“Yes. I do.”
“Good. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, so hurry up. You finish before that, come knock on the back door to the office.”
“What about the dogs?”
“Like I said, stay in the middle of this open lane. Do not veer off.”
“Got it again,” George said.
Danno nodded and rushed off. George turned back to the Oldsmobile. He peered down into the wrecked convertible. The entire interior was littered with broken glass. The engine block took up most of what was the passenger’s front seat. There was a little more room on the driver’s side. George pulled out his cell phone, turned on its flashlight, and focused the beam under the engine and under the front seats for a quick look. Broken glass was piled up under there, too. He realized this was going to be a near impossible task — a microchip would be just slightly larger than a postage stamp and a couple of millimeters thick at best. That’s if the reservoir microchip was in the vehicle at all. George took a deep breath. It was better to quit thinking and just get on with it. He bent over the driver’s door and started sorting through the shards of glass with a broken windshield wiper blade.
A half hour had passed and George hadn’t found a thing. He was covered in dirt, grease, and soaked in sweat. Frustration was giving way to anger. This little field trip had seemed like it was going to be a lot easier in the abstract. At least the attendant hadn’t come back yet. He debated stopping.
George was in the vehicle’s backseat now, lying on his stomach, shining light up under the front seat. At this point he was picking up each piece of glass and after examining it, throwing it out of the car. A sweep of the flashlight revealed that there were a lot more pieces left to go. He shifted his weight to get a better reach under the seat—
“Hey, buddy? Time’s up.” Danno had returned.
“Okay!” George replied cheerfully, without getting up. “Almost done.” Now that he was being forced to quit, he didn’t want to. He kept at it, moving faster, but stopped throwing the discarded pieces of debris out of the car. He was now merely pushing them aside. In the rush, he was cutting his fingers on the fragments.
The attendant shuffled around the dusty ground with his feet, waiting. He was obviously ready for George to leave pronto. “Now means now! Don’t make me go get one of the dogs.”
“Okay,” floated up from under the seat. George sorted faster, becoming frantic. All this for nothing!
Danno’s patience was at an end. “I’m about to reach over and grab you by the belt and haul you out of there.”
“I’m coming.” But he wasn’t.
“Okay… On three. One…”
George kept sifting, sweat burning his eyes.
“Two…”
“Okay!”
“Three!”
George felt a hand grab his belt. His arms flailed as he was propelled backward out of the car and began staggering around, trying to regain his balance, when Danno let go of his belt. The man might have been overweight, but he was powerful.
“I gave you way more time than we agreed to. It’s time to go.”
“Damn it!” George screamed at the guy. “I know what I came for is in there! You have to let me keep looking!”
“I don’t have to do anything. You want to keep looking? Come back in a couple of months when the LAPD releases the vehicle. You pay the tow and storage fees, and she’s yours. We’ll even tow it to your house. Although that’ll be extra.”
“Just five more minutes,” George pleaded.
“No!” The tow guy trained a hard gaze on George, then glanced down as the sunlight had caught a reflection on the front of George’s dirty shirt. In addition to a few glass fragments, there was a thin, flat, gold-colored rectangular object. Danno plucked it off of George’s shirt.
“Is that what you were looking for?”
George had his mouth open to argue some more but stopped and looked down at what the guy was holding in his hand. It was a microchip.
“I’ll be damned,” George murmured.
George sat in his car in the corner of the salvage yard’s parking lot with the engine on and the air conditioner cranked up. He was overheated, but he was also elated. This just might be the Rosetta Stone to break the code. He had a magnifying glass app on his phone open that operated through its camera lens, which was focused on the small gold object in his hand. He could see a series of haphazard linear gouges on the surface, probably from the utility knife that had been found at the crash site. Apparently Sal had actually managed to cut the damn thing out himself! The poor guy must have intuited what was happening. That was George’s current theory. And it made more sense than anything else he could think of. Way more sense than suicide.
George gave up trying to examine the chip with the magnifying app on his phone. He needed something more powerful to try to view the individual chambers that held the medication. To do that, he needed to go back to the medical center. He couldn’t believe that he had actually gotten his hands on the damn thing!
Rap, rap, rap! George’s head shot up and spun around to the noise. The attendant was knocking on the window with a short billy club.
“You can’t stay here in the lot,” he yelled through the glass, giving an unmistakable signal that George was seriously trying his patience. “Move it.”
George waved okay and put the car in gear.
George scanned the rows of individual reservoirs on the chip. Each was the size of a pinprick, and there were thousands of them. George had researched the way the chip worked. Each individual reservoir had been assigned its own radio frequency, which, when received, signaled a thin layer of gold nanoparticles encapsulating a drug dosage to dissolve. The freed medication was then transported across the biological membranes, where it entered the bloodstream and spread throughout the entire body.
George was back at the medical center in the pathology lab, where he had commandeered a dissecting microscope to study the microchip. With the powerful magnification he could see that its myriad small containers were in fact empty! All of them. There was no way that could be considered normal for a two-month-old reservoir that had been intended to last at least two years. The chip also noted the type of drug it held: Humalog. George recognized the name as a brand of fast-acting insulin.
For George, it was now a question of whether or not the reservoir emptied pre-mortem or postmortem. Pre-mortem, meaning that the dosages were dumped en masse while Sal was alive. The implication of that was murder, whether by hacking or deliberate intent on behalf of the application’s designers. Postmortem meant that after Sal had died and the reservoir had gone through the trauma of being gouged out of Sal’s body, it had somehow released its contents. Then there was always the issue of it sitting for a few days under the broiling L.A. heat wave sun in a wrecked car. Maybe that, too, could have done it.
Of all the possibilities, George thought pre-mortem was the most realistic option, but he needed more proof, and he had an idea of how to get it. It was possible that Sal’s broken smartphone combined with the microchip might be all he needed, provided he could get someone to help him. The first person that came to mind was Zee.
George switched off the light of the dissecting microscope and left the pathology lab after thanking the technician who had helped him. He was pleased with what he had accomplished, but recognized something important: He needed to be careful. Lots of people, including Clayton and possibly the men searching Sal’s apartment and surely Amalgamated, would be wanting Sal’s microchip. It was, if he was right, a smoking gun.
George drove home, his mind going a mile a minute. He knew that he had stumbled onto something serious. The first person he should call was Paula. She had to know that her “baby” had been hijacked. He just hoped that she wouldn’t blame the messenger, because he knew she would be both horrified and devastated. He wondered if he should call her while she was still in Hawaii, and then wondered why he was wondering. Of course he should call her as soon as he was certain. This wasn’t something that could wait. People were literally dying.