down the street to where the doctor’s Kia was parked.
“Do you know this car?” Favor asked.
“I have seen it around here. I don’t know the owner, and I don’t know where it belongs.”
“Good,” Favor said. He had wanted to make sure that the old man wasn’t somehow connected to the doctor and the Kia. Tacloban seemed just small enough.
“Let me tell you what I need. In about two hours, somebody’s going to get into that car and drive away, and I want to follow it, see where it goes. Can you do that?”
“Can you tell me why?”
“I can tell you that we’re helping a nice lady who has lost two children.”
“Oh, terrible! And is the driver of this car involved?”
“I believe that he is.”
“This is like the movies? You want to follow the driver and see what he is up to?”
“That’s the idea.”
“I can follow him. But will he be suspicious if one trike follows him everywhere? It is not better to use two? Then we can alternate staying behind him. It will not be so obvious.”
A rolling tail. The old guy was thinking like a pro.
“Do you know another good driver?” Favor said.
“My son Erming is as good as me. I’ll arrange it with him. Don’t worry, Ray, we will follow the son of a bitch like fleas on a dog.”
“Have you ever done this before?” Favor asked.
A gap-toothed grin spread across the old man’s face.
He said, “No, but I have always wanted to try.”
Two hours later, Mendonza was up in the second-floor room at the Mirador pension, looking through his camera’s viewfinder. The telescopic zoom was pointed down into the first-floor office of the clinic across the street.
At twelve minutes past six, Mendonza watched as the doctor removed a rack of blood samples from the refrigerator in the clinic’s back room and placed the rack into a cream-colored packing box. Mendonza dialed Favor’s cell phone. They were using new SIM cards, on the assumption that the original numbers had been compromised. He snapped off several photos and said, “Ray, you were right. He’s doing it again.”
A second vial went into the box. Then an ice pack. The doctor closed the carton, sealed it with red packing tape, and took the carton off the counter, and carried it out of sight.
About half a minute later, the doctor stepped out from the front door of the office building.
Mendonza said, “Here he is,” and then, a moment later, “Shit, Ray—no box.”
Favor was sitting in Romeo Mandaligan’s sidecar, parked opposite the Kia, while Erming Mandaligan waited on his own trike, half a block away.
“Where’s the carton?” Favor said into the phone.
“I don’t know,” Mendonza answered. “Can’t see it. Still in the clinic, I assume.”
Favor poked his head out from the sidecar’s enclosure and looked down the street, toward the office building. Nightfall comes suddenly in the tropics, and twilight was now quickly fading to darkness. But Favor spotted the doctor coming up the sidewalk toward the Kia. He seemed to be walking casually. His hands were empty.
“You going with him?” Mendonza asked.
“No. We follow the blood, not the man. Keep watching that front door.”
A couple of times, as the doctor approached the car, he glanced back over his shoulder. Favor realized that he was looking to see if he was being followed.
“He’s nervous,” Favor said. “Someone knows we’ve been poking around; they probably told him to be careful.”
The doctor approached the car, stepped around to the driver’s-side door. Romeo revved the trike’s engine. Favor tapped him on the leg and said, “No. Not yet.”
Romeo shook his head at his son across the street.
The doctor slid in behind the wheel, the Kia’s headlights came on, the car moved into traffic. It turned right at the next intersection and swung out of sight.
“Wait,” Favor said to Mendonza on the phone and to Romeo on the motorcycle seat beside him. But he was saying it almost as much to himself.
Minutes passed. Five minutes. The lights went dark in the clinic. Seven minutes.
“Romeo, let’s wait over here,” Favor said, pointing down the street toward the pension and the clinic.
Romeo blipped the gas and turned the front wheel.
From the pension’s second-floor window, Mendonza had a partial view of the trike, a block and a half away. He could no longer make out the details in the fading twilight, but he knew where it was parked; and when the headlamp swung out into traffic, he knew that this was Favor and the driver, now on the move, coming