Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

"You are under arrest."

The smile on the Ghost's face faded, realizing that he was serious. "This will go badly for your wife and children if you don't let me go."

Li growled, "You will lie down on your belly. Now."

"All right. An honorable and honest security bureau officer. I am surprised… What's your name, little man?"

"My name is not your concern."

The Ghost knelt on the cobblestones.

Li decided to use his shoelaces to tie the Ghost's wrists. He then – Suddenly Li realized in shock that the shopping bag was between them and that the Ghost's right hand had disappeared behind it.

"No!" he shouted.

The Lucky Hope Shop bag exploded toward Li as the Ghost fired through it with a second gun he had hidden in an ankle holster or his sock.

The bullet zipped past Li's hip. He raised his hand in an automatic gesture, flinching. But by the time he was thrusting his own pistol forward the snakehead had knocked it from his hand. Li grabbed the Ghost's wrist and tried to pull the Model 51 from his fingers. Together they tumbled to the slick cobblestones and this gun too fell to the ground.

Desperately, they clutched at each other, clawing and striking when they could but mostly wrestling and trying to reach one of the weapons that lay on the cobblestones near them. The Ghost slammed his palm into Li's face and stunned him then spun away, struggling to pull the Glock from the cop's pocket.

Li recovered quickly and tackled the Ghost, knocking this weapon too to the ground. The cop's knee struck the killer's back and knocked the breath out of him. Still facing away from Li, the Ghost, gasping and moaning in pain, struggled to his knees. Li's arm remained around the snakehead's throat in a choke hold.

Unstoppable, the Ghost struggled toward the pistol.

Stop him, stop him, Li raged to himself. He's the man who would kill Hongse, the man who would kill the Changs.

Who would kill Loaban too.

Stop him!

He seized the leather thong around the Ghost's neck, the one that held the stone monkey amulet, and began to pull hard. The leather tightened. The Ghost's hands flailed uselessly and from his throat came a gurgling noise. The snakehead began to quiver. His heels were nearly off the ground.

Let go, Sonny Li told himself. Arrest him. Don't murder him.

But he didn't let go. He pulled harder and harder.

Until the leather snapped.

The monkey figurine fell to the ground and shattered. Li stumbled backward, falling hard into the alley, striking his head on the cobblestones. He nearly passed out.

Judges of hell…

The cop could faintly see the Ghost, also on his hands and knees, gasping and coughing, holding his throat with one hand as his other patted the ground for a weapon.

An image came into Li's mind: His stern father reprimanding him for some foolish comment.

Then another one: The bodies of the Ghost's victims in Li's town in China, lying bloody on the sidewalk in front of the cafe.

And he pictured another terrible sight, one that had not yet happened:

Hongse dead, lying in darkness. Loaban too, his face as still in death as his body had been in life.

Sonny Li rolled to his knees and began crawling toward his enemy.

The crime scene bus left twenty-foot skid marks on the Chinatown street, which was slick with runoff from the melting ice from bins at a nearby fish market.

Amelia Sachs, her face grim, jumped out, accompanied by INS agent Alan Coe and Eddie Deng. They ran through the pungent alleyway toward the cluster of uniformed officers from the Fifth Precinct. The men and women stood casually, looking as matter-of-fact as police always did at crime scenes.

Even scenes of homicides.

Sachs slowed and gazed down at the body.

Sonny Li was lying on his stomach on the filthy cobblestones. Eyes partially open, palms flat beside him, level with his shoulders, as if he were about to start a series of push-ups.

Sachs paused, filled with the desire to drop to her knees and grip the man's hand. She'd walked the grid many times in the years she'd worked with Rhyme, but this was her first scene involving a fellow cop – fellow cop and, she could now say, friend.

A friend too of Rhyme's.

Still, she resisted the temptation toward sentiment. This was, after all, a crime scene no different from any other and, as Lincoln Rhyme often pointed out, one of the worst contaminants at scenes was careless cops.

Look past it, ignore who the victim is. Remember Rhyme's advice: Give up the dead.

Well, that'd be damn tough to do. For both of them. But for Lincoln Rhyme especially. Sachs had noticed that in the past two days Rhyme had formed an improbable bond with this man, as close as he'd come to a friendship since she'd known him. She was now aware of the painful silence of a thousand conversations never to occur, of a thousand laughs never to be shared.

But then she thought of someone else: Po-Yee, soon to be another victim of the man who'd committed this crime, if they didn't find him. And so Sachs put the pain away, the same way she closed and locked the storage box in which her Colt.45 competition shooting pistol rested.

"We did what you wanted," said another officer, a detective in a gray suit. "Nobody got closer'n this. Only the EMS tech was in." A nod toward the body. "He's DCDS."

Cop initials perfunctorily signifying the category of lifelessness: deceased confirmed dead at the scene.

Agent Coe walked slowly up to her. "I'm sorry," the agent said, running his hand through his scarlet hair. There seemed to be little genuine sadness in his voice, however.

"Yeah."

"He was a good man."

"Yes, he was." She said this bitterly, thinking: And he was a hell of a better cop than you are. If you hadn't fucked up yesterday we'd've gotten the Ghost. Sonny would still be alive and Po-Yee and the Changs would be safe.

She motioned to the cops. "I've got to run the scene. Could I have everybody out of here?"

Oh, man, she thought, dismayed at what she now had to do – though she was anticipating not the difficult and sad task of searching the scene but something far more arduous.

She pulled her headset on and plugged it into her radio.

Okay. Just go ahead. Do it.

She made the call to Central and was patched through to the phone.

A click.

"Yes?" Rhyme asked.

She said, "I'm here."

A pause then: "And?"

She sensed him trying to keep hope out of his voice.

"He's dead."

The criminalist gave no response for a moment. "I see."

"I'm sorry, Lincoln," she said softly.

Another pause and he said, "No first names, Sachs. Bad luck, remember?" His voice nearly caught. "All right. Get going. Run the scene. Time's running out for the Changs."

"Sure, Rhyme. I'm on it."

She quickly dressed in the Tyvek suit and went about processing the scene. Sachs did the fingernail scrapings, the substance samples, the ballistics, the footprints, the shell casings, the slugs. She took the pictures, she lifted prints.

But she felt she was just going through the motions. Come on, she snapped at herself. You're acting like you're some damn rookie. We don't have time to just collect evidence. Think about Po-Yee, think about the Changs. Give Rhyme something he can work with. Think!

She turned back to the body and processed it more carefully, considering everything that she found, demanding in her mind that every bit of evidence explain itself, offer an explanation of where it had come from, what it might mean.

One of the uniformed officers walked up to her but seeing her stony face he retreated quickly.

A half hour later she'd finished bagging everything, written her name on the chain of custody cards and assembled the evidence.

She made another call to the criminalist.