The Finder: A Novel (17 page)

He could feel the liquids gurgle inside him and he could feel them gurgle out. The nurses measured his urine, the watery mud of feces that came from him. Not that it changed anything. They meant well and were trying their best. Just quietly helping him, hour after hour. Few men honestly confronted the superior unselfishness of women. Because to do so unraveled their entire belief systems and that was something they could not endure. He always tried hard to follow the
nurses' directions—
please, lift your legs . . . here's the spoon, Mr. Grant . . . we need to turn you so we may clean you
. . . He was not afraid of the pain. The little box worked quite well and he had been very clear with Ray that when the time came, Ray was to push him softly into oblivion. It would be hard for his son, he knew his son would resist doing so, especially given his training, but he hoped Ray would do what needed to be done, in the end.

He hoped his son would have the strength to kill him.

And yet, to repeat himself—as he was doing, he knew, repeating his thoughts over and over, slowly wearing them into nothing—and yet his son was here and would go on. But there was trouble for Ray now. The Chinese girl. The men who had taken away his machine. Ray had explained the problem. And he had been able to respond, to nod his head a bit and say yes. Ray was very clever. But the father always knew the son's flaws. Ray could be too impulsive, too instinctive. This might change as he got older. He had a weakness for women, too. Not a womanizer, not exactly. His weakness was that he cared for them easily, without remembering to protect himself.

Ray's other weakness was more serious. It was that he assumed that he was lucky. He had done so since he was a boy. Lucky how? Not that good things always happened to him but that bad things wouldn't. He'd been buried alive and lived. You were that lucky only once in a life. And maybe that used up all the rest of your good luck.

As for what Ray did while he was away, the old detective didn't quite understand all that. Foreign countries, he didn't know about. He knew about Brooklyn, Queens, and parts of Manhattan. The trouble with the Chinese girl was real enough. It was New York City kind of trouble. He sensed it. Somebody wanted something badly. Probably had to do with money, maybe the half-dead Mafia in some way, given the neighborhood. Mob carting services, truck companies, garages. He'd never dealt with Chinese gangsters but knew they could be tough, ruthless. Ray was mixed up in it now . . . he'd find that sewage company tomorrow and somebody there would know a few facts. Or Ray would sense a lie. He had that gift. As a detective you told yourself that people were telling the truth unless you had reason to think they were lying.
Otherwise you would drive yourself mad with suspicion. But nonetheless you could tell. The brain knew. Something in the voice, the eyes, the facial muscles. Scientists had studied this, proved it. But as a detective you just got very good at sensing the lie. You listened to hundreds of people lie, you learned how human beings do it. He'd forgotten—oh, yes. This Chinese girl had gotten to Ray somehow. Ray was in this thing now, whether he wanted to be or not. It was going to get worse for someone, he was sure. Two girls had died, and if he knew anything about how these things went, they wouldn't be the last. He knew Ray had moved his guns to the shed and put on a new lock. He knew that Ray had hidden the key in the birdhouse. And he knew that Ray had checked on the guns yesterday. This was unlike him. It meant Ray was preparing himself, worried. And the nurse had told him about what Ray had done to the men in the hallway, the savagery he'd displayed.

Does all this scare me? thought the old detective. Maybe. Well, yes. But I have to believe in Ray, because otherwise I am dying for nothing. I have to try to help him. Be
victorious.

And that was when he thought of something, something important that Ray needed to—?

The Dilaudid pump clicked and sent him a bolus. The warmth of it was so beautiful . . .
I'm addicted . . .
But wait! What was the thing he had just thought of, the thing Ray had to know? The morphine was taking it away from him . . . something important, having to do with Ray's problem, the kind of information that he used to . . . the exact sort of thing a detective always wrote down in his . . . just so he couldn't possibly . . . And here he . . . he had
forgotten,
the morphine warming his eyes, slowing his heart, pulling his breath deeper toward painless sleep . . . oh, he had thought of . . . it was . . . the thing that his son needed to know . . . what was it?

"Yo, I'm Richie's cousin."

Too fast.

"Hey, guy, I'm Richie's cousin."

Better. Get that Brooklyn thing into the voice.

He was sitting in his truck down at the corner of Fourteenth Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, pulled over by Dyker Beach Park, where he could see old Italian guys playing bocci, rolling the weighted balls along the packed-dirt alley. Lot of good times playing baseball in that park. Across the street was a deli that once been a joint called the 19th Hole, a notorious Mafia hangout. Dozens of murders had been ordered, planned, requested, or approved there by the Lucchese crime family. His father had once said to him that Ray was never to set foot in the 19th Hole under any circumstances, no matter how old and tough he thought he was, and if he knew anyone who frequented the place, Ray was to drop the acquaintance immediately. But now the Mafia was mostly broken up, scattered, on the run. So they said, anyway.

The city kept removing pay phones, but there was one outside the deli, he'd remembered. He didn't want to use the house phone, plus the sounds of the street would add authenticity. The phone was free. He jumped out of the truck, crossed Fourteenth Avenue, slipped in the quarters, dialed.

"Victorious," came a woman's voice.

"I'm trying to get in touch with Richie."

"He's not around."

"I kinda need to talk to him."

"Call him on the cell," she said.

"Don't got the number."

"Who is this?"

"Richie's cousin." There, the leap into the lie.

"Well, he's out on a job."

"Just tell me where he is, I'll go talk to him there."

"Can't do that."

"Listen, I'm trying to help the guy out with something, see what I mean, like?"

A long pause followed. "Hang on."

Then he heard the woman talking into some kind of radio or squawk box. "Richie, where you at?"

A garble of static came back that Ray couldn't understand.

"I got a guy says he's your cousin."

More static.

"Hello? He says what's this about?"

Ray looked down Eighty-sixth Street, drew in a lungful of the place. "He knows what it's about. I ain't talking about it on the phone."

She repeated this, and the squawk box answered.

"All right," she told Ray. "He's out on a job down in the Rockaways, 123rd Street right before the boardwalk."

"Thanks." He was about to hang up when he heard a man ask, "Who just called for Richie, who was that?"

The line went dead.

Ray listened to the far buzz in the earpiece, then hung up. He lifted the receiver again and inserted a bunch of quarters from his pocket, not even counting them. She didn't answer, but her cell phone message came on, then the beep. "Jin Li," he said, "this is Ray, the guy who used to be your boyfriend. I'm not calling to talk about what happened between us. I'm just worried about you, okay? Your brother is in New York and found me. He's got a bunch of guys with him and he's looking for you . . ." What else to say? Don't mention the police, he told himself, that will just freak her out. "He explained to me about what happened to you with the two Mexican girls. So I'm looking for you,
too. You can call me, but not on my cell. It's gone. Call me at home. You have the number. If a woman answers, remember it's my father's nurse. I know you are scared. All right, I hope you are—" The phone chimed, time was up. He replaced the receiver. If she wasn't answering her cell phone, well—it could mean several things, all of which gave him a bad feeling.

The Rockaways was a big sandbar that hung below Brooklyn, with a village clustered at either end and miles of fabulous beach in between. Technically it was part of Queens, though it felt like Brooklyn, because you could get there from Flatbush Avenue, the zigzag thoroughfare that people had been using for more than three hundred years, starting with Dutch farmers driving their pigs and cattle to market until the present, when you were just as likely to find a Pakistani hauling a load of fake BMW carburetors made in Vietnam to be installed by a Jamaican mechanic in a car owned by a Nigerian. The future of New York City was often found in the cultural mixology of Brooklyn and Queens long before arriving in Manhattan. The Rockaways, however, had always been hard-core Irish, a place apart, dominated by policemen and firefighters, more or less segregated. Once known as the "Irish Riviera," the Rockaways was a place where working-class New Yorkers once rented bungalows for fifty dollars a summer. Jigs and reels were danced in the bars, beer five cents a glass. That was all gone. Now it was high-rises and million-dollar homes. He'd once spent a lost weekend there when he was eighteen, drinking, running around, driving on the beach. How naïve he'd been at that age, obsessed with a girl whose name he could no longer remember and, even more important at the time, preoccupied with his summer league baseball team. He'd been a pretty good catcher, could take the beating of the position. But, like most American teenagers, he'd been utterly oblivious to almost everything beyond himself. Boys were different in other parts of the world; they became men sooner, were accelerated toward their fates. Example? Sure: Once, in Mogadishu, Somalia, he'd had a fifteen-year-old stick a Chinese-made AK-47 into his face while a crew of younger boys
swarmed over his supply truck, stealing water, medicine, foodstuffs, motor oil, water purification tablets, children's clothing, and three dozen crank-powered radios. Ray had spent two days loading the truck, and in a matter of minutes, it was plundered. The boy made Ray lie on the ground, and when his crew was done he had fired a bullet into the desert sand next to Ray's head. Then left. Ray had taken his sweet time getting up and, before doing so, it occurred to him that he could dig up the bullet, which he did, about a foot deep in the sand. It was still warm and he touched it to his lip religiously, why he didn't know. The next day, after he had returned to camp with the empty relief truck, he heard that the boy who'd held him at gunpoint had, that same evening, had both arms macheted off by a rival group stealing the supplies from his crew.

Here and now,
Ray told himself,
be here and now. Don't be haunted.
He made the turn for the Rockaways, the Atlantic to his right. He reminded himself that all he knew about Richie was that he'd probably been the man who'd pumped out the household waste in Queens that had found its way into a parking lot drain in Brooklyn. Not much to go on. But not nothing, either.

The Rockaways—the name suggested a faraway place where you might rock a chair by the ocean. Which was correct. On 123rd Street big houses sat on narrow lots, the kinds of places families could stay in all summer, kids going to the beach every day, dad out back with the barbecue. He spotted the big green sewage truck pulled up on the curb, passed by, found a parking spot, and walked back. A large man in coveralls with a blond crew cut stood next to the truck, letting a fat rubber hose run through his gloved hands as it mechanically spooled itself onto the truck. He was just finishing.

"Hey," called Ray, walking up. "You got a minute? Let me tell you my problem. I live couple streets away. Kinda embarrassing. My wedding ring went down the toilet. Barely flushed, though."

The man nodded warily, inspecting Ray up and down, no doubt wondering if Ray's presence was related to the earlier call about the "cousin."

"Happens all the time," he said. "Earrings, watches, dentures. All kinds of stuff."

Ray felt jumpy, a little strange. "How do I get it back?"

"Could still be there. Turn off all your water. Give us a call, we'll pump you out, see if it's there."

Ray pretended to watch the hose. "You got any kind of screen on that, find things caught in it?"

"Yes. But we only use it if we're looking for something. It'd get jammed every three minutes, shit people put in there. I mean the stuff that
ain't
shit, if you see what I mean."

Ray nodded. "How fast these trucks fill up?"

"Day or two. Lot of shit in the world."

"Holds what—?"

"On the side of the truck it says eight thousand gallons but we try not to fill it quite that much. Gets too heavy. Hard to go uphill. You can crack a guy's driveway."

Ray pointed at the name on the door:
RICHIE
.

"They give every guy his own truck?"

"No, only us top guys."

"What if the truck breaks down?"

A pause, the mood shifting. "What if I don't feel like answering any more questions?"

"Hey, just being friendly," Ray said.

Richie grunted. Then he looked at Ray, mouth tight. "I don't know who you are, buddy, but you're fucking with me. I can feel it. So get the fuck away from me and my truck and just take your bullshit elsewhere. Either that or we got a problem, and if we got a problem, then I got a lot of ways to fix it."