The Finder: A Novel by Colin Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

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