Colin Harrison: The Finder

The weight of a father. Terribly light in his arms; he'd carried children who were heavier.

"Thank God you came back when you did," Wendy said.

"Is he hurt?" Ray took each step carefully, turned sideways when he came to the doorway. Settled him in the hospital bed. The nurse first hooked up the hydration IV. Then the Dilaudid. He was panting and almost unconscious.

She felt his father's bones, took his pulse.

"The bleeding around the chest?"

"That's mostly seepage. I don't see any serious bleeding. He's very dry, of course."

"The nephrostomy tubes?"

"One's easy to put back in. The other will be a little bit of work."

"What was he doing down there?"

"You didn't see?" she asked Ray.

"No."

"He got into the file cabinets, all those papers."

"Which papers?"

"His old work files, I think. He had one in his hand when I found him."

"Which one?"

She pointed to a green folder on the table. "This one."

Ray took the folder. But he had already found the notes his father had written down in his now spidery handwriting: prison place/shit man building/name means winner. He glanced through the file. Victorious Sewerage in Marine Park. With a hand-drawn diagram of the building in the back of the lot.

"He was in such a good mood, too, after the visit from your friend."

"Friend, what friend?"

"That drop-dead gorgeous Chinese girl. You do know who she is, don't you?"

"Yes-"

"Well, she was here, hoping to see you, and she ended up seeing him."

"When did she leave?"

"That was hours ago! She said she might go out, then come back, I could be wrong about that. She came to see you and I said you were out."

But Ray was already running toward the truck, police file in hand.

Only later, when he was almost to Marine Park, did he realize that he'd forgotten about the guns hidden under the fertilizer bags in his father's shed. Too late to go back now.

A visitor? Victor was standing in his lot trying one clonephone after the next and getting no answer when he saw a car pull in. Those fuckers had turned off their phones-he'd make them pay for that. But now he watched the car. He shouldn't have left the gate open. The driver slowed and looked around. Vic stepped back behind one of his trucks. The car drove up to the trailer, then made a slow, investigatory circle around it. It parked, and an old man, tall and lanky, unfolded himself from the driver's door and walked up the trailer steps and knocked. There'd be no answer; the business was closed today, everyone gone.

The man knocked again. Nothing. He pulled something out of his sleeve and slipped it into the door. Ha, thought Vic, that won't work; it's also chained from the inside. The man was able to get the door open just enough to poke his head in for a quick look before he turned and descended the steps. He walked around the huge sewage trucks, stopping to write each license number on a pad of paper. The kind of thing a cop might do, Vic decided, but then again, there were ways to look up license information if you were not in law enforcement; you just had to have a friend who was.

After a few minutes, the man headed toward the warehouse. Vic hurried to the door and unlocked it, and even opened it an inch, not only to entice the man, if he was a cop, but also to help him get past any anxiety about making an unlawful search. If the door was un locked and open, then the guy would not be able to resist entering; he'd just cautiously push through the door and look around.

And that is what the man did, though now with his gun drawn. Fine, thought Vic. I can do that, too. I wasted a lot of bullets scaring the Chinese girl, but I have two left. Nobody is going to hear anything back here anyway.

I need to visit Ray Sr. one more time, thought Peter Blake. I'll swing by the house after I'm done poking around this shithole. If he found nothing, he'd go back and arrest Carlos Montoya.

The warehouse door, he saw, had been left open. Was someone inside? Blake slipped out his service revolver and kept it at his thigh. The sewage trucks and the trailer had been unoccupied. If anyone is here, then they are inside, figured Blake. He pushed the door open with his toe. Peeked inside.

Musty and gloomy in that big space. Truck parts, old junk, hoses, stacks of tires. Tough to see in the dark.

Jin Li heard the shot. A quick pop. Then a pause. Then one more. It took a moment for her to understand what she'd just heard.

Then she did. Oh, Ray, she cried.

The gate was open. Next to the trailer was what looked like an unmarked police car. He drove past all the parked trucks and straight to the large warehouse behind it. He got out and tried the door. Locked. He tried the big garage-bay doors. Locked. He walked around the entire outside of the building. No windows at all on the ground floor, and a door on the far side that was locked. The building was a fortress, when you thought about it. He could try to crowbar his way in, but the doors looked heavy. And there might be an easier way. Ray tied a rope to the end of his crowbar. The rope was one hundred feet long. He took the crowbar by the straight end and flung it tomahawk-style at the windows. The crowbar crashed into the cement block below the windows and fell harmlessly to the ground, the yellow nylon rope looping downward after it. Ray retrieved the crowbar and threw it again. And again, trying to get it high enough to break a window and go inside the building. On his fifth try, the spinning crowbar reached high enough, broke the window glass, and fell through. The yellow rope whizzed out of its pile, jumping upward.

The trick was getting the hook of the crowbar to catch on something secure. Ray tugged the rope experimentally. He let the rope back down, then tugged again. Nothing. This time he slowly pulled the rope hand over hand, hoping it would catch on something inside. It didn't. He pulled and tugged, and finally it caught on something-a light fixture, a piece of electrical tubing, a pipe, something like that. How secure it was, he didn't know. He tested it with his weight. Pretty good, maybe.

In a moment he was up the wall and standing in the busted-out window frame. He'd performed this exact same maneuver in a building destroyed by the tsunami. With one hand holding the frame, he released the upward tension on the nylon rope until its crowbar hook dropped free. Then he pulled the rope and hook up to where he was balanced, untied the crowbar, slipped it into his belt loop, then tied the rope itself onto the window framing, being sure to knot it to several frames, not just one. Unlikely they would all fail at the same moment. With the rope secured this way, he could perform a standard free belay down the inside face of the warehouse.

Which he did, landing on the floor of the second story. He frantically searched the open area, pushing over boxes and poking through debris. Where are you, Jin Li? he thought. In a minute he had satisfied himself that she was not there. That left the first story, which was reached by a set of concrete stairs. Ray searched each area. Loaded with tires, truck parts, old cans of chemicals and solvents. A terrible fire hazard.

"Jin Li!" he called.

Nothing. It was a big building; studying every square foot of the floor would take hours.

He looked at the floor for openings, trapdoors. Maybe there wasn't a secret room like the one in his father's drawing. Or maybe he wasn't looking for it the right way. The electric wire was trenched from the avenue and no doubt arrived in an electrical panel somewhere on the side of the building facing the street. And there it was, in the far corner. But any idiot could follow wiring from a service box. If you wanted to hide wiring to a secret room, you'd run it off an existing branch, not home run it back to the main box. Even sneakier would simply be to run any power in that room off a regular socket with an extension cord. In that case there would be no permanent wiring leading to the hidden space. The same could be done with water. You simply attached a regular garden hose to a hose bib and ran the water wherever you wanted. But this would have to be inside, at least during cold-weather months.