“He’s a consultant. He knows everything about port security. He could be working some kind of hush-hush job. He might be prohibited from contacting me. Maybe phones are being hacked.”
“Did you call the people he works for?”
“I would if I knew who they were.”
Cindy was undeterred.
“So keep going with your ticktock,” she said.
“OK, OK.”
I told the girls about the mysterious blond woman who’d been seen entering Chan’s room at the Four Seasons. Cindy jumped in, saying, “I posted her picture on our site and got a tip.”
“The next day,” I said, throwing my hands into the air, “before we could follow up—”
Claire finished my sentence: “The crash of WW 888.”
I said, “That night when I got home, Mrs. Rose said I had just missed Joe. He’d been home to change his clothes. He left me a message saying he’d been pulled into the plane crash nightmare, and, like, don’t wait up.”
“So he’s definitely alive,” said Yuki. “He’s not hurt. He’s working.”
“That’s what he said.”
I believed what I was saying, but damn it, it was weird that Joe couldn’t get in touch at all. Actually, it was inexplicable. When our lunch was over and the last of my friends were gone, I bathed Julie, gave her some applesauce, and called Joe.
“I’m sorry,” said the mechanical voice, “but the subscriber’s mailbox is full. Good-bye.”
Honestly? This was killing me.
CHAPTER 39
I SPENT THE rest of the day doing laundry, and by dinnertime I was hungry and bored. I took Julie across the hall to Mrs. Rose, saying, “I’ll be right back,” and headed out to our local Asian grocery store.
It was dark when I got down to the street. I was considering what kind of veg I wanted to go with last night’s pot roast when something happened—a shock or a blow.
All I knew for sure was that my face was on the pavement so fast that I never got my hands down to break my fall. Had I tripped? Had I had a stroke?
My head throbbed and my vision was distorted, but I made out the shapes around me as shoes.
Lights flashed, headlights zooming past. Nothing made sense. I wanted to throw up. I had struggled up to my hands and knees when I took a blow to my side and was down again. I rolled into a ball and covered my eyes, and heard two voices, maybe more, speaking to me in heavily accented English.
I looked through my fingers and saw four blurry Asian faces looking down at me. I thought I recognized the one who had confronted me in front of the ME’s office. Same guy who slammed into me after the NTSB press conference.
He was wearing black, and he had a wide face, and he was shouting at me, something like “You know Chan?”
Was I making that up?
“Back off,” I said. “I’m a cop.”
I reached for my gun at my hip, but it wasn’t there. There was another shout—“Who you work for?”
“What? Get away from me.”
I took another blow to the back of my head, and when I woke up, I was in an ambulance moving at high speed. The EMT at my side was saying, “Welcome back. What’s your name?”
I called Conklin from the ambulance and, shouting painfully over the sirens, I asked him to call Mrs. Rose.
Right after that, I was wheeled into the ER. My clothes were removed and stuffed into a plastic bag. A nurse took my blood pressure and temperature and layered on two blankets. Eventually a Dr. DiDonato appeared.