The Finder

37

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.