Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  Before I did anything I slid on my pair of leather gloves. I may not have fingerprints, but a guy’s hands have more identifying characteristics than you might think. My skin still produces oils that my fingerpads leave behind in a unique scarred, splotchy pattern. Only an expert would recognize them, but it’s still possible. Also there’s DNA that a smart guy could isolate. I didn’t exactly expect to get caught due to something like that, but I wasn’t about to take any risks I didn’t absolutely have to.

  I walked carefully around the marks in the dust, where the treads of two cars had dragged mud in from the field. I guessed that one set of tracks was from Ribbons driving the Dodge in, and the other set from taking the second car out. I peered in through the partly shattered windshield. There were bullet holes everywhere. Big ones, from the rifle. There were deep bloodstains in the driver’s-side upholstery, straight down to the foot well. The blood had bonded with the fibers and scabbed there like a permanent dye. Most of it was still liquid, but very thick and dark from coagulation. You’d be amazed by how fast the stuff sinks in and clots. It is hard to remove. It must be washed out with cold water and bleach. I had to do it after a job, once. I leaned over the driver’s-side window. Bone and brain matter were scattered through the interior as well. It was so thick in places that it hardly looked real.

  Drops of blood tell a story—and they aren’t hard to read, if you know what to look for. Moreno must have been in the car when he was shot. The drops on the windshield were fine, less than a millimeter wide, and beginning to skeletonize, which suggested his head had been close to the wheel and the direction of impact came from behind. I traced the angles of the spatter to the area of convergence. The bullet had entered his skull from the back of his head and passed through his midbrain and exited through the forehead. There was high-impact spatter, but nothing suggesting a secondary bleed. The shot had killed him instantly. High-caliber. Well-aimed.

  I took a look at Ribbons’s blood. Even in this mess, I could tell which blood was which. Ribbons’s blood had a different character to it. The drops were bigger. Ribbons’s blood-spatter droplets were seven millimeters wide and grouped tightly. They made a stain all the way down the left side of the driver’s seat, from about shoulder height down. That wasn’t spatter from a gunshot. No way. It was secondary bleeding, which must have taken place after the initial bullet impact. Big drops like that indicated passive spatter, which told me that Ribbons had dumped Moreno’s body, but only climbed into the driver’s seat after taking a bullet himself. I looked around but couldn’t find the high-impact spatter from Ribbons’s initial wound, so he must’ve been shot outside the car.

  I put myself in his position for a minute. I closed my eyes and felt his panic and pain wash over me like a tremendous wave. He was running on pure instinct. The getaway plan was the only thing he knew. It was the only thing he trusted.

  I blinked and took a closer look at the car. There were tool marks between the window and the weather strip, where one of them had jimmied the lock. The car had been stolen because they knew they’d have to ditch it immediately. Beside the bloodstains, in the cup holder was an empty pint of bottom-shelf bourbon.

  I had to put my sleeve over my nose. The car smelled terrible.

  The smell was like an air conditioner, but foul. There was something both sulfuric and chemical about it, like gasoline mixed with nail-polish remover. Blood and brain matter don’t smell like that. I pointed the light from my cell phone through the windows of the car. Between the front seats was a small leather case. Moreno had held such a case under his arm when we met in Dubai. I never asked, because I knew that inside there would be a bent spoon, a lighter, a length of foil and a glass pipe. It was a case for smoking cocaine and crystal meth. Moreno, I’d heard, preferred to let it vaporize so he could suck it up through a rolled-up bill. When he wasn’t smoking or drinking, he’d scratch the sore on his face. When I knew him, he scratched and scratched and scratched.

  But the smell wasn’t that.

  Freebasing smells astringent and slightly metallic. I’d been around enough thugs and addicts to know firsthand, though I’d always refused to join them when they offered. This didn’t smell anything like that. It was much worse.

  I circled around toward the other side of the car. The stench seemed to get worse by the trunk. Blood was spattered over the left hubcap, with tiny loose bloody chunks of skull lodged in the trim of the wheel well. Jesus. For a moment I could visualize Ribbons panicking, tossing Moreno’s body out onto the pavement and shifting into Reverse. The car had rolled over his head and crushed it. The trunk was locked. It took a minute to find the release. Inside was a black duffel bag with empty boxes of discount imported rifle ammunition. The boxes were cut down, as if with a letter opener. Only one unfired round was left and I examined it—7.62 × 39mm steel-core bullet, almost certainly for Ribbons’s AK-47. He might have left it behind during the frenzy, or dropped it while he was loading his magazines. I put the bullet in my pocket, then opened the spare-tire compartment, in case the smell was coming from there. No. I opened a side door to the backseat.

  Under the seat was a soft leather briefcase with more ammunition inside. I ran a single gloved finger over the passenger window, and felt the stress cracks. My glove came off marked with dirt and blood residue. The two bullets had cut through the upholstery. They were somewhere deep under the seats, unless they’d gone right through.

  I ducked out of the back and closed the door, took a few steps forward and pulled on the passenger’s-side door. It was unlocked. I checked the glove box, where I found a plastic bag containing better than half a dozen orange pill bottles. Hemostabil, ibuprofen, dextromethorphan, diazepam, phenobarbital. I recognized a few. Ibuprofen was the major ingredient in several popular over-the-counter painkillers. Dextromethorphan was a cough suppressant. Diazepam and phenobarbital were sedatives, probably to calm their nerves and take the edge off the crystal meth. All of them together looked like the combat cocktail I’d heard rebel soldiers used to take in South America. Behind the drugs was an aerosol canister labeled QuikClot. I recognized the brand, having seen a bit about it on the news a few years ago during the Second Gulf War. Soldiers would spray it on and their wounds would clot over and stop bleeding for a while. It saved a few hundred lives, so they brought it stateside for hemophiliacs. Now anybody could get some, if they knew where to look. Band-Aid of the future. Comes sprayed out of a can.

  I could imagine Ribbons parking the car and scrambling to field-dress his wound. But gunshot wounds are tough. They bleed deep. If he was smart, he would have jammed in something soft to plug it up, like a scrap of fabric or even a piece of a hamburger bun, and then tied it off with a strip of his shirt or some plastic wrap. With the QuikClot and some basic first aid, Ribbons could have kept himself conscious for hours after his gunshot wound.

  I opened up the leather case between the seats and wasn’t surprised by what I found. There was a bent spoon that smelled like vinegar and a couple of fresh needle sharps. There was a thirteenth of methamphetamine with a pink color to it. I dabbed my finger in the methamphetamine and tasted it. It was adulterated with some sort of strawberry flavoring. They were both probably high out of their minds when the heist went down.

  I caught sight of a Colt 1911 pistol on the floor of the backseat. I climbed partway into the passenger seat and looked at the smashed-out rear window. Ribbons must have fired the Colt at something behind him, turning in his seat and shooting right through it. Who had been behind him? Were the cops chasing him, or the third shooter, or was all of this just from the ten seconds or so before he could get the engine started?

  I could barely think over the hideous smell. The beep I’d heard happened again, and this time it was very close by.

  I took out my cell phone and entered Ribbons’s number digit by digit. When I pressed the call button, a second later a loud chirp somewhere between a bell and a metal scratch came from the driver’s-side door. It echoed against the voluminou
s hangar walls.

  I found the phone, an old clamshell, lodged under the bloodstained seat cushion. Twenty missed calls from a blocked number. The last answered incoming call was five a.m. There was a rejected call at two minutes to six, and then another one two minutes after six. There were several dozen text messages too. All of them Your father needs you, all from blocked numbers. The contact list was empty.

  The last incoming call was from me.

  I got out of the car again and went back around to the trunk. The smell was both disgusting and distracting. I dropped to one knee and shined the light from my cell phone below the undercarriage. I covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve. When I looked under the trunk, my eyes went blurry. Then I saw the source of the smell.

  My god.

  16

  Under the car was a silver-brown five-gallon fuel canister. The valve was broken, and the liquid had slowly seeped out into a large puddle. The side of the canister was marked with a yellow hazard symbol. I instantly knew what it was. Naphtha, also known as Coleman fuel. Made of petroleum and charcoal tar. Very flammable. Extremely. It was slowly evaporating under the Dodge.

  Worse, it had been there for more than twelve hours.

  When I was just starting out, I did my early bank jobs with whomever I could. I met a wheelman who was a fastidious and clean guy. Always kept his hair just so with that grease that they used to sell in the little round cans. He was the kind of guy who liked the word slick. Slick car, slick look, slick moves. He drove a silver Shelby GT500 that was so well preserved that it looked like he’d driven it through a time machine. It had an engine as shined up as a wedding ring and a coat of paint as fresh as an army recruit. He loved that car. After a bank job in Baltimore, where I’d helped him by pretending to be a wealthy customer, we were running from the cops with six hundred grand in bearer bonds, and somehow they’d figured out where we were going to swap our throwaway car for the GT. Once we were in the 500, the wheelman didn’t hesitate. He parked the first place he thought was safe and walked down the street to the grocer while I stole us a third getaway car from a hotel parking lot. He picked up five gallons of naphtha on a prepaid credit card without the girl behind the counter popping her gum at him. He dumped the whole canister through the driver’s-side window, tossed a match in and let the only thing he’d ever loved burn away behind him. That Shelby was his life. The fuel burned that car down to the chassis. Down to the engine block. His classic car was a cinder by the time the cops arrived. His brand-new tape deck. His vintage fender. His custom leather seats—all toast. We both walked away from that heist with enough money to buy a fleet of those GT500s, but his new one wasn’t quite the same, he told me. The Coleman fuel had also burned away its soul.

  I took three steps back, remembering what my wheelman had called it.

  Torch gas.

  I backed quickly away from the toxic fumes. When I was out, I took a long, deep breath. I’d seen what this shit could do. Shotgun casings into plastic puddles. Handgun brass into charred pools of metal. Body parts would burn until even the bones were ash.

  I considered turning right around and finishing what Ribbons had started. One little spark would torch away every shred of evidence. Blow it up like the Fourth of July. The drugs would vaporize. The bullets would melt like solder on the chassis. The whole hangar would go up.

  But that was the thing.

  There was evidence here that I wasn’t picking up on. To an expert, this car could tell a story. So far it had told me about Ribbons’s state of mind, his health and his getaway plans. But there was more. What about the tread marks leading out? What sort of car did they belong to? And besides, the minute I tossed the match at this wreck, the police would be en route, and I still had business here.

  Why hadn’t Ribbons torched the car in the first place? He got as far along in the process as dumping out the torch gas; why hadn’t he finished the deal? Everything was ready to blow, so it wouldn’t have taken much. All he had to do was light a match. Matches can be hard to strike when you’re wearing gloves, and maybe going through septic shock from a bullet wound, not to mention shaking from a quarter gram of crystal meth, but it couldn’t have been that hard. Maybe he had tried to set the thing on fire, I thought. Matches aren’t as reliable as people think. Eight times out of ten, a lit one will go out before it hits the ground. And sometimes, even when it stays lit long enough to hit the fuel, nothing happens. I once saw a guy flick a lit cigarette into a bucket of gasoline. It sizzled out, just like he said it would. Fire needs fuel and oxygen. Liquid fuels, especially in containers, often don’t have enough oxygen to catch from a single small flame. But that didn’t sound right. If Ribbons was cogent enough to get this far, he would have done anything to set this Dodge on fire. The evidence here could convict him. Hell, even if he’d run out of matches, he could have lit the thing up with the muzzle flash from his assault rifle. There must’ve been something else going on that I was missing.

  I took out the phone again and stared at the numbers for a few seconds. Atlantic City. The number came back to me, like muscle memory.

  Executive Concierge Services.

  The line opened up a second later. “This is Alexander Lakes.”

  “I need a wheelman.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m looking for a person who knows cars. Do you guys do services, or only provisions?”

  “We’ve worked with several mechanics in town. Where should I say—”

  “I don’t need a mechanic. I need a wheelman. Someone who can fix a broken transmission isn’t good enough. I’m looking for someone who can take one look at some tracks in the mud and tell me what sort of car they came from. Someone discreet, who doesn’t ask questions and who likes getting paid in cash. I need someone who knows cars like I know how to breathe.”

  Lakes went silent for a second. Thinking.

  He said, “We can provide that.”

  I listened as Lakes walked his phone into a different room. Because of the nature of my work, the collection of names and phone numbers in my head could fit on a single index card. I rely on fences and jugmarkers to know people for me. It’s safer, most of the time. I could hear crickets in the distance until Alexander came back on the line.

  “There’s a man named Spencer Randall who I’ve worked with before. He’s done some emergency driving for our clients in the past. Very professional, very discreet. He’s one of the best drivers I’ve ever met.”

  “Does he know cars?”

  “Better than anyone.”

  “Is he in the city?”

  “He has an automotive shop in Delaware.”

  “Don’t you have anything closer? Delaware’s too far.”

  “Sir, as I mentioned, we do not keep a list of clients. Only assets.”

  I shook my head. “Randall’s really all you’ve got?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. If you give me a few hours—”

  “Give me the number.”

  In the background I could hear the hum of a computer and the sound of a television with the volume down at the other side of the room. I thought I could hear children playing. He recited the number slowly, and I only needed to hear it once. I terminated the call and put in the new number.

  The phone rang seven times.

  When someone answered, it was clearly in a machinist’s shop. The man on the other end cleared his throat. He said, “This is Spencer Randall. Who is this?”

  He had a soft voice and he spoke through his nose a little too much.

  “My name is Jack,” I told him.

  “How can I help you, Jack?”

  “I need a wheelman.”

  The line went quiet for a moment. Wheelman, an almost exclusively criminal term, dates back to the early days of professional bank robbery, before John Dillinger and the Chicago Outfit. It was coined by a German guy named Herman Lamm, who was the original jugmarker. A former military man, he was the first person to plan his heists as if they were tactical operations. B
efore him, bank robberies were all messy, bloody, impromptu affairs. He chose the word for the getaway driver after what a naval captain would call the guy who steered his ship, because, at the time, driver was still associated with horses and carriages.

  “Who gave you this number?” Spencer said.

  “A man named Lakes. You know him?”

  “Yeah, I know him,” he said.

  “I hear you’re in Delaware,” I said.

  “Wilmington. I run a shop.”

  “I’m in Atlantic City. I’ll give you a thousand dollars for an hour of your time, but it has to be right now.”

  “I’ll want to hear the circumstances first.”

  I paused to think about what I should tell him. “I think it would be better if you saw for yourself.”

  “Then my answer’s no. I don’t do any job without getting the information up front. I’m not even supposed to be taking this call. Jesus, I don’t know you. I don’t recognize your voice. For all I know you could be bringing me into some sort of bait-car scheme.”

  “It’s nothing like that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I’m just asking you to look at something and tell me what it is. You’ll be in no danger.”

  “I want more than a thousand bucks. How much are you getting on this job?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit. Nobody works for nothing.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m nobody. Now or never, Spencer.”

  “Make it five thousand. And I don’t run from cops. I see flashing lights, I pull over. As far as I want to know, this is all aboveboard.”

  “Three thousand.”

  “Done. Where should I meet you?”

  I checked my watch.

  “The movie theater by the airport,” I said. “Pleasantville exit. You can’t miss it. One hour.”

  “I’m three hours away.”

  “You’re a wheelman. I don’t want a Sunday driver.”