Interference

by Danielle Girard

  Alison nodded. “Is Joe dangerous?”

  “I doubt it, but his daughter is,” Hal told her.

  Hal and Ryaan hurried through the recreation room and out to the main corridor. “I’ll call dispatch. You try to reach Mei.”

  Ryaan pulled out her phone. Hal was jogging by then, and Ryaan had to run to keep up. She called Mei at the lab. Got voicemail. She sent the image of Joe and his daughter to Mei’s cell phone. In the message, she wrote. “Call me now.”

  Hal informed dispatch about Sophie Turner and warned them to send someone to Mei Ling’s residence immediately.

  “Where do you think she is?” Hal asked when they reached the car.

  “Not at the station. I called there first,” Ryaan said.

  “You don’t think she’s with Sophie now, do you?” Hal asked.

  “I hope not,” Ryaan told him. She started to duck into the car when Hal grabbed her hand. She turned back to him and before she could react, he kissed her. It was brief but firm. Before she could speak, Hal ran around the car and got into the driver’s seat.

  “Sorry,” he said, pulling his seatbelt on quickly. “Been wanting to do that for weeks.” With that, Hal revved the engine and flipped on the lights and siren as they hurried back to the city.

  Hal’s radio squawked from the dash. “All available units. We have a code 3 at the corner of Geary and Mason. Multiple gunshots fired.”

  Gunshots. Emergency.

  “Repeat, all available units report to Geary and Mason. Code 3.”

  “Geary and Mason,” Hal repeated. “That’s the Tenderloin.”

  “Multiple gunshots.” Ryaan imagined the guns that had vanished from the trunk of that car. “There are still eighteen out there from the warehouse.”

  Hal looked over at her. “You think Sophie Turner is there?”

  Ryaan stared out the windshield. “I hope so.”

  Hal turned on his siren and lights and drove like a bat out of hell.

  Chapter 44

  Mei knew she’d given herself away. She thumbed the screen and tried to push the phone icon. Dial a number. Any number.

  “Hand it over.”

  Movement in the corner of her eye. Mei looked into the barrel of a gun. Sophie motioned to the phone. “Give it to me.”

  Mei didn’t look down but gripped the phone tighter. She was dead without it.

  Sophie hitched the gun higher. “Now.”

  Mei glanced at the screen. Saw a name. A call. She pressed the lock button on the top. Started to raise her hands. Then tossed the phone underhand across the floor. Like a bowling ball. The phone flipped and skidded to a stop against the wall.

  Something cracked across her cheek. A sharp pop in her jaw as the gun struck her. She howled, dropped to her knees. Saw black then blinding white arrows.

  “You have a hard time with English?” Sophie asked. “I said give it to me. Not throw it across the room.” She spoke through gritted teeth.

  Mei pressed the back of her hand across her lip, felt the blood. Slowly, she looked up. The gun was inches away. “Why are you doing this, Sophie?”

  Sophie raised the gun again. Mei flinched.

  Sophie laughed. The bully with a weapon. Mei said nothing. No one knew where she was. She had no weapon. Her purse was in Sophie’s car. Her phone across the room. The apartment was completely empty. Nothing that wasn’t nailed down. And no backup.

  “Stand up.”

  Trembling, Mei pushed herself up. Her right cheek throbbed, her pulse pumping in her jaw. Blood was sour in her mouth. “You drugged me.”

  Sophie said nothing. Like she was waiting.

  A game, Mei thought. Play the game. Back to the night at the club. When could Sophie have drugged her? Mei pictured their drinks. The wine bar was too quiet. The shots were too fast. Four of them on the first round of beers. Mei never put hers down. She was careful like that. It had to be that second bottle of beer, the one Mei ordered. Sophie had lifted them off the bar, handed her one. No. Sophie had waved to someone first then handed her one. “You dropped something in my beer when you pretended to wave. After you came back from the bathroom.”

  “Not bad, Mei.” Sophie smiled. It made her sick. “Slow but not bad.”

  Mei glanced at the gun. The Sig 9mm held around ten rounds. Maybe she could get Sophie to burn through some of them, but ten…? That was a lot of chances.

  She needed to buy time to think. “The bug on my phone.” Mei’s mind raced. When had Sophie planted that? “In the elevator during the shooting? No. It had to be before that.” Play to the ego, she thought. “How did you pull that off?”

  “You left your phone in our office twice while you were filling out paperwork.” Sophie was quick to answer. “It hardly took genius.”

  Mei remembered that. So careless, so unlike her. Get her to talk, she thought. “Why me?”

  “You tell me,” Sophie said.

  Mei wanted Sophie to talk. “Because I am new in town,” she guessed. “Unattached.”

  “Except that husband of yours in Chicago.”

  Mei felt sick. Andy. They hadn’t spoken since Wednesday night. She’d asked for space. He gave it to her. And now…

  Sophie grinned. Her upper gums were visible, pink and angry. She was suddenly ugly.

  Mei shivered. Touched the tender skin on her face. “This can’t be about guns. I can’t believe you were really interested in that. Stealing them from the warehouse, spreading them out, that was all just an elaborate distraction.”

  Sophie shook her head. “I don’t have time for this, Mei.” She nodded toward the hall. “Let’s go see that bedroom. There’s so much glass in here.”

  Mei didn’t move. She listened for sounds. No one was coming. Even if she could find a way to break the window and escape, she was four stories up. Stall. “Must be Mendelcom, then.”

  Sophie’s head snapped up. Her eyes were too bright. The pupils were tiny black dots and the red vessels in the whites made her look like demonic. “My father spent twenty years there.”

  “Working on that drug.”

  “Prostura was his baby,” Sophie said. The gun dropped momentarily. Mei hesitated too long. Sophie aimed at her again.

  “He must have worked on it for years,” Mei said.

  “Fifteen years,” she snapped.

  Mei spoke slowly to draw her out. “And he never got the credit.”

  “Mendelcom promised him a payout if his work led to this kind of breakthrough. They refused to pay, so dad filed a lawsuit for breach of contract. A couple months into it, he had a stroke—at the office.” Sophie’s expression became small and pinched. “The stroke was genius for Mendelcom and easy. Spike his coffee one morning and he was out of the way.”

  “You think someone at Mendelcom caused the stroke?”

  Her eyes were wild. “I know they did. All it would have taken was a healthy dose of one of their vasoconstrictors. It was perfect.”

  “What about the suit? And his attorney?” Mei asked.

  “Retainer money ran out. The skunk walked.”

  “That had to be awful.”

  Sophie jabbed the barrel into Mei’s chest. “Fuck you. I don’t need your pity.”

  Mei shook her head. “Not pity, Sophie. I mean it.”

  Sophie stared at her, shook her head. Like she was having a dialogue with herself.

  Mei shifted away from the gun. A tiny step at a time. “What happened?”

  “I was in middle school,” Sophie said. “Dad was in the hospital. Me against a giant like Mendelcom. They weren’t going to pay a dime. They were happy to have him go. He’d already done the important work. Without him, there were just fewer expenses.” Sophie seemed lost in thought. The gun was still close. Too close to make a move.

  “Where is your dad now?” Mei asked.

 
; “Living in a dingy senior home. That was the other genius move from Mendelcom. They paid up dad’s benefit package—made it look nice and generous—then they paid for a lifetime of care.”

  “That’s—” Mei shifted onto her right foot.

  “Nothing in comparison to what he was going to get,” Sophie snapped. “He’s been locked up since ‘96. He can’t move. He can’t speak. But he’s still as sharp as ever. He could have gone on to do important things. He could have helped them develop another drug. But no. They just cut him off.” She paused in her rant. Mei eased a few inches from the barrel. “So I killed Prostura.”

  “By changing the results of the trial.”

  Sophie nodded. “Changed their results and wiped away the backups. Easy as that.”

  “You think Mendelcom doesn’t have secure backups on a billion dollar drug trial?”

  Sophie smiled. A genuine smile. “Sam was able to create a virus in the backup. When Mendelcom realized the data was altered, they restored the corrupted backup. All of it, gone.”

  Mei knew it wasn’t that simple. The data was still out there somewhere. It could be pieced together, but Sophie had certainly succeeded in making things difficult. The devastation to the share price alone would likely take years to recover. She thought about challenging her, but it seemed unwise. “What now?”

  “Now, Dad and I retire. We spent every penny we had to short Mendelcom at its high. I have been buying it back since the news came out.”

  Mei’s time was running out. Still no plan. “You can buy shares from anywhere,” Mei said. “Why are you still here?” She touched her hand to her cheek, wiped the blood on her pants. Felt a hard shape in her pocket. The key.

  “I needed a court order to get my dad out of that hell hole. The bastards had medical power of attorney. Arranged by Mendelcom, of course.”

  Mei reached into her pocket. Gripped the key hard between her fingers.

  “But it’s all done now. Paperwork. Everything.” Sophie looked at the gun and waved it at Mei. “If it weren’t for having to deal with you, I’d be on my way to pick him up now.”

  Mei sprang.

  She knocked the barrel aside with her left hand, and swung hard at Sophie’s neck with her right. The key between her fingers cut clean through the skin.

  Sophie screamed and grabbed at her neck. “You bitch.”

  The key fell.

  Sophie pulled her hand away to shove Mei. The wound was bleeding but not enough. Mei had missed the carotid.

  Mei kept hold of the barrel with her left hand, deflecting it as Sophie pressed it toward her. She grabbed Sophie’s right wrist, fighting to aim the barrel away. Sophie howled in pain and Mei saw bruising around her wrist. She gripped harder, twisting, while Sophie struggled to lift the barrel to Mei’s chest. Mei fought it down. Sophie was stronger. She had a better hold.

  Dropping her hold momentarily, Mei drove her elbow into Sophie’s face. The gun slipped. Sophie grabbed it back. A bullet discharged with a hollow pop. The glass window exploded beside them.

  Mei put all her weight into twisting the barrel away. Sophie screamed and drove the barrel against Mei’s hand. The metal burned. The barrel dropped. The trigger went off.

  Mei looked down at the barrel against her hip. Heat seared her side.

  Sophie was laughing. Raising the barrel to aim again. A stupid smile on her face, like she was winning.

  A roar rose up from Mei’s chest. Sophie flinched. Mei stomped hard on Sophie’s instep. Sophie sank a few inches. Mei drove her weight into the outside of Sophie’s knee, hard and fast. Something cracked. Sophie moaned. Mei wrenched the gun toward the ceiling, and drove Sophie backward with all her strength.

  Both holding the gun, they stumbled a few feet. Sophie’s leg buckled. She fell back. She let go of the gun. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth dropped open and she reached out. “No,” she screamed. Mei felt the cold air. Sophie’s arms windmilled as she tried to balance. She reached for Mei. “Help me!” Her fingers grazed Mei’s jacket. Her scream pierced the open air and she was gone.

  Mei froze and watched. The body fell in slow motion. And then not. Mei watched as it struck the pavement. As Sophie struck. Like a rag doll on the pavement.

  Mei backed slowly from the window. A trail of blood followed. She touched her side. Thick and tacky, blood filled her hand and ran between her fingers. So much blood. She wanted to lie down. Her phone. She moved toward the door. So dizzy, it took forever. When she reached the wall, she lowered herself slowly onto her knees, every motion excruciating.

  She took hold of the phone. The screen was cracked, but she swiped across the screen. Pressed the emergency button.

  It didn’t even ring. “911. What is your emergency?”

  “This is Inspector Ling,” she said. “I’ve been shot. Bronte Street.”

  “What’s the street number on Bronte?”

  Mei couldn’t think. The room was spinning. Don’t close your eyes. “Ma’am? Inspector Ling?”

  “Don’t know.” She moved onto her side. The phone dropped to the floor beside her face. “Don’t know the number.”

  “Stay with me, Inspector. I’m tracking your location from your phone. We’re sending police and paramedics now.”

  Mei nodded.

  “Inspector?”

  “Yeah,” Mei whispered.

  “You stay there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “I am now,” she said. Her eyes fluttered closed.

  “I need you to keep talking, Inspector.” The voice was urgent. “Keep talking to me, do you hear?”

  “Okay,” Mei said. Things were foggy. Confused. She’d found her phone, called the police. “I used the emergency button.”

  “What emergency button, Inspector?”

  “On my phone.”

  “Good,” came dispatch. “That was a good thing to do.”

  Mei licked her lips. “These phones are so clever.”

  “Good, Inspector. You keep talking.”

  “I love technology,” Mei whispered, every word a fight. She took shallow breaths as the pain worsened. The effort was exhausting. The dispatcher kept talking. But her own words wouldn’t come.

  “Inspector, the ambulance is at your location. Are you in an apartment?”

  “Top floor.”

  “Top floor,” the woman repeated.

  Mei nodded. She was trying to think of something else to tell the lady on the phone when she heard the merciful sound of pounding on the door.

  Chapter 45

  Mei was dreaming in Cantonese. Her mother was speaking to her softly, the way she used to when Mei was young, before the ways in which Mei didn’t fit in became a wedge between them that grew into a wall. Her mother used to whisper to Mei about what it was to be the middle child in China. There, birth order was significant. The middle child was known as the one accustomed to adapting, to compromise. Her a mā was also the middle child, of three girls. Her older sister the controlling one and her younger sister, Ayi, the princess.

  “We asked you to compromise too much,” her mother whispered. She used the Cantonese to-hip with the characters for “prepare” or “ready” and “agree” or “unity.”

  “You were the united daughter. Never fighting like your sisters.”

  “We thought you were easy,” her father said in a quiet voice.

  “But we didn’t know that we were asking you to be something you’re not.” Her mother was crying. “Ayi told us.”

  Mei smelled her mother’s rose perfume and shifted in her bed. Searching to hold onto the dream, she longed for the warmth of the voices. Her parents loved her. They accepted her. She felt like she was sliding off the bed. The mattress was angled and awkward, not like hers. She moved her hand and pressed up against a metal bar, like a railing. A jail, she
thought and then had the strange sense that maybe it was something else, some sort of tomb. She just wanted to go back to the dream.

  “She’s going to be okay, Mrs. Ling.”

  That sounded like Sabrina. Then, she remembered Sophie, the apartment. It all flooded back. She had to fight to pull herself from sleep. As the voices quieted, the other sounds became more obvious. The low hum of machines, not like the quiet of computers but with similar parts. Louder, like the servers that ran in corporate offices. The whirring of heat sinks, fighting to cool whatever processors were at work in the room. An occasional beep. Lower-pitched and longer than a computer’s. She was in a hospital.

  Mei tried to touch her face, but her hand was tethered. She opened her eyes. There was the sound of her mother gasping, her father’s loud happy click. Their faces hovered above her.

  “Zhu zhu,” her father said. “You’re awake.”

  Mei smiled. It hurt. It had been years since her father called her zhu zhu which translated to “small pig” and was not the kind of nickname an eight-year-old American girl wanted. “Hi, A Bàh.”

  Her mother rushed away from the bed and a moment later, she shouted into the hallway. “Get the doctor! She is awake. My daughter is awake.”

  In a flash, her mother was back, ducking under her father’s arm to press herself against the bed’s metal rail. “How is your pain? They had to pull a bullet out of you. Does it hurt?”

  Mei nodded and licked her lips. “A little.”

  “Do you want some water?”

  Mei nodded.

  Sabrina appeared, handed her mother a pink cup with a straw, and gave Mei a little smile.

  “Thank you so much, dear,” her mother told Sabrina, taking the cup.

  Mei had to close her eyes for a moment. Sabrina and her parents were in the same room.

  “I’m going to go get some coffee,” Sabrina said. “Can I get you some?” she asked Mei’s father.

  Mei opened her eyes as her mother pressed the straw to her lips. She watched her father with Sabrina and drank.