“Steve gave us a bonus,” Cooper said. “In fact, Mister Stanton, why don’t you wait in the limo? We’ll be off-loaded in just a moment.”
Steve shook his head. “Uh… I’d rather stay on the ship with you and Jeff until everything is finished.”
That line made Bo Pan even angrier. He coughed up a wad of phlegm, spat it onto the deck, then started climbing out of the slightly moving boat onto the pier. Two of the Chinese men ran over to help him. One took the duffel bag. The man handled the bag delicately, reverently.
Bo Pan and the men got in the van, which quietly drove down the dock toward the pier gate.
Cooper turned to Steve.
“Want to tell me what that was all about?”
Steve shook his head. “No. I do not.” The kid looked like he might puke at any moment. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a banded stack of hundred-dollar bills and handed it to Cooper.
“Another part of your bonus.”
Cooper looked at it, dumbfounded. Another mad stack, another ten grand, just like that.
Steve started climbing out of the boat. Cooper had to help him, thanks to two computer bags, one of which was stuffed with two laptops.
As Steve walked to the limo, Cooper wondered what had just happened. He’d try to get it out of Steve later, if, indeed, Steve was really going to hang out.
Cooper turned, waved to José. The Filipino came running over.
“Yes, Jefe?”
“Big surprise,” Cooper said. “We’re all staying in the Trump Tower for the next two nights. All free, big guy.”
José’s smile faded. “A tower?”
“A hotel,” Cooper said. “Big one. Fancy as hell, from what I hear. Steve paid for it. We even get a limo ride.” He nodded toward the long, black car, the shivering girls.
José coughed, then sneezed. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“Bless you,” Cooper said. “You okay?”
José shrugged. “Coming down with something. I think I’ll just go home. I miss my family.”
Cooper wanted to talk him into coming but could see there was no point. José missed his family, true, but he was also always paranoid of anything that involved giving ID or being around lots of strangers. The man was so hardworking, so at home on the boat; it was easy to forget that once on land, he didn’t have the same rights and privileges that Cooper and Jeff enjoyed.
“Okay,” Cooper said. “You need a ride anywhere?”
José shook his head. “My cousin is coming to get me. It’s just a two-hour drive to Benton Harbor, no problem.”
He coughed again, much harder this time. His eyes watered.
“Damn, dude,” Cooper said. “Maybe you should swing by a hospital and get that checked out.”
José cleared his throat, shook his head and smiled; he thought Cooper was joking.
Cooper felt like an idiot for the second time in as many minutes — José was as afraid of hospitals as he was of hotels. He probably feared that a trip to the hospital might turn into a visit with the INS. A ridiculous fear, Cooper knew, but then again he never had to deal with such concerns.
Cooper peeled off twenty one-hundred-dollar bills from the stack, handed them to José.
“Tell your cousin not to drive like a goddamn illegal, will ya?”
José’s face lit up in surprise. He put the money in his pocket. “Sometimes, Jefe Cooper, you’re a good guy — for a racist asshole, I mean. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Cooper said. “Great work. Now help get Steve’s crap off the boat, okay?”
José jogged over to join Jeff and the two dockworkers, who were already unloading Steve’s crate.
A tickle flared up in Cooper’s windpipe, a tickle that quickly turned into a small cough. He cleared his throat… felt a little scratchy.
Well, he wouldn’t let a little cold stop him from having one grade-A bitch of a good time.
Windy City? Here we come.
FREQUENT FLIERS
Bo Pan put a bottle of water and a tin of Sucrets on the counter.
The cashier grabbed it, ran it across the scanner, spoke to him without looking up.
“Hello, sir,” she said. “How are you today?” Her name tag said Madha. She held out her hand. “That will be seven fifty-five.”
Bo Pan adjusted the strap of his carry-on bag so he could get at his wallet, then handed over the money. When he did, his hand touched hers.
Neutrophils detected contact, reversed their grip, letting go of Bo Pan and clinging to Madha instead. In two days, she would kill her husband by driving the point of a clothes iron into the back of his skull.
“Would you like a bag, sir?”
Bo Pan shook his head. “No, thank you. I am fine.”
She offered him his change. “Thank you for shopping at Hudson News.”
He took his money, moved to the magazine rack. Bo Pan pretended to look at the covers showing bright cars, men with too much muscle or women showing too much skin. Americans certainly loved big breasts.
He tried hard to stay calm — his contact was late. His plane boarded in ten minutes.
What if Ling didn’t show?
He unwrapped a Sucret and popped it into his mouth. Cherry flavor. He liked that. His throat was scratchy, and it felt like he had a fever coming on.
Bo Pan heard the rattling of wheels rolling along the concourse’s tile floor. He looked up just as Ling rolled a dolly into Hudson News. The dolly held five blue plastic trays, each loaded with soft drinks. Ling met Bo Pan’s eyes but didn’t acknowledge him in any way.
Ling rolled his dolly of drinks toward the glass refrigerator.
Bo Pan turned quickly to follow; when he did, he bumped into Paulette Duchovny from Minneapolis. Bo Pan’s hand came up immediately, reactively touching Paulette’s bare forearm.
“Oh!” he said. “Sorry, sorry.”
Three hours from that moment, Paulette would be back in Minneapolis. Two days after that, she would infect seven other people, including her son, Mark, and her daughter, Cindy. Mark and Cindy would lock up the house and stand guard as Paulette transformed into something that was not fully human. Before the sun set on the fourth day, Paulette Duchovny would do what a voice in her head told her to do — she would murder a family of five in their home, ending the slaughter by gutting a three-month-old baby.
Paulette smiled at Bo Pan. “That’s okay, no problem.”
He nodded again, then walked to the refrigerator. Ling was already there, the glass door pinned open by his dolly. He was pulling bottles of Coke out of the plastic bins, then reaching into the refrigerator to place them behind the bottles that were already there.
Ling saw Bo Pan, then took a step back and gestured at the open refrigerator. “Go ahead, sir.”
“Thank you,” Bo Pan said. He grabbed a Coke.
“Oh,” Ling said, then reached down to the floor and picked up a black fanny pack. The pack’s pouch looked like it held something cylindrical, perhaps about the size of a travel mug.
He offered it to Bo Pan. “You dropped this.”
Bo Pan’s heart hammered in his chest. It couldn’t be this easy to get an object past the TSA. It simply could not. The CIA was here, somewhere, they were watching, waiting for him to take it. They would start shooting at any moment.
Bo Pan took the fanny pack. As he did, his left pinkie touched Ling’s right thumb.
In three days, Ling would be dead, a leaking bag of fluid slowly sloughing off of a prone skeleton. The infection would not properly work with his particular physiology, and he would slowly dissolve in a chain reaction of apoptosis. But before he died — and after he became contagious — Ling would stock a total of twenty-two airport refrigerators. He would leave mutated neutrophils on over three hundred bottles, neutrophils that would be nicely refrigerated until a hand touched them, or a pair of lips brushed against them.