Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  I read somewhere that there’s no such thing as eidetic memory. Nobody remembers everything perfectly, and the people who claim to are liars. I believe it, but even normal people can remember more than they think. Greek poets used to memorize epic poems hundreds of pages long, and they weren’t anything special. They did it much like I memorize maps. They did it the same way Angela taught me to memorize things. Slowly, and with a lot of practice.

  I saw all the possible routes expand out in my mind, spreading like the branches of a tree.

  I found something that looked promising about ten blocks away. It was a route that ran parallel to the beach for a few blocks before turning off into one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods. The ending spot looked like a large empty blank spot on the map. There was a listing there for a baseball field, but nothing else. I stared at it, taking my time, and finally could make out where the control tower used to be, and the runways, and the parking lot. It had been an airfield once. Now it was just a dead zone of abandoned buildings, not ten blocks from downtown.

  I traced the route. Went over all the directions in my head. It was less than a five-minute drive. Three minutes, if there wasn’t any traffic. Two, if you were driving like the devil was on your tail. Maybe the third shooter did give chase, and caught up even before Ribbons got there.

  And I’d be in for a very bloody surprise.

  13

  KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA

  Our plane landed at five in the evening and the city was cooking. I remember the night clearly. It was winter down there and the sun was hanging on the edge of the horizon, dipping over the ocean and casting the whole city in light the color of blood. We’d followed the sun for most of the thirty-hour flight. I’d watched it through the airplane window over the wing.

  Marcus had given us all new passports. Mine was from the United States and had the name Jack Delton in it. It didn’t look like a fake, either. Even the special laminate felt real when I rubbed it. It would serve as my primary form of identification while I was in the country. Of course I’d also brought a second passport just in case, but that was for emergencies only.

  We were all ushered through Immigration with no fanfare. Outside, a white limo was waiting for us. Marcus had arranged everything in advance, which was good. I didn’t speak a single word of Malay and didn’t have a dime of local currency. I was relying on him completely.

  I had no idea how much trouble that would get me.

  Malaysia was like no place I’d ever seen before. As we rode to the hotel, I leaned against the limousine door and watched the streets go by. The city was full of wealth and culture, but all of that wealth and culture was scattered around in a way that seemed haphazard to me. The financial district had skyscrapers the size of mountains next to great open spaces with nothing in them at all but dust and crab bushes. The parks had fountains lit up like Las Vegas, but the edges of the city were as poor as the slums of São Paulo. The Petronas Towers dominated the view constantly. They were lit up with spotlights that reflected off the clouds. It was their symbol, I guess. Their Empire State Building and their Golden Gate Bridge and their Hollywood sign all rolled up into one. Everywhere I looked, there they were, glowing in the distance.

  By the time we got to the hotel, I was exhausted. It was a nine-hour time difference from L.A. and I hadn’t slept a wink on the whole thirty-hour flight. Our suite at the Mandarin Oriental was the size of a small house. I walked in the door and took off my shoes in almost the same motion. There was a basket of fruit on the counter with a personalized welcome card on top, but all I could think about was coffee. I went directly to the small kitchen to look for a drip machine while the rest of the group went into the dining area and started pouring drinks from the bar. I looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the glowing super-skyscraper across from us. It was past dark by then and the lights were coming up like distant fireworks.

  I’d located the machine and just put the coffee grounds into the basket when I heard Angela walk up behind me. I froze at the sound of her heels on the carpet. They reminded me of when we’d first met.

  When Angela took me under her wing, I was twenty-three years old. I wasn’t a very careful person. In fact, I wasn’t very much of a person at all. I was just a kid from Las Vegas who didn’t want to deal with society anymore. I didn’t have any particular personality or talent. I’d spent a couple of years at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, but I never made any friends. Outside of my course work, I didn’t have any ambitions. No drive. When I met her, I was dreaming up bank robberies on park benches and sleeping in the back of my car. I made a lot of amateur mistakes. Angela trained all that out of me. She taught me how to be careful, how to cut off my last ties with the normal world and how to live like a ghost. One night, she heated up a frying pan on the stove until it glowed orange, then told me to put my belt strap in my mouth and bite down on the leather. With her help, I pressed my fingertips against the searing metal one by one, over and over, until the scar tissue formed and the wrinkles never grew back.

  “You’re making coffee at this hour?” she said.

  “I can’t sleep.” I said.

  “Two sugars for me, then.”

  She sat down on the couch opposite the kitchenette. I could feel her looking at me, even with my head turned. I poured excess water out of the flask. I filled the machine with water and pressed the button. The machine boiled and dripped. She sat there in silence as I watched the coffee brew until the light went off. I opened two sugar packets for her and then poured hot coffee into two ceramic cups. I stirred hers gently with the handle of the spoon.

  “You’ve been quiet,” she said.

  “I’ve never been to this city before.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s more than that.”

  I handed her the cup and sat next to her in a chair in front of the desk by the window. I watched her swirl the coffee and look into it like she was reading tea leaves.

  “How much do you know about Marcus?” she said.

  “I know his jobs are huge. I know everybody comes away from them rich.”

  “But do you know anything about him? Anything at all?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “But I barely know anything about you, and I’ve known you for almost eight years now. Do you know something I don’t?”

  “I know he’s very intelligent,” she said.

  I nodded. “He seems to have everything figured out. I like that. He looks like he knows what he’s doing.”

  “But you don’t know if he knows what he’s doing.”

  “You’re right, I don’t.”

  She pursed her lips and put her coffee down on the study desk next to us. She crossed her legs and bit her lip as she considered something in her head. She took her time before she said it, like she wasn’t completely sure what to say, or how to say it.

  “I told him about you,” she said after a moment.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He said he wanted options, so I gave him your blind e-mail. I thought you wouldn’t come. I thought you wouldn’t even consider it. The way you pick jobs isn’t normal. I’ve seen you pass up jobs that another man would’ve waited his whole career for. I thought he’d send you a message and you wouldn’t even respond. You’d be off in the Mediterranean somewhere, reading one of your books, waiting for something more interesting to come along. Sketching old Roman wall paintings or something.”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “You are,” she said. “And I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

  I looked down at my coffee and didn’t say anything. Angela dug her feet into the carpet like she was thinking something over that was too big to put into words. We were quiet for a moment. She was lost somewhere in her thoughts.

  Then she said, “I want you to draw me a dollar bill.”

  “What?”

  “I mean right now, draw me the best American one-dollar bill you can.”

  “Is this a hypothetical thing, or d
o you actually want me to do it?”

  “No. I really want you to do it. You probably see a dollar bill dozens of times every day. You’ve probably spent more time looking at the dollar bill than you’ve spent looking at your own toes. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I just want you to draw me one.”

  “What for?”

  “Consider it part of your education.”

  “I’m really no good at forgery.”

  “I didn’t ask you to copy a dollar bill, I asked you to draw me one.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “This is about the dollar bill in your head,” she said. “Not the one right in front of you. Think of it as an exercise in perception. I want to see what you remember, not what you see. I can look at a map and memorize it in an instant. That isn’t just something I was born with. I taught myself to do that. I studied mazes until I could copy them after just a glance. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. I want to see you do the same thing, starting with the front of a dollar bill. Look, I even have a pen in the proper color.”

  She opened her purse and took out a green fine-point, felt-tip pen. She put it on the desk next to the pad of hotel stationery. I stared at her. She stared right back at me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I picked up the pen and started with a rectangle, roughly two and a half times longer than it was wide. At first I thought it would be easy. Who doesn’t know what a dollar bill looks like? But as I tried to put it all together in my head, it started falling apart. There were a lot of details. I could remember the general layout. I put the number one in all four corners. I remembered that the top left number was surrounded by a floral design, so I circled it. I remembered that the number at the top right was surrounded by a shieldlike thing, so I added something like that. I put an oval in the center and drew Washington’s portrait pretty simply, then put the words The United States of America above it. Under the portrait I wrote One Dollar. I turned the piece of paper around and showed it to her.

  “No,” she said. “Try it again.”

  I took another look to evaluate what I’d done wrong, then ripped off a new page.

  I started with the same rectangle, because I knew I’d got that more or less right. I put the numerals in all four corners and put a circle around the top left and a box around the top right. I put the oval with the portrait in the right place, and The United States of America and One Dollar too. This time I remembered that up at the very top of the bill were the words Federal Reserve Note, so I put those in, and I remembered that there were official seals on either side so I drew circles to the left and right of the portrait. I put a row of random numbers under the word America, and the words This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private under the word United. I drew a little squiggly line under each seal where the signatures were supposed to be.

  She stopped me before I could finish. “No, that’s not it, either.”

  I crumpled up the sheet and started a third one.

  I drew the rectangle. I put the numbers in all four corners.

  She stopped me right there.

  “Nope,” she said.

  I tossed the pad of paper away across the desk.

  “What do you want from me?” I said.

  “I want to teach you something.”

  “What do you think this could possibly teach me?”

  “I want to teach you to think about what you assume you already know.”

  I glowered at her for a second. Chewed my lip.

  Angela took a dollar bill from her pocketbook and put it on the table in front of me, faceup. Brand new. It couldn’t have been newer or fresher or crisper if it had just been pressed and cut yesterday.

  I stared at it.

  It was black and white. Only the serial numbers and the treasury seal were green. My eyes were stuck there, lost in the blackness and whiteness of the bill.

  “Memory is a funny thing,” she said. “We remember American money as green, even though the fronts of the bills aren’t. But that’s not the lesson here.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off that bill.

  She said, “This lesson is about trust.”

  Then she picked up the green pen, stood up and walked away. Her coffee cooled on the desk and sat there until morning, when I finally got up the nerve to pour it out. The dollar bill stayed longer. I still have it somewhere. I keep it as a reminder of something. I’m not sure what.

  The next day we went to work.

  14

  ATLANTIC CITY

  I followed the short, twisty route through the heart of the city, reconstructing Ribbons’s getaway in my head. I could see him driving in front of me, pushing the limits of the shot-up getaway car until the chassis shook and smoke curled out from the hood. He was wrestling with the wheel. His rims sent up showers of sparks. Coolant and oil were leaking. But Ribbons kept driving. He had to. It was that or go back to prison.

  Leaving the casino district was like dropping off the edge of the earth. Back there by the Boardwalk, the city was bustling with commerce. Five blocks farther down, the surroundings felt like a third-world country. In just a three-minute drive, I went from hundred-million-dollar penthouses to blighted slums. This non-neighborhood resembled a crack addict’s mouth; row houses stood out like crooked, rotten teeth with huge gaps between them.

  I passed a broken fence the city had put up around the abandoned airstrip to keep people out. The place didn’t look like much—or anything at all, really. I might have driven past, had I not been searching for it. The Civic’s engine was the only sound. Nearby I could see a whole baseball stadium with plywood over its windows and doors. I drove past another rusted fence that separated the landing strips from what had been the airport parking lot. In another era, there would have been security checks and floodlights and closed-circuit cameras every fifty feet. Now, the only floodlights would come in at night from across the thin saltwater inlet at the end of the runway, where the casinos cast long shadows over the bits of pipe and the blocks of concrete where the control tower had stood. Brown grass pushed itself up between the cracks.

  The engine ticked as it cooled. I got out and bit the air.

  It was a smaller place than you might’ve guessed. Part of it had been repurposed, part of it hadn’t. A couple of places almost looked like a public park, and a couple of others were pure urban blight. Piles of trash. Industrial remnants. Burned-out cars and waterlogged furniture. There were acres of empty buildings and spray-painted concrete blocks that had been torn loose by salvage crews but never hauled away. I saw a few gaps in the fence where a person could drive in, but I didn’t. I ducked through one of them and went in by foot. Nature had started to reclaim the land. What used to be roads for baggage trucks and flash pits for runway lights were now dirt paths and concrete sinkholes. The landing strip had become a field again, and the paint had cracked long ago. I guessed that there were periodic patrols, but I saw no signs of recent activity. The No Trespassing signs were worn and painted over with indecipherable street tags. It was like an unclaimed junkyard. I walked through it until I got close to the center, where there was a cluster of abandoned buildings. Two empty red dumpsters and a soccer goal post, left inexplicably on their sides in the dirt, sat sentry over the far runway.

  The first building, which I supposed had once been a hangar, was locked from the outside with a chain that had withstood many hoodlums. It was held together by a combination lock with four tumblers, connecting two brown-tinted links. The lock and the chain had rusted together.

  The second hangar looked much the same. There was a pile of garbage in between, and I could smell rotting waste and animal feces.

  I started off toward the third hangar.

  But then I heard it.

  It was a sharp chirp, somewhere between the sound of metal hitting metal and the chime of a bell. It was faint enough that I barely caught it over the breeze.

  For a soft moment I waited, listening, but heard only my heartbeat. Then the wind
picked up and the stench of the garbage hit me even harder. I looked around, in case there was someone there. I moved slowly, very slowly, toward where I thought the sound had come from. I turned the corner, back toward hangar two. This one had double barnstyle doors designed to slide open from the center. In the airport’s heyday, this building would have protected a half dozen private planes from the elements. Now it smelled like any other rusted warehouse. I looked closer at the chain holding the door segments together.

  It had been snapped in two places.

  The doors were cracked just a few inches. The inside of the hangar was pitch-black. Two sets of tread marks led into it. I stepped carefully around them. Car prints. Fresh. At that moment, my breath stopped.

  Blood.

  Caked on the hangar’s right door handle was a small red splotch in the shape of a thumbprint. The blood was smeared unevenly over the handle, hanging in thick clots where it had dried and was beginning to flake off.

  I slid the hangar doors open.

  15

  Inside was the getaway car.

  It was a ’92 white Dodge Spirit—or at least it had been white, before it was crashed a few times and shot up with a rifle. There were spider-vein cracks in the windshield, where bullets had passed through the glass and left perfect small circles. The rust stains on the body were so deep that the paint had started to peel, and all four tires were as flat as strips of paper wrapped around the hubs.

  The old hangar felt like a cavern. Back when the airport still ran flights, a hangar this size could have housed four prop planes front to back, or a single five-window Cessna half the size of Marcus’s Sovereign. Now the steel floor was thick with grime and broken glass, and the thin insulation on the walls was rotting from the inside out. Stagnant water had pooled under the empty skylights. When the field had closed its gates, the city must have salvaged anything of value. Even the Plexiglas. This would’ve been the perfect place for Ribbons to ditch this old getaway car and stash their next one. It was dirty and easily overlooked, but no more than a five-minute drive from the Regency. And I’d done it in traffic.