“No!” he shouted. “I want my mom!” I yanked him firmly away from the terrarium. “I want my mother! Let me go!” And so we went, my hand clamped on his, past the aquariums, past the kittens and puppies in their cages, past the worried onlookers. “Let go!”
“He got scared of the spiders,” I explained to the worried spectators. “I was not scared! I want my MOTHER!” The last word came as a shriek, and I started to worry some do-gooder might intercede before I reached the door. Tantrums stop at three, right? “NO!” Tim screeched.
I wondered how a guy like myself is supposed to deal with these situations. Where the hell is the manual?
Finally, the sidewalk. A few patrons and store employees gazed at us out of the darkness of the shop as if from their own cages. From the looks of them, I couldn’t tell if they had sympathy for me or were about to call Child Protective Services.
I knelt in front of Tim, who continued to yell—Let go of me! I want to see my mom!—and took both his shoulders in my hands.
“Stop it,” I hissed. “Don’t be such a baby.”
He stopped yelling, but he didn’t stop fuming. He breathed fast through his nose, his jaw was clenched. His eyes were dry and narrowed.
And I have no doubt that Timothy Kim, eight-year-old boy, would have enjoyed nothing more at that moment than watching me be eaten alive by giant tarantulas.
98
I GOT TIM BACK TO the car, wondering how difficult it would be to find a nanny in this neighborhood. He sulked quietly on the seat next to me, not even touching the hot dog I’d bought for him. Candy and hot dogs, I thought. Stellar nutritional fare from a public health doc.
I asked Tim again if he wanted to talk about microarrays. He didn’t bother to answer me. The silence was good, though, giving me a chance to think. The aimless rolling of the car over San Francisco asphalt was soothing in a way. The light odor of Dorothy’s car, the scent of her somewhere in there, was soothing to me, at least. But maybe that’s what calmed the kid down, too. The smell of his mother.
Since my research into Dragon East had been a bust, I decided to call a guy who could, I hoped, plumb a lot deeper than I could.
“Dr. McCormick, didn’t know if I’d hear from you again.” No “dude” this time. No “man.” No talk of revolution. This professional Miles Pikar was new to me. “How’d it go with finding what you needed?”
“I found him. Thanks for the Napa information.”
“Great. Went well?”
“Went okay. But I need to ask you another favor.”
“Hold on.” I heard Miles say something I couldn’t make out, then something like “close the door.”
“Had to secure the area, dude. One of my project managers was in here. He got Black Nexus 4 last night and he couldn’t stop playing. Says the character development’s better than the movies. You a gamer?”
“No.”
“You got to try it, man. Putting Hollywood and the publishing industry out of business. It’s the new juggernaut. Try it.”
“Maybe—”
“I’m one hundred percent serious here.” There was a brief pause, and I could almost hear the lightbulb buzzing to life. “We got to get together and talk about possibilities, dude. The pandemic angle, the flu thing. Tracking down a virus before it blows up all over the world. You could educate folks about—”
“Maybe next week, Miles. I got that favor—”
“Righto. Shoot.”
Miles seemed not the least bit perturbed that I’d squelched discussion about a pandemic video game. The guy’s relationships with ideas—video games, databases, revolution—was impressive both in its depth and in its detachment from them.
“A big favor,” I said.
“You’re starting to worry me. Just ask, and I’ll let you know if I can do it.”
“There’s a company called Dragon East Importers. I need to know about them.”
“Need to know what?”
“I’m not really sure. The basic stuff: what they are, what they do, who owns it.”
“Not a problem. You can do this yourself, you know. Hop onto the Net.”
“I did that already. I didn’t find anything. I was hoping you could go a little deeper.”
“How can I go a little deeper, dude?”
“I don’t know. You’re the database guy. You have friends, right?”
“I might or might not have friends, the existence or nonexistence of whom I will neither confirm nor deny.” He laughed. I didn’t. “What’s this about?”
“Same thing. That disease I told you about. And those murders in Woodside. It’s about both of them. You hear about that explosion in the Richmond?”
“Yeah. All over the news. Amazing no one was killed.”
“It’s about that, too.”
“Oh, shit, dude. You need to be talking to the FBI or something, not to Miles Pikar.”
“I’m talking to Miles Pikar because I can’t talk to the FBI or the cops or anyone else. There are some considerations here.”
He laughed again. “Considerations? Man, you going solo on this? The public health doctor? What about considerations for anybody else getting hurt if you don’t go to the cops?”
“People are going to get hurt if I do go to them. The story’s only half put together, and right now I need the bad guys to think everything’s okay.”
“Bomb going off in the city sure seems like everything’s okay.” There was silence on the phone. “Okay,” he finally said, “you’re talking to me. You’re talking to Miles Pikar.” He exhaled. “Dragon East, meet the dragonslayer.”
99
I DIDN’T WANT TO TAKE the sullen kid with me, but didn’t really have a choice. Taking him to an arcade and leaving him there would have been bad parenting, right? But leaving him in the car in the parking lot of a biotech company? Dr. Spock stuff.
“You did a great job,” I said. “Finding that piece of paper. That helps a lot, Tim.”
He didn’t respond.
“We’re going to get your mom, kid. Don’t worry.”
“You can’t find her.”
“What do you mean?”
He didn’t tell me. I changed the subject, tried to put him in a better frame of mind. “What’s the favorite thing you ever did with your mother?”
Tim was quiet for so long, I thought he’d ignored my question. But then he said, “If I was good, she would get a pizza and we would eat it on Thursday nights. She’d let me stay up late to watch TV.”
“I bet you got to eat pizza every Thursday, didn’t you?”
“Yup. Once, we went for a pizza to a place where Uncle Paul knew the man there—”
“Uncle Paul?” The kid called Murphy Uncle Paul?
“Yeah. And the man showed me how they spin it before they put all the stuff on it.”
“Wow.”
“And he let me put our pizza into the oven and I touched the oven with my hand and burned it.”
“That doesn’t sound fun.”
“It hurt a lot. But I didn’t cry. Uncle Paul said that I was the bravest kid he ever saw. He’s really big. A lot bigger than you.”
“I know,” I said, a little melancholy now. “Uncle Paul was big.”
“And then we ate the pizza and got another one and Uncle Paul said we were a great family. He said he wanted us all to be together soon.”
My heart began to break.
“What did your mom say?”
“She said I shouldn’t get my hopes up. But I knew Uncle Paul wanted to be with us. He said I was the best son anyone could have. He really likes Mom a lot. He was supposed to come live with us but then Mom got sick.”
“You didn’t see him again?”
“Yeah. He said he was coming to live with us. But then I had to go live with Uncle Tony.”
I wanted to ask Tim about his father, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t bear to hear that his dad was planning real soon to show him the big lake right next to Chicago.
&nb
sp; The kid’s story dredged up something deep, something I’d spent half my life trying not to disturb. All those promises not kept. My father promising, year after year, we’d go on a big vacation together—Disney World, deep-sea fishing trips, Phillies games. The promises, after his divorce from my mother, that we’d see each other every weekend, which quickly became two weekends a month, then one weekend a month, then holidays. The promises that he loved my brother and me just as much as he loved his new family, his new kids. But his new kids got to go to Disney World. We never did.
It’s the tiny cuts that hurt the most.
I hadn’t spoken to my father since I was kicked out of med school. He found out the day it happened, from a frantic call from my mother. He called me, made a stab at sympathy that lasted about five seconds, then gave me hell for what I’d done to my mother. Dad, defender of the woman he’d dumped fifteen years before to go shack up with a nurse twelve years his junior. Gloria was a taut blonde who’d drifted into my father’s OR one day, then drifted into his bed. Mother to my father’s other children, the kids he always wanted. Dad, the surgeon, who made sure my half-and step-siblings got whatever remote-controlled whatever, who made sure my mother had to go to court to fight him for every penny she needed to feed and clothe my brother and me. Dad, for whom Christmas was a vehicle to assuage his guilt. The extravagant, empty presents. The go-cart that neither my brother nor I could use because Mom lived in an apartment in town.
“I can’t believe I raised a son who would do this,” he said in that call from Pennsylvania to California all those years ago. Raised a son? All I could manage was a terse “Fuck you,” which I’m sure confirmed for him that he’d done the right thing in neglecting this tainted, rotten offspring of his.
Just like me, the little boy with the fond memories of pizza had been set up. Paul Murphy wasn’t planning on living with you, kid. Even if he hadn’t wound up with his face mutilated and his throat cut, he wasn’t going to live with you. A guy with two children, a wife, and a big house in Woodside wasn’t going to say fuck all and come shack up with his deformed mistress and her kid, no matter how brave that kid was.
You liar, Paul Murphy, I thought. You lying bastard.
“Where are we going?” Tim asked.
“I have to talk to someone. There’s a company…”
But the end of the sentence didn’t form. Both Murph and my father were nattering away in my head. Lying bastard? they said to me. Take a look in the mirror, Nate.
“What company?” Tim asked.
My lies are little ones, I protested to the phantoms in my brain, for a higher purpose. Higher purpose? they mocked. Like fudging that data?
Okay, I told them. Not that.
“It’s a company called Tetra Biologics,” I said to Tim.
Murph and dear old Dad wouldn’t let up. Higher purpose? Like telling this kid his mother’s going to be okay?
She is going to be okay, I replied.
She’s not. And you know that.
“Cool. That’s where Uncle Paul works.” Tim was peeping up over the dashboard, looking expectantly at the road ahead. “Maybe he knows where Mom is. Can we see him?”
I took in the face with the excited almond-shaped eyes, the hopeful half-smile, and realized this boy hadn’t had much to smile about lately.
“Uncle Paul’s got a lot to do,” I said, the lie ripping to shreds any honor I had left.
100
“THAT WAS FAST,” I SAID.
“I’m nothing if not fast,” Miles Pikar replied. “Dragon East Imports, my friend, is a small company in the City by the Bay, which—”
“I know that,” I said.
“—which does not do a lot of importing, it seems.”
“So, what do they do?”
“Nothing, man,” Miles said. “Its listed value is about three hundred bucks. Got no assets except for a phone and a fax machine.”
“Damn it.”
“But, it does have an owner, Sino Sun Holdings—”
“Great—”
“Which is a shell corporation based here.”
“Not great,” I said. “Are the officers listed?”
“Of course. Three of them. All deceased.” I thought I heard keys tapping.
“They’re straw men,” I said.
“Sure are. Dead men don’t do a lot for the bottom line.”
“So, the only connection we have is these three people. Can you run the names to find out if these guys are listed as officers for other companies? If they used them once, then—”
Miles sighed heavily.
“Look,” I said, “I need to know who was running the clinic. I need some sort of proof.”
“Maybe it’s time to talk to some of your government pals.”
“I don’t have many government pals left.”
“Guilt somebody. Someone might be interested.”
“I can’t go to anybody. That’s why I called you.”
“Why not?”
I looked at Tim, made decisions and revisions. After a beat, I told Miles about Dorothy Zhang, choosing my words carefully. I could tell that the kid—now munching pensively and delicately on his hot dog—was tuned to me like a shortwave. I told Miles about Brooke.
“Whoa, man,” Miles said. “Heavy. Sounds like you need the cops more than me.”
“I don’t need the police. I don’t want the…the bad people to do anything. You think if the police get involved they’re just going to let…”—again I looked at Tim—“they’re just going to let DZ go? And lay off Brooke?”
Silence on the phone, then Miles said, “I gotta think about this, man. I gotta think.”
The click on the other end of the line was rushed, hasty, and hit me like a slap.
Frustrated, I threw the phone into the console.
“He’s not going to help you find my mother,” Tim informed me.
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll find her.” I hoped I sounded at least half convincing. As an afterthought, I said, “Don’t be a coward, Tim. Try never to be a coward.”
A few minutes’ drive from Tetra, I asked Tim whether he wanted a soda. Kids love soda.
“You said soda was bad for you,” he informed me.
“When did I say that?”
“When I saw you in school. You said it made you burp and go broke.”
The kid’s brain was like Velcro. I made a note to watch what I said. “I was kidding. Do you want any or not? Offer going once, going twice…”
“Yes, but I have to pee.”
I didn’t see how those two things were exclusive of each other. “We can do both, Tim. That’s the single greatest thing about America: you can get a soda and pee at the same place.”
My sarcasm quieted him and gave me yet another thing about which to feel guilty.
We stopped at a convenience store. I bought two Cokes, and Tim disappeared into the back to use the can. Outside, I dug around in my pockets for a card I hoped was still there. It was, and I dialed the number. Alex Rodriguez said she was surprised to hear from me.
“I need to meet you now,” I told her.
“I don’t know if this is the best—”
“It’s about Paul and—” I stopped myself. “We need to meet, Alex.”
“But not now. How about tomorrow? I have meetings all afternoon. My schedule is packed.”
“Clear it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Clear your schedule. Tetra is involved.”
“In what—” She didn’t finish the sentence. “When can you be here?” she asked instead.
“Seven minutes.”
101
I SWUNG THE CAR INTO THE Tetra parking lot, and pulled to the far end, away from the colony of vehicles close to the building’s entrance. It was hot in South San Francisco, much hotter than in the city proper. The dizzying number of microclimates in the Bay Area always stumped me, a guy from Pennsylvania who was used to hearing it would be 92 in York, 93 in Harrisburg, and 92 in Lancaste
r. That day, it was more like 71 in San Francisco, 91 at Tetra. “Nature’s air conditioner,” as the folks in SF called the fog, was great for Caucasian guys like me with an overactive metabolism. The problem was that Nature’s air conditioner had just about the range and coverage of a window unit.
Anyway, I was not dressed for Mojave temperatures. And I was not dressed for success. The patina of dried water, tears, sweat, and mucus had formed a palimpsest on my shirt, which meant I’d have to keep the jacket on. At least the big white monster of a building in front of me would have real, man-made central air.
“Come on, Tim.” I opened the door and reached for his hand.
I wasn’t happy about towing the kid behind me, but if the events of the day taught me anything, it was that you can’t abandon an eight-year-old in a vehicle in ninety-plus degree heat.
We walked across the parking lot. Tim’s sweaty hand kept slipping from my grip when our steps fell out of sync. It was like holding on to a squid.
“Uncle Paul took me up to his laboratory before—”
“Tim—”
“—and showed me liquid nitrogen and we froze a grape and smashed it on the floor. It was like a marble. It was so cool.”
He looked up at me. Why was the kid making me do this? “Uncle Paul isn’t here today,” I said.
“Where is he?”
“He’s…on vacation.”
“With his other family?”
“Yeah,” I said, loathing myself. “With his other family.”
From all the way across the lobby, I could tell that Alex Rodriguez wasn’t thrilled to see me. And when her eyes locked on the yard monkey next to me, her face pulled to an actual scowl.
She drew close to us, and I stood. “This is Tim,” I told her.
“Uh, nice to meet you,” Alex said. She stuck out her hand and Tim, taking the cue, shook it. From the stiff formality of her movements, I could tell Alex was about as comfortable with minors as I was.
She glanced at the security guard behind his desk, returned her gaze to me. “Let’s talk outside.” Somewhere in the subtext was the message that Tim was not invited. Alex, though, wasn’t satisfied with subtext. “It’ll be cooler in here for Tim.”
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