It must’ve been a hell of a fight. Raiff found himself very impressed by this boy he’d never met and seen only in pictures. It was important to keep his distance, do nothing that might risk exposure.
THE DANCER’S IN THE LIGHT
But where was he now?
“Your turn,” Grimes was saying, repeating himself after Raiff had ignored him. “A dead doctor, two dead parents, and a missing kid. Run the numbers for me, the way you see them.”
Raiff doubted Grimes wanted to hear the truth: that his entire world was currently hanging in the balance and a missing boy was the only chance it had to hold on.
“I’ll let you know,” Raiff told him, turning to retrace his steps out of the house.
“Hey,” Grimes called, before he reached the door.
Halfway there, Raiff swung back toward him.
“Tell the other guy I didn’t appreciate his attitude.”
Raiff stopped in his tracks, something seeming to prickle against his spine. “What other guy?” he asked.
47
KNOCK WOOD
RATHMAN APPROACHED THE CLERK behind the counter of the Monterey Motor Inn, disgusted by the stench of body odor rising off the man so entrenched in a comic book that he didn’t even notice his presence.
“Ding-ding,” Rathman said, instead of ringing the flimsy bell.
A ceramic figure, being used as a paperweight to keep a stack of registration forms from blowing away every time the door opened, sat next to it. A placard reading KNOCK WOOD was strung across the male figure’s chest while his hands were frozen over what was clearly a boner in his pants, which had a chip at belt level.
“You want a room?” the clerk asked, frowning over the interruption.
“Not why I’m here.”
“We only take cash.”
“That’s okay,” Rathman nodded, snatching the comic book from his grasp so quickly, the clerk was left grasping air, “because I’m not staying. I’m here to ask you a few questions about some recent guests of yours. A boy and a girl. Would’ve checked in, er, maybe four, five hours ago.”
“Hell, no. I don’t rent to anyone under the age of eighteen.”
“One of those kids belongs to my employer. He’d be most grateful for your assistance,” Rathman said, and slid a twenty-dollar bill across the counter.
The clerk stuffed it in the pocket of his white button-down shirt, which was stained yellow under his arms. “What do you mean by ‘belongs’?”
“The money means I get to ask the questions.”
“For twenty bucks, no kids checked in tonight.”
“How much is a room?”
“Forty.”
Rathman slid another twenty across the counter.
“But information’s more, say, a hundred.”
Rathman made it look like he was going for his pocket again, then grabbed hold of the KNOCK WOOD paperweight in his free hand instead. He brought it down hard enough on the back of the clerk’s ink-stained hand to shatter the ceramic figure at the base. Then, instead of pulling it back up, he pressed the jagged shards that began where the figure’s feet had been into the clerk’s flesh.
“You were saying?”
The clerk was gasping for breath, his now broken hand trembling horribly as he fought to pull it free.
“Two kids, high school age, checked in here earlier, yes?”
The clerk nodded.
Rathman pulled a photo of Alex Chin from his jacket pocket. It hadn’t been hard to find one, since various shots of the boy were all over the Internet. It was the same picture he’d flashed to a waitress at a nearby diner just off the Pacific Coast Highway who’d recognized the boy and told Rathman he’d been in there earlier along with a girl who looked about his same age.
Which made her a bit too old for him. His tastes ran younger, accounting in large part for the unceremonious end to his military career. Army brass didn’t grasp the meaning of fringe benefits and it was only Afghanistan. Rathman was truly shocked anybody cared. No mention of this, of course, appeared anywhere in his record, the army wanting to spare itself the embarrassment. The man who’d turned him in was buried in Arlington National Cemetery now, though Rathman guessed the funeral had featured a closed casket. He also guessed Marsh wouldn’t have given a shit, even if he had known. Maybe he did.
“This is the boy, yes?” he continued, enjoying the pain the clerk was in and pressing the jagged bottom of KNOCK WOOD deeper into his skin to bring on more.
The clerk gasped, his knees almost buckling. He managed to nod again, still breathing hard with thick rivulets of sweat now dripping down his face like a bad paint job.
Rathman looked out the office window toward the parking lot where his team had gathered. He preferred handling interrogations alone. More fun that way.
“What room are they in?”
“They’re gone,” the clerk managed, just barely. “Checked out. Asked for directions before they left.”
Rathman pushed the jagged edge in just a bit deeper. “To where?”
48
FLASH DRIVE
THE MOTEL CLERK HAD smirked when they turned in their key so fast, figuring whatever business they’d come to the Monterey Motor Inn to do was done.
“We might be back,” Sam offered.
“Sure.”
“I mean it.”
The clerk was back in his comic book, Coke-bottle glasses hiding him from the rest of the world. “Whatever you say.”
“Just hold on to the key,” Alex added.
The clerk nodded, flipped the page.
“Oh, and, hey,” Alex continued, “where’s the nearest FedEx Office located?”
The FedEx Office they ended up at was located in Santa Cruz off Route 1 on Front Street near the University of California at Santa Cruz. It featured a sign in the window that read NOW OPEN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS and charged twenty dollars an hour to rent a computer, one hour minimum, and they accepted cash. Sam forked over the cash again, without protest. She always carried plenty of it on her because her parents hated credit cards, in large part because their credit history made it hard for them to qualify for decent ones.
“I’ll pay you back,” Alex told her, and dropped into the chair in front of the computer.
This time of night only a single clerk was on duty and, other than him and Sam, there were only two other people in the store, both of them making copies. Besides the odorous residue left behind by his chair’s last occupant, Alex also smelled overheated machine parts from the pair of copiers still spitting out pages the clerk was busy prepping to be bound. He thought he smelled hot plastic in the air too, something like when you drop a grocery bag into a campfire and feel your eyes burn if you stray too close to the smoke.
Side effect of getting his bell rung, maybe, Alex thought, wondering why everything seemed to have a smell to it all of a sudden. Maybe that’s what the mysterious CT scan had revealed, his olfactory nerves growing like weeds inside his skull, accounting for his newfound skill.
“What?” Samantha asked him.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, you did. But you were mumbling.”
“Just thinking out loud, I guess.”
Be nice if I knew what I said, though.
“You’re doing it again.”
Alex looked away from her.
“We haven’t talked about what happened in the hospital yet,” Sam said.
“Yes, we did.”
“Not everything. You started to tell me about that second CT scan, then you stopped.”
Alex took the flash drive from his pocket, not in the mood to describe what had happened while he lay on the scanner table. “The machine went crazy. Now, could you watch the front of the store? Just in case.”
He watched Sam glance at the flash drive, understanding. “Sure.”
“Thanks.”
As she moved away, Alex eased the drive into the USB port and waited for the drive’s icon to appear on the screen. He didn’
t want Sam seeing whatever his mother had left for him on the flash drive, at least not before he did. He glanced toward her standing by the front door, pretending to study some magazine she’d found, and when he looked back at the rented computer’s screen the drive’s icon had appeared:
FOR MY SON
That’s how it was labeled, nothing more. For my son … Such simple words belying a far more complex story that had led to tonight’s maelstrom of violence, still cushioned by the haze of shock. But the haze was receding now, the reality setting in as sharply as the scents Alex grabbed out of the air.
Alex clicked on the icon, revealing a collection of labeled files contained on the drive from which to choose. Their titles banged up against each other in his head, save for one that captured his eye and held it:
ORIGINS
Alex positioned the mouse over that file and clicked. The screen flashed dark, then light again, and Alex found himself staring at his mother as captured by her cell phone in a kind of video selfie.
He watched the screen jitter as she laid the phone down, atop the fireplace mantel, and backed off enough for the camera to capture her, just as Alex had taught her to do. Judging by the length of her hair and bruise on her forehead from where she’d walked into a door, he guessed she’d recorded the video perhaps three months before, late summer, maybe.
“Hello, my son,” greeted An Chin, trying for a smile.
Alex turned down the computer’s volume so only he could hear his mother’s words.
49
ORIGINS
THERE IS NO EASY way to tell this tale, so I will start at the beginning, before you were brought into our lives.
America was the dream of both your father and I and we worked for years to attain it, ultimately immigrating with little more than the money in our pockets after having our funds bled dry by the corruption it took to get out of China. We would settle down in this land of so much promise and build a family. Try as we may, though, no family came. Doctors explained the problem lay with me; apparently, a childhood fever had done unseen damage to my insides. Your father put up a brave face, not wanting to blame me, but I knew how sick with disappointment he was. When the doctors failed to help us, we sought outlets in San Francisco that offered traditional Chinese medicine, but this proved no more fruitful than traditional medicine.
Then, when neither prayers nor remedies provided the answer, fate intervened and smiled upon us.
By bringing us you, Alex.
You’ve heard me talk about Laboratory Z to your father, I know you have. I never really knew what went on there. I didn’t clean that part of the complex in San Ramon; nobody on the menial staff did, all of us lacking the proper security clearance to even enter that section of the facility. As a maid, though, I kind of melted into the scenery, becoming no different in my dark blue uniform than the artistic tapestries that adorned the walls. I was part of the woodwork and scientists in lab coats whose name tags featured bar codes instead of names spoke without reservation in my presence. Enough for me to discern that something very big indeed was happening here.
In Laboratory Z.
I was working outside the secure entrance to the lab the day fate brought you to me, when a shrill emergency alarm sounded. Drills were hardly unusual, and I assumed this to be merely another until a flood of personnel stampeded past me dragging panic behind them. The open doors let a peculiar smell emerge in their wake. It made my nose feel hot, actually hot, when it reached me. Something metallic and coppery, a combination of something left burning on a stove and spilled blood. Amid the steady flash of the emergency lighting, I heard cries and screams, plaintive wails coming from inside the laboratory.
Instinct took over and I dashed inside into a noxious white mist that burned my eyes. I took it to be some sort of fire suppressant at first, then wasn’t so sure. It didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular, just seemed like, well, air. As if someone had taken a spray can to that air and painted it. Darker in some places than others, as if it were still drying.
Everyone who’d been inside the lab must have evacuated and I was struck by the awful fear I’d lost my way in the gray air, when I heard something that made no sense:
A baby crying.
I stopped and listened some more, trying to pinpoint the sound. The noxious odor grew thicker the deeper I ventured into Laboratory Z, intensified the more I sank into a white, dewy mist that felt hot and cold at the same time. Sparks flared, illuminating the semblance of a path for me. Cries and screams sounded, seeming to come from beyond a wall of super-thick glass that was fracturing into a spiderweb pattern even as I neared it. I caught glimpses of motion beyond that glass where the mist thickened the air to a soup-like consistency that formed a curtain over the world beyond.
I did my best to ignore whatever awful toxic thing was transpiring inside that mist, not wanting to picture the product of the leak, explosion, accidental release, or whatever had spawned the disaster. I sucked in mouthfuls of the stench-riddled mist, expecting it to be like smoke when it was more like, well, nothing but stained air, neither hot nor cold. I kept on toward the crying, a whirring sound reaching me then that reminded me of the noise an amusement park ride makes when it reaches the crescendo of its pace.
Instinct, a woman’s, drove me deeper inside whatever the mist contained. Tracing a line against the fracturing glass when the thick blanket finally stole my vision, tracing it to the sound of the baby. It stopped crying as I neared where it must have lay.
Please don’t stop, I willed, cry so I may find you.…
And, as if complying with my unspoken command, the cries started anew and I saw a disembodied shape emerge, a pair of arms with the rest of whoever they belonged to hidden by the mist. The crying, loud enough to stun my ears now, was coming from those arms because, I saw, they were holding a baby, extending it out toward me.
“Take him!” a voice screeched. “Get him out of here!”
I didn’t question, didn’t argue, just took the infant in my own arms and drew him tight against my chest protectively to shield him from whatever the mist might be carrying.
“Should I…,” I started.
But the arms were gone and the shape beyond them was gone too, pulled back inside the thicker portion of the mist. So I turned and did my best to retrace my route from the lab I realized was growing hotter by the second. I felt trapped inside a steam oven until my route got me back to the doorway and outside into the cool, clean air. I took a deep breath, realizing only then I’d been holding it the last stretch of the way that had seen me tuck the infant inside my regulation jacket to further shield him.
Maybe I would’ve still turned the child over once I reached the triaged chaos of the parking lot. Halfway across the asphalt, though, I was struck by a shock wave equal parts hot and cold that swallowed me up and coughed me out. I felt airborne but when I looked down, my feet had never actually left the concrete, which had cracked underfoot like thin glass. Everyone around me was rushing, the wail of sirens sounding intermittently in my head as if someone was turning them off and then on again.
There was no one to hand the baby I’d rescued to, so I held fast to him, charging through the parking lot I now saw was strewn with cars missing all their window and windshield glass. My own car was parked in a lot reserved for lower-level employees and my breath had long deserted me by the time I reached it, gasping for air with the burned-wire stench stuck in my nostrils that felt as if they’d been zapped by some medical freezing agent.
I got my door open and climbed inside my car with you nestled in my lap. You’d stopped crying, seemed to be smiling, your eyes meeting mine.
I fell in love in that moment and knew I could never part with you. You were mine and your father’s; fate had willed it so. Where the herbs had failed us, destiny had intervened and gave us what we wanted more than anything.
Gave us you, Alex.
50
THE DANCER
ALEX REALIZED HIS EYES h
urt; his head too. He’d been staring so intensely at the screen that his neck had knotted. It cracked audibly when he stretched, unable to resist returning his eyes to the screen. His mother’s story had brought her back to him during the course of those moments. Alex felt he was with her in Laboratory Z, witnessing her brave actions as they unfolded. Rescuing the baby fate had not allowed her to have with his father.
Both gone now.
And Alex was starting to realize why, the pieces falling together. His eyes had misted up. His lips were trembling and he suddenly felt very cold. He sat in silence, the world narrowed to the scope of the computer and no more.
But that was enough.
Who am I? What am I?
Thus far, the flash drive had offered more questions than answers. Something either terrible or wonderful, maybe both, had been going on inside Laboratory Z. On the day of his rescue, the day of the explosion and fire, his mother had been unable to provide much detail as to the cause.
And there were so many secrets contained in his mother’s words. Except his family was gone. Every other relative he had lived in China, and besides an occasional e-mail and rare Skype call, the Chins had maintained no contact with any of them. They were, after all, Americanized and likely thought less of by the folks back home.
So who was the person who’d thrust him at An Chin through the thick mist that had enveloped the lab?
It might have been an obvious question, but no obvious answer was in the offing. Someone trying to protect baby Alex seemed the soundest explanation, but that didn’t explain how baby Alex had gotten there or if he was somehow connected to Laboratory Z’s ultimate destruction.
Alex felt the rigors of all this thinking making his head throb again, the shards of pain that seemed to radiate out from inside his skull.