A Job Offer for Patience (2)
A Job Offer (Patience: 2)
It took ten minutes to get the story out of him. When he was finished, I no longer thought he was crazy. I was. Or I would be if I took the job.
As I expected, Frank worked as an egineer for a private VC backed startup headquartered in Pioneer Square. What I hadn’t expected was their product: animal cloning.
Everyone has heard about Dolly the sheep. Less people have heard about Barbara Streisand’s dog Sammie and her clone-mates Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett. Fifty grand in this economy buys more than I expected.
Cloning was no longer sci-fi fantasy magic. These days, like IVF or getting parking downtown during a Seahawks game, it mostly came down to cold hard cash and a willingness to try until it works. Over the past two years his company had successfully delivered hundreds of cloned animals, everything from dogs to cats to horses and cows.
His effort to describe the science flew mostly over my head, but what I understood made enough sense to me. Take some genetic material from a living animal, gently place it into a scooped out shell of a embryo, shove the embryo into a surrogate and wait a couple of months for a miracle birth. Voila. Clone.
I knelt on the cold bus flooring and gave Ralph the head scratch of a lifetime. My fingers gently measured the length of his ears, searching his midnight black curls for what I still wasn’t sure. He was a dog, there was no doubt about that. But Frank’s dog?
“A clone,” I said.
“Yes. I’m sure of it.”
“Okay,” I heard myself say. “So someone cloned Ralph, raised him for a couple of years, trained him, and then dumped him on your front porch to find. And you want me to find out who?”
“Yes,” Frank said. “But its a little more complicated than that I’m afraid. See?” He reached down to stroke a hand over Ralph’s back. Ralph rolled over to expose his stomach, pink tongue hanging out like a piece of strawberry bubble gum just after a bubble has popped. Eyes blacker than coal stared up at Frank with an expression that couldn’t be anything other than sheer love.
“You’re saying that Ralph isn’t just a clone.”
“Exactly.”
I thought I had followed everything Frank had said. Now I wasn’t quite so sure. “I don’t get it,” I said.
“Cloning only produces a genetic copy of the original. Functionally identical twins, lets say. They’d stand the same height, have the same curly hair, even the same disposition for getting bad breath after eating. But cloning has limits. It can’t reproduce memories. It can’t reproduce respect and love. It can’t teach him my smell.”
“I see,” I lied. “I’m gonna level with you, Frank. This sounds out of my depth. Last week I helped find a runaway kitten who’d gotten trapped in a rain gutter. My biggest bust was a puppy smuggling ring down in Tacoma. You’re basically talking black magic to me. Isn’t there anyone at your company that could help? Why wouldn’t you go to the police?”
“My company is the only one on the West Coast with the ability to do something like this. And for them to use Ralph…” His lips moved as he struggled to find the right words. “The police aren’t going to be interested unless there’s been a crime, or a threat. Finding Ralph is a message.”
I took a seat on the edge of my desk. I could feel another one of my headaches coming on, the kind that tunnels out between my eyeballs and doesn’t stop until it sees daylight. “Look, Frank. I’m having the same hard time the police would have. If I took on every half-assed case that walked through my doors I’d never get any real work done. How do I know this isn’t you trying to show off your dog?”
His smile looked like he’d never heard of coffee or cigarettes. God, I wish I had the tech bro insurance. “Fair enough. How can I prove it to you?”
“Fifteen hundred dollar retainer. Payable now. I charge two hundred a day plus expenses. If this takes longer than a week to unravel we can discuss a longer term contract.”
He punched my name into Venmo and two seconds later my phone gave a quiet chirp. “Does that mean you’ll take the case?”
I stood, pulled on my red toque, and reached for my coat. “Congratulations. Lets figure out where Mr. Doggo came from. We’ll start where ever you found him.”
Frank looked around hesitantly, his hand stretching down to scratch Ralph’s head. “Should I get an Uber? Or does your office… drive?”
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