White Ghost by Steven Gore Read Free Book Online Page B

started moving, the traffic sounds began to fade. Ah Tien imagined that they’d driven into the Bayview warehouse district, maybe even to East Wind itself.
    The van stopped and then rocked as the side door slid open.
    Ah Tien felt himself wrenched from the floor. Cool ocean air struck his face as he tumbled to the sidewalk. His head thudded against the concrete. Hands gripped his upper arms and yanked him onto his knees. Through the nausea and daze of a concussion, Ah Tien heard footsteps approach, certain it was Ah Ming coming to confront him. He searched for the words he’d practiced, the ones that would resonate with their past bond, the culture they shared, and the obligations weighing on them that he knew would save his life.

CHAPTER 10
    A s his wife drove the winding road up the canyon after teaching her evening graduate seminar, Gage sat by the fireplace of their East Bay hillside home, an unopened book in his hand. The metallic rumble of the automatic garage door broke through Gage’s insulation of exhaustion. The sound pushed him to his feet and walked him to the front door.
    â€œAny news?” Faith asked, as he took her jacket.
    â€œDr. Goode’s office called. They’ll have the radiologist’s report by tomorrow. They want us in the day after.”
    Faith inspected his face. “How do you feel?”
    â€œThe usual. How was class?”
    Faith smiled. “The usual.”
    Gage poured her a glass of wine, then joined her on the couch. They sat in silence, looking toward the bay and the lights of San Francisco beyond. After a few minutes, he leaned back and closed his eyes. Moments later he was asleep.
    Faith gazed over at him, then ran her fingers through his hair, looking through the shadow of the coming appointment back at how their life together began.
    She never thought she’d ever date a cop, even an ex-cop,much less marry one. She didn’t like guns, didn’t like uniforms, and didn’t like the rigidity of thought that these entailed.
    But this one had been different.
    Older than the others in the Berkeley graduate philosophy seminar, he’d sat silently, week after week. Listening. Thinking. The fifteen students were intimidated by him. And it wasn’t merely that among those who wanted to believe their pens were mightier than others’ swords, he was the only one who’d ever carried a gun. Rather, it was that he wasn’t driven to speak by nervousness, by a desire to impress the others, or by a need to ask ingratiating questions of the professor.
    The others whispered about him, concluding in the end that he must be brilliant, that somehow he knew it all already.
    Faith took a sip of wine and smiled to herself as she remembered the first words he spoke, six weeks into the quarter.
    â€œI’m not sure we’ve really grasped what Hobbes was trying to tell us.”
    He then described a homicide he’d investigated, a rape and murder of a child. He wove together passages from Leviathan, On the Body, and Human Nature with what witnesses had told him, the evidence the crime scene people found, his interview of the murderer, and finally a rival gang stabbing him to death in prison.
    Faith remembered the silence in the room when he’d finished. What he said had terrified them, for they’d discovered the state of nature in their own hearts: they’d all wanted to knife the murderer themselves.
    It hadn’t been the analysis that had captured her, it was how he’d begun.
    I’m not sure.
    And that was true. He wasn’t. He only knew that somehow, if he thought deeply and carefully enough, he’d better understand what had led to those two dead human beings, those two wasted lives, and understanding all that made a difference to him.
    Until that moment, Faith assumed that Gage, like the others in the seminar, would go on to an academic career. But it was clear after he’d spoken that this was a man who needed