by Roger Hobbs
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2013 by Roger Hobbs
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hobbs, Roger.
Ghostman / by Roger Hobbs.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-95997-3
1. Criminals—New Jersey—Fiction. 2. Robbers and outlaws—Fiction.
3. Atlantic City (N.J.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.024G48 2013
813′.6—dc23
2012025792
Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Autobiography of the Ghostman
A Note About the Author
PROLOGUE
ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY
Hector Moreno and Jerome Ribbons sat in the car on the ground level of the Atlantic Regency Hotel Casino parking garage, sucking up crystal meth with a rolled-up five spot, a lighter and a crinkled length of tin foil. They had thirty minutes.
There are three good ways to rob a casino. The first is in the front door. It worked back in the eighties, if not so much anymore. Just like a bank, a couple of guys would walk in with masks and guns and put some iron to the pretty little thing behind the bars. She’d start crying and begging for her life while the manager would hand over the stacks from the drawer. The bad guys would walk back out the front door and drive away, because common sense said that a gunfight would cost the casino more than whatever you’d got from the cages. But times change. The cashiers are trained for it now. Security’s more aggressive. As soon as the silent alarm goes, and it always does, guys with guns are coming out of the woodwork. They still wait for you to leave, though as soon as you step back out the door there are forty guys waiting with AR-15s and shotguns to take you down. No two-minute lag like before.
The second is to go for the chips. Take the elevator down from the suites, walk up to the high-roller roulette table, take out your gun and put a bullet right through the double zeros. Everybody runs at the sound of the shot, especially the croupier. Rich people aren’t brave, and employees even less so. Once they’ve scattered, get a bag and scoop up all the chips. Put two more bullets into the ceiling to let them know you’re serious, then run out like the devil was chasing you. Sounds dumb, but it works. You’re not messing with the cages, so the response time won’t be so fast. Security won’t be waiting outside like they would be in the first scenario. You might actually make it to the parking lot and, from there, the highway. You’ve still got the problem of what to do with the chips. If you take enough of them, say a million or more, the casino will swap out all the chips on the floor for new ones with a different design, and you’ll end up holding a bag full of worthless clay. Worse, technology is making this gambit obsolete. Some casinos are now adding microchips for counting purposes and they’ll be able to track the ones you took. You’ll be wanted from Vegas to Monaco in six hours, and the chips will be just as worthless. And if somehow neither of these two things happen, the best you can hope for is to try to sell them on the black market. But if you do that, you’ll have to sell them for half face value or less, because nobody wants to eat that rap unless they can double their money. Long and short of it is, chips don’t get you anywhere.
Finally, the third way to rob a casino is to steal the money while it’s in transit. Take down one of the armored cars. Casinos move a lot of cash. More than banks, even. You see, most don’t keep big pallets of hundreds locked up on the premises like they do in the movies. There are smaller cash cages all over the place, not massive vaults with hundreds of millions piled up. And instead of keeping all those stacks of money around, they do what every institution of that size does. When they’ve got too much cash, they send it to the bank in an armored truck. When they don’t have enough, they do the same thing in reverse. Two or three deliveries a day, all told.
Taking down an armored truck isn’t really feasible, though. The modern ones are like tanks full of money. Hitting the bank where the money’s coming from isn’t an option either, because banks have even better security than casinos. The key is to make your move right in the middle of the transaction, while the guys are loading the money on or off the truck. They even make it easy for you. Most casinos don’t have a special armored-car depot; too impractical. Instead, the truck parks next to one of the rear or side entrances, a different one every time. The guards open up the back and then walk the money right through the glass doors. This is the golden minute of professional heisting. For sixty seconds, a couple of times a day, more money than a couple of guys could get from half a dozen banks changes hands out there in the open right in front of everybody. All a professional heisting team has to do is get past two or three guys with crew cuts and guns and then drive away before the cops show up. Easy as that. Of course, you need to know when the deliveries are going to happen, and how much money is involved, and which entrance the trucks are going to use, but these details aren’t impossible to get. Information’s the easy part. Getting away, that’s the hard part. If you can snatch the money and disappear in two minutes, you’ll end up rich.
Jerome Ribbons looked down at his gold Rolex. It was half past five in the morning.
The first delivery was half an hour away.
It takes months of planning to take down a casino. Luckily for them, Ribbons had done this sort of thing before. Ribbons was a two-time felon out of north Philadelphia. Not an attractive résumé item, even for the kind of guy who
sets up jobs like this, but it meant he had motive not to get caught. He had skin the color of charcoal and blue tattoos he’d got in Rockview Pen that peeked out from his clothing at odd angles. He’d done five years for his part in strong-arming a Citibank in Northern Liberties back in the nineties, but had never seen time for the four or five bank jobs he’d helped pull since he got out. He was a big man. At least six foot four with more than enough weight to match. Folds of fat poured out over his belt, and his face was as round and smooth as a child’s. He could press four hundred on a good day, and six hundred after a couple of lines of coke. He was good at this, whatever his rap sheet said.
Hector Moreno was more the soldier type. Five and a half feet, a quarter of Ribbons’s weight, hair as short as desert grass, and bones that showed through his coffee-colored skin. He was a good marksman from his days in the service, and he didn’t blink except when he twitched. His sheet showed a dishonorable discharge but no time served. He got back home and spent a year cutting chops in Boston and another browbeating protection money out of dope dealers in Vegas. This was his first big job, so he was nervous about it. He had a whole pharmacy in the Dodge with him, just to get his nut up. Pills and poppers and powders and smokes. He wanted to burn away his jitters with a fistful of speed. There were never enough drugs for him. They’d gone through the whole plan over and over to get ready, but Moreno needed more than that. He finished a big bone of crystal meth with a slurp. His eyes watered up. A friend of his had cooked the crank up in a trailer west of the Schuylkill. It was low-quality Strawberry Quick, but he didn’t care. He wanted to fix and focus, not get blown out of his mind on crank and paint thinner before the main event.
Ribbons looked at his watch again. Twenty-four minutes.
Neither man spoke. They didn’t have to.
Moreno took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one, then passed the foil over to Ribbons. He let out two puffs in quick succession.
Ribbons numbed his mouth down with a pull off a pint of bourbon first. Basing meth is a hot and bitter experience. He took his time chasing the drop across the foil between his callused fingers. This wasn’t the first time he’d been down this road. The meth felt good, though not nearly as good as the rush he’d get with his mask on and his gun up. He liked to be right in the thick of it.
Moreno watched him, smoked his cigarette and stole a few pulls off the bottle of cough syrup. His heart skipped. A lot of people in the old neighborhood would have paid top dollar for this premium kind of high, but none of them ever did cough syrup anymore. Only him. Makes you see things like you do when you’ve got fever so high you’re on the edge of death. You see God waiting for you at the end of the tunnel. Nobody ever told him about the endless hard breathing, the heartbeat or the things he’d hallucinate once the DXM hit his bloodstream like an eight ball of ketamine. He listened to the radio and waited.
Moreno flicked his cigarette out the window and said, “Got your house picked out yet?”
“Yeah. Blue Victorian. Beautiful place down by the water. Virginia.”
“What did the lady say?”
“That it’s a buyer’s market. Our deal won’t be a problem.”
They sat quietly for a while, listening to the morning traffic report on the radio. Nothing much to talk about anyway, nothing they hadn’t said a thousand times over cups of coffee and blueprints and glowing computer screens. There was nothing more to do but listen to the traffic reports.
They had planned this job way in advance, though maybe it’s wrong to say that they’d planned it at all. The man with the idea was three thousand miles west sitting by his phone in Seattle and waiting to make a call. He was the jugmarker. Most robberies are lone-wolf operations that never get off the ground. A couple of crackheads try to knock down a bank and end locked up for the duration. A job with a jugmarker isn’t one of those. It is the kind of job you hear about once on the evening news and it never comes up again. The kind that goes off right and stays right. This was a job with strict plans, timing and endgame—a jugmarker’s heist from beginning to end. The man with the plan knew everything and called all the shots. Ribbons and Moreno didn’t like to say his name. Nobody did.
Bad luck.
Moreno and Ribbons weren’t dumb, though. They knew the patterns of the security cameras. They knew the armored truck inside and out. They knew the drivers’ names, the casino managers’ names, their habits, their records, their phone numbers, their girlfriends. They knew things they wouldn’t even need, because that was part of the process. There were a million things that could go wrong. The idea was to control the chaos, not step right into it. Now it was all down to the traffic reports.
After twenty minutes, Ribbons’s phone rang. A sharp, crisp chirp, repeated twice over. A specific ringtone for a specific number. He didn’t have to answer it. Both men knew what it meant. They exchanged glances. Ribbons sent the call to voice mail, put the drugs back in the glove box, and looked at his watch a third and final time. Two minutes to six in the morning.
The two-minute countdown had started.
Ribbons took a high-fiber cotton balaclava out of the glove box. He put the ski mask on and fitted it until the fabric was snug around his face. Moreno followed slowly with his own. Ribbons connected the wires under the dash and powered up the engine. On the floorboards was a KDH tactical-assault vest with level-four ballistic plates designed to stop rifle rounds from insurgent assault weapons fifty feet away. Ribbons had to wear one. He was the point man. His stomach hung out beneath. Under a blanket in the backseat was a Remington Model 700 hunting rifle loaded with five rounds, fitted with a red-dot sight and modified with an eight-and-a-half-inch AWC Thundertrap silencer—Moreno’s weapon. Next to it was a fully automatic Kalashnikov, Type 56, with three mags of 120-grain, full-metal-jacket, boat-tail hunting rounds, thirty in each. Ribbons took the AK and loaded a mag into the receiver, pulled back the cocking lever, turned to Moreno and asked—
“Are you as ready for this as I am?”
“I’m ready,” he said.
Again they were silent. The parking-garage lights flickered, then turned off—no need for lights after sunrise. Their Dodge Spirit was covered in rot-brown rust stains. Right in front of them, visible across the street, was the casino’s side entrance where the truck would be. The rain streaks on the windshield looked like a kaleidoscope to Ribbons’s eyes.
Ninety seconds before the truck was supposed to arrive, Moreno got out of the car and took his position facing the street, behind a roadblock. The salt air had eaten the concrete down to the steel rebars. He looked up at the security cameras. They were shifted away. Perfect timing. Casino security’s tight enough to have cameras in the parking lot, just not quite tight enough. Moreno had mapped out the camera blind spots and tested them weeks ago. Nobody really cares what goes on in the parking lot at six in the morning. Moreno steadied the forearm of his rifle on the concrete block. He flipped the lens cap off his sight, pulled back the lever and locked in the first round.
Then Ribbons got out. He hustled while the cameras were still shifted away and hid behind the next pillar, in another blind spot. He started breathing deeply and quickly to loosen himself up so he’d be ready to run. The Kalashnikov seemed tiny in his massive hands. He held it close to his chest. He was beginning to feel sick. That old familiar feeling crept into his stomach, like it always did. Nerves. Not as bad as Moreno’s nerves, he thought, but still there, every time.
Sixty seconds.
Ribbons counted down the seconds in his head. The timing was very important. They were under strict orders not to move until the exact moment. The sweat made the inside of his gloves slick. It is harder to shoot precisely in latex gloves, but he was also under orders to keep them on until the end of the day. He was as still as the Buddha behind his pillar, even though it was a little too small for him. He didn’t even have enough space to pull back his jacket and look at his watch. Instead he concentrated on breathing, in and out, in and out. Seco
nds ticked away in his head. Water fell in drops off the concrete overhead.
At exactly six a.m., the Atlantic Armored truck slid through the green light at the corner and turned down the street. Both the driver and the guard wore brown uniforms. The truck was ten feet tall and weighed close to three tons. It was white, with the Atlantic Armored logo painted on both sides. It turned in the casino’s loading zone and came to a slow, rolling stop under the Regency sign. Ribbons could barely hear a thing over the sound of his own hurried breath.
Armored cars are never easy. They’re intimidating machines. It’s not just the obvious things, like the three inches of bullet-resistant NIJ-tested armor, or the tires reinforced with forty-five layers of DuPont Kevlar, or the windows made of a transparent sort of polycarbonate capable of stopping a whole clip of ten-millimeter armor-piercing rounds. No, all that’s obvious. The more dangerous things about an armored car involve the stuff on the inside. The guards, for example, are trained guys with guns. The inside of the truck’s got cameras that record everything that happens in there. There are sixteen gun ports, so the guys on the inside can shoot the guys on the outside. And to top it all off, there are magnetic plates in the strongboxes. If the loot is ever taken off the plate, a timer starts going. If the timer ever runs out, little ink packs in the money explode and ruin the prize. But to a jugmarker and a team with a plan, all those worrisome features fall by the wayside. There is always a weakness. In this case, there were two. The first is obvious: nothing stays inside an armored car forever. Wait for the guys to get out, and all the armor and cameras and magnetic plates mean nothing. The second requires a little more thought, however. The second requires much more cruelty.
Kill the guards, and the cash can be yours.
There were two of them, both in the front cab. One driver and one money handler, with a couple of years of experience between them, or so the research said. One had a family, the other didn’t. Once the truck had come to a stop, they’d got out. As soon as they closed the doors, a guy in a cheap black suit came out through the casino entrance to meet them. He was balding and had a name badge over his lapel. He was the casino vault manager. Middle forties, cleanest record a guy could have. Not even a parking ticket. He took a key out of his pocket and handed it to the money handler. Of course, even with his clean record, he was never allowed in the truck itself. Not once in ten years. The uniforms would handle it out here, and he would handle it back in the cage. He waited on the sidewalk and rubbed his hands together.
