The Stone Monkey

it, Fred?” Coe asked.
    “Nup,” the preoccupied agent said.
    “But I—”
    Dellray shook his head emphatically. “There’s nothin’ you can do, Coe. If they collar him you can go question him in detention. Jabber at him all you want. But this’s a tactical apprehension op now and that ain’t your specialty.”
    The young agent had provided good intelligence about the Ghost but Rhyme thought he was difficult to work with. He was still angry and resentful that he hadn’t been allowed to actually be on board the cutter interdicting the ship—another battle Dellray had had to fight.
    “Well, that’s bullshit.” Coe dropped moodily into an office chair.
    Without a response, Dellray sniffed his unlit cigarette, tucked it behind his ear and took another call. After he hung up he said to the team, “We’re trying to set up roadblocks on the smaller highways out of the area—Routes 25, 48 and 84. But it’s rush hour and nobody’s got the balls to close the Long Island Expressway or Sunrise Highway.”
    Sellitto said, “We can call the toll takers at the tunnel and the bridges.”
    Dellray shrugged. “That’s somethin’, but it’s not enough. Hell, Chinatown’s that boy’s turf. Once he’s there it’ll be hell to find him. We gotta get him on the beach if there’s any way.”
    “And when,” Rhyme asked, “are the life rafts going to land?”
    “They’re guessin’ twenty, twenty-five minutes. And our folk’re fifty miles away from Easton.”
    Peabody asked, “Isn’t there any way to get somebody out there sooner?”
    Rhyme debated for a moment then said into the microphone attached to his wheelchair, “Command, telephone.”
    •   •   •
    The 1969 Indianapolis 500 pace car was a General Motors Camaro Super Sport convertible.
    For this honor, GM picked the strongest of their muscle car line—the SS fitted with a 396-cubic-inch TurboJet V-8 engine, which could churn 375 horsepower. And if you were inclined to tinker with the vehicle—by removing sound deadeners, undercoating, sway bars and interior wheel wells and playing around with the pulleys and cylinder heads, for instance—you could goose the effective hp up to 450.
    Which made it a boss machine for drag racing.
    But a bitch to drive at 130 miles per hour through a gale.
    Squeezing the leather-clad wheel, feeling the pain in her arthritic fingers, Amelia Sachs piloted the car eastbound on the Long Island Expressway. She had a blue flasher on the dash—a suction cup doesn’t stick well to convertible roofs—and wove perilously in and out of the commuter traffic.
    As she and Rhyme had decided when he’d called five minutes before and told her to get the hell out to Easton, Sachs was one-half of the advance team, which, if they were lucky, might get to the beach at the same time the Ghost and any surviving immigrants did. The other half of the impromptu team was the young officer from the NYPD Emergency Services Unit sitting next to her. The ESU was the tactical branch of the police department, the SWAT team, and Sachs—well, Rhyme actually—had decided that she should have some backup with firepower of the sort that now sat in the man’s lap: a Heckler & Koch MP5 machine gun.
    Miles behind them now were the ESU, the crime scene bus, a half-dozen Suffolk County troopers, ambulances and assorted INS and FBI vehicles, making their way through the vicious storm as best they could.
    “Okay,” said the ESU officer. “Well. Now.”
    He offered this in response to a brief bit of hydroplaning.
    Sachs calmly brought the Camaro back under control, recalling that she’d also removed the steel plates behind the backseat, put in a fuel cell in lieu of the heavy gas tank and replaced the spare with Fix-A-Flat and a plug kit. The SS was about 500 pounds lighter than when her father had bought it in the seventies. Could use a little of that ballast now, she thought, and snipped another skid short.
    “Okay, we’re okay now,” the ESU cop said, apparently far more comfortable in a shoot-out than driving down the wide expanse of the Long Island Expressway.
    Her phone rang. She juggled the unit and answered it.
    “Say, miss,” the ESU cop asked, “you gonna use one of those hands-free things? I’m just thinking it might be better.” And this from a man dressed like Robocop.
    She laughed, plugged the earpiece in and upshifted.
    “How’s the progress, Sachs?” Rhyme asked.
    “Doing the best I can. But we turn off onto