The Stone Monkey

this.
    You are part of the old.
    You will reform your ways.
    You will die for your old beliefs  . . . .
    A reversal, he’d come to learn, was merely a temporary unbalance and even the most horrific events in his life had ultimately been harmonized by good fortune. His abiding philosophy was found in one word: naixin. This translated as “patience” in Chinese but meant something more in the Ghost’s mind. The English equivalent would be “All in good time.” He had survived these forty-some years because he’d outlasted trouble and danger and sorrow.
    For the moment the piglets had gotten away. Their deaths would have to wait. Now there was nothing to do but escape from the police and the INS.
    He put his old pistol into his pocket and trudged through the rain and wind along the beach toward the lights of the small town. The closest building was a restaurant, in front of which was a car with its engine running.
    So, some good fortune already!
    And then, glancing out to sea, he saw something that actually made him laugh. Yet more good luck: not far offshore he saw another piglet, a man struggling to stay afloat. At least he could kill one more of them before he escaped to the city.
    The Ghost pulled his gun from his pocket and started back toward the shoreline.
    •   •   •
    The wind was wearing him down.
    Making his way toward the small town, Sonny Li slogged through the sand. He was a slight man and in the hard, dangerous world in which he made his way he relied on bluff and surprise and wits (weapons too, of course), not on physical strength. He was now at his limits, exhausted from this morning’s ordeal.
    The wind . . . Twice it actually knocked him to his knees.
    No more, he thought. Despite the risk of being seen, struggling through the soft sand was simply too much for him and he stumbled back onto the rain-swept asphalt road and continued toward the lights of the small village. He pushed forward as best he could, afraid that the snakehead would leave before Li found him.
    But a moment later he received the reassurance that the man was still here: several more gunshots.
    Li struggled up a hill and peered into the streaming wind and rain but he could see no one. The sound had apparently been carried some distance on the wind.
    Discouraged, he continued forward. For ten endless minutes he battled his way along the road, throwing his head back occasionally and letting the rain soak his parched mouth. After all the seawater he’d swallowed he was desperately thirsty.
    Then he saw, on his right, a small orange life raft sitting on the beach. He assumed that it was the Ghost’s. He looked up and down the shore for the snakehead but it was impossible to see very far through the mist and the rain.
    He started toward the raft, thinking that perhaps he could follow the man’s footprints and find him hiding in town. But as he took a step off the road a flashing light appeared. He wiped the rain from his eyes and squinted. The light was blue and moving rapidly toward him along the road.
    INS? Security bureau officers?
    Li hurried into some dense bushes on the far side of the asphalt. He crouched and watched the light grow brighter as the vehicle in which it was mounted, a sporty yellow convertible, materialized out of the rain and murk and skidded to a stop 100 meters away. In a crouch Li began to move slowly toward the car.
    •   •   •
    Amelia Sachs stood on the rain-swept beach, staring down at the woman’s body, slumped in the grotesque pose of death.
    “He’s killing them, Rhyme,” Amelia Sachs, dismayed, whispered into the headset mike of her Motorola SP-50 handy-talkie. “He’s shot two of them, a man and a woman. In the back. They’re dead.”
    “Shot them?” The criminalist’s voice was hollow and she knew that he was shouldering the responsibility for yet more deaths.
    The ESU officer trotted toward her, holding his machine gun ready. “No sign of him,” the man shouted over the wind. “People in that restaurant a half click up the road said that somebody stole a car about twenty minutes ago.” The officer gave Sachs the description of a Honda and the tag number and she relayed it to Rhyme.
    “Lon’ll put it on the wire,” he said. “Was he alone?”
    “Think so. Because of the rain there’re no footprints inthe sand but I found some in the mud, where he was standing to shoot the woman. He was by himself then.”
    “So we’ll assume his bangshou ’s