The Stone Monkey

town house Amelia Sachs stepped forward slowly into the dark corridor.
    “Wait here a minute, John,” she whispered.
    “Yes” came the faint reply.
    She stepped into the corridor. Hesitated only a moment and then called, “Now.”
    “What?” the Ghost asked, hesitating.
    But instead of responding she spun back toward him,raising her own pistol so quickly that the motion of the black weapon was a gray blur. The abyss of the muzzle settled steadily on the Ghost’s chest before he could even lift his own Glock.
    Sachs’s utterance hadn’t been directed to the Ghost at all, but to the half-dozen men and women in full combat gear—Bo Haumann and other Emergency Services Unit tactical cops—who pushed into the small kitchen. They rushed in from the back door and past her from the living room, guns pointed at the shocked Ghost’s face, screaming their deafening litany, “Down, down, down, police, drop your weapon, on the floor, down!”
    His pistol was torn from his hand and he was flung facedown to the floor and cuffed and frisked. He felt a tug at his ankle and the Model 51, his lucky gun, was lifted away, then his pockets emptied.
    “We’ve got the subject down,” an officer shouted. “Scene clear.”
    “Outside, we’ve got two, both down and locked.” Meaning on their bellies with cuffs or plastic restraints on their wrists. These were the two men in the Windstar Sachs had spotted following them. More of the Uighurs from the cultural center in Queens, she’d assumed.
    “Any other minders?” Sachs bent down and whispered harshly into the Ghost’s ear.
    “Any—”
    “We’ve got the two men who were following us. Anybody else?”
    The Ghost didn’t answer and Sachs said into her radio, “I only noticed the one van. That’s probably it.”
    Then Lon Sellitto and Eddie Deng joined her from upstairs, where they’d been waiting, out of the way of the takedown team. They looked the Ghost over as he lay on thefloor, breathless from the shock and the rough treatment. Amelia Sachs thought he looked harmless—just a handsome but diminutive Asian man with slightly graying hair.
    Sellitto’s radio blared with the message, “Snipers One and Two to Base. Okay to stand down?”
    He turned the squelch down on his Motorola and said, “Base to Snipers. That’s a roger.” The big detective added to the Ghost, “They had you in their sights from the minute you stepped out of the station wagon. If you’d aimed your weapon in her direction you’d be dead now. Lucky man.”
    They dragged the Ghost into the living room and pushed him into a chair. Eddie Deng read him his rights—in English, Putonghua and Minnanhua. Just to make sure.
    He confirmed that he understood, with surprisingly little emotion, Sachs observed, considering the circumstances.
    “How’re the Changs?” Sachs asked Sellitto.
    “They’re fine. Two INS teams’re at their apartment. It almost got ugly. The father’d got his hands on a gun and was ready to shoot it out but the agents spotted him through a window with a nightscope. They got the apartment’s phone number and called to tell them that they were surrounded. As soon as Chang realized it was a legit INS team and not the Ghost he gave it up.”
    “The baby?”
    “She’s fine. Social worker’s on the way. They’re going to keep them at their place in Owls Head until we’re through with this piece of shit.” Nodding toward the Ghost. “Then we can go over there and debrief them.”
    The town house in which they now stood, about a mile from the Changs’, was a neatly decorated place, full of flowers and tchotchkes: a surprise to Sachs, considering that it was inhabited by one of the city’s best homicide detectives.
    “So this’s your house, Lon?” she asked, picking up a porcelain Little Bo Peep statuette.
    “It’s my better other’s,” he answered defensively, using the cop’s pet name for Rachel, his girlfriend (he’d combined “better half” and “significant other,” in a rare display of levity). They’d moved in together several months ago. “She inherited half of this stuff from her mother.” He took the figurine from Sachs and replaced it carefully on the shelf.
    “This was the best we could do for a takedown site on such short notice. We figured if we drove too far from Owls Head, the prick’d start to get suspicious.”
    “It was all fake,” the Ghost said, amused. It seemed to Sachs that his English was better than the dialect he’d