The Stone Monkey

he’d back her up.
    “Will you help us out here, Captain?” Rhyme asked. “She needs to be the one who goes down.”
    Through the wind the captain said, “Okay, Officer. But tell you what, we’ll set the chopper down at the Hudson River helipad. That’ll save some time. It’s closer than Battery Park. You know it?”
    “Sure,” she said. Then added, “One thing, though, Captain?”
    “Yes’m?”
    “On a lot of those dives I did in the Caribbean?”
    “Right.”
    “Afterward, when we were sailing home, the crew made rum punch for everybody—it was included in the cost of the dive. You have anything like that on Coast Guard cutters?”
    “You know, Officer, I think we may be able to rustle something up for you.”
    “I’ll be at the pad in fifteen minutes.”
    They hung up and Sachs glanced at Rhyme. “I’ll call you with what I find.”
    There was so much he wanted to say to her and yet so little he was able to. He settled for “Search well—”
    “—but watch my back.”
    She stroked his right hand—the one whose fingers couldn’t feel any sensation whatsoever. Not yet, at any rate. Maybe after the surgery.
    He glanced at the ceiling, toward his bedroom, where the god of detectives, Guan Di, presently sat with his evaporating cup of sweet wine. But Lincoln Rhyme, of course,restrained himself from sending a prayer to a folk deity wishing Sachs a safe journey and sent that message directly—though tacitly—to her.
    •   •   •
    Learning three things from one example . . .
    Confucius, hm? I like that, thought Lincoln Rhyme. He said to his aide, “I need something from the basement.”
    “What?”
    “A copy of my book.”
    “I’m not sure where they are,” Thom replied.
    “Then you better start looking, don’t you think?”
    With a loud sigh, the aide vanished.
    Rhyme was referring to a hardcover book that he’d written several years ago, The Scenes of the Crime. In it, he’d examined fifty-one old crime scenes in New York City, some solved, some not. The book included a cross section of the more notorious crimes in the city, ranging from mayhem in the Five Points section of town, considered in the mid-1800s one of the most dangerous places on earth, to architect Stanford White’s love triangle murder in the original Madison Square Garden, to Joey Gallo’s unfortunate last meal at a Little Italy clam house, to John Lennon’s death. The illustrated book had been popular—though not popular enough to keep it from being remaindered; the surplus copies had been sloughed off to “bargain books” shelves in bookstores around the country for discounted sales.
    Still, Rhyme was secretly proud of the book; it was his first tentative venture back into the real world after his accident, an emblem that, despite what had happened to him, he was capable of doing something beyond lying on his ass and bitching about his state.
    Thom returned ten minutes later, his shirt streaked withdirt and his handsome face dotted with sweat and dust. “They were in the farthest corner. Under a dozen cartons. I’m a mess.”
    “Well, I’d think if things were better organized down there, it might’ve taken less work,” Rhyme muttered, eyes on the book.
    “Maybe if you hadn’t said to pack them away, you never wanted to see them again, you hated the quote fucking things, it might not have taken so much work either.”
    “Say, is the cover torn?”
    “No, the cover’s fine.”
    “Let me see,” Rhyme ordered. “Hold it up.”
    The weary aide brushed some dirt off his slacks and then offered the book for inspection.
    “It’ll do,” the criminalist said. He looked around the room uneasily. His temples were pounding, which meant his heart, which he couldn’t feel, was pumping blood hard.
    “What, Lincoln?”
    “That touchpad. Do we still have it?”
    A few months ago, Rhyme had ordered a touchpad attachment for the computer, like a mouse, thinking that he could use his extant finger—his left ring finger—to control the computer. He hadn’t shared with Thom or Sachs how important it had been for him to make the pad work. But he hadn’t been able to. The range of motion for the digit was too limited to move the cursor in any helpful way, unlike the touchpad controller that operated his Storm Arrow, which was specifically made for people in his condition.
    The failure had, for some reason, devastated him.
    Thom left the room for a moment and returned with the small gray unit.