Chapter Forty-five
A sound nearby.
A footstep? wondered Sam Chang, sitting on his couch, next to his youngest son.
In the front? In the back?
They sat in the dim living room of their apartment, clustered around the television on which a talk show was playing. The volume was up but still Chang had clearly heard a noise.
A snap.
Yes, a footstep.
What was it?
A phoenix rising from ashes, a dragon angered that this heavy house had been built on his home?
The spirit of his father returning here to comfort them?
Perhaps to warn them.
Or maybe it was Gui, the Ghost himself, who had found them.
It's my imagination, Chang thought.
Except that he looked across the room and saw William, where he'd been reading a year-old auto magazine. The boy was sitting up, his neck lifted, head swiveling slowly, like a heron trying to identify the source of danger.
"What is it, husband?" Mei-Mei whispered, now seeing both their faces. She pulled Po-Yee to her.
Another click.
A footstep. He couldn't tell where it came from.
Sam Chang was on his feet quickly. William joined him. Ronald started to rise but his father waved the young boy into the bedroom. A firm nod at his wife. She gazed into his eyes for a moment then slipped into the bedroom with the toddler and her youngest son and shut the door silently.
"Do what I told you, son."
William took his position beside the doorway that led to the back of the apartment, holding an iron pipe Chang had found in the backyard. Together father and son had planned what they would do if the Ghost came for them. Chang would shoot the first person through the door--either the Ghost or his bangshou. Hearing the shot, the others would probably hang back, giving William time to grab the fallen man's pistol, so he too would have a weapon.
Chang then shut off two of the lights in the living room so that he would not be so evident a target but could see the assailant in the doorway in silhouette. He'd shoot for the head; from here he couldn't miss.
Sam Chang crouched down behind a chair. He ignored his exhaustion from the ordeal on the ship, exhaustion from the loss of his father, exhaustion from the erosion of his soul in these two short days, and with his steady, calligrapher's hands, pointed the weapon at the doorway.
*
Inside the 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!"