Flawless

by Joshua Spanogle

He looked away. I grabbed his arm. “She mentioned him, didn’t she? She said something about—”

  He wrenched his arm away and stood. “I need to get out of here. I need to get my mother and myself out of here.”

  “And what about your sister?”

  “My sister can take care of herself. Let me give you some advice, Doctor: Get yourself gone. Forget you ever heard of my sister.”

  “I can bump this up to the next level, you know. I can keep this going with the police.”

  “Right.” He forced a sour laugh. “You do that. See how much it helps you.”

  I held his gaze for a moment, then scooped my copy of the follow-up form into my hands.

  “They know about you.” Zhang watched me fold the form. “If you stay in this city…” He didn’t finish the sentence. “This is the beginning of the end, Doctor,” he said. “Get out of here.”

  And I did.

  In the car, I slipped the Smith & Wesson under the seat. I brought my hand in front of my face. It trembled. The beginning of the end, Daniel had said. What beginning? What end?

  I tried to steady my hand. I couldn’t.

  Daniel Zhang came out of his house. He threw two black duffels into the trunk of the red Mercedes. He climbed into the car. A moment later, he was gone.

  43

  FIVE AND A HALF MILES east of Daniel Zhang’s place, I parked the car as close to the entrance to the bar as I could get. In the sideview mirror, I watched headlights loom and zip by, fully expecting to see a white Caddy lumbering along, machine guns bristling from its windows.

  The neighborhood, called South of Market—SoMa—had forever been changed in the 1990s-dotcom convulsion. Clubs with names like “DaDa” and “Playbar” had muscled aside the auto shops and warehouses and artists’ studios. Though the bubble and its burst were now distant memory, the gentrification remained, poised to siphon dollars from a resurgent Internet economy.

  I exited the car, slammed the door, looked around. Vehicles whisked by, a few pedestrians sauntered. Everything—the cars, the people, the shuttered buildings—seemed to hide a threat. 750,000 people in this city, and I felt alone and pursued by every one of them. My heart would not stop thumping, my hands would not stop sweating. I circled to the trunk of the car and unboxed the shoulder holster.

  It took me a few minutes to deal with all the straps and configurations. My arm, it seemed, could not find the right hole, and the thing wrapped around me like a net. A metaphor if ever there was one. But I wanted to make sure that if I went down, at least I’d go down with a Smith & Wesson blazing. If not blazing, then I’d go down struggling to get the damned thing out of the holster.

  Finally, I worked out the logic of the contraption. I traded my sport coat for the windbreaker I’d fished out of my duffel. Zipped up, it hardly showed the bulge of the holster.

  At the front door of the car, I paused.

  Screw it, I thought.

  And that’s how I—the former public health official who chastised Paul Murphy about having a gun in his home—carted a loaded firearm into a bar.

  The Grand Junction had weathered the neighborhood’s changes better than most. And though I hadn’t been there for ten years, I was pretty sure it was not the type of place where you’d ever find Asian guys with big tattoos. Asian guys with small tattoos, sure, but they were mostly hipsters and software guys looking to hear a band and tie on a buzz. It seemed, in short, safe.

  Making sure I had a good view of the door, I took a seat at the end of the bar. The place had a vaguely Western decor: a stuffed elk head, a Remington sculpture knockoff collecting dust, a couple of battered license plates from Colorado. From the female bartender, I ordered a beer. Without any problem, it was provided to me. Small victories, I thought.

  There was a baseball game on the television, and the place was maybe half full. I grabbed a handful of pretzels, chewed them into mush, and washed it down with a gulp of suds. The guy sitting next to me—thin, mid-forties, long wispy hair, some rock concert T-shirt under a corduroy blazer—was chowing his way through what looked like a veggie burger. I realized I was starving, so I ordered one. I ordered another beer.

  “You look tired, dude,” the guy mumbled at me through his burger.

  “I am tired, dude,” I said. I can give it as good as I can take it.

  “Yeah. We’re all tired. The country’s tired, man, you can feel it. It’s ’cuz we’re holding on by our fingernails above the abyss. You work around here?”

  I should’ve known that a bar, in the late evening on a weekday, didn’t attract the solitary types who wanted to keep their shit to themselves. It would attract socially outgoing misfits like my neighbor here. Folks who had a desperate need to connect.

  “I don’t work,” I said.

  That should shut him up.

  Or not.

  “Yeah. And they say the economy’s on the mend. Bullshit, I say.”

  “Look, man, I really am tired.”

  “Okay. That’s cool, dude.”

  I took a long pull on the beer. I held my hand in front of me. Steady as a goddamned rock.

  “You’re not a software developer, are you?” the guy asked. “You’re—”

  “No.”

  “—you’re more the business-development type.”

  “I’m a doctor,” I said. Where the hell was that veggie burger?

  “Oh, yeah. The hand thing. Surgeon?”

  “No.”

  “What kind?”

  “Public health.”

  “No shit? We just did a big database project for Georgia State Department of Health.”

  “No shit,” I said. For the first time, I turned to look him in the eye. “I used to work in Georgia.”

  And that is how I met Miles Pikar, Chief Technology Officer for Paladin Software, my new best friend.

  Two hours and five beers later, I had disgorged to Miles pretty much everything that had happened in the previous week. I told him about Murph. I told him about Dorothy Zhang. I did not tell him about the gun.

  He took a sip of beer. “The Zhang woman just vanished?”

  “Looks like it,” I said.

  Miles rattled on about some database, something about deadbeat dads and child support and tracking employment. The dads talk got me thinking about parenthood, which got me thinking about children, which got me thinking again about one particular child: Tim Kim.

  I interrupted Miles. “The missing woman’s got a kid. A boy.”

  “He’s probably with the dad.”

  “He’s not with the dad. Dad doesn’t know where he is. Besides,” I said, “it makes sense, right? If she’s hiding out from something, she wouldn’t just leave the kid with him. Whoever’s pressuring her would be sure to guess where the child is. It’d be too easy to grab the kid from his dad and use him as leverage.”

  Miles shrugged. “It would be pretty good leverage. A kid. You got kids?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. You got a partner?”

  I told him about Brooke Michaels; I told him she was the third most important thing in my life, after Murph and after finding out what happened to the people in the photos.

  “Your priorities, my friend, are a bit fucked up.”

  You said it, dude.

  He patted me on the shoulder. “I gotta go, Nate.”

  “It’s only midnight,” I said pathetically. I was, needless to say, pretty far gone by this point.

  “Have to wake up early tomorrow, get a little yoga in before I genuflect for The Man.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Miles Pikar looked at me with something like pity in his eyes. “Where’re you crashing?” he asked.

  “Dunno. There’s got to be a motel around here somewhere.” I snapped my fingers at the bartender, who pretended not to hear. In my inebriated state, I was becoming that guy, the drunk jerk way past his tolerance.

  “Look, dude, I got an extra bedroom. You want, you can stay with me.”

  “
No,” I said. I turned to the bartender again. “Excuse me? Is there a motel around here?”

  She didn’t answer me, but looked at Miles instead. She drew her hand across her neck in a “he’s cut off” motion.

  “Avoid interaction with Brenda,” Miles advised. “She hates you. Come on, you stay at my place.”

  “I can’t,” I replied.

  “Why?”

  That was a stumper.

  Miles laughed, stood up, and helped me out of my chair.

  44

  WHEN I WAS FINISHING MED school in Baltimore, I did a month in the Emergency Department, tending to a constant stream of gangbangers with gunshot wounds, homeless guys who drank themselves into comas, motor vehicle accidents, and, it being Baltimore, heroin addicts who’d gotten a little enthusiastic with their fix. One afternoon, a black guy in baggy jeans and a Wu-Tang T-shirt came in with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. We all assumed some brawl over girls or drugs, just another slab of bad urban meat across the table. Turned out, though, it wasn’t a brawl. Turned out that the weapon that injured the guy wasn’t a TEC-9 or a MAC-10 or anything with millimeter behind its caliber. It seemed Alphonse Durrin—I still remember his name—spent his weekends as a Revolutionary War reenactor and had accidentally shot himself. He’d been readying the gun for a big get-together in upstate New York and it went off.

  To recuperate, he had to take two weeks’ leave from his job as a senior VP at an investment bank. The pistol, he told me later, was authentic. Three grand from a dealer in Tampa.

  I remembered that story as I walked with Miles back to his apartment. I remembered it because appearances—the trappings of fashion, the inkings of race—are so insidiously deceptive, most of the time you hardly see their handiwork. So, it’s a shock when what you didn’t even know was there is dismantled. It’s a shock when the urban thug turns out to be a history nut and a veep at a bank. It’s a shock when the guy whose hair and vocabulary scream “society dropout,” whose Pink Floyd T-shirt consisted of little more than threads and flecks of color, turns out to be the CTO of a tech company. When that CTO owns an enormous flat. When that dropout CTO owns the whole building.

  Miles’s large, open loft with hardwood floors, exposed beams, exposed brick was a surprise. The cleanliness was a surprise, too. Spotless almost, except for the squares of sod on the counter.

  “Wheatgrass, man. I just started growing it. For the smoothies.”

  Smoothies whipped up in the three-hundred-dollar blender parked on a granite counter next to the big Sub-Zero refrigerator.

  “This place, man…this place is cool,” I said lamely.

  “The revolution starts here. In the quiet comfort of Casa Pikar.”

  Miles kicked off his flip-flops, hiked up his jeans, and led me to a room off the kitchen, a tidy place with its own bathroom. “Your fiefdom.”

  It looked to me like this was the only separate room in the place. “Where do you sleep?”

  “Over there.” He pointed to a bank of computers and flat-screen monitors. Next to them was a bed. “I sleep next to my babies.”

  In my deeply inebriated state, it all made sense.

  “You got to get to sleep, dude. Big things in store for you.”

  I nodded and turned unsteadily toward the bedroom.

  “Un momento, señor. You said the kid’s name was Timothy Kim?”

  “Who?” The synapses that hadn’t been completely numbed by the alcohol made some connections. “Yeah. Tim Kim. Dorothy Zhang’s kid. Yeah.”

  “You got a middle name?”

  “I don’t…I can’t remember. Why?”

  He patted me on the shoulder again. “Get some sleep, Doc.”

  45

  I OPENED MY EYES, AND the hangover slammed into me like a meteor. I closed my eyes.

  Morning.

  There are times in my life in which I do stupid things. Hard to believe, I know, but fully three-quarters of my time on this planet has been spent with my head at various distances up my ass. Ask Brooke. For example, taking a gun to a bar was not smart. Getting drunk in the middle of this—of figuring how to deal with a slaughtered family and a possible public health nightmare—was not smart. That not-so-smart bout with alcohol got me thinking of other not-so-smart bouts with alcohol. In particular, I was thinking of one evening years ago when I decided to let Murph talk me into a drinking game. Poker. Head-to-head.

  The Boy Scout outweighed me by a good fifty pounds, but, with pressure mounting in my lab, I’d recently begun to strengthen my liver with nightly challenges of bourbon. That night’s match with Murph, I figured, was even. What I hadn’t counted on was that Murph was one hell of a poker player.

  We thought about betting shots of vodka, but, being PhDs, we realized that would make the game very short. So we opted for shots of beer. You win the hand, the other guy drank the collected “bet.”

  It was just us, two cases of Busch, and a steady stream of classic rock from the stereo. Friday night, gambling, drinking, and Credence. An alpha male’s dream. Well, all dreams come to an end, and this dream ended four hours after it began, with me in Murph’s bathroom, heaving out my guts. Naively, I’d also agreed that the first one to vomit had to pay for the beer. So, after crawling out of the bathroom, I peeled off some bills, thrust them at Murph, and passed out on his couch.

  The following morning I awoke under a blanket that had somehow found its way onto me. The coffee table next to me had been cleared of its beer cans and shot glasses and cards. There was a glass of water on the table, and two Tylenol. The money I’d given to Murph lay on top of a scrap of notebook paper which read: Blackjack tonight???

  For me, the more primitive senses—smell, pain—bring on memories with more intensity than sight or hearing. A hangover was kind of a sixth sense, and I was unprepared for the rush of Paul Murphy that flooded into me. Lying in Miles Pikar’s swank guest bedroom, eyes squeezed tight against a new day, I missed the Jolly Giant. I missed the years in which we hadn’t seen each other, the marriage, the kids, the changes of jobs. I missed never having played that game of blackjack with him.

  I opened my eyes and felt like death.

  The granite floor of the bathroom was cold under my bare feet, but the water gushing from the brushed-steel faucets turned hot instantly. I spent a good amount of time scrubbing my face, as if cleaning it would somehow erase the hangover. It didn’t, and I caught a whiff of my own musty odor. I really needed a shower.

  First, though, I needed to give some salutations to my host, make sure it was okay that I dirtied towels and scummed the model-home bathroom. I pulled on clothes, made sure the gun was balled up in the windbreaker on the bed. I checked the cell to see if Brooke had called sometime in the previous ten hours. Not that I would have called back, but it would have been nice to know she’d blinked before I did. She hadn’t. There were, however, two missed calls logged on the phone. Both from a blocked number.

  The massive loft space was dully lit by huge windows and, it turned out, by three flat-screen monitors and a single desk lamp at the far end of the room. I walked in my stocking feet over to the monitors. There were lines of text on two of the screens, a bunch of collapsed files on the other.

  “There’s coffee in the pot,” Miles Pikar said without turning around. “Sleep well?”

  “Well enough. You?”

  “Two hours, dude.”

  “Two hours? You under deadline or something?”

  “Doing my part to aid the forces of good. Get your coffee. I got something to show you.”

  I crossed the quarter mile of apartment to the kitchen area, found a cup that said “National Institute of Standards and Technology,” and filled it with the inky fluid. The coffee was dark as Texas crude.

  When I returned to Miles and his toys, his knee was hopping up and down like a grasshopper’s.

  “Not in Chicago,” he said, eyes on the computer. “You were right. Not with the dad.”

  On the screen, he opened a file that looked so
mething like a spreadsheet. At the top, I saw a field entitled “Last Name.” Under it was the name “Kim.” First name “Timothy,” middle name “Dong-wei.” The boy was eight years old. Race, immunization status, address were listed.

  “How’d you get this?” I asked Miles.

  “Database magic, my friend. And some early work with the California Basic Education Data System, which gathers stats on kids and their curricula. There were a bunch of changes to the database since then, but my guys laid down some of the original architecture.”

  “And this is open to the public?”

  He looked at me with a crooked smile and said nothing.

  I smiled back. “You hacked in?”

  “‘Hacked’ is such an ugly word, Doc. Ugly, ugly word. Let’s just say I let myself in through a back door. And remember I worked on this a long time ago, so I feel I have some ownership over it.”

  “Sure.”

  “Got to justify,” he said. “Lets me sleep better at night.”

  “Your two hours.”

  “It was a good two hours.”

  He clicked more keys; a long list of names popped up. Timothy Kim’s was highlighted in yellow. “This is the data from the San Francisco Unified School District. Young Timothy was pulled out of the system in June of this year.” He flipped back to another page. “He was enrolled in an alternative school in Berkeley for the summer, some arts and sciences summer program. He left in August and”—he brought up the first page—“enrolled at Glenfield Elementary School in the Napa Unified School District.”

  “And that’s his current address?” I pointed to the screen.

  “Current as of a few weeks ago.”

  In the field entitled “Parent/Guardian” was the name “Dorothy Zhang” followed by “(mother).”

  “Nifty,” I said.

  “Dude, data is nifty. Databases are divine.”

  I took a sip of coffee, felt a few neurons wake up and flash to life. “Isn’t this illegal?”

  “Highly. But I covered our tracks. Besides, for the forces of good…”

  “Right.”

  Just then the telephone on the desk rang. Miles popped on a headset, spoke rapidly into it. “Up. Been up. Been helping out a friend…Dude I met in a bar last night. No, not like that. He’s a doctor. Don’t sweat it. Just come up.” He took off the headset and Miles Pikar, database guru, surprised me again.