Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

"Nope – and we checked ever-body: NYPD, ATF, DEA and Justice."

"Well, we'll see what the lab comes up with."

"I owe you, Lincoln."

"Pay me back by getting somebody from your shop to work GHOSTKILL, Fred."

Four blocks from the bubble tea house Sonny Li found the address of Mr. Wang, which the woman in red had given him.

The storefront showed no indication of what the occupant did for a living but in the dusty front window sat a shrine, illuminated by a red light-bulb and sticks of incense long burnt away. The faded letters said, in Chinese, fortunes told, truth revealed, luck preserved.

Inside, a young Chinese woman behind a desk looked up at Li. On the desk in front of her were both an abacus and a laptop computer. The office was shabby but the diamond Rolex watch on her wrist suggested that the business was successful. She asked if he was here to hire her father to arrange his home or office.

"I was pleased to see an apartment I believe your father did. Can you tell me if it was his work?"

"Whose apartment?"

"It was an acquaintance of another friend, who sadly has gone back to China. I don't know his name. I do know the address, though."

"And that is what?"

" Five-oh-eight Patrick Henry Street."

"No, no," she said. "My father does not work there. He does no work south of Midtown. Only for uptown people."

"But your office is here."

"Because people expect it to be here. All of our clients are on the Upper East and Upper West Sides. And only a portion of them are Chinese."

"And you don't live in Chinatown?"

She laughed. "We live in Greenwich, Connecticut. Do you know it?"

"No," he said. Disappointed, Li asked, "Can you tell me who might've arranged this apartment. It was very well done."

"This friend, he is wealthy?"

"Yes, very wealthy."

"Then I would say Mr. Zhou. He does many of the rich places downtown. Here's his address and name. He has an office in the back of a grocery and herb store. It's about five blocks from here." She wrote the name on another slip of paper and jotted down the directions.

He thanked her and she turned back to the computer.

Outside, for luck, Sonny Li waited until a taxi speeding down the street was three meters away then jumped in front of the car. The driver cursed and extended his middle finger.

Li laughed. He'd cut the demon's tail very close and rendered him powerless. Now, blessed with invulnerability, he would find the Ghost.

He glanced at the slip of paper once more and started down the street toward the Lucky Hope Shop.

The Ghost, wearing his windbreaker to conceal his new Glock 36, a.45-caliber model, was walking down Mulberry Street, sipping the milk out of a whole coconut he'd bought at the corner. A short straw protruded from the opening the vendor had hacked into the top with a cleaver.

He'd just gotten the news from the Uighur that Yusuf had hired to break into the special NYPD safehouse where the Wu family was being kept in the Murray Hill section of the city. But the security was better than he'd expected and the guards had spotted him. They'd nearly caught him but the Turk had escaped. Undoubtedly the police had moved the family already. A brief setback but he'd eventually find out where they were.

He passed a store selling statues and altars and joss sticks. In the window was an effigy of his protector, the archer god Yi. The Ghost bowed his head slightly and then continued on.

As he walked, he asked himself: Did he believe in spirits?

Did he believe that the dragons inhabited hills?

He doubted that he did. After all, Tian Hou, the goddess of sailors, might have shaken her finger at the tempestuous sea and calmed it but she'd done so only in a myth. In reality she hadn't saved the piglets trapped in the hold of the Fuzhou Dragon.

And his own prayers to the goddess of mercy, Guan Yin, had gone unanswered years ago – she hadn't stopped the hand of the pimply student from beating his parents and brother to death for the ambiguous crime of being part of the old.

On the other hand, the Ghost certainly believed in qi – the life energy that flows through everyone. He had felt this force a thousand times. He felt it as the transfer between him and the woman he was fucking, felt it as the power of victory the instant he killed an enemy, felt it as a warning that he should avoid going into this room or meeting with that businessman. When he'd been sick or endangered he'd felt his qi impaired.

Good qi and bad qi.

And that meant you could channel the good force and divert or block the bad.

Down one alley, then down another, then across a busy street. Into yet another dim cobblestoned alley.

Finally he arrived at his destination. He finished the milk in the coconut and tossed the shell into a trash can. Then he carefully wiped his hands on a napkin and walked through the doorway, waving hello to his feng shui expert, Mr. Zhou, who sat in the back of the Lucky Hope Shop.

Sonny Li lit another cigarette and continued down a street called the Bowery.

Li knew snakeheads and he knew that they had money and a fierce sense of survival. The Ghost would have other safehouses in the area, and, since feng shui was such a personal matter, if the Ghost was satisfied with the work that Zhou had done on Patrick Henry Street he would have used the man for these other locations too.

He felt good. Good omens, good power.

He and Loaban had made their sacrifices to Guan Di, the god of detectives.

He'd been cutting demons' tails.

And he had a loaded German automatic pistol in his pocket.

If this feng shui man knew he was working for one of the most dangerous snakeheads in the world, he might be reluctant to talk about him. But Sonny Li would get him to.

Judge Dee – the fictional detective, prosecutor and judge in old China – conducted investigations very differently from Loaban. The techniques were similar to those used in modern-day China. The emphasis was on interrogation of witnesses and suspects, not on physical evidence. The key in criminal investigations, like so much else in Chinese culture, was patience, patience, patience. Even the brilliant – and persistent – Judge Dee would reinterview the suspect dozens of times until a crack was found in his alibi or explanation. The judge would then tear apart the man's story until the suspect delivered the all-important goal of criminal investigation in China: not a jury verdict, but a confession, followed by the equally important vow of contrition. Anything that could elicit a confession was fair – even torture (though in Judge Dee's day if you tortured a suspect and it later turned out that he was innocent the judge himself would be tortured and put to death).

Sonny Li was the namesake of a great American gangster, Sonny Corleone, son of the Godfather Vito Corleone. He was a senior officer and detective in the First Prefecture, People's Public Security Bureau, Liu Guoyuan, Fujian Province, a world traveler and the friend of loaban Lincoln Rhyme. Li would extract the Ghost's other addresses from the feng shui expert no matter what it took.

He continued along the street, past the bustling crowds, the fish markets in front of which were baskets of scrabbling blue crabs and bins of ice containing clams and fish – some of them sliced open, their tiny black hearts still beating.

He came to the Lucky Hope Shop, a small place but packed with merchandise: jars of twisted ginseng root, packs of dried cuttlefish, Hello Kitty toys and candies for children, noodles and spices, dusty bags of rice, bins of melon seeds, star noodles, tea for the liver and kidney, dried croaker, oyster sauce, lotus, jelly and gums, frozen tea buns and packs of tripe.