Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

Chang blinked at these words of his son's – spoken once again in a tone that approached insolence. Then Wu appeared with the rest of the immigrants and Chang ran forward to help his wife and father into the van, calling back to his son, "Yes, you drive."

He'd killed two of the piglets on the beach – the injured man and a woman.

But there'd been about a dozen people in the raft. Where were the rest?

A horn blared. The Ghost whirled around. It was Jerry Tang, drawing his attention. He held up the police scanner, his gestures frantic. "The police will be here any minute! We have to go!"

The Ghost turned away and scanned the beach once more, the road. Where had they gotten to? Maybe they'd -

With a squeal of tires Tang's four-by-four pulled into the road, accelerating fast.

"No! Stop!"

Seized by fury, the Ghost aimed his pistol and fired once. The slug hit the rear door but the vehicle continued, not slowing, to an intersection and then skidded through the turn and disappeared. The Ghost stood frozen, the pistol at his side, staring through the mist at the road where his means of escape had just vanished. He was eighty miles from his safe-houses in Manhattan, his assistant was missing and probably dead, he had no money and no cell phone. Dozens of policemen and troopers were on their way. And Tang had just abandoned him. He could -

He tensed. Not far away a white van suddenly appeared out of a field on the other side of a church and turned onto the road. It was the piglets!

The Ghost lifted his pistol again but the vehicle disappeared into the fog. Lowering the gun, the Ghost took several deep breaths. After a moment he grew serene. He was plagued by troubles at the moment, yes, but he'd experienced much adversity in his life, far worse than this.

You are part of the old.

You will reform your ways.

You will die for your old beliefs…

A reversal, he'd come to learn, was merely a temporary unbalance and even the most horrific events in his life had ultimately been harmonized by good fortune. His abiding philosophy was found in one word: naixin. This translated as "patience" in Chinese but meant something more in the Ghost's mind. The English equivalent would be "All in good time." He had survived these forty-some years because he'd outlasted trouble and danger and sorrow.

For the moment the piglets had gotten away. Their deaths would have to wait. Now there was nothing to do but escape from the police and the INS.

He put his old pistol into his pocket and trudged through the rain and wind along the beach toward the lights of the small town. The closest building was a restaurant, in front of which was a car with its engine running.

So, some good fortune already!

And then, glancing out to sea, he saw something that actually made him laugh. Yet more good luck: not far offshore he saw another piglet, a man struggling to stay afloat. At least he could kill one more of them before he escaped to the city.

The Ghost pulled his gun from his pocket and started back toward the shoreline.

The wind was wearing him down.

Making his way toward the small town, Sonny Li slogged through the sand. He was a slight man and in the hard, dangerous world in which he made his way he relied on bluff and surprise and wits (weapons too, of course), not on physical strength. He was now at his limits, exhausted from this morning's ordeal.

The wind… Twice it actually knocked him to his knees.

No more, he thought. Despite the risk of being seen, struggling through the soft sand was simply too much for him and he stumbled back onto the rain-swept asphalt road and continued toward the lights of the small village. He pushed forward as best he could, afraid that the snake-head would leave before Li found him.

But a moment later he received the reassurance that the man was still here: several more gunshots.

Li struggled up a hill and peered into the streaming wind and rain but he could see no one. The sound had apparently been carried some distance on the wind.

Discouraged, he continued forward. For ten endless minutes he battled his way along the road, throwing his head back occasionally and letting the rain soak his parched mouth. After all the seawater he'd swallowed he was desperately thirsty.

Then he saw, on his right, a small orange life raft sitting on the beach. He assumed that it was the Ghost's. He looked up and down the shore for the snakehead but it was impossible to see very far through the mist and the rain.

He started toward the raft, thinking that perhaps he could follow the man's footprints and find him hiding in town. But as he took a step off the road a flashing light appeared. He wiped the rain from his eyes and squinted. The light was blue and moving rapidly toward him along the road.

INS? Security bureau officers?

Li hurried into some dense bushes on the far side of the asphalt. He crouched and watched the light grow brighter as the vehicle in which it was mounted, a sporty yellow convertible, materialized out of the rain and murk and skidded to a stop 100 meters away. In a crouch Li began to move slowly toward the car.

Amelia Sachs stood on the rain-swept beach, staring down at the woman's body, slumped in the grotesque pose of death.

"He's killing them, Rhyme," Amelia Sachs, dismayed, whispered into the headset mike of her Motorola SP-50 handy-talkie. "He's shot two of them, a man and a woman. In the back. They're dead."

"Shot them?" The criminalist's voice was hollow and she knew that he was shouldering the responsibility for yet more deaths.

The ESU officer trotted toward her, holding his machine gun ready. "No sign of him," the man shouted over the wind. "People in that restaurant a half click up the road said that somebody stole a car about twenty minutes ago." The officer gave Sachs the description of a Honda and the tag number and she relayed it to Rhyme.

"Lon'll put it on the wire," he said. "Was he alone?"

"Think so. Because of the rain there're no footprints in the sand but I found some in the mud, where he was standing to shoot the woman. He was by himself then."

"So we'll assume his bangshou's still unaccounted for. He could've gotten to shore in another raft. Or he might've been in the wrecked one."

Her hand near her weapon, she scanned the scenery. Fog-bleached forms of rocks and dunes and brush surrounded her. A man with a gun would be invisible.

Then she said, "We're going to look for the immigrants, Rhyme."

She expected him to disagree, to tell her to run the scene first, before the raging elements destroyed all the evidence. But he said simply, "Good luck, Sachs. Call me back when you start on the grid." The line went dead.

Search well but watch your back …

The two officers trotted along the beach. They came across a second raft, a smaller one, beached a hundred yards from the first. Sachs's instinctive reaction was to search it for evidence but she stayed true to her immediate mission and, arthritis stabbing her joints, ran with the wind at her back as she scanned the landscape for the immigrants – and signs of an ambush or a hidey-hole where the Ghost might've gone to ground.

They found neither.

Then she heard sirens in the distance, carried on the streaming wind, and saw the carnival of emergency vehicles speed into town. The dozen or so residents who'd been ensconced in the restaurant and gas station now braved the weather to find out exactly what kind of excitement the storm had brought to their miniature town.

The first mission of a crime scene officer is controlling the scene – so that contamination is minimal and evidence doesn't vanish, either accidentally or at the hands of souvenir hunters or the perp himself, masquerading as a bystander. Sachs reluctantly gave up her search for other immigrants and crew – there were plenty of other people to do that now – and ran to the NYPD blue-and-white crime scene bus to direct the operation.