Free White Ghost by Steven Gore Page A

think I can come up with a way to do it.”
    â€œIf you’re healthy enough.”
    â€œThe symptoms have backed off a little. It might get better on its own.”
    â€œDoes that mean they’re close to figuring out what it is?”
    â€œAlmost. One more test and I think this’ll be over with.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œNothing. Don’t worry about it.”
    â€œTell me or I’m going to call Faith.”
    â€œA little surgery.”
    â€œWhat kind of little surgery?”
    â€œA biopsy. A minor one.”
    â€œThere’s no such thing as a minor one. Where are you having it done?”
    â€œStanford Hospital. I’ll just be there overnight. In and out. No big deal.”
    â€œOf course it is. I’m going to make some calls.”
    â€œJack, don’t—”
    But Burch had disconnected.

CHAPTER 17
    L ew Fung-hao stood near one of the last remaining phone booths in San Francisco’s Chinatown reading a nightclub playbill pasted to the side of a fish market. He cocked his head when the telephone rang as though puzzled by why it was ringing with no one standing by to answer it. He shrugged toward the fruit and vegetable vendors a few yards away, then reached for the receiver.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œMe and my friends are in the other city.”
    It was Le.
    Lew lowered his voice. “Did you destroy Ah Ming’s cell phone?”
    â€œYes. What now?”
    Lew smiled at the vendors.
    â€œGo to Tai Ping Travel and ask for Tat Mo. He’s expecting you.”
    Lew hung up, then shuffled away like an old man with nowhere to go and nothing to do. He wound through the Chinatown alleys, then back out to a commercial street of restaurants and offices. He walked until he found a cellular outlet and boughta pay-as-you-go phone. He then stepped into the recessed doorway of a residential hotel and sent a text message to Ah Ming:
    All is well.
    A H M ING READ THE WORDS , then leaned back in his chair and looked at the calendar. All he needed to do was replace Ah Tien, he told himself, and everything would continue as planned, and as it always had. But he knew he was deceiving himself for he was on the needle end of two capital murders: Ah Pang and Ah Tien.
    Tension pushed him to his feet. He held out his hands and stared at them. At moments like these he saw them for what they were and recalled the day thirty years earlier when they transformed from flesh and bone into weapons, when they’d beaten a gambler to death in Taiwan who hadn’t paid a debt to United Bamboo.
    At the time the act had seemed like a kind of metamorphosis. He later came to understand it was more a moment of revelation about himself to himself. For he’d come to recognize it hadn’t been guilt he’d been feeling as he looked down at the man’s body, but rather an almost incomprehensible combination of power and shame. He’d had the gambler under control with the first blow. There’d been no reason for a second, even less for the fatal third one.
    Ah Ming turned his hands over and inspected the lines on his palms, troubled not by the deaths of that man or of Ah Tien or of the dozen others over the years, but by Ah Pang’s. He was certain he could dominate men, the killings were proof of that, but the coincidental was uncanny and unnerving, and too much like a fortune-teller’s prediction that mirrored a reoccurring nightmare.

CHAPTER 18
    I ’m just pulling away from Winston Fong’s house,” Sylvia said in a call to Gage. “I snagged him when he walked to the corner store. He’s nervous and wants to meet in a public place outside of San Francisco. I suggested Jack London Square.”
    At 7:45 P.M. , Sylvia and Gage were sitting at a wrought-iron table watching the tourists, the seagulls, and the moneyed high-tech young intermingle on the Oakland waterfront.
    At 8:00 she tilted her head toward Winston emerging alone