Colin Harrison: The Finder

He ran up the cement stairs to the second floor and scanned the open rafters for clues. You'd have to vent a secret room because sooner or later the air would go bad. The basic vent stack rose up the north wall. This would be the exhaust for the heating system. The venting was old, wrapped in asbestos plaster. But it seemed that the elbow of a four-inch PVC pipe met it right before it pushed up through the roofline. Painted the same color as the old plaster wrapping, it was easy to miss. He traced the pipe back into the wall from which it came. It came right out of the exterior wall. How strange was that? The wall was concrete block and he saw no indication that the vent pipe had been buried within it. There would be a scar in the cement blocks going straight up to the roofline. But maybe the vent went through the wall. He rushed to the window, broke it with an elbow, and peered out.

The vent pipe disappeared into a regular aluminum downspout that was presumably draining water off the roof. Very ingenious.

Downstairs he climbed atop a pile of tires and broke the window directly below the one he'd just looked out of upstairs, and then, using his crowbar, hooked the downspout and yanked on it. The pipe bent toward him, and at the now exposed joint between sections he saw a green garden hose and an orange-colored, heavy-duty extension wire.

Now it was a matter of following the spout down the building with his eye. Five feet from the ground, it veered sharply toward the northeast corner of the building.

He knew where that was. He jumped down from the tires and threaded his way through the junk and along an unlit hallway until he found the building's northeast corner. A battered old van was parked inside. He looked around for any service tools, oil cans. Nothing. This wasn't a place where vehicles were serviced. Why was the van in here? Hidden?

He looked below the truck's underbody, the wheels. Then he saw the door in the floor, right under the left front wheel of the van.

"Jin Li?" he screamed. He rapped the door with his crowbar.

Did he hear her? He heard something.

The van's door was open. He checked the dash, under the seat, the glove box. No keys. He glanced through the rear window of the cab into the back of the van. A body lay there. Jin Li? He jumped out and slid open the side door.

Pete Blake, half his head blasted away. He got here before I did, thought Ray. How did he find out about Victor?

Now he returned to the trapdoor, banged on it hard again. This time he definitely heard her.

"I'm coming!" he yelled.

He needed to get the wheel off the door. That was easy enough. He found three six-by-six pieces of lumber and slid them under the van, right beneath the engine block, one atop the other. Then Ray took his knife and cut out the air valve of the right rear tire. The valveless tube shot a jet of stale, rubber-smelling air, the weight of the van driving down on the compromised tire. The tube sang as the air escaped and the van settled downward on the piece of lumber, which served as a fulcrum to lift the front wheels. He repeated the process with the left rear wheel, sinking it six or eight inches. Ray heard the body of Pete Blake roll to the back of the van. Now the front wheels were more than a foot in the air-just high enough for him to open the hatch door.

"Jin Li?" he called.

"Ray! Here!"

He was furious to get inside and opened the hatch to reveal a crudely built wooden ladder that descended into a dark space. He swung down the ladder, shined his flashlight around. Some kind of dripping tub that smelled terrible. That accounted for the need to vent the room.

On a mattress thrown in the corner lay Jin Li, trussed by tape and rope.

"Okay," he said, pulling on a lightbulb string, "you're okay."

With the light on, he could see better. She'd been hit in the face many times. She began to cry. He held her, kissed her head, felt her shaking in his arms. He used his knife on the ropes and had to work at the tape for a few moments.

She convulsed and he held her again.

"Oh, Ray," she cried.

"Let's get out of here."

"There's a chain," she said.

Yes. The lock and chain links were too strong to break, so he set upon the anchoring ring, making short work of it with the crowbar, and slid the last link off it.

"You're going to have to carry the chain until I can cut it off."

"Okay."

He lifted her to her feet; she could barely stand.

He caressed her cheek. "Are you thirsty?"

"No."

"Hungry?"

"Just weak, I guess."

Too weak to stand for long. He squatted down and had her lean softly over his shoulder, her head dropped over his back.

"This is called the fireman's carry."

"That makes sense."

"Why?"

"Because you're a fireman, even though you never told me."

He carried her straight up the ladder, and when his head poked up through the opening, Victor hit him in the temple with a shovel and he collapsed down the ladder, falling heavily, Jin Li dropping hard on top of him.

"Ray!" she screamed, seeing the huge gash in his head.

Victor jumped down, landing squarely on top of Ray, his boots on his chest. Ray groaned. The front of Victor's shirt was spattered with blood. He had the detective's gun if he needed it but wanted to have a little excitement first.

The Chinese girl screamed.

Victor swung the shovel at her to keep back. Then he lifted the shovel blade like a guillotine over Ray's neck, about to chop downward, but Ray spun to the side and the blow hit the cement floor.

Ray scrambled over toward Jin Li. She backed away and picked up the bucket of foul chemical jelly, handing it to Ray.

"Make it go on fire!" she screamed. She stepped in front of Ray just as Victor swung the shovel, and took the next blow on her shoulder. She fell to the floor.

Ray understood. He thrust the bucket up to the hot lightbulb, pressing the bulb deep into the mixture, and instantly it burst into flames. Victor was reaching into his pocket. Ray swung the bucket at Victor, its burning liquid contents leaping across the intervening space and splattering across his eyes and nose and mouth, adhering to him and burning blackly. Victor howled and lunged blindly at Ray, his hands grabbing him by the throat, and the two men stumbled backward toward the tub-which is where Ray tripped, and as he fell he twisted sideways and Victor sprawled awkwardly across the tub, sinking heavily into the lumpy mixture and simultaneously setting its contents on fire. The big man writhed beneath the burning jellied surface, his hands grabbing weakly at the edges of the tub, his feet kicking to make him stand, and for a moment he lifted the black shape of his head but then his movements ceased and he slumped into the flames, his clothes and skin charring rapidly.

The little room filled with black smoke. Ray took a breath at floor level, where the air was better, again hoisted Jin Li over his shoulder in the fireman's carry, and staggered his way up the ladder and out of the room, pushing her past the underside of the van and scrambling after her. He kicked the hatch door shut behind him, knowing that whatever was left of Victor would soon be a carbonized, heat-eaten, faceless husk.

He carried Jin Li outside, and as she panted heavily, he reflected that he, a fireman, had just set another human being afire. I never wanted that, he thought, feeling the blood on his forehead. He was dizzy but okay. And how strange that he had tripped and Victor had gone over him. You can't be luckier than that, Ray thought-as lucky, but not more so.

All pleasure ends. Thirty stories above Central Park, a man worth $1.2 billion pisses into his bathtub. His prostate-removal surgery is scheduled for the next morning. It's a bloody operation with a long recovery time. I can get you another ten years, the surgeon has said to him, and that's good enough. But it will be weeks on the comeback, and he suspects-knows-that he will never be the same again. He's going to be tired, cautious, weakened. Older. What a good thing that the Good Pharma problem is gone now, resolved, the stock restored to its rightful former price, his block of shares sold off, the $89 million in proceeds booked into the Martz New Century Partners Fund, where he is going to let the money sit safely. Yes, there was a little unpleasantness involving the Chinese speculator, but in the face of his coming operation, he doesn't quite wish to recall the particulars. And as for Tom Reilly, the guy came through in the end, and that's who you want as your captain. Lands on his feet! Wall Street likes the guy. Reilly's future looks very good indeed. Heard he was getting divorced, though. But a guy like that, getting remarried will be easy.