Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

Suddenly she felt a huge weight lifted off her shoulders.

Midnight.

But, despite the exhausting day, which had led him from a sinking ship to a Central Park West apartment half the globe away from his home, Sonny Li didn't seem tired.

He walked into Lincoln Rhyme's bedroom, carrying a shopping bag. "When I down in Chinatown with Hongse, Loaban, I buy some things. Got present for you."

"Present?" Rhyme asked from his throne, the new Hill-Rom Flexicair bed, which – he'd been told – was exceedingly comfortable.

Li took an object from the bag and began unwrapping a small wad of paper. "Look what I got here." In his hands was a jade figurine of a man with a bow and arrow and looking fierce. Li looked around the room. "Which way north?"

"That's north." Rhyme nodded.

Li put the figurine on top of a table against the wall. Then returned to the bag and took out some sticks of incense.

"You're not going to burn that in here."

"Have to, Loaban. Not kill you."

Despite Li's assertion that Chinese have a difficult time saying no, this was not a trait the cop apparently shared.

He set the incense into a holder and lit it. He then found a Dixie cup in the bathroom and filled it with some liquor from a light green bottle, which had also appeared from the shopping bag.

"What're you doing, making a temple?"

"Shrine, Loaban. Not a temple." Li was amused by Rhyme's failure to miss the obvious distinction.

"Who is that? Buddha? Confucius?"

"With a bow and arrow?" Li scoffed. "Loaban, you know so much about so little, and so little about so much."

Rhyme laughed, thinking that when he'd been married his wife had often said much the same, though at a higher volume and less articulately.

Li continued. "This is Guan Di – god of war. We make sacrifice to him. He like sweet wine and that what I bought for him."

Rhyme wondered how Sellitto and Dellray, not to mention Sachs, would react when they saw the transformation of his room into a shrine to the god of war.

Li bowed toward the icon and whispered some words in Chinese. He extracted a white bottle from the shopping bag and sat in the rattan chair by Rhyme's bed. He filled a Dixie cup for himself and then fiddled with one of Rhyme's tumblers, taking off the lid, filling it halfway up and then replacing the lid and fitting a straw inside.

"And that?" Rhyme asked.

"Good stuff, Loaban. Chu yeh ching chiew. We make sacrifice to us now. This stuff good. Like whisky."

No, it wasn't like whisky at all, definitely not delicately peat-smoked eighteen-year-old scotch. But, although the taste was pretty bad, it had one hell of a kick to it.

Li nodded toward the impromptu sacristy. "I find Guan Di at store in Chinatown. He very popular god. Thousands shrines all over China devoted to him. But I not buy him because of war. He is god of detectives too, I'm saying."

"You're making that up."

"Joke? No, I'm saying, is true. Every security bureau I ever been in has Guan Di there. Case don't go so good, detectives burn offerings, just like we do." Another shot of the liquor. Li sniffed. "That strong stuff, I'm saying. The baijiu."

"The what?"

He nodded at the bottle of chu yeh ching chiew.

"What was your prayer?" Rhyme asked.

"I translate: 'Guan Di, please let us find the Changs and catch the fuck Ghost."'

"That's a good prayer, Sonny." Rhyme drank more of the liquor. It grew better with every sip – or maybe it was that you tended to forget how bad it was.

The Chinese cop continued, "That surgery you talk about. That make you better?"

"It might. A little. I won't be able to walk but I could regain a little movement."

"How it work?"

He explained to Li about Dr. Cheryl Weaver, whose neurology unit at a branch of the University of North Carolina was performing experimental surgery on spinal cord injury patients. He could still remember almost verbatim the doctor's explanation of how the technique worked.

The nervous system is made up of axons, which carry nerve impulses. In a spinal cord injury those axons're cut or crushed and they die. So they stop carrying impulses and the message doesn't get from the brain to the rest of the body. Now, you hear that nerves don't regenerate. That's not completely true. In the peripheral nervous system – like our arms or legs – damaged axons can grow back. But in the central nervous system – the brain and the spinal cord – they don't. At least they don't on their own. So, when you cut your finger, your skin grows back and you regain your sense of touch. In the spinal cord that doesn't happen. But there are things that we're learning to do that can help regrowth.

Our approach at the Institute here is an all-out assault on the site of the injury. We attack SCI on all fronts. We use traditional decompression surgery to reconstruct the bony structure of the vertebrae themselves and to protect the site where your injury occurred. Then we graft two things into the site of the injury: one is some of the patient's own peripheral nervous system tissue and the other substance we graft is some embryonic central nervous system cells.

"From a shark," Rhyme added to Sonny Li.

The cop laughed. "Fish?"

"Exactly. Sharks are more compatible with humans than other animals are. Then," the criminalist continued, "I'll take drugs to help the spinal cord regenerate."

"Hey, Loaban," Li said, looking him over carefully, "this operation, it dangerous?"

Again, Rhyme heard Dr. Weaver's voice.

Of course there are risks. The drugs themselves aren't particularly dangerous. But there're risks associated with the treatment. Any C4 quad is going to have lung impairment. You're off a ventilator but with the anesthetic there's a chance of respiratory failure. Then the stress of the procedure could lead to autonomic dysreflexia and the resulting severe blood pressure elevation – I'm sure you're familiar with that – which in turn could lead to a stroke or a cerebral event. There's a risk of surgical trauma to the site of your initial injury – you don't have any cysts now and no shunts – but the operation and resulting fluid buildup could increase that pressure and cause additional damage.

"Yes, it's dangerous," Rhyme told him.

"Sound to me like 'yi luan tou shi.'"

"Which means?"

Li considered then said, "Words translate: 'throwing eggs against rocks.' Means doing something bound to fail, I'm saying. So why you do this operation?"

It seemed obvious to Rhyme. To move a step closer to independence. Perhaps to be able to close his hand around the tumbler, for instance, and lift it to his lips. To scratch his head. To become more normal – using the term that was very politically incorrect within the disabled community. To be closer to Amelia Sachs. To be a better father to the child that Sachs wanted so badly.

He said, "It's just something I have to do, Sonny." Then he nodded at the nearby bottle of Macallan scotch. "Let's try my baifu now."

Li barked a laugh. "Baijiu, Loaban. What you just say was 'Let's try my department store.'"

"Baijiu," Rhyme corrected himself.

Li filled the cup and the tumbler with the aged scotch.

Rhyme sipped from the straw. Ah, yes, much better.

Li tossed down a whole Dixie cup of scotch. He shook his head. "I'm saying, you should not do this operation."

"I've weighed the risks and -"

"No, no. Embrace who you are! Embrace your limitations."

"But why? When I don't have to?"

"I see all this science shit you have here in Meiguo. We not have science everywhere in China like you do. Oh, Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangdong, Fuzhou, sure, sure – we got mostly everything you got, a little behind, thank you, Chairman Mao, but we got computers, we got Internet, we got missiles – yeah, sometime they blow up but usually they go in space okay. But doctors, they not use so much science. They put us back in harmony. In China, doctors not gods."