"Yeah, James?"
"What?" said Vic, wondering if he sounded like James Tonelli, one of the names on the list.
"Why the fuck you calling my wife's cell phone number? How'd you get it?"
Gotta move fast here, thought Vic.
"James, this is Tom Reilly asking you a question. Talk, man."
"Mexicans," said Vic.
"I know. I heard. Again, why you calling my wife, James?"
"This isn't James, Tom."
A pause. "Who is this?"
"This is someone who knows what you told James Tonelli to do."
"I didn't tell him anything to do."
"Bullshit you didn't. You told him to kill some CorpServe workers."
"Who is this?"
"I want money, Tom. Real money. I know what you do, I know where your wife is."
"Listen—"
"No, you listen. I'll be calling back in one minute. Think about how much it would cost to pay me or how much it would cost you
personally
if I told people what you told James Tonelli to do."
He waited three minutes. Then called back.
"Two million, Tom. I want that in cash by the end of the day tomorrow." He hung up.
Tom examined his phone. He knew that Martz was wondering why he was taking a personal call at a time like this. But he had to play ball with this other guy. If he didn't, then—well,
then
he's sitting in court listening to James Tonelli, witness for the state after copping to a reduced charge, saying how Tom had ordered the cold-blooded murder of two Mexican girls. By then he would have lost his job, his wife, his whole world. He could get hold of $2 million easily enough; that was a quick call to his private banker. Maybe I should stall the guy, Tom thought. But he remembered that the guy had Ann's cell number, which she generally didn't give out. It was used for emergencies at the office only. And for talking with Tom. If this guy had her number, then maybe he knew where they lived.
"Tom?" called Martz from across the roof.
But there was another distraction. Phelps was holding a cell phone. "Our friend here Mr. Chen had a message, from a Brooklyn cell phone, I think."
"Put it on speaker."
They did. It was a woman crying frantically in Chinese, speaking rapidly. Maybe she said the word "Brooklyn," Tom couldn't tell. The effect on Chen, he noticed, was immediate. He became agitated.
"What'd she say?" Martz asked Hua.
"She says she is kidnapped in Brooklyn and she thinks it's a place with a lot of shit and the guy's name means he is a winner."
"That's right," said Chen. "Exactly. That is my sister!"
Chen's phone rang again.
"On speaker again," said Martz.
"Who's this?" came a man's voice. Tough sounding.
Martz answered. "Why are you calling this number?"
"Looking for a guy named Chen."
"What do you want to say?"
"Let me talk to Chen."
Martz shook his head. "Can't do it."
They heard a woman crying out in Chinese, shrieking, weeping.
"Jin Li!" yelled Chen. "I hear you."
"Shut the fuck up," the voice on the phone barked.
They heard the Chinese woman again, being struck.
"Chen, I got your sister here," came the voice. "I want money fast. You heard her message. She might not be alive much longer."
Martz held up his hand. "Who is this?" he demanded.
"Someone who wants to speak to Chen." The phone went dead.
Chen said, "Let me make a call. I have to use my phone."
"No. Nobody does anything." Martz had to think it through. Chen's sister worked for CorpServe, he remembered, supervised the cleaning of the Good Pharma offices. The lift had started but they were losing time, not getting anywhere.
"I think I know who this is," Tom said to Martz. He'd be careful to move the blame away from himself. "This is where our problem began, thanks to Chen."
A phone rang again, Tom's this time. "Yes?"
"Put it on speaker, Tom," ordered Martz.
"Hang on," Tom said. "This is a private call."
"Not right now!" Martz yelled. "Your nuts belong to me, Tom Reilly, I've had enough of your bullshit!"
Tom put his phone on speaker. "Go ahead."
"Listen to me, listen to me good," came the male voice. "I'm going to explain—"
"It's the same voice!" yelled Martz. "Same as the other phone! Calling you!"
"Who's that?" came the voice. "You were on the other call!" There was some fumbling and static. "Wait, you motherfuckers, you just wait."
The phone in Phelps's hand rang. Chen's phone.
"Put that one on speaker," said Martz. "Christ. Now we got both of them."
"Who the fuck am I talking to?" came the man's voice out of both phones. A weird screeling feedback infected his voice. "I'm talking to everybody?"
No one answered. The wind moved over the roof.
"Listen, motherfuckers, listen Thomas Reilly or William Martz or Christopher Paley—"
"Who's that?" Martz interrupted.
"Company lawyer," Tom answered.
"Listen, you motherfuckers, and Chen, if he's there, listen to this—" There was the sound of three gunshots,
pop-pop-pop,
and then the screaming of the Chinese woman, a horrible keening. Had he shot her? "Hear that? I want a million in cash right now. I will be calling back in ten minutes. Or this woman is dead."
Both phones hung up with a loud click.
"We've been hijacked," Martz said. "I don't get it."
Now it was Chen who had a question. "This is fake, this is to make me call China for you?"
"No, goddamn it," said Martz, looking at his watch. "No. Getting a million dollars in the middle of the night is not easy." He sighed heavily, the cost of business getting steeper. "Look, Chen, I don't know who this guy is, but a million dollars is not going to stop me now. You understand? I got a lot more riding than that. And you, you have your sister. We could go to the police—"
"No, no police," said Chen. "I do not like police."
"Neither do I."
Chen seemed calm, resolved. "You will let me make one phone call, and then I will call China for you. I will call everybody in China for you. This is my sister."
Martz looked around at the others, not sure if he'd been tricked. Tom Reilly shrugged. "We got to do something."
Martz stared ferociously at Chen. "Deal," he said.
They gave Chen his phone back. He dialed.
"Who're you calling?" Martz said, but Chen, intent on getting the digits correct, wasn't listening.
Where was the nurse?
The phone was ringing. Raymond Sr. listened to it. He flung out his hand and found the phone.
"Yes?" he breathed.
"Mr. Ray Grant?"
A strange voice he'd never heard before. "Yes."
"Jin Li is in prison room. In shit man building. I do not have the language. Name is English word means winner. Very much danger. Do you understand?"
"No."
"Prison room. Shit man big building. His name means winner."
The phone went dead.
This time he was ready with a pad of paper and pen. He wrote:
prison place/shit man building/name means winner.
Winner. Champion. Victor. Conqueror. He stared at the paper. There was a boy . . .
The Dilaudid machine clicked. The nurse had recently increased the dose, he knew. He stared at the piece of paper. Winner. The winner was the victor. Victorious. He knew what that meant. Yes. But his eyes went heavy and he was gone. There was a boy named Victor, he thought he told the nurse. But was he talking? He wasn't sure. Not much older than my son. He and a friend of his from his baseball team got jumped by some Russian guys. The other boy got it worse, got his head beat in. I talked to Victor in the hospital. He was pretty beat up.
We didn't have quite enough for an arrest. We'd started to question the Russian guys, one by one. Then one morning they find the biggest of them under the boardwalk in Coney Island. Shot. The killer had used a homemade silencer, a Clorox bottle wrapped with electrician's tape. Then had some fun with the corpse. Had put his balls in his eye sockets and his eyeballs in his hands. Vicious. The other Russian guys just disappeared. I didn't think it could be Victor. He was so young, sixteen, seventeen. Big handsome kid with dark hair. Eyes wild. But well spoken, intelligent. I watched him for a few months. I thought about bringing him in, and finally I did. I had nothing on him and I got nothing off of him. Father owned some kind of huge sewerage service in Marine Park. The night the Russian guy got killed, Victor was with his girlfriend, the sister of the friend who'd gotten the terrible beating. So she said. I talked to her by herself. She said that she and Victor had been having sex in some kind of secret basement room at his father's business. They had sex and then got drunk. Or maybe the other way around. That was his alibi. Her parents weren't around much, out of the picture. The girl's old man was depressed about his son. I didn't see Victor as the killer. He wasn't hardened yet. You don't usually have a drunk seventeen-year-old killing and mutilating a twenty-four-year-old Russian guy who weighs about 230. Didn't add up. I couldn't figure it. You getting all this? Am I making sense?
The nurse came into his room, heard Mr. Grant making his funny gobbling noises, talking in his sleep. She pulled up his covers and went back to the television room, enjoying the peaceful evening.
He'd left her there.
After all the shooting and screaming into the phones. Maybe he'd been talking to Chen; it wasn't clear. Why did he leave, was he expecting someone? Meanwhile, something—an idea, a panicked fantasy—was eating at her, even as she felt despair about her circumstances. She found herself staring at the fuming tub filled with the brown liquid. All the canisters of chemicals. She'd remembered the smell and then she'd remembered something from an applied chemistry course at Harbin Institute of Technology. She needed to increase the density of the jellied liquid. Could she reach? She wriggled into a crouch, grasped her waste bucket, stood awkwardly, shuffled to the tub, and scooped up a bucket load of the scummy mixture. Take your time, she cautioned herself. She knelt and set the bucket on the floor then sat down.
She watched the liquid settle and ever so subtly separate, the water rising to the top. She took off her shoe and stirred the stuff with it. The shoe started to smoke, but the water was brought to the surface. She tipped the bucket and poured off the brownish water, and it trickled across the cement floor toward the drain. By the time the shoe was too floppy and eroded to wear anymore, she had refined the mixture enough that the bucket was one quarter empty. And much more odorous. Her eyes watered. Yes, when the mixture was drained of water, it seemed to evaporate more easily. Evaporation, she recalled, was the achievement of the gaseous state. I know what to do, she told herself.
She took the heel of her shoe and dipped it into the mixture. Then she flicked the heel at the lightbulb. A perfect shot. One of the flying globules spattered against the bulb, stuck, heated, and then, just as it dropped away, burst into flame, landing on the floor and producing a horrible black smoke until it burned into nothing but a carbon smudge.
Jin Li coughed a moment, then remembered to slide the bucket around the edge of the mattress, where he would be less likely to see it and discover what she had done.
I'm going to sell
this guy, thought Tom, as Martz looked on. He sat next to Chen on the table. "Okay, what I have here is a document that reports on the effectiveness of Good Pharma's new synthetic skin program. This is legitimate." He paused to let the translator catch up. "It shows that the skin has proved viable in extreme burn cases, and increasingly effective in geriatric patients. As you know, everybody in the developed countries of the world is getting old, fast, and we feel this product will find ready acceptance."
Chen said something to the translator, who then turned to Tom. "He says his earlier information showed that this product did not work. Early trials showed it was a failure. He says he will be asked about this."
Tom nodded. "That's smart, that makes a lot of sense. Those early trials suffered from methodology problems, not product failure. We were applying the synthetic skin to patients on blood thinners and in keloid scar areas. Both of those issues were resolved and our success rates shot up."
The translator relayed this.
Chen nodded his understanding.
Tom pushed on. "In approximately one hour, a leak of this positive information about our synthetic skin product is going to occur in a website chat room given over to the care of nursing patients. It's not an investors' site. But the site content is syndicated to a number of other
websites for nursing patients and their families. From experience we know that an embedded nugget like this will be noticed by investment bloggers and the like, soon creating a viral rumor that Good Pharma has something hot in the pipeline."