The Rising(49)

Rathman looked out the office window toward the parking lot where his team had gathered. He preferred handling interrogations alone. More fun that way.

“What room are they in?”

“They’re gone,” the clerk managed, just barely. “Checked out. Asked for directions before they left.”

Rathman pushed the jagged edge in just a bit deeper. “To where?”





48

FLASH DRIVE

THE MOTEL CLERK HAD smirked when they turned in their key so fast, figuring whatever business they’d come to the Monterey Motor Inn to do was done.

“We might be back,” Sam offered.

“Sure.”

“I mean it.”

The clerk was back in his comic book, Coke-bottle glasses hiding him from the rest of the world. “Whatever you say.”

“Just hold on to the key,” Alex added.

The clerk nodded, flipped the page.

“Oh, and, hey,” Alex continued, “where’s the nearest FedEx Office located?”

The FedEx Office they ended up at was located in Santa Cruz off Route 1 on Front Street near the University of California at Santa Cruz. It featured a sign in the window that read NOW OPEN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS and charged twenty dollars an hour to rent a computer, one hour minimum, and they accepted cash. Sam forked over the cash again, without protest. She always carried plenty of it on her because her parents hated credit cards, in large part because their credit history made it hard for them to qualify for decent ones.

“I’ll pay you back,” Alex told her, and dropped into the chair in front of the computer.

This time of night only a single clerk was on duty and, other than him and Sam, there were only two other people in the store, both of them making copies. Besides the odorous residue left behind by his chair’s last occupant, Alex also smelled overheated machine parts from the pair of copiers still spitting out pages the clerk was busy prepping to be bound. He thought he smelled hot plastic in the air too, something like when you drop a grocery bag into a campfire and feel your eyes burn if you stray too close to the smoke.

Side effect of getting his bell rung, maybe, Alex thought, wondering why everything seemed to have a smell to it all of a sudden. Maybe that’s what the mysterious CT scan had revealed, his olfactory nerves growing like weeds inside his skull, accounting for his newfound skill.

“What?” Samantha asked him.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes, you did. But you were mumbling.”

“Just thinking out loud, I guess.”

Be nice if I knew what I said, though.

“You’re doing it again.”

Alex looked away from her.

“We haven’t talked about what happened in the hospital yet,” Sam said.

“Yes, we did.”

“Not everything. You started to tell me about that second CT scan, then you stopped.”

Alex took the flash drive from his pocket, not in the mood to describe what had happened while he lay on the scanner table. “The machine went crazy. Now, could you watch the front of the store? Just in case.”

He watched Sam glance at the flash drive, understanding. “Sure.”

“Thanks.”

As she moved away, Alex eased the drive into the USB port and waited for the drive’s icon to appear on the screen. He didn’t want Sam seeing whatever his mother had left for him on the flash drive, at least not before he did. He glanced toward her standing by the front door, pretending to study some magazine she’d found, and when he looked back at the rented computer’s screen the drive’s icon had appeared:





FOR MY SON


That’s how it was labeled, nothing more. For my son … Such simple words belying a far more complex story that had led to tonight’s maelstrom of violence, still cushioned by the haze of shock. But the haze was receding now, the reality setting in as sharply as the scents Alex grabbed out of the air.

Alex clicked on the icon, revealing a collection of labeled files contained on the drive from which to choose. Their titles banged up against each other in his head, save for one that captured his eye and held it:





ORIGINS


Alex positioned the mouse over that file and clicked. The screen flashed dark, then light again, and Alex found himself staring at his mother as captured by her cell phone in a kind of video selfie.

He watched the screen jitter as she laid the phone down, atop the fireplace mantel, and backed off enough for the camera to capture her, just as Alex had taught her to do. Judging by the length of her hair and bruise on her forehead from where she’d walked into a door, he guessed she’d recorded the video perhaps three months before, late summer, maybe.

“Hello, my son,” greeted An Chin, trying for a smile.

Alex turned down the computer’s volume so only he could hear his mother’s words.





49

ORIGINS

THERE IS NO EASY way to tell this tale, so I will start at the beginning, before you were brought into our lives.

America was the dream of both your father and I and we worked for years to attain it, ultimately immigrating with little more than the money in our pockets after having our funds bled dry by the corruption it took to get out of China. We would settle down in this land of so much promise and build a family. Try as we may, though, no family came. Doctors explained the problem lay with me; apparently, a childhood fever had done unseen damage to my insides. Your father put up a brave face, not wanting to blame me, but I knew how sick with disappointment he was. When the doctors failed to help us, we sought outlets in San Francisco that offered traditional Chinese medicine, but this proved no more fruitful than traditional medicine.