The Finder: A Novel (6 page)

"He's dying. He might even prefer to be shot."

"Maybe yes. But you do not. You want to be with him," Chen ventured, watching Ray's expression. "You need this man, your father, I think to myself."

They'd been watching him for the last few days, Ray realized, running groceries, in and out of the house. Knew when he was there and when he wasn't. Did they also know he was with the woman, then put their plan into motion? Possibly. Barged in to find his father peacefully in bed watching the Yankees game, Gloria sitting next to him. Ray had let himself get distracted. How he hated himself for that now. "I can't help you," he said. "I'm just the guy who was banging your sister, no more, no less."

"I am going to pay you to find her."

"Sorry, not interested."

Chen's right hand played with the gold watch on his left wrist, his small index finger rubbing an intimate circle on the face. "I will pay lot of money. I have lot of money and I will pay lot of money to find her."

Ray looked at Chen directly. "Not interested."

"What will motivation you?"

"Nothing will motivation me. I'm not interested." This wasn't true; he was now quite interested in finding Jin Li, but on his terms, not her brother's.

Chen didn't respond. Instead he pulled a toothpick from his breast pocket and picked at his teeth. Finished, he inspected the toothpick for dental residue, then laid it carefully on the glass table. One of the beefy men standing at the back of the room came forward with a waste-basket and plucked the toothpick up and dropped it into the basket. Then he took out a tissue and wiped the glass table clean.

Chen pointed over Ray's head. "When they sell me this apartment they say the window do not open too much. They say something about cold air-conditions and the architect design. Special glass that is shiny. I say I pay so much American money for this apartment, you say I cannot have window that is open? Everybody say New York is big deal, number-one city. I say no. New York no big deal, too old. Not too smart. China smarter. Shanghai much more smarter. You come to my
country, you find out. In Shanghai I get window that is open when I push it. I say this to big New York architects. They say this is one-billion-dollar building, most expensive in New York City ever. I say one billion dollars is very small piece of money in China. They say okay we will fix, we will make you special window, just for you. So now I have special window."

Chen nodded to the men behind Ray. They slid open one of the panels of glass. The night air swirled coldly into the room and the sounds of traffic drifted up from the street.

"We throw you out the window now."

Ray looked at him. "I don't know where your sister is."

"Yes, I possibly believe you."

"Then what's the problem?"

"The problem, Mr. Ray, is you say you will not look for her."

"I don't think I can find her."

"We know you can find her. Jin Li say you have very big military training."

"I don't."

"Jin Li say your passport is stamped Afghanistan, Turkey, Malaysia, places like this."

"She interpreted those facts incorrectly."

"You will look for my sister?"

"No," he said.

"I see. Okay, like I say, okay." Chen pointed at the window. "Out."

"Can I tell you why this is a very stupid idea?"

Chen spoke to his men in Chinese. They stopped.

"This building is new," said Ray. "It's full of extremely rich people like you, Chen. It certainly has one of the best security camera systems in the city. The Saudis and Israelis would never buy in unless the security was good. They have things to worry about these days. Cameras watched you all the way up the elevator. If you throw me off the building, I will hit the street and die—instantly, I hope. Many people will notice this. My death flight might even be captured on video, which means it would be on the Internet an hour later. They will use their cell phones and call the police. One of the Midtown North rolling units
will be here within a minute. Meanwhile you will have to escape, going right past all those cameras. The police will probably seal off the building, which is standard procedure when someone falls out of a window, especially when the place is loaded with celebrities and rich people. But let's say you get out of the building. Are you going to escape by limousine? I don't think so. So you would have to take a cab, a hired car, or even walk. Where would you and all your men go? A hotel? The airport? Central Park? You see, there's no—"

"Out!" said Chen.

He didn't bother fighting them. They lifted him up and carried him to the window, then threw him headfirst out of it, face up, his knees bent over the sill, with each man holding one of his feet. His baseball cap fell off. By instinct he grasped the edge of the window. One of the men smashed his hand with the butt of a gun.

"Don't break window!" yelled Chen from within the room.

The men lifted him and pushed him farther out, so that only the heels of his shoes touched the building. He felt their tight grip around his ankles. He weighed about 190 pounds. How long could they hold that? His hands fell below him, blood rushed to his head. His back touched the face of the building, the sheer clean line of windows, most lit, a few dark, dropping below him. I'm upside down, he thought stupidly. Some change in his pockets shook loose and he watched it tumble brightly toward the lighted streets below, taxis flowing around an upside-down Columbus Circle. The yellow pencil fell from his breast pocket. He closed his eyes to calm himself, slowed his breathing. Release your desire, he chanted, for desire causes you to struggle and be fearful.
You desire not to die.
He'd been in worse jams than this one. Far worse.

"Do you agree?" shouted an angry voice.

He said nothing and instead concentrated on his breathing. They wouldn't drop him. It was a matter of outwaiting them, not letting himself be terrorized.

"Mr. Ray! Listen to me. Listen now!"

Something touched his face. He kept his eyes closed. Don't break, he told himself, don't you break.

"You see, you look!"

His eyes stayed closed. He breathed through his nose to slow his heartbeat. It worked. He knew from experience that he could last five minutes upside down if necessary.

"You look!" they screamed. "You see this!"

The thing brushed his face again. He opened his eyes.

"Do you see what that is?" he heard Chen yelling from above.

At first he did not. A box with tubes, hard to focus on while hanging upside down, swinging back and forth in front of his eyes, the tip of one of the tubes attached to a bloody needle.

Then he understood.

His father's morphine pump.

They'd taken it, yanked it right out of the vein in his father's right arm. He needed a forty-milligram bolus of Dilaudid every hour, or the pain was—

"Yes, yes!" Ray screamed. "I'll do it! Yes, get me up!"

When the limousine returned Ray to his father's semidetached house in Brooklyn, two of the three men got out slowly, watching him, but as soon as he was free he bolted toward the front door, carrying the Dilaudid pump. His red truck was back in the driveway, he noticed. He flew in through the cluttered entrance, past all of his father's gardening equipment and landlord supplies, and into the living room, surprising the guard, who jumped to his feet and drew a .45 pistol.

Ray froze, raising his hands. The other men arrived in the room and the guard lowered his gun. The nurse, Gloria, sat next to the hospital bed holding his father's head in both her old hands, bent close to him, lips on his forehead, whispering lovingly to him as he arced his back in pain, digging fitfully at the bed with his shrunken legs. His upper lip was drawn back, showing his old worn teeth, and the lids of his closed eyes fluttered in torment, the brows above raised in disbelief and wonder at the canyon of pain through which he traveled. Ray had seen his father suffer, but this was different; this was an old man on a steel hook.

"Oh!" cried Gloria, seeing that Ray held the drug pump. He handed it to her. "He's been so good, so brave. God has been helping him in this terrible hour."

She plugged in the machine, keyed in the restricted access code, checked the drug supply, and quickly inserted a new intravenous line into his father's arm. The two other Chinese men appeared in the doorway.

"You are the one who did this to my father?" Ray asked the guard.

"He is old," said the guard.

"Would you do this to your own father?" said Ray, smelling alcohol on the man.

"Father never get old."

"We are leaving now," said one of the others. He pointed at Ray and then at the front door. "You go first."

He felt the three men behind him as he walked to the front door. As he passed through the cluttered hallway, Ray let his right hand trail to the side and find a spray can of rust-preventative paint. The left hand grabbed a pair of hedge clippers he'd dropped into the umbrella stand the day before.

He popped the top off the paint, found the spray button with his finger, wheeled, and sprayed the first man behind him right in the eyes. The man screamed and clawed at his face. Ray clubbed him with the paint can and he went down.

As the second man reacted, Ray grabbed the clippers with both hands and clipped savagely at the man's face, taking off the tip of his nose—he cried out and instinctively covered his face with his hands. Ray clipped again, this time sinking the blades into the man's fingers. The man fell to his knees, blood streaming onto the floor.

The third man had his gun out now and fired wildly past Ray, shattering the light fixture. Ray clipped at the outstretched hand holding the gun, missed, then went low and tackled the man, pinning the gun with one hand. His other hand pulled down the hall table and he swept his fingers blindly through its contents. The man was punching Ray in the head with his free hand, grunting with the effort. Ray found a roll of cellophane tape. No good. Loose batteries, a box of tacks. Nothing
he could use. He took several blows to the head. The guy was really hitting him. Then his fingers felt a narrow key used to open paint cans that the hardware store on Eighty-sixth Street gave away for free when you bought paint. Shaped like a curved screwdriver. This Ray jammed into the man's ear, the first time into the cartilage, the second time right into the auditory canal. He buried it to the hilt, pounded it with his palm. The pain of a burst eardrum was such that the man went slack, urinated, and began to weep. Ray pulled the gun from his hand, jumped up dizzily, and swept the gun at the three men, all of them balled up in pain.

"No kill! No kill!" the one with the missing nose tip begged.

Ray put the gun to the neck of the third guard. "You understand English?" he screamed.

The man nodded.

"Don't hurt my father! Do not
ever
hurt my father!"

"Okay, boss, okay," the man coughed.

Ray yanked the man to his feet, took the guns from the other two, and kicked them out the front door. The limo driver, a white man, no doubt hired with the car, stared ahead, studiously ignoring the injured men stumbling into it. Their wounds were not life-threatening, Ray knew. He'd seen nearly every kind of injury a human being could suffer, and these were not serious. A phone call would be made, a private doctor found, perhaps in Chinatown in Manhattan but just as likely in one of the enclaves of Chinese doctors in Queens or Brooklyn.

Ray quickly retreated into the living room and saw that the Dilaudid had pulled his father into a deep sleep. Gloria looked up from her book, noticed the guns in his hands, then found his eyes. "I gave him double. He's fine now."

"You?"

She pointed at her Bible. "I got my reading."

Ray checked the window. Two blocks away, the limo sped through a red light. Already the men would be calling Chen and Chen would be calculating his response, wondering if Ray's actions confirmed him for the task of finding Jin Li or whether such sudden violence suggested a
reckless lack of judgment. In either case, Ray had revealed himself to Chen, and this in itself constituted Ray's first disadvantage, his first mistake.

Stupid, he berated himself, you can't be so stupid and expect to survive.

It was a good hiding place
but she hadn't slept well. Every hour or so she woke as a siren flew by, or someone hollered murderously in the street below, and she found herself hotly disoriented all over again, not sure whether to hang her head out the window and look down or wait soundlessly where she lay. Who would know about the building? A few people. But who would know
she
knew about this building? No one. No one in the world should know, Jin Li told herself. So why am I so nervous?

The night was warm, and thus the five-story building, one of a series of former factories on West Nineteenth Street, had become aromatized by the humidified essences of mold, dust, dead flies, cardboard, and dry-rotting wood—seemingly the layered odor of time itself expiring without end. The structure and six just like it had been built in the early part of the twentieth century; successive waves of real estate speculation had passed through and around these buildings, converting most to loft apartments, offices, showrooms, fancy restaurants that invariably failed, and the like. But a few remained unrenovated, and the reasons usually had to do with structural damage to the building, either from fire or water or, more often, because the building itself was a neglected holding long entangled in a lawsuit, estate matter, or family dispute.