pipeline."

Chen nodded. He was a quick study, after all.

"I need to say big numbers," he explained.

Martz interjected, "Yes, let's give him those."

"With fast-track approval by the Food and Drug Administration, we will have product in the pipeline in eighteen months. We figure the first-year sales at eight hundred million dollars, second year one-point-nine billion, and so on. Remember the target consumer population is getting larger rapidly. Those numbers are domestic only, by the way, so they at least double internationally. With rapid market penetration and what we expect will be eighty percent market-share domination, plus per-unit margins rising on falling unit-production costs, we see pure net profit streams in excess of two billion dollars five years from now-"

"Wait, please," said the translator, "too fast."

"No," said Chen, "no, not too fast. I got it. I understand. My friends in China, they will like this."

She abandoned me. He called the nurse, but no answer came back. Watching TV, bored with waiting for him to die. He'd have a little talk with his son about this. Ray was due home soon but there was no time to waste. He examined his tubes. One for pain, one for hydration, three for piss-the kidney tubes plus the catheter in his penis.