White Ghost

by Steven Gore

  “There’s nothing you can’t ask.”

  “I watched on television. Why’d you let the man point that gun at you for so long? I thought my heart would stop. And now that the media is reporting who he really was, I just . . . I just don’t get it. He could have . . .”

  “As it turns out, it’s not that complicated. I’m really not a tough guy. Never was. The truth is I wasn’t ready to face my own death.”

  Stern leaned back and studied Gage. For a few seconds she sat, lips compressed, eyes narrowed, gaze unfocused, then she sat up.

  “I think I understand. I really think I do.”

  “I thought you would.”

  Stern turned toward Faith. “And you knew it all along, didn’t you? You knew. That’s why you let him go.”

  Faith nodded. “I knew.”

  “You have more courage than I have. I don’t think I could have done that.”

  “Everyone has to approach death in their own way in order to remain who they are. And I married him for who he is.”

  Stern looked back at Gage, started to speak, then paused. He knew what she was thinking, the question she was asking, the question he was asking himself: Would he ever be ready?

  Gage looked down at Faith gazing up at him. He’d learned something else in the alley. Faith was all death could take from him; everything else he could leave behind.

  Note to the Reader

  I’m not a tough guy either. And that’s just one of the similarities between Gage and me. Not only do he and I share the same sense of the world and walk the same moral landscape, but he knows the rough ground of crime and the hard people who make it so only because I traveled there and learned it all before him. And he knows how to live in the shadow of death only because that shadow fell over me first.

  As I approached the fourth Gage novel, and my seventh overall, it seemed to me it was time to show some aspects of what that life is really like. And not for my sake, but for others who live, have lived, or will live—or who will die—in that shadow. And what I learned over the last fifteen years of biopsies and chemotherapy, of hospitals and examining rooms, of radiology labs and infusion centers is that—contrary to the mythology of panic and terror, collapse and paralysis, that surrounds cancer—we carry on.

  Except for those who have been inflicted with forms that are too disabling or who survive only weeks or months—we carry on.

  Mothers mother. Fathers father. Workers work. Sellers sell. Writers write. Doctors doctor. Liars lie. Cheaters cheat. Predators prey.

  We are who we are, and we do what we do.

  Regardless of what our initial reaction to the diagnosis might have been—rage, fear, resignation, self-estrangement, or self-pity—it fades. Regardless of the promises we might have made to ourselves—to be kind or generous or Zenlike in our equanimity—we return to whomever we’ve always been. Regardless of the ways in which we might have viewed ourselves—as patients, victims, sufferers, warriors, or survivors—in the end we rediscover who we’ve always been. Regardless of the ways we think the world has been changed and remade—brighter or dimmer, engaging or indifferent—in the end we find it’s the same world and we are the same in it.

  And we carry on.

  All this should be obvious. And it certainly is, inside infusion rooms and radiation oncology departments and in all the other places where patients are diagnosed and treated. But outside, however, in fiction and in memoir, on talk shows and in film, and in the cottage industry of self-help and popular psychology, the mythology lives on.*

  The adversity Gage faces in White Ghost is more urgent than mine, a chronic and often treatable, but ultimately incurable form of lymphoma. The oncologist’s original prognosis of my time from diagnosis through treatments to death turned out to be overly conservative and I rode, am still riding, the bell curve of probability, first traveling up and then down the sweeping arcs, and now along the thinning tail. Indeed, I worked for another nine years in scores of places around the globe before I reached the moment in Gage’s life when this story begins.

  But by then I was transitioning from investigator to writer and whatever discomforts I underwent in treatment were compensated for by my undergoing them in the company of my wife and in the comfort of my own home. My commute was no longer to my office downtown, but only to a converted bottom-floor bedroom. My lunch, just a short climb back up the stairs. A nap, just one more flight.

  Although there is never a good time to undergo chemotherapy, my two years of treatment began during a busy period. I was putting the final edits on Final Target, finishing the first and second drafts and major edits of Absolute Risk, and writing the second Harlan Donnally novel. I was also investigating a death that occurred ten years earlier, one of my last cases.

  According to the local police department, a young man in his twenties who had been found dead in a basement had been beaten by drug dealers a few weeks earlier and had died of his untreated injuries. During the intervening decade, no one had been arrested, no suspects even identified. The case was old, cold, and closed.

  It had been many years since I’d worked in the tough parts of the Bay Area. My practice had developed into one that found me working more often in London, Kiev, or Chennai than in San Francisco, Oakland, or San Jose, and investigating this death meant for me, as for Gage in White Ghost, going to once familiar places and relying on people from the past to catch up to the present.

  In searching the housing projects and skid-row motels and drug corners for witnesses, I found myself surrounded by death, and not only because of the reminders provided by my continuing visits to the Stanford Cancer Center. Driving around those streets was like walking through a cemetery, one not made up of headstones and crypts, but of sidewalks and corners, streets and alleys, front steps and backyards, empty lots and abandoned houses, each a reminder that many of those in the generation I once knew and on whom I had once relied to get me to the facts behind the tales were dead.

  As I was talking to an old-timer outside the liquor store at Eight and Campbell in West Oakland, I thought of Stymie Taylor, a damaged man who’d spent much of his life in prison, but who many times knew someone or something that helped me get to the truth. I stopped in to visit his mother who had been at his bedside when he died. By then she’d outlived four of her children. She told me Sunday dinners had become a time of empty chairs.

  Driving past a drug-dealing spot in East Oakland, I thought of Henry Scott, a cunning man who’d done a lot of bad in his life. I saw him last when he dropped by my office about a dozen years ago. I’m not sure why he came to see me and I’m not sure he knew why either. I was long out of his world, but by his walk and his talk, I understood the place he still held in it. I told him if he stayed in the Bay Area, he’d be a dead man; and a couple of months later he was, shot down outside a bayside nightclub.

  And there were many more. Way too many more.

  I passed the corner flower shop near the Sixty-Fifth Avenue housing project, within gunshot distance of hundreds of murders in the previous thirty years, and I remembered a sign I’d seen in the window in 1986: Funeral Sale. There are so many things wrong with that phrase, so disturbing anyone would even think it, I’ll just let the image of that storefront speak the thousand words for itself.

  I drove through the once infamous intersection of Ninety-Eighth and Edes, where in 1989 I had been trapped as men shot at each other from opposite corners. At least I’d had my car’s sheet metal around me. The people running and ducking didn’t. Six rounds were exchanged in seconds, the gunfight was over, and the shooters fled leaving nothing behind but lead and a memory.

  Hairless, fatigued, pale, infused with chemotherapy drugs, and on the hunt for a witness, I walked into the courtyard of an apartment building where I had been told one was living. It was also where years earlier a drug dealer had me at gunpoint. It struck me that if he’d pulled the trigger I wouldn’t have lived to die of cancer. I saw where I’d been standing and where he’d been standing, a
dead strip of concrete on which there had occurred a live moment. I remembered his hand coming up out of his pocket and the look in his eyes.

  They say cancer is the emperor of all maladies. At least on that day, it wasn’t. It was a man with a gun.

  In the end, it had turned out to be just another day in the life. He went his way. And I went mine.

  Ultimately, I located witnesses who told me, and who later testified in federal court, that the men who had beaten the victim and caused his death weren’t drug dealers at all. In truth, they were undercover police officers, and the homicide detective assigned to the investigation had known it almost from the start.

  Based on the testimony of these witnesses and admissions by some of the officers involved, the judge later ruled that the department had engaged in a decade-long cover-up. The city’s defense against the family’s civil rights claim had been both absurd and immoral: its attorneys had made a statute of limitations argument that the victim’s family should have discovered and exposed the police conspiracy sooner.

  In fact, the injustice went far beyond the death and the cover-up. Not only did the detective remain in the homicide unit even after his role in the case became known inside the police department, but upon his retirement, the district attorney, the chief law enforcement officer in the county, hired him to work as an inspector in her office. And the lieutenant who supervised the officers, who was present at the time of the assault and who engaged in what the department admitted was an attempt to influence officers’ reports of the beating, was assigned to head the internal affairs unit and promoted to the rank of captain.

  I considered using the death of this young man as the basis of a Harlan Donnally novel, but unlike the mayors, city council members, judges, prosecutors, police chiefs, and city managers who served during these years, no reader of fiction would tolerate this kind of ending.

  Some of Gage’s thoughts in White Ghost are ones I had as I searched for witnesses, and they are at least some of the thoughts all cancer patients have as we carry on. Among other things, it meant thinking about time and what is worth spending it on and a reminder that the young man whose death I was investigating died at about the same time as I was first diagnosed. His life was stolen, beaten out of him by fist and boot, but mine remained—it still remains—my own to spend. And at least some of that time I chose to spend walking Graham Gage and Harlan Donnally, and their readers, through the landscape on which I have lived much of my life.

  Acknowledgments

  During a number of trips to Thailand over the years, I met with drug traffickers and members of syndicates who came together as investors in heroin in deals, along with those who laundered their money and the enforcers, political figures, and military officers who protected their operations. I also spent a good deal of time in Taiwan and China and met with government officials and owners of factories and trading companies involved in heroin and other smuggling.

  For dramatic effect, I have portrayed real, but more extreme, symptoms of lymphoma as reflected in the clinical literature, but—unlike the characters Ah Ming, Eight Iron, Kasa, and Zhang—these should not be taken as typical. There has been substantial progress in lymphoma diagnostics and treatment, but it’s still not specific enough to account for the disparate outcomes of patients with the same diagnosis, some surviving mere months and others, like myself, still alive after a decade and a half.

  In recognition of the continuing resistance to the dictatorial rulers of the country, I have chosen to use the name Burma, rather than Myanmar, a name imposed by the military.

  The death described in the Note to the Reader is well documented in court rulings and news reports.*

  I am fortunate to have had the benefit of careful readings of the earliest version of this manuscript by Enid Norman, Seth Norman, and Chris Cannon and the careful readings of my medical condition by Doctors Ranjana Advani and Alan Yuen, and PA Katy Pose to whom I have dedicated this book.

  To my wife, Liz, I dedicate me.

  About the Author

  STEVEN GORE is a former private investigator turned “masterful” writer (Publishers Weekly) who combines “a command of storytelling” with “insider knowledge” (Library Journal). With a unique voice honed on the street and in the Harlan Donnally and Graham Gage novels, Gore’s stories are grounded in his decades spent investigating murder, fraud, organized crime, corruption, and drug, sex, and arms trafficking throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He has been featured on 60 Minutes and honored for investigative excellence. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

  www.stevengore.com

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Steven Gore

  GRAHAM GAGE THRILLERS

  Final Target

  Absolute Risk

  Power Blind

  HARLAN DONNALLY NOVELS

  Act of Deceit

  A Criminal Defense

  Night Is the Hunter

  Credits

  COVER DESIGN BY RICHARD L. AQUAN

  COVER PHOTOGRAPHS:

  CITY © BOANO/GETTY IMAGES;

  CIRCUIT BOARD © GETTY IMAGES

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  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WHITE GHOST. Copyright © 2016 by Steven Gore. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-202508-1

  EPub Edition MARCH 2016 ISBN 9780062198143

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  * And a troublesome one it is. I will be discussing the reasons for its persistence and perniciousness and its commercial exploitation in a work of nonfiction, In the Mouth of the Wolf. The preface to that work can be found at http://www.ars-medica.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/13/50.

  * Northern District of California, Docket No. C 09-01019 WHA, The Estate of Jerry A. Amaro III; Geraldine Montoya; Stephanie Montoya, Plaintiffs, v. City of Oakland; E. Karsseboom; R. Holmgren; S. Nowak; M. Battle; C. Bunn; M. Patterson; T. Pena; Edward Poulson; Richard Word, Defendants.

  United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Docket No. 10–16152, The Estate of Jerry A. Amaro III; Geraldine Montoya; Stephanie Montoya, Plaintiffs–Appellees, v. City of Oakland; E. Karsseboom; R. Holmgren; S. Nowak; M. Battle; C. Bunn; M. Patterson; T. Pena; Edward Poulson; Richard Word, Defendants�
��Appellants. “Court-Oakland Cops Stonewalled Beaten Man’s Mom,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 28, 2011.